Remember how much Matrix Reloaded kicks ass? Tonight I went and saw it again, only this time it was on IMAX so it was kickasser. They didn't just project the regular 35mm film onto an IMAX screen, they actually remastered the original film, so it was crystal clear, and super big. I love that movie. And it was good to see it again to confirm the theories that we (well, mostly the Goddess, actually) came up with concerning Revolutions and all that. Although there is a lot of stuff out there, I think we (okay, she) has hit on something no one else has, yet.
Oh yeah, and I wanted to mention one other thing, and there is a sort of segue to this, because the Matrix obviously has a lot of influences, among them anime, mythology and sci-fi. One book series I really liked a lot was Dan Simmons' Hyperion Canticles
.Or Chronicles. Cantos? I don't remember. Anyways, Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and the Rise of Endymion were the four books, though the first two can certainly stand on their own. Do you recognize the titles? Hyperion Fall of Hyperion and Endymion are all poems by John Keats. These books are about, in the very simplest sense, evil machines who want to enslave humanity (hence the Matrix tie-in), but there is much more to them than that. They feature the theology of Teilhard de Chardin and the poetry of John Keats as kind of the glue, and have lots of Catholic and Buddhist stuff going on too. I should reread them, actually, because they are getting kind of fuzzy. I wrote a paper on them in University (English 481 or something- Postmodernism and Science Fiction) examining what the hell a romantic poet was doing in a book set 800 years in the future, and I wrote it as if I was a private eye (like Brawne Lamia in the books) and I got the highest mark possible for it- the professor thanked me for writing it because it made his day, and so he gave me a 9, which at the good ole U of A is the best you can get, for some reason.
Jackie, I tried looking up some info for those other anthologies, but there are just too many called "World's best Sci-fi" or whatever, so my advice would be to go to your local boek winkel and see what they have- generally these anthologies have some gems in them, even if lots of it is poo. But definitely get the Hyperion books if you can find them. Hey look- I found one anyway!