…it’s that you always need a safe word.

by Bart van Ackooij

Find a list here at DenOfGeek.com.

My thoughts:

• Total Recall is one of those love/hate movies. I can’t decide which, but I think this one is doomed to fail. I kinda thought Mars was almost central to the plot of the original movie, but Mars isn’t part of this reboot. But then again, Mars wasn’t part of PKD’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”.
• Whoa whoa whoa there, sparky. Michael Chabon is doing the script for John Carter? Hmmm. The previews have it looking like every other generic sci-fantasy actioner. But now it sounds like it has the potential for a lot more.
• I’m excited for Prometheus but the promo photos worry me. Everything looks so neat and clean, particularly the ship. Granted, a single photo isn’t enough to base a good opinion on, but the Alien movies were amazing in part because everything was gritty, dirty, and looked like a scary place where you wouldn’t want to be even if you weren’t in space. If you take that element away, it is just a monster movie.
• Iron Sky: Hell YES!

Brian: Gone in 60 Seconds

Suzanne: The Hours

Ashton: Soap (the entire series)

Jett: Don’t Go Near the Water

I started writing this back in July but never finished it. So “last week” is more like “last quarter”.

I took a day off work last week and took the family out to see Cars 2 in 3-D at the local cinema. Perhaps we’ve had it too good for too long with Pixar. They consistently produced brilliant, imaginative animation with engaging characters. I mean really, you can’t fault Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Wall-E or Up whether you’re judging though children or adult eyes. From the start, Pixar cast the right voice actors, wrote brilliant stories, composed great music and employed brilliant visionary directors.

In comparison, their biggest competitor in Dreamworks has been a bit hit-and-miss. Below is a graph showing rating scores from RottenTomatoes.com for Pixar movies (in pink) and Dreamworks movies (in blue).

First thing you can see is that, for the most part, Pixar rates higher than Dreamworks. And, Pixar always has rated highly from their first movie Toy Story back in 1995, following up with greats including Mosters Inc, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The only aberration, funnily enough,  seems to be Cars from 2006, making a score of 74% their “bad movie”. Dreamworks seems to be a roller coaster on the ratings ride, with great shows like Chicken Run, Shrek, Shrek 2 and How to Train Your Dragon being interspersed with stinkers like Shark Tale and Shrek the Third.

But what’s this on the end there? It looks like Pixar took a nose dive off a cliff face after taking a long run up and crashed spectacularly. That, my friends, is Cars 2 with a score of 38%, making Cars 2 the first Pixar movie to get a yellow sticker. True, it’s as visually stunning as any other Pixar movie. More-so, given the “locations” and the 3-D treatment. But none of it could disguise the leaky seals and smoke coming from under the hood. Could it be because Cars 2 was was less about Lightning McQueen, a good strong character, and more about Mater, who, let’s face it, is pretty weak? Could it have been marked down for trying to cram in too much action, like car chases, explosions, guns and violence at the expense of a good story? Could it be because of the weak story pandering to the lowest common denominator, and being too obvious as a vehicle to sell more toys?

Personally, I think it’s a mix of all these. After the movie I think the whole family felt disappointed in the movie. Certainly, Jett no longer regards McQueen as as favourite character but expresses his admiration for Finn McMissile. I don’t know what’s in the pipeline at Pixar, but I hope they can redeem themselves with the next movie. I really hope that they don’t try to revive it and make Cars 3. Even if that engine was fully restored, the body was given a new coat of metallic paint and a new genius director was given the keys I don’t think it’d come out a winner. It would probably never been forgiven for past failures and would forever be known as the Sporty Corvair of animated feature movies.

Crushed, impaled, stabbed, run off a cliff by a herd of bulls or even plain ol’ shot in the face. Whether he’s a good guy or bad, Sean Bean always gives a good performance.

We had a little trip on the weekend from my parents place out to the Busselton Jetty and accompanying Underwater Observatory. The jetty is 145 years old and, at almost 2km, is the longest timber-piled jetty in the southern hemisphere. The Underwater Observatory is like an aquarium in reverse letting you take a walk 8m below the waves to check out the sealife making it’s home in and around the jetty pylons.

While waiting for our scheduled tour, we had a walk around the local Pioneer Cemetery. For some reason the kids are obsessed with checking out names and dates on headstones in cemeteries, and always ask if we can stop and have a look if we have the opportunity. In that cemetery we found lots of names like “Bunbury” and “Bussell”, obviously after whom these South West towns were named after.

One caught my eye. The name on it was Samuel Isaacs and without reading the inscription, Suzanne and I both turned to each other and said “Wasn’t that the guy…?”. Turns out it was the guy, and we both remembered the story from our school days. Isaacs and another local girl by the name of Grace Bussell (after whom Gracetown is named) rode their horses through the surf into the ocean to rescue people from a sinking ship. They ferried people back to the safety of shore by dragging them behind their swimming horses. You can read more about it here.

Samuel Isaacs monument, Busselton

On the way back the kids were disappointed to find that they brought the DVD covers but not the DVDs themselves so they couldn’t watch their favourite movie on the way home. You gotta hand it to them, though. It was a whole 6 minutes before the inevitable question came: “Are we there yet?”.

We stopped at a gas station for some road cokes (and chocolate milk for the kids) and while Suzanne way paying for them I dug out the trusty iPod as a backup with the intention of playing a little ZZ Top or Aerosmith. The Rolling Stones Forty Licks would surely get us home. When I plugged it in and pressed play, it was already playing Derezzed by Daft Punk from the Tron: Legacy sound track. Ashton said she wanted to listen to the entire album. Jett wasn’t so keen but it was he who left the DVDs behind so we let Ashton choose.

Ashton and Jett have seen Tron once only, and they really enjoyed it. Hey, it’s an enjoyable Disney movie so it’s understandable. But by listening to the soundtrack she was able to recall and describe pretty detailed parts of the movie. “This is the part where Sam meets Kevin Flynn for the first time. Only he’s CLU,” and “I remember this is where they are falling in the elevator,” and “This is where CLU gave his speech about “out there is our DESTINY“, but Kevin Flynn said the same thing about “in there” being our destiny at the start”. Derezzed is pretty much the signature track on the album, and instantly recognisable from the movie. But soundtrack albums also tend to have a lot of slower background atmospheric music, especially in scenes heavy on dialog. But Ashton knew pretty much where she was in the movie based only on seeing the movie and hearing the soundtrack once. Pretty impressive.

Finally, really truly for real, Star Wars on Blu-Ray is available for preorder. Get in now at a discounted price. Between this and Lord of the Rings, I think it’s time to upgrade to Blu-Ray.

Kevin Flynn

1982s Tron was the first movie to ever use CGI effects, and was the first appearance of a fully digital character in the form of the “bit”. For this reason, Tron is a significant piece of motion picture history and not just a retro nerdcore dream.

So, it stands to reason that the release, 28 years later, of Tron Legacy should also carry some significance. We had almost three decades of hardware and software improvements in digital movie production, and the introduction of watchable 3-D.

The idea behind 80s Tron is that Jeff Bridges plays Kevin Flynn, a programmer who is transported from the real world into his own system where everyone dresses in skin tight glowing neon spandex. These guys are personifications of actual running programs and resemble their “User” creators. Despite the religious themes examined, there’s really not much to argue that Tron was anything more than cheesy and camp, but still pretty awesome.

Fast forward to 2010 where where we find Sam, Kevin’s son, flashing back to the 80s and to the last time he saw his father. Sam grows up and despite being a cowboy is the major shareholder in Encom. Sam’s surrogate father figure, played by Bruce Boxleitner who also appeared in the original as the title character “Tron” and his User “Alan”, tells Sam that he was paged by Sam’s dad Kevin from the old pinnie parlour he used to work. Sam investigates and finds himself transported into the computer world where his dad has been lost for 20 years.

It’s called “The Grid”. It came before “The Matrix”. So there.

Digital Eye Candy

The rest of the story is hard to describe as anything other than “cool”. It’s 3-D eye candy, it’s ear shredding aural ecstacy, it’s a rich vibrant digital world you might have imagined 28 years ago that wasn’t possible because of the technical limitations of the day with magnificent scale and depth where you get lost in a world of glowing suits, speeding light bikes and digital storms. Getting lost is a good thing, because the plot is paper thin and pretty weak and doesn’t make much sense. Face it, this movie is effects- and nostalgia-driven and that’s all. In fact the movie moves pretty slow in parts because everyone has to keep explaining to Sam what’s is happening, and what has been happening up to that point. So you’ve got a movie with an ankle-deep plot and a lot of time spent explaining it. Quite an accomplishment.

My only real disappointment is that Kevin Flynn turned into The Dude from The Big Lebowski. He was all “Man” this and “Dude” that and started “knocking on the sky” or some other digital-hippie wank to fill in some time. 80s Kevin Flynn was better.

The best performance was Michael Sheen playing Zuse, an albino digital version of Ziggy Stardust who was as camp as a row of tents. He was funny and brilliant. Also, the soundtrack by Daft Punk is utter perfection. I understand they did the whole score and they manage to get it right the whole way through.

My verdict: if you’re into deep and meaningful investigation of intellectual themes and tight plots then this might not be the right movie for you. Tron is a sensory experience, and a fun way to spend $25. Pop the extra couple of bucks and catch it in 3D.

I found a couple new Tron posters from Korea, all 1024 x 1448. Korean characters make everything look better.

Not long now. Only two weeks! Gotta start convincing my wife that we need to go see it together. It has been a long time in the making.

Looking for the 1980s Tron movie? Or the Tron Legacy Soundtrack? Try Amazon!