Re: Forget TRON: Legacy - give me the sequel to Buckaroo Banzai!

What exactly is the subtext?

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Lance McLain
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 11:03 AM
To: DADL (off topic)
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Forget TRON: Legacy - give me the sequel to Buckaroo
Banzai!

On Dec 29, 2010, at 12:19 PM, Peter T. Chattaway wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Dec 2010, Lance McLain wrote:
>> If Twilight is a fantasy for narcissistic teen American princesses
>> who must be center of attention (and I think it is)...then Tron:
>> Legacy is a similar nostaligic fantasy for the geeky guy still
>> reveling in his 1980's teen years.
>
> Bah.  Twilight at least has the Mormon subtext to keep things
> interesting.

You know, I had never realized the whole Mormon subtext until we were
evangelized by some Christian friends of ours on how evil we were for allowing
our girls to watch and read them.  Ha!
And by the way, even knowing that now and having read the anti- Twilight
propaganda, I still have difficulty find the whole Mormon subtext in any way
meaningful (at least in the movies, I didn't read the books).

> And the original Tron had the suppression-of-religion-under-
> Communism- defeated-by-Christ-figures thing going for it.
>
> What, by way of comparison, does Tron Legacy have in that department?

How about the whole Buddhist/Koan thing.  The notion that sometimes doing
nothing is the best thing, the value of silence, the minimalism of Flynn's
accomodations, etc...

>> I can see why the critics and anyone who thinks too deeply panned
>> this.
>
> But can you see why Tron fans are panning this?

Yeah..they've grown up.

>> If you watch this film with the primary intent of looking for flaws
>> you will find them in spades.
>
> How about looking for virtues and not finding any?  (Or all that
> many.)

Fair enough.  But I don't think it was ever intended to be primarily a morality
tale.  Or are you talking about more technical virtues and not thematic ones?

>> And yes, on a critical level, I should expect more of film.  But at a
>> visceral level, this film had me reliving my glory days, when I
>> thought I could program the world.
>
> Can't say the film worked for *me* on a visceral level.  That might be
> because it was pretty stupid from the get-go.  I mean, the movie
> pretty much lost me right around the point where the minimum-wage
> security guard risks life and limb to pursue that guy on top of the
> skyscraper.  And not just any minimum-wage security guard, but an
> overweight klutz (remember how he spills his coffee?) for whom balance
> presumably does not come easy.

Yeah, that was so awful, I wondered why it was even done.  It was so bad, that
it must have been done for other reasons.  But that whole break-in sequence was
unrealistic to begin with so maybe the director
was just clumsily preparing the viewer for the absurdities to come?
Was this the directors first movie? I didn't see anything else listed for him in
IMDB.  I suppose it did foreshadow the death defying heights of the digital
world to come....but I don't see why the cop had to come out on the beam. That
was just weird.

> As lovely as it was to see the Vancouver skyline on the big screen
> like that, the scene was still pretty stupid, and nothing that
> happened in the hour-and-a-half after that made up for it, and indeed
> there were quite a few other travesties as well (like the extremely
> perfunctory yet contrived way they tried to shoehorn the character of
> Tron himself into the story).

Dude!  Those motorcycles were awesome, and the planes and Frisbee fights and
such.  That was freaking awesome!

>> And while it satiated my need for teen coolness, it also critiqued
>> itself as well (unlike Twilight).  It acknowledged the limits of mans
>> ability to create, that there exists creative powers outside of man
>> (with the iso), that the human need for family bonds is more
>> important than getting lost in the technology and we must be on guard
>> against it. Other than that, I don't think you should think too much.
>
> See, already I think you're thinking too much simply by virtue of
> lending any weight to the fact that the film included these very, very
> basic concepts (concepts it did not know what to do with, I might
> add).

Yeah...I agree with that.  But the film or characters themselves didn't take
those concepts that seriously either.

>> And Paul, the concerns you expressed about the need for digital world
>> relating to the real world didn't bother me so much.  Rather, I saw
>> the digital world being more related to the mind of Flynn (as it was
>> his creation) than the outside world.
>
> But that's part of the problem right there.  The digital world that we
> saw in the original film was not *Flynn's* creation, it was
> *everyone's* creation.  And Tron's most important relationship was not
> with Flynn, but with his actual user, i.e. Alan Bradley.

Ah...well I hadn't seen the original film in so long, I might as well not have
seen it.  So I had no problem with the film being inconsistent with it's
predecessor.

> Hmmm.  This post may sound rather negative.  I certainly don't mean to
> say that you shouldn't have enjoyed it, if in fact you did enjoy it.
> I just don't see any way that I myself can be argued into liking it.
> :)

:)  No worries.  I don't mean to say that you should have enjoyed it, if in fact
you didn't.  I admit though, I enjoyed it much more before I read all the
critical reviews later that told me why I shouldn't have.  Killjoys.  ;-)

regards,
-Lance

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