Tron: Legacy: Grid-locked!

It’s been two decades since programming genius and former ENCOM CEO Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) fell off the grid and disappeared into the Grid, leaving behind a son so baffled and dim he never bothered to check the wall behind dad’s Tron arcade game for the secret passage leading to the electronic rabbit hole. Perhaps Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) preferred being a wealthy orphan, having inherited dad’s company without having to assume any of dad’s responsibilities. When asked what he thinks happened to his father, Sam, now 27, shrugs amiably and replies, “He’s either dead or chillin’ in Costa Rica. Probably both!”

When Sam does finally follow Kevin into the infinite geometrical plain of the Grid, he actually seems more at home there than in Vancouver, where Tron: Legacy was filmed. Having simply traded one world without sunlight for another, Sam’s immediately stripped of earthly clothing, covered in flatteringly body-hugging electro-goo, given an “identidisc”—a sleek LP-sized object which slips snugly into your backpack and records everything you do—and sent off to play killer Frisbee in the neon coliseum. Sam proves a natural gladiator, literally shattering his opponents in quick succession and breaking away to find Kevin, who’s been hiding in some pocket where Clu (also Jeff Bridges), his evil renegade avatar who now controls the Grid, can’t find him. Kevin, now bearded and gray, wears comfy looking karate gear and sits barefoot and cross-legged, still pondering the possibility of “a digital frontier that will reshape the human condition” and “a system where all information is free and open… Beautiful.”

If we don’t count his appearances in a brief flashback and as Clu, whose face is digitally air-brushed to make Bridges look 27 years younger and really, really creepy, Sam’s reunion with Kevin about marks Bridges’ proper star entrance, 30 minutes or so into Tron: Legacy and not a moment too soon. 20 years trapped in a video game and Bridges still seems like a human being, while Hedlund, whose performance involves a great deal of face squishing, feels like a figure out of a video game from the very start. Bridges’ approach is so loose, funky and tender as to be refreshingly antithetical to the one-dimensional performance style that dominates these sorts of effects-heavy 3-D fantasies. Despite being a fugitive in the now fascist state of the Grid, Bridges’ Kevin retains a youthful enthusiasm for his grandiose project, which might as well be an organic farm on Mars. “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!” The Dude abides… in virtual reality!

(There is one other notable actor of considerable skill and subtlety in Tron: Legacy, but unfortunately Michael Sheen, whose work I generally enjoy very much, here in creamy platinum Ziggy Stardust mullet, is working very hard at something that just doesn’t seem to fit. He plays this Mad Hatter nightclub owner. His clientele is uniformly sedate, but he dances around shouting and playing air guitar with his dandyish cane. As I write this it occurs to me that Sheen’s incongruous mania probably sounds pretty funny. If it is, I missed the gag the first time around.)

To be honest, though Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis’ script is somehow simultaneously underwritten and confusing, if not completely nonsensical—How do flesh-and-bone people get sucked into the Grid? And how do they eat that sucking pig?— there’s a lot about Tron: Legacy that feels like a welcome alternative to your average contemporary science fiction blockbuster. Rather than assault the viewer with frames saturated with extraneous detail and Redbull-addled editing, Joseph Kosinksi’s directorial debut, with production design by Darren Gilford, ushers us into a disco-lit world of smooth plateaus and distant thunder that’s austere enough to allow the action to become more graphically dynamic. The outfits, motorbikes and ships employed by the bad guys emanate a warm orange glow that reminds me of the inside of my toaster oven, and Daft Punk’s pleasingly percolating synth washes enhance the film’s overall liquid vibe as Sam, Kevin, and Quorra, Kevin’s lovely, almond-eyed Girl Friday (Olivia Wilde), attempt to cross the Sea of Simulation. It’s both a chase movie and the cinematic equivalent of a warm bath.

Tron: Legacy ends however not in the Grid but back in our gungy material world. Kevin’s big epiphany during his years away was that perfection needs to be cultivated rather than designed or dictated: “Bio-digital jazz, man!” The final shot, which of course alludes to another Tron sequel, implies that it’s the world we actually live in that contains the real adventure.

Time slips, the world ends, The Rock sees double, and Southland Tales slouches toward DVD shelves, one coma-inducing chapter at a time

Before we get started, let me just say that it's useful to remind oneself every now and then that there are countless ways in which movies can turn out lousy. When you consider all the factors that come into account when putting together a feature film —the diverse contributors, conflicting visions, constraints financial or physical, accidents happy or otherwise, disasters natural or manmade—it’s kind of a wonder that any of them turn out good. And if you throw a young, reckless, giddily adventurous auteur into the mix, things can get only more precarious.

I want to talk about Southland Tales, writer/director Richard Kelly’s much anticipated follow-up to his 2001 debut Donnie Darko, which must be the most beloved non-theatrically released American movie of the century. A long, unwieldy, virtually incomprehensible satire about the American apocalypse, featuring a wildly bloated cast half-comprised of has-beens most popular during Kelly’s childhood—John Lovitz, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, Curtis Armstrong—it debuted as a work-in-progress at Cannes 2006 to a chorus of boos and loathing reviews from all but a small band of US critics. (Most of them, incidentally, quite good critics.) Whether because of Kelly’s protracted re-cutting schedule or an understandably pessimistic marketing team, Southland Tales slouched back into the ether until, having shed 20 minutes, several characters and a few subplots, it was finally granted a limited release last November before vanishing without a trace. In Canada it never even opened. It finally arrived on DVD shelves last month.

Having very much admired Donnie Darko, and putting little faith in the judgment of noisy festival naysayers, I eagerly looked forward to Southland Tales, making a point of reading as little about it as possible so as to come at it fresh. Ready for whatever, I popped it in the player and within two minutes realized I needn’t bother to continue my initial jolt of frenzied note-taking—the exposition was being hurled around like a cafeteria food fight. Texas has been nuked; oil is drying up; the US is at war with at least five counties; a neo-Marxist resistance is emerging from somewhere in Venice Beach; Americans are being monitored everywhere and all the time; an action star gets amnesia and teams up with a “cock-chugging” porn star developing an apocalyptic action movie and an all-porn star talk show. I got that much. But the problem wasn’t so much what was being relayed as how. Screens within screens resembling drearily cheesy video games (or, I guess, Fox News) slam into place and slide around. Between the near-constant, impossibly flat voice-over, courtesy of Justin Timberlake, and the soft electro-wall paper score, courtesy of Moby, I felt the film was actually designed to help me slip into a coma. Little did I realize that much of the two-and-a-half-hour movie would be more of the same. I started taking pee breaks when I didn’t even need to pee.

The central players in Southland Tales don’t help matters. I guess the trio of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Seann William Scott is some sicko’s idea of a dream team, but their collective dearth of charisma or even ability with coherent line readings makes their perversely vapid characters that much less engaging. Of course they’re supposed to be funny. “All the pilgrims did was ruin the Indian orgy of freedom,” Gellar’s nattering “cockchugger” complains. “The fourth dimension’s going to collapse on itself, you stupid bitch!” imparts Johnson in his bizarrely spaced, over emphatic sub-Shatner speak. Those are some of the best, or at least most memorable lines, but they look better on paper than they play in the movie. Admittedly they play far, far better than the astoundingly lame insertions of Jane’s Addiction lyrics, Philip K. Dick book titles or T.S. Eliot poetry into the dialogue. This unimaginative flaunting of influences reaches its nadir early on, when we get to watch a good chunk of the opening of the classic nuclear noir Kiss Me Deadly on Gellar’s TV. In his Village Voice review, J. Hoberman writes that “Kelly’s movie may not be entirely coherent, but that’s because there’s so much it wants to say.” I genuinely appreciate Hoberman’s championing of Kelly’s bravura messiness—I am, after all, a huge fan of Inland Empire—but it seemed to me like most of what he had to say was “Look at how many movies/books/music I’ve seen/read/listened to!”

Maybe Kelly really just wanted to make a cult phenomenon, a rather odd choice when that’s exactly what his first movie already accomplished. Maybe it was meant to be something else altogether. In trying to figure out what Southland Tales is, it might be worthwhile to establish what it isn’t. Southland Tales is neither a Heaven’s Gate nor a Battlefield Earth, which is to say it isn’t an overly ambitious maybe-masterpiece completely overshadowed by its expense and extravagant production, nor is it a mega-budgeted lemon full of dialogue, costumes, performances (I’ll stop here) so risible as to be pure camp and infused with elements that allow for some fun extra-filmic readings (ie: the Scientologist movie star fronting a story written by the father of Scientology). I don’t know that Southland Tales’ long gestation period captured the public’s imagination all that much. I don’t know that there’s been much of an effort yet to canonize it in any so-bad-it’s-good category. Outside of a sometimes-fevered critical debate that I suspect was of interest only to other critics, I don’t know that the film has thus far met anything but near-total indifference. Whether or not this will change will probably depend on whether or not the above appraisal reads to you like a clear warning to steer clear or a disguised encouragement to see the greatest cheesed-out, conspiracy theorist/stoner epic since El Topo.

Horton Hears a Who!: the sub-microscopic apocalyptic disaster movie as talking animal kiddie fluff

An elephant is gradually shunned, then hunted down by his entire jungle community for claiming that there is life beyond what we can see, hear or feel. A less-than-respected town mayor is wracked with anxiety, a panicked sense of futility, burdened with the knowledge that his world teetering on the brink of apocalypse. Pretty heavy shit for a kid’s movie, but we’re riffing in the heady realm of Dr. Seuss, who sort of had a knack for blending mortally high stakes and political metaphor with screwy humour and fantastical hi-jinx.

Horton Hears a Who! has the enormous advantage of Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) still lingering in our collective memory, ensuring us that no matter what the Fox animation squad does to Horton can’t possibly be worse that the grotesquerie of Howard’s live-action toilet fodder. Horton does share Grinch’s star, but fortunately Jim Carrey, often cartoonish in any case, can’t mug quite as gratingly when reduced to voice only. (And weirdly, the elephant looks more like costar Steve Carell than it does Carrey.) In fact there are a moments where his good-natured titular elephant, persecuted for claiming that an entire world exists on a spec resting on a flower, is reasonably charming, interacting with his pupils or with his mouse pal, the obligatory sidekick well-voiced by Seth Rogan.

What ushers Horton Hears a Who! to a substantially higher level of Seussian entertainment however are the scenes in Whoville, where Carell’s Mayor slips and slides through a village of curly, gravity-defying, Gaudi-inspired architecture and candy-coloured everything. While Horton’s jungle home feels akin to typical contemporary, soft-hued, numbingly fluid, Hollywood-budgeted computer animation, Whoville, where the animation style has been stripped down to something far more graphically bold, draws us into a landscape that actually feels like a place Seuss might have dreamed up.

But the film’s major problem isn’t related to these varying degrees of visual or aural charisma. What makes Horton Hears a Who! something of a drag is the fact that you can feel writers Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul (the scribes behind The Santa Clause 2) straining to expand Seuss’s winsomely compact tale to feature length. There are too many supporting characters with little to do, too many scenes that become repetitive and redundant. One of the laudable themes of the story is the importance of questioning authority: if only the team behind the film could have questioned their studio superiors to the point of making them accept that Horton, like the beloved 1966 version of Grinch, would probably work better at a third of the duration.

In Bruges: Hitmen with your best shot

Few mysteries baffle like the persistence of movies about hitmen. Why we’re supposed to be so in love with those who assume this vile occupation that almost no one can relate to is beyond my critical powers. We can get philosophical about it, discuss the existential dilemma inherent in killing strangers for money or draw thematic corollaries with the glorious samurai genre, but that still wouldn’t explain why the vast majority of hitmen movies are so incredibly stupid, shallow and devoid of imagination.

I’d be curious however to question English playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh on the appeal of hitmen flicks, since McDonagh doesn’t seem stupid or shallow or content to ape Tarantino and yet has chosen to make his feature debut in just this over-harvested field. In Bruges is basically your hitmen buddies go on holidays and get sensitive movie. Among other questionable choices it stars Colin Farrell. The surprise comes only as you get well into the film: it’s not that bad.

On orders from the boss, Ray (Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) hightail it the opulent Belgian medieval village of the title to hide out and await instructions after the proverbial job gone wrong. While elder, gentler Ken yearns to kick back and sightsee the abrasive-tongued Ray just wants to booze up and forget what we gradually learn was a horrific accidental killing dealt out by Ray’s own hand. Compulsively following a perverse obsession with dwarves (I’m not making this up), Ray winds up sneaking onto the set of some godawful Euro-co-pro art film and snagging a fetching Dutch AD, who as it turns out is also heavily involved in criminal activity.

This playing as a comedy at least half of the time, the blokes do have some winning one-liners become increasingly sympathetic. Gleeson’s pretty easy to love and Farrell, despite some grating overacting of the face, gets more interesting as his character opens up about what’s really eating him. Whether or not these guys are plausible cold-blooded career killers is a question perhaps best-posed to the professionals, but when a supremely nasty Ralph Fiennes shows up in the third act and the heavy shooting starts they look comfortable enough blowing each other way, I guess.

While McDonagh remarkably manages to weave much audacity and crudity into a narrative so rife with guilt, loneliness and suicide without becoming entirely glib, the actors do a solid job of basically asking that we all agree on how totally bogus this all is and get on with splattering brains and pleading for redemption. The truth is that In Bruges never entirely redeems its flaws, but it’s a not too shabby a start for a career in movies.