When it comes to appreciation of geeky 1980s movies, I generally think I
have my bases covered pretty well. As buzz for Disney’s TRON: Legacy began to build, however, I had to admit that this was a movie with which I was almost entirely unfamiliar. So I saw the original
in anticipation of the sequel. I confess that I found the 1982 movie a
bit disorienting, but there were aspects of it that I really enjoyed,
and because I watched that first, I think I was better able to
appreciate the new movie.
TRON: Legacy stars the
little-known Garrett Hedlund as Sam Flynn, the 27-year-old son of Kevin,
the computer genius who created the video game and traveled inside it
during the first movie. He’s an aimless hothead, but he’s really a
softie, and underneath a veil of cynicism is a kid who never quite gave
up hope that his beloved dad, who went missing two decades earlier,
might still be out there and still be thinking of him. The story in this
second movie is about a lot of things: idealism, loyalty, cooperation,
wisdom. It’s about the value and danger in trying to build a perfect
world. But mostly, it’s about a father and son, long separated,
reuniting in time to share a dream both had long believed impossible.
I’m
a sucker for stories about father-son relationships, so I had a hunch
that this movie would resonate with me on that level. It did, and it
made me smile to see that Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, two of the
main writers on the daddy issues-laden LOST,
worked on the screenplay. Jeff Bridges, who starred in the original
movie and who I’m really coming to admire as an actor, takes on an
intriguing dual role here.
As in the first movie, there are
Users and Programs, and in some cases, we have two complementary
characters. Here, Bridges plays both Kevin Flynn, the grizzled sage who
has mostly lived a life of quiet meditation since becoming trapped in
the world of the Grid 20 years ago, and Clu, the well-groomed, much
younger-looking, sinister program who Kevin designed to help him create
his virtual utopia. He doesn’t have the same aura of menace about him
that David Warner does in the first movie, but there’s something equally
unsettling about him. He looks familiar and friendly but has a dark
purpose, the true extent of which is known only to him. The two
characters act and look so different that if the movie itself didn’t
keep bringing it up, it might be easy to forget that they are the same
person.
Hedlund makes a pretty appealing main character, and I
love his scenes with Bridges as the senior Flynn, but it was Olivia
Wilde who really made an impression upon me as Quorra, Kevin’s longtime
companion and apostle of sorts. Wide-eyed and beautiful, Quorra is
naïve, compassionate and eager to learn more about the world from which
the Flynns came. Among the secondary players, it was nice to see Bruce
Boxleitner again playing Flynn’s old friend Alan Bradley. In the real
world, he and Sam share some nice, quiet scenes that remind me of the
relationship between Harry Potter and Remus Lupin, his parents’ school
chum and his favorite Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.
A
scruffy-looking Cillian Murphy puts in a brief appearance as the
soft-spoken son of the first movie’s big baddie, Ed Dillinger. I thought
that he would play a bigger role in the movie, but he’s just in one
scene as an indication that Flynn’s company is falling into villainous
hands – or at least greedy hands. Ed Jr. doesn’t really seem evil to me,
just very turned off by the idea of giving something away for free,
which Kevin Flynn had no qualms with. In the digital world, I found
Michael Sheen so colorful as flamboyant club owner Castor that I could
have sworn he was dressed in a peacock’s array of colors instead of just
white. Any time he is on the screen, he demands complete attention.
I
heard a lot of complaints about the movie’s plot, but it worked for me,
and I think a great effort was made to beef up the exposition so that
the audience didn’t feel as confused as the main character. I wouldn’t
say that watching the first movie is essential to enjoying this one, but
I think your appreciation of it will be a bit deeper if you do, and
you’ll pick up on fun references. Of course, if you’re going just to get
a visual spectacle, I don’t think that you’ll be disappointed in any
event.
The Grid is a very distinct place, very technological,
with an oppressive atmosphere of swirling black clouds that reminded me
of The Dark Knight.
In contrast to all that darkness are the stark, luminous patterns on
the vehicles, clothing and architecture. In general, white lights
signify virtue, while orange is vice. Unfortunately, we see a lot more
orange than white. Still, there is a certain harsh beauty to it, and I
often found myself thinking of Star Wars, with light cycles
battling it out instead of X-wings and characters slashing each other
with discs instead of light sabers in the deadliest twist on Frisbee
imaginable. Those discs didn’t make too much of an impression on me in
the first movie, but they’re all-important here, both as weapons and
information storage units; Flynn’s contains the key to the Grid, and as
such, it is deeply coveted by his nefarious doppelganger.
Although
all the dreariness of the Grid got to me, making me feel a bit
claustrophobic, I rarely had the sense of vertigo I got with the first
movie, even watching it in 3D (which I don’t really think adds much to
the experience). I didn’t like the score, which mostly consisted of low
droning, but it fit the tone of the movie, which is a mere PG but feels
darker. It really isn’t; there’s very little profanity, and what
violence we see is just in the form of characters pixelating away into
nothing, so it’s certainly not graphic. But the system of the Grid feels
very fascist, and there’s a message in there somewhere about the danger
of trying to keep things too uniform. Younger kids may find it a bit
too heavy; it could have used a little more humor, and I confess that I
rather hoped Sam would wind up bringing his dog into the Grid with him.
That could’ve been fun. Still, on the whole, TRON: Legacy is quite enjoyable, both eye-catching and touching, and it was a great way to wrap up my 2010 movie-going.
Showing posts with label Jeff Bridges. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeff Bridges. Show all posts
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
The Coen Brothers Tackle the Old West in True Grit
“Jeff Bridges is really hot.” So proclaimed my mom the other night as I perused Hulu to find the clip of him singing a duet of Silver Bells with Cookie Monster during his gig as Saturday Night Live
host. My brother Nathan and I turned raised eyebrows in her direction,
and she hastened to add that she meant he was a hot commodity at the
moment. We’ve been teasing her mercilessly ever since, but she’s
certainly right about that. Yesterday, Nathan and I had to choose
between two movies featuring Bridges in a major role. Had we gone with TRON: Legacy,
it might not have seemed quite so preposterous to imagine the term
“hot” applied, in another sense of the word, to Jeff Bridges. But in True Grit, the Coen Brothers’ remake of the classic John Wayne movie, the idea was beyond laughable.
Bridges portrays Rooster Cogburn, a U. S. Marshal with a reputation as the meanest dead-eye around. He’s a grizzly old cuss who drinks and smokes too much, and it doesn’t particularly concern him that he may be a little too quick with that trigger finger. He does things his way and refuses to apologize, and trying to have a conversation with him inevitably entails exasperation, since his gravelly rants are rarely more than half-comprehensible. He spits. He snarls. He spends vast quantities of time in the outhouse. He’s just plain grungy. He is so not hot. He is, however, wonderful to watch.
Rooster spends most of the movie on the trail of Tom Chaney, the low-life who murdered the wrong kid’s dad. With spunk reminiscent of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley – whom she resembles in her long braids, hat and coat – and a laser focus like The Princess Bride’s Inigo Montoya, Mattie Ross is determined to see her father’s killer brought to justice. After an impressive show of her shrewd business sense with a local horse trader, Mattie sets her sights on the reluctant Rooster, ultimately convincing him to take on her challenge. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s also agreed to a pint-sized traveling companion, whether he wants her or not.
Rooster and Mattie seem strangely suited to each other. They’re both tough as nails, and they make a good team. Neither thinks much of LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger played with a preening swagger by Matt Damon. He’s pretty hot on himself when they first meet, and he views Mattie as nothing more than a nuisance in the culmination of his long quest to track down Chaney for other reasons. Mattie isn’t interested in his help if it means that Chaney will hang for killing a Senator and not her father. Rooster simply finds all his bragging tedious. They become competitors in a heated race, with Chaney the prize. But as the Wild West brings each into contact with nefarious scoundrels, all three pursuers will find hidden grit and a new respect for each other.
Hailee Steinfeld has already begun receiving accolades for her role as the determined 14-year-old Mattie, and I have no dispute with that. This is a girl intelligent beyond her years, so Steinfeld has lots of tricky dialogue to pull off with conviction. Steely resolve is her baseline emotion, but we see her break out of that from time to time, particularly when various people inspire her sympathies. In both this and No Country For Old Men, the movie that established me as a Coen Brothers fan, Josh Brolin plays a man who spends most of the movie being followed. In the former, he’s a pretty good guy who made a really big mistake. In this case, he’s still not wholly unsympathetic, but Tom Chaney is not a man of virtue. Neither is his current boss, gang leader Lucky Ned Pepper, a crusty criminal played by Barry Pepper.
Robert Duvall played that role in the original movie, which I didn’t realize until after I watched it; seeing that on IMDb made me chuckle because Pepper’s performance reminded me quite a bit of Duvall. Never having seen the original movie, I can’t really make comparisons. I understand that much of the dialogue remains intact, so I’m not sure how much I can credit the Coens for their screenplay, but I thought it was an exceptionally well-written movie. I often had to strain a bit to understand the dialogue, since, aside from Mattie’s, most of it came filtered through a fairly thick accent, but it was worth it to catch those careful words. As we headed home, my dad and brother wondered whether 19th-century outlaws were really as eloquent as this movie makes them out to be. The dialogue is often a thing of beauty.
And it’s funny. Like No Country, it’s populated with quirky characters, perhaps none more so than a medicine man played by Ed Corbin who turns up on horseback dressed in a bearskin. Dakin Matthew is a hoot as the increasingly flustered Colonel Stonehill, who simply can’t match wits with this tough teenager, and Jarlath Conroy has a brief but memorable role as an eccentric Irish undertaker. Most of the humor, however, comes from Rooster’s random ramblings, Mattie’s cleverness and LaBoeuf’s self-adulation, especially when any two of the three clash. However, these personalities also are at the heart of the movie’s most touching scenes.
The film is beautifully shot from start to finish, and it didn’t surprise me one bit to learn that Roger Deakins, whose work so impressed me in No Country and other recent movies, was the cinematographer. The countryside looks bleak but also somehow appealing, in a stirring the pioneer spirit sort of way. Complementing it well is Carter Burwell’s score, which incorporates several traditional hymns, particularly Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. “Nothing in this world is free but the grace of God,” reflects an older Mattie in the opening narration, and her faith is a thread that runs through the movie, which begins with an epigraph from Proverbs.
I loved No Country For Old Men, and I was surprised about it, since it was so very violent. True Grit is an old-fashioned Western, so there are a few shoot-outs, but there’s only one scene I would really call gruesome, and it passes quickly. The movie is rated a mild PG-13, and only on rare occasions is the "13" really earned. Profanity scarcely slips out of even the uncouth Rooster’s mouth. There is drinking and smoking aplenty, but that hardly seems worth mentioning in a movie set in the Old West. This flick feels like a respectful throwback, with only occasional bits of subtle humor taking aim at the genre. It’s the story of two, sometimes three, distinct characters taking a grueling journey together and gaining a deeper appreciation for each other and understanding of themselves. I’m still looking forward to TRON. But I’m very glad we saw True Grit, and if there was any doubt before, I can now say with certainty that when the Coen Brothers make another movie, I will be buying a ticket.
Bridges portrays Rooster Cogburn, a U. S. Marshal with a reputation as the meanest dead-eye around. He’s a grizzly old cuss who drinks and smokes too much, and it doesn’t particularly concern him that he may be a little too quick with that trigger finger. He does things his way and refuses to apologize, and trying to have a conversation with him inevitably entails exasperation, since his gravelly rants are rarely more than half-comprehensible. He spits. He snarls. He spends vast quantities of time in the outhouse. He’s just plain grungy. He is so not hot. He is, however, wonderful to watch.
Rooster spends most of the movie on the trail of Tom Chaney, the low-life who murdered the wrong kid’s dad. With spunk reminiscent of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley – whom she resembles in her long braids, hat and coat – and a laser focus like The Princess Bride’s Inigo Montoya, Mattie Ross is determined to see her father’s killer brought to justice. After an impressive show of her shrewd business sense with a local horse trader, Mattie sets her sights on the reluctant Rooster, ultimately convincing him to take on her challenge. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s also agreed to a pint-sized traveling companion, whether he wants her or not.
Rooster and Mattie seem strangely suited to each other. They’re both tough as nails, and they make a good team. Neither thinks much of LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger played with a preening swagger by Matt Damon. He’s pretty hot on himself when they first meet, and he views Mattie as nothing more than a nuisance in the culmination of his long quest to track down Chaney for other reasons. Mattie isn’t interested in his help if it means that Chaney will hang for killing a Senator and not her father. Rooster simply finds all his bragging tedious. They become competitors in a heated race, with Chaney the prize. But as the Wild West brings each into contact with nefarious scoundrels, all three pursuers will find hidden grit and a new respect for each other.
Hailee Steinfeld has already begun receiving accolades for her role as the determined 14-year-old Mattie, and I have no dispute with that. This is a girl intelligent beyond her years, so Steinfeld has lots of tricky dialogue to pull off with conviction. Steely resolve is her baseline emotion, but we see her break out of that from time to time, particularly when various people inspire her sympathies. In both this and No Country For Old Men, the movie that established me as a Coen Brothers fan, Josh Brolin plays a man who spends most of the movie being followed. In the former, he’s a pretty good guy who made a really big mistake. In this case, he’s still not wholly unsympathetic, but Tom Chaney is not a man of virtue. Neither is his current boss, gang leader Lucky Ned Pepper, a crusty criminal played by Barry Pepper.
Robert Duvall played that role in the original movie, which I didn’t realize until after I watched it; seeing that on IMDb made me chuckle because Pepper’s performance reminded me quite a bit of Duvall. Never having seen the original movie, I can’t really make comparisons. I understand that much of the dialogue remains intact, so I’m not sure how much I can credit the Coens for their screenplay, but I thought it was an exceptionally well-written movie. I often had to strain a bit to understand the dialogue, since, aside from Mattie’s, most of it came filtered through a fairly thick accent, but it was worth it to catch those careful words. As we headed home, my dad and brother wondered whether 19th-century outlaws were really as eloquent as this movie makes them out to be. The dialogue is often a thing of beauty.
And it’s funny. Like No Country, it’s populated with quirky characters, perhaps none more so than a medicine man played by Ed Corbin who turns up on horseback dressed in a bearskin. Dakin Matthew is a hoot as the increasingly flustered Colonel Stonehill, who simply can’t match wits with this tough teenager, and Jarlath Conroy has a brief but memorable role as an eccentric Irish undertaker. Most of the humor, however, comes from Rooster’s random ramblings, Mattie’s cleverness and LaBoeuf’s self-adulation, especially when any two of the three clash. However, these personalities also are at the heart of the movie’s most touching scenes.
The film is beautifully shot from start to finish, and it didn’t surprise me one bit to learn that Roger Deakins, whose work so impressed me in No Country and other recent movies, was the cinematographer. The countryside looks bleak but also somehow appealing, in a stirring the pioneer spirit sort of way. Complementing it well is Carter Burwell’s score, which incorporates several traditional hymns, particularly Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. “Nothing in this world is free but the grace of God,” reflects an older Mattie in the opening narration, and her faith is a thread that runs through the movie, which begins with an epigraph from Proverbs.
I loved No Country For Old Men, and I was surprised about it, since it was so very violent. True Grit is an old-fashioned Western, so there are a few shoot-outs, but there’s only one scene I would really call gruesome, and it passes quickly. The movie is rated a mild PG-13, and only on rare occasions is the "13" really earned. Profanity scarcely slips out of even the uncouth Rooster’s mouth. There is drinking and smoking aplenty, but that hardly seems worth mentioning in a movie set in the Old West. This flick feels like a respectful throwback, with only occasional bits of subtle humor taking aim at the genre. It’s the story of two, sometimes three, distinct characters taking a grueling journey together and gaining a deeper appreciation for each other and understanding of themselves. I’m still looking forward to TRON. But I’m very glad we saw True Grit, and if there was any doubt before, I can now say with certainty that when the Coen Brothers make another movie, I will be buying a ticket.
Monday, November 22, 2010
TRON Is Intriguing But Disorienting
I’ve been hearing a lot about TRON, the geeky Disney cult classic
whose sequel is about to hit theaters, and I decided that it was high
time to familiarize myself with the first movie. It seems a little odd
to me that I never watched it, as extensive as my Disney viewing has
generally been, but it wasn’t a movie that ever really had much of a
pull on me. It seemed a bit too... technological. Still, I was curious
to check it out, which Dad and I did this past rainy Saturday afternoon.
Since he teaches computer programming, I thought the movie would
probably make more sense to him than to me, but ultimately both of us
found it pretty disorienting.
Jeff Bridges stars as Kevin Flynn, a brilliant programmer who has been denied credit for his work. After his program starts to go haywire, he finds himself sucked into it, rather in the manner of Fantastic Voyage. Instead of being inside a person, he’s inside a program, and it’s up to him, along with some intrepid helpers, to get things running smoothly again. I’m mostly familiar with Bridges from later movies, where he always looks pretty scruffy and weathered, so it was interesting to see him here, so youthful and with a Steve Gutenberg-esque twinkle in his eye. He makes a good leading man and plays well opposite Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley, whose in-program counterpart is Tron. As Tron, he’s pretty dashing and heroic, but I prefer the rather bumbling Alan with his gargantuan glasses. Cindy Morgan is a valuable ally to both as Lori / Yori, Alan / Tron’s spunky love interest.
The world within the computer program is very visually striking. When my dad went to rent this, the clerk warned him not to expect much in the way of special effects. What was cutting-edge at the time looks pretty dated now. I didn’t mind it in terms of looking cheesy, but the visuals actually kinda gave me a headache after a while. However, there are aspects of this world that look very cool, including the light cycles, whose geometrically precise races with each other remind me of the cellular automata programs Dad used to spend so much time working with. I also loved the appearance of the water that the characters inside the program drink to replenish their strength.
The world within the video game is dark and oppressive, which is mostly a reflection of the evil master control program that has overtaken it. I was intrigued when I saw that David Warner was in this movie, as his warm, humble Bob Cratchit is my hands-down favorite ever, while he convinced me of his range by completely repulsing me in Titanic. His role here is rather like the latter, and his icy delivery is mesmerizing. As performances go, I was also impressed with Barnard Hughes as Dr. Walter Gibbs, a kindly scientist whose video game counterpart serves as a guardian keeping riff-raff out, and Dan Shor moved me as Ram, a zealous idealist for whom Flynn’s presence represents a profound affirmation of all that he holds dear. There are some interesting philosophical ideas brought up throughout the movie, and Ram is at the heart of many of them.
While I liked several of the characters and found the premise intriguing, I found that more often than not, I didn’t have a very clear idea of what was happening and why. I found it hard to follow, with a whole lot of wandering around down dark corridors in a strange half-light. I knew what the ultimate goal was, but I didn’t really have a handle on the steps of the process. So for me, I liked the general plot and individual moments, but I had a hard time staying engaged.
I’m glad I watched TRON, and after seeing the trailer on the big screen when we went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I last night, I’m jazzed to see TRON Legacy. I just hope I find it a little easier to tell what’s going on.
Jeff Bridges stars as Kevin Flynn, a brilliant programmer who has been denied credit for his work. After his program starts to go haywire, he finds himself sucked into it, rather in the manner of Fantastic Voyage. Instead of being inside a person, he’s inside a program, and it’s up to him, along with some intrepid helpers, to get things running smoothly again. I’m mostly familiar with Bridges from later movies, where he always looks pretty scruffy and weathered, so it was interesting to see him here, so youthful and with a Steve Gutenberg-esque twinkle in his eye. He makes a good leading man and plays well opposite Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley, whose in-program counterpart is Tron. As Tron, he’s pretty dashing and heroic, but I prefer the rather bumbling Alan with his gargantuan glasses. Cindy Morgan is a valuable ally to both as Lori / Yori, Alan / Tron’s spunky love interest.
The world within the computer program is very visually striking. When my dad went to rent this, the clerk warned him not to expect much in the way of special effects. What was cutting-edge at the time looks pretty dated now. I didn’t mind it in terms of looking cheesy, but the visuals actually kinda gave me a headache after a while. However, there are aspects of this world that look very cool, including the light cycles, whose geometrically precise races with each other remind me of the cellular automata programs Dad used to spend so much time working with. I also loved the appearance of the water that the characters inside the program drink to replenish their strength.
The world within the video game is dark and oppressive, which is mostly a reflection of the evil master control program that has overtaken it. I was intrigued when I saw that David Warner was in this movie, as his warm, humble Bob Cratchit is my hands-down favorite ever, while he convinced me of his range by completely repulsing me in Titanic. His role here is rather like the latter, and his icy delivery is mesmerizing. As performances go, I was also impressed with Barnard Hughes as Dr. Walter Gibbs, a kindly scientist whose video game counterpart serves as a guardian keeping riff-raff out, and Dan Shor moved me as Ram, a zealous idealist for whom Flynn’s presence represents a profound affirmation of all that he holds dear. There are some interesting philosophical ideas brought up throughout the movie, and Ram is at the heart of many of them.
While I liked several of the characters and found the premise intriguing, I found that more often than not, I didn’t have a very clear idea of what was happening and why. I found it hard to follow, with a whole lot of wandering around down dark corridors in a strange half-light. I knew what the ultimate goal was, but I didn’t really have a handle on the steps of the process. So for me, I liked the general plot and individual moments, but I had a hard time staying engaged.
I’m glad I watched TRON, and after seeing the trailer on the big screen when we went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I last night, I’m jazzed to see TRON Legacy. I just hope I find it a little easier to tell what’s going on.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)