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This Day in History: March 31, 1999
I was born in 1977 so I came of age during the nineties. Consequently, the events of the nineties — the Persian Gulf War, Ross Perot’s third party run, the drug-addled suicide of Kurt Cobain, the launch of Microsoft Windows, the murders of Tupac and Biggie and the East Coast/West Coast feud that precipitated it, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Y2K scare, etc. — feel as immediate to me as Trump’s latest tweet storm. So imagine my sense of shocked resentment when I realized that The Matrix, one of the best movies of the decade, was released twenty years ago today. The Matrix, written and directed by the Wachowskis (then credited as the Wachowski Brothers), earned $460 million dollars worldwide and spawned two sequels.
Trailer for “The Matrix”
I have to admit, I didn’t see the film during its initial theatrical run. For starters, the trailers didn’t give me much of an idea what the movie they advertised was about.
After The Matrix was released, I asked my younger brother, Gregory, who had seen it to summarize the plot. Gregory did a spectacularly bad job of synopsizing…
