The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 33

TV SCHEDULE C6 ARCHITECTURE C8 AINMENT ENTER! EDITOR CHARLES CAMPBELL 605-2120 FAX 605 2521 mail ccamphell Tl IE VANCOUVER SUN WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 1999 C5 A dame who knocks 'em dead Powerful woman a powerful symbol Burnaby-raised actress Carrie-Anne Moss expands her limits with her role in the sci-fi action film The Matrix While the action-flick superchick is. a novelty to the 20th century, the powerful woman is nothing new. From the Amazons to Joan of Arc, the strong, armed woman has been the one of the most significant and most threatening symbols in human history. In 100 years of film history, producers, directors and screenwriters have made various attempts to harness the symbolic power of the female warrior. Some triumphed, others did not.

Here's a non-comprehensive tour of some of the most notable attempts. 1912 Sarah Bernhardt in Louis Mercanton's La reine Elizabeth: a brief biopic about the famous English queen. While the performance was melodramatic, it was a breakthrough because it showed a woman who was powerful not some shrieking victim tied to 7 'v 1 KATHERINE MONK SUN MOVIE CRITIC For six entire months, Carrie-Anne Moss was climbing the walls literally. The Vancouver-born actress had no other option. Cast opposite Keanu Reeves in the new science-fiction thriller The Matrix, which opens across North America today, Moss understood that it was either climb the walls, kick the stuntman, jump from one high-rise tower to the next or wimp out forever on the very notion of superwomanhood.

She decided to go big, and now the one-time cast member of Models Inc. finds herself in a whole new world the world that stands to redefine forever the terms "femme fatale" and "knock 'em dead dame" the world of the action-flick superchick where women have big causes and even bigger muscles. Beginning with the likes of Katharine Hepburn's slacks-sporting aviatrix in Christopher Strong, and evolving into such she-heroes as Sigourney Weaver's Ripley (the Alien series), Angie Dickinson's Pepper (Police Woman), Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling (Silence of the Lambs) and Lucy Lawless's Xena, the action-flick superchick is a relatively new character type to hit the silver screen. A pastiche of traits pulled from the first suffragettes, frontier matrons, world war survivors, modern feminists and the classic male warrior "stereotype, the action-flick superchick has a wide- i 1 X' A. i the railroad tracks.

1933 Greta Garbo p'ays a cross-dressing monarch in Queen Christina, complete with sword. Katharine Hepburn stars as lo March in Little Women, donning pants, raising her fists and playing a swashbuckler in one scene before assimilating Victorian ideas of femininity. In the same year; Hepburn I dotjtjed pants again as a L--reaching appeal that breeds tans among all seg- headstrong female aviator in Christopher Strong. Hepburn continued to play the emancipated woman, In she Dlaved a girl playing a boy in Sylvia Katharine "-'Scarlett. Hepburn I948 Ingrid Bergman plays the French warrior saint in Victor Fleming's dull biopic of Joan of Arc.

1954 )an Crawford dons chaps, trousers, Glenn BagloVancouver Sun A STAR IS BORN: Carrie-Anne Moss gets her big-screen break in The Matrix, opening in cinemas today. holster, pistol and one bad attitude as a saloon keeper on the frontier in Johnny Guitar. 1968 Jane Fonda's cult hit Barbarella features one of the screen's first female warriors not based on a real person. Cut from ments of the population because she's not only strong, but her strength lends her a novel, empowering sex appeal that's undeniably hypnotic for both sexes. Proof of the new archetype's power is witnessed .4 in Moss' character Trinity -f a cyber warrior charged with freeing the human race from the clutches of a computer-controlled empire.

Dressed in skin-hugging black latex, Moss is seen performing a variety of feats in The Matrix, from supersonic sprints to running up the walls like some sticky-fingered spider channelling the spirit of Bob Fosse. Menacing, strong, beautiful and yet soft-hearted enough to fall in love, Moss inhabits the role of Trinity with absolute conviction but it wasn't easy. "To be honest, I'm a total girlie-girl. My room in the house I grew up in in Burnaby was packed with Holly Hobbie dolls. My brother even remembers how we'd sit on my canopy bed and talk about what we were going to be when we grew up he remembers me talking about how I always wanted to be an actress.

But he'd never seen me like this before. He was shocked," says Moss from a Westin Bayshore hotel loveseat overlooking the North Shore mountains. Back in her hometown for business after a decade of career stops and starts, Moss left Vancouver in her early 20s to stalk her dream. While her first paying jobs were as a model, she quickly moved into acting and landed a regular part on Dark Justice, the European-produced serial shot in Spain. Shortly thereafter, Moss moved to Los Angeles and landed parts in Aaron Spelling's Models Inc.

and the Toronto-shot FX: The Series. the same skimpy cloth as the Bond girls and The Avengers' Emma Peel, Barbarella may have been a sex kitten, but she could be lethal a theme picked up, but not carried by, Pamela Anderson Lee in the recent disaster titled Barb Wire. Now, at the age of 31, Moss appears to be on the verge of real stardom with a hot part in a major feature, but she's still real and she's still Canadian. "I know I've changed a lot in some ways and not at all in others. I've evolved that's all.

I used to wake up some mornings and just know I wasn't happy. I remember sitting in Belgium, when I first left home and started modelling, and being really unhappy," she says. "Then I just decided that I had to make the difference. My friends call me the 'breakthrough girl' because I'm known to have these daily epiphanies. Now, if I have a great cup of coffee in the morning, that's enough for me to have a good day." Sure, that seems easy for Moss to say.

She's drop-dead gorgeous and is finding real success. But in actual fact, nothing in life came easy for the budding starlet. The daughter of a single mom, she commuted across town to attend high school and acting classes at Magee. Moss relied on a support group of girlfriends to get her through adolescence a network she maintains to this day. "Life is never easy.

But I've tried to develop an attitude towards life that forces me to move forward. I think I'm one of those people who was just born with a sunny disposition. I try to focus on keeping that, and oddly enough, it's not that hard. Life doesn't have to be complicated. It's actually really simple," she says, taking off her shoes and moving toward the fireplace.

"Sorry, but I'm freezing," she says, rubbing her ice-white toes and painted toenails. Suddenly, the action-flick superchick persona seems to be slipping. What world-saving cyber warrior has the time to chose between cherry-wood and burnt rose toe lacquer? SEE MOSS, C6 Jr Jane Fonda Matrix moves fast enough to mask its flaws 1974 B'acl star Pam Gr'er packs heat -lots of heat in Foxy Brown. 1979 Sigourney Weaver gives birth to the screen's first modern female warrior as Ripley in Ridley Scott's Alien. Ripley was novel because Scott painted her in androgynous shades, allowing her to assume a warrior's stance without being framed as a sex object.

Scott recently tried to do the same thing for Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, but no amount of shaving could convince audiences that Moore was a Navy Seal. 1980S Television becomes a treasure chest of female action heroes, from Charlie's Angels to The Bionic Woman. The small screen taught a new generation of women that girls could also save the world from the forces of evil. The small screen continues to take the lead with such heroines as Xena: Warrior Princess and Nikita, the serialized THE MATRIX Starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano.

14A.136mia KATHERINE MONK SUN MOVIE CRITIC There's more than one good reason to see The Matrix and they aren't all dependent on the black latex costumes worn by charismatic cast members Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. While the Gaultier-styled Saran Wrap suits are about the only thing in the movie that directors Larry and Andy Wachowski (Bound) kept tight, other elements such as cutting-edge special effects, wire-and-harness stunt work and a mentally challenging storyline pull The Matrix away from same-old sci-fi. Based on what might happen if our society lost control of its machines and artificially intelligent mother-boards started suckling the electric power generated by human beings, The Matrix presents us with a conceivable evolutionary premise: we're no longer at the top of the food chain. While it's a little hard to ponder such a scenario in 1999, the Wa-chowskis manage to pull us into the paranoid vortex by setting the movie in a time we recognize as our own. tough to do with any clarity.

Splicing two layers of reality together, the brothers have a hard time maintaining control of their complex symbolic worlds, not to mention the intricate special effects. At times, they seem confused as to which element serves the other: Do the effects serve the story, or does the story serve the effects? For the average viewer, it doesn't really matter since there's enough action (i.e. gunfire, fights, stunts, awesome special effects) to cloak even the most torturous of plot flaws and painfully bad dialogue. Moreover, the cast is compelling. Reeves turns in another believable action performance in a role that invites sarcastic criticism.

Fishburne is magnetic, and Vancouver's Carrie-Anne Moss is the best thing that's happened to the woman warrior since Sigourney Weaver saved her cat from the slimy jaws of death in Alien. So if you're looking for a good spring fix of existentialist sci-fi, look no further than The Matrix then do everything you can to look deeper than the skin-tight surface. At the Dunbar, Capitol, Ex-planade, SilverCity Riverport, Richmond Centre, SilverCity Metropolis, Station Square, SilverCity Coquit-lam, Coquitlam, SilverCity Guildford, Grande, Willowbrook, Towne ver. Into this landscape, people such as Neo (Reeves) are born. They do not question their environment.

They do not wonder if the world they live in is real or Memorex -or the almighty matrix. Yet Neo is plagued by questions. A software programmer by day, Neo hacks into one mainframe after another by night searching for the legendary hacker of hackers -Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne). For years, Neo searches without success. And then, one night, he is contacted.

Milliseconds later, Neo is a wanted man. Using paranoia as their pointy tool, the Wachowskis begin to poke at the gauze of reality we so readily accept as real. After all, if feelings are merely electric pulses to our brain, how are we to know they are the effects of genuine, not manufactured, stimuli? We can't, and that's where the Wachowskis dive off the deep end and start confusing comic-book messages with ancient my thological themes. Sure, grafting the myth of Orpheus a character from Greek mythology who attempted to rescue his wife from the underworld with modern "morphing" computer lingo is a nice twist. But it's take on Luc Besson's big-screen yarn about a woman who 7 i 1 becomes a killing machine in La Femme Nikita.

Sigourney Weaver WOMAN WARRIOR: Carrie-Anne Moss is as tight as her suit. The landscape is a familiar assortment of skyscrapers and city streets. Rain falls in rivulets and people quietly move through the planes of time and space with sealed lips and few smiles. In short, it looks like any old day in Vancou 1990S Big-screen stars such as Meryl Streep (The River Wild, Meg Ryan (Courage Under Fire) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Dangerous Minds) prove that Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton (Terminator 2: Judgment Day) weren't the only ones who could bulk up and kick some bad ass. Even inner-city gangster movies opened the door to strong women, such as Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett (now married to Will Smith), who fall in heroic cowboy style in a blaze of glory and bullets in Set It Off..