TRON: Legacy

When at the theatre to see "Black Swan" I was waiting for the person I was seeing it with to show up. As I waited I noticed a table set up with a few people sitting behind it, just giving away tickets to TRON. As I am a fan of free stuff I couldn't pass it up. (especially since a single ticket at that theatre is $12.50, fuck that!)

Having never seen TRON I didn't really know what to expect from this sequel. I knew there were motorcycles in it, that The Simpsons and Family Guy had both made fun of it, and that it was all just special effects.

Kevin Flynn was a computer programmer twenty years ago, and a video game maker. He disappeared right on the verge of a break through, something big enough to change everything about our world and solve its problems. His son (Sam) now an orphan is left to watch the company his father started become everything he was against. After a page comes his way from a number long disconnected he looks into it. That's when he accidentally transports himself into the world of TRON.

There's not much to say for the story, its basic, easy to follow, and leaves the narrative open to have tons of action and special effects battles to keep everyone entertained. That though was part of my problem with it, we get into this virtual world much to quickly. The story of Sam being an orphan and fighting the system was interesting, enough to keep the movie afloat with just that. But they rush it so then they can get into the "bread and butter" of what people came to the theatre to see.

When seeing a coming attraction for this my interest was piqued. Not so much in the story, I could care less, or the action, how much different could it be? No, I was interested in the lighting. Their suits although mostly dark latex or leather is contrasted by the lines of literal light they have going over them, they are lighting themselves. In a world that has no sun that makes their suits vitally important. When alone in a room its darker than if there are fifty people, interesting, and fun to play with. Sadly they don't push it hard enough, they don't use it to its full potential. In a world that is an ideal virtual world it doesn't have the room to be gritty, everything is slick and even. Which itself was really cool, every surface is polished and clean.

The acting is incidental to the story, it doesn't really matter, and Kevin Flynn, Jeff Bridges playing the character he did in the original is just having fun with the role. After winning an Oscar, and playing the U.S. Marshal in the up coming and for me very highly anticipated Coen brothers film "True Grit", I say let him have a little fun. Sam, played by Garrett Hedlund is adequate, he doesn't have to do much but be good looking, look confused most of the time, and then kick a little ass, but mostly watch other people do it. For me the real star of the movie was Olivia Wilde, for no other reason than she is gorgeous, and looks so in this movie. They must have had to pour her into her costumes. She also kicks a lot of ass, she does more fighting than anyone else in the movie, and was good at.

The effects at parts were pretty awesome, and seeing it in 3D, the second film I've seen in 3D in the last twenty years (The other being Alice in Wonderland) was interesting. I am not a fan of 3D for the most part, for to many reasons to start listing in this entry. But the 3D fit this well, and for the most part didn't mess with my eyes to much other than a few shots that were strange to have in 3D. Another problem I had with the effects was that there is a character called CLU, he is a computer version of Bridges, but hasn't aged at all since his creation. So he is basically a complete computer creation (funny right) since Bridges is to old for the role now. But his skin looked waxy, his lips didn't seem to move right, it was just generally a bother to watch him since I could tell so much that he was fake, surrounded by real actors.

The landscape of the virtual world was also problematic, instead of letting us see it for as it was, they just hid it behind mist. Mountains, oceans, everything but the city was obscured by this mist, and since there's no sun, and the light never changes, neither does that. Perhaps I'm putting to much expectations on a movie that's merely meant to be a spectacle, and a movie I didn't really care if I saw anyway. I can say that I was entertained for the most part, so I guess it worked and did the job it set out to do.

My few complaints aside I was amused while watching it. This was not meant to be much, cringing at the dialogue and throwing my hands into the air when the plot didn't make sense is merely a side effect of expecting it to be as good as other movies I've seen, its not going to be. Turn your brain off, stare at the pretty lights and girls and just enjoy it for what it is. 6/10 stars.

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde

P.S. Either have TRON be a main character, or at least important, or don't have him at all. He was a tacked on character that didn't make sense. With a story arc that was as bad and short as I've seen in some time.

Talhotblond

This will make you think twice about who you talk to online, maybe even make you think three or four times about it. We've all seen "To Catch a Predator" this is.... not that, the damage done here goes so much deeper.

I don't want to give away to much about this documentary, but I'll do my best to explain what it is. A man named Thomas Montgomery is bored with his life, his middle aged wife and two daughters, he works at a factory making guns. There is not much exciting about his life, that is until he meets a girl in a chat room, shes 18 and looking for an escape from the little town she lives in, in West Virginia, her screen name, Talhotblond, who says her name is Jessi. Thomas becomes Tommy, a fellow 18 year old, who's a sniper in the Marines, and they fall in love. When Montogomery's wife finds out she sends a letter to Jessi telling her the truth.

An online fight ensues, but they end up talking again. Jessi now is talking to a coworkers of Thomas' a younger man in his early twenties. She is stirring up a jealousy and hatred in Thomas. He ends up killing this younger man, like a sniper would, and a man hunt begins as more secrets are revealed and the stakes become clear.

This is the real story of three people who had a love triangle with the two men never actually meeting the girl. They became so enthralled with their own online story they killed for it. It is a very well made documentary, it looks good, and keeps up a nice pace. They got access to people involved with this story that I wouldn't have thought they would have been able to pull off.

Its a scary thought that there are so many people out there who do this sort of thing, they build up these fantasies in their minds that they think it's real. Thomas actually thought that if he wished hard enough he could reenter youth, become 19 again, even have a bigger penis. Disturbing in so many ways, and so sad. What makes a person so delusional that they start to believe that sort of thing? Because of two peoples actions, someone ended up dead, lives in two different families were ruined, and for nothing, for absolutely nothing. They never met each other, how could they become this enraged, this homicidal from a chat room, from reading some misspelled writing scrawled in an IM window. Even taking into account this went on for months it still doesn't explain it all.

They do run into a few problems in how they have to tell the story, they need to have the conversations from online for us to see, there's no audio, just at times words coming up on the screen telling us what they were saying to one another. It was what they had to do, and they couldn't help it, but it still bothered me after a little while.

An interesting and sad watch. I wish that there weren't people out there like this, to many people that seem normal have this deep rooted psychosis, and its scary to me. 8/10 stars.

Director: Barbara Schroeder

A Taste of Cherry

It is very hard to care for a character when you know almost nothing about them. You don't know what their central conflict is, you don't know anything about their life, and they insist on using people like they have no feelings or right to express their opinion.

Mr. Badii is driving around his city looking for someone to help him, the job he has is simple and the pay is good. He wants some one to come to a hole that he has dug near a tree in the outskirts of town, yell his name twice, if he doesn't respond fill the whole with 20 spadefuls of dirt and leave. If he does answer, help him out of the grave. As he drives around and meets people he sees a cross section of the country he lives in. Immigrants, low income laborers, and a man who works at the natural history museum.

We spend almost the whole time in the car as he drives around, he is rude to people, short with them. If they express their opinion at all he tells them he doesn't want to hear it, he just wants them to do this job. He calls these people his friends, he manipulates them, and asks so much of them for a monetary compensation. To everyone he talks to the money is meaningless, they only want to help him. Badii is a selfish, and careless man. He gets frustrated when people wont do his bidding, people who would be more likely to kill themselves than him, they live sad and hard lives where he seems well off. We never know why he wants to kill himself though, so I cant say much about that.

It has a terrible non-ending, I'm sure you can guess from reading this where the story ends, so we get no closure on the story. There are some great moments in it, but because of the ending those moments are meaningless, if the whole story is about the last day of his life, or a day he nearly made a huge mistake we need to know that, this cant be left open.

They do some very interesting stuff with lighting and composition, but because the film is almost entirely in his car it becomes repetitive quickly. They also put in hints for things that never happen, what a waste. Example: Whenever he gets to the site where he dug the hole we can hear an injured or lost puppy somewhere nearby crying. To me it would seem like to end it he would save the dogs life, thus saving his own, but no. Its never referred to.

I cant really recommend this to anyone, it drags to often, and it not story enough to be a feature length, I think as a 45 minute short it would work very well, but at more than double that it simply flips about trying to run the clock out. 5/10 stars.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Actors: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Mir Hossein Noori