> WHOAMI

I'm Todd. I'm 17, I'm a senior, I live in Oregon, and I write programs. QBasic since I was 12, Turbo Pascal in AP Computer Science this year, and I'm teaching myself C out of a book from the library that is older than me. My mom says I spend too much time in front of a screen. I tell her that's exactly what the machines want her to think.

I saw The Matrix on opening night, Wednesday, March 31, 1999, with Freddie and Billy, because we had heard it was "the computer movie" and we thought it would be dumb, like every movie where somebody types on a keyboard and a 3-D skull spins on the screen. It was not dumb. We sat through the credits without talking and then went to Denny's and talked until 2 a.m.

Then I went back. And back.

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> CAST

KEANU REEVES as Neo. By day, Thomas Anderson, a programmer at a big software company. By night, a hacker who goes by Neo. People make fun of Keanu, but he spent months learning kung fu for this and you can tell, and his whole confused thing is perfect for a guy who just found out his entire life was a computer program.

LAURENCE FISHBURNE as Morpheus, the captain of the ship, who believes in Neo before Neo does. The calmest person ever filmed. The fight with Neo in the training program is my favorite scene in the movie, period.

CARRIE-ANNE MOSS as Trinity. The first five minutes of the movie are her, and those five minutes are why everyone in the theater stopped eating popcorn. Also she's on the DVD commentary, which is cool.

HUGO WEAVING as Agent Smith. The best bad guy since Darth Vader. He's an Australian actor and he talks like a computer that has learned English from a manual and resents it.

JOE PANTOLIANO as Cypher. The guy on the ship who is tired of the real world. You hate him, but you kind of understand him, which is worse.

GLORIA FOSTER as the Oracle. She's baking cookies in a regular apartment kitchen and she knows everything. That scene gets better every time.

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> THE WACHOWSKI BROTHERS

Larry and Andy Wachowski, two brothers from Chicago, wrote it and directed it. Before this they made one movie, Bound, in 1996. They filmed The Matrix in Sydney, Australia, and brought over a famous Hong Kong fight choreographer, Yuen Woo-ping, who trained the actors for months before filming started. They mixed kung fu movies, comic books, anime, Alice in Wonderland and philosophy, and somehow it all fits. I want to be them when I grow up. Or at least I want to have that idea.

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> HOW BULLET TIME WORKS

You know the shot. Somebody jumps or dodges, everything almost freezes, and the camera swings around them in slow motion like it's on a track. The rooftop scene where Neo bends backwards. There's no camera that can move that fast around a person. So how?

The DVD explains it, and here's what I got out of it:

As a programmer, I think of it like this: normally a movie is one camera and a loop over time. Bullet time flips it around. It's an array of 120 cameras and a loop over space. That's the whole trick, and nobody thought of doing it that way until these guys.

DVD tips: Turn on the "Follow the White Rabbit" feature. A little white rabbit shows up on the screen during nine of the big effects scenes, and if you press Enter on the remote it jumps to behind-the-scenes footage of how they shot it. The bullet time documentary itself is kind of hidden; look under "Take the Red Pill" in the menus. There's also a commentary with Carrie-Anne Moss and the effects supervisor, John Gaeta, and an HBO making-of special.

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> THE RED PILL AND THE BLUE PILL

Morpheus holds out two pills. Take the blue one and you wake up in your bed and go on with your normal life and forget all this. Take the red one and you find out what the Matrix really is, and you can never go back.

The first four times I saw the movie, I would have grabbed the red one before he finished talking. Now I'm not so sure. See my theories page for why.

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> SEQUEL RUMORS

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> RAIN.BAS

The green falling code at the top of this page is just typed in, but I also wrote a QBasic program that does it for real on your screen. It's short. Copy it into QBasic (it comes with DOS and it's on the Windows 95 and 98 CD too), press F5, and press any key to quit.

' RAIN.BAS - green rain, by Todd
RANDOMIZE TIMER
SCREEN 0: WIDTH 80, 25
COLOR 10, 0: CLS
DIM y(1 TO 80)
FOR i = 1 TO 80
  y(i) = INT(RND * 24) + 1
NEXT i
DO
  x = INT(RND * 80) + 1
  c$ = CHR$(INT(RND * 94) + 33)
  LOCATE y(x), x: COLOR 2
  PRINT c$;
  y(x) = y(x) + 1
  IF y(x) > 24 THEN y(x) = 1
  LOCATE y(x), x: COLOR 10
  PRINT c$;
LOOP UNTIL INKEY$ <> ""
COLOR 7, 0: CLS

Color 10 is bright green and color 2 is dark green, so each column has a bright "head" and leaves a dim trail behind it. On a fast computer it goes crazy fast. On our old 486 at school it looks just right. I'm working on a Pascal version where the trails fade out, but it's not done.