TRON: Legacy

I'm sorry, I thought I heard the space baby crying

Grade: B –

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner, and Michael Sheen

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 2 hour, 7 minutes

Tilt your head to the side, close one eye, and squint through those polarized spectacles, and you might just glimpse a mirage of deeper meaning in TRON: Legacy, the once unforeseen sequel to Disney’s 1982 sci-fi original. Gimcracks about the creation and evolution of life, religion, and God are encrypted throughout this executable extravaganza. The notion than an entire world can be condensed into terabytes on a jump drive is no less thought-provoking – or loopy – than the kicker to Men in Black in which galaxies are being thumped around a game of marbles.

Frankly, the more you try to think about the plot, the greater the chance of crashing your mental hard drive. Twenty-some years after computer programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) vanished without a trace, his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) tracks a mysterious page back to his father’s old video arcade. A little Journey and a few keystrokes later, Sam finds himself uploaded onto the grid, where an aging Kevin has been usurped by his power-hungry avatar Clu (a digitized Bridges circa 1982), who is bent on attaining his creator’s goal of perfection, and world domination, by any means necessary.

A chase to derez baddies and access portals ensues, but dopey plotlines are not the aim here. TRON: Legacy is visual and aural masterwork, a marriage of eye-popping special effects and a vivacious, orchestral soundtrack from the French electro duo Daft Punk that combines classical and electronic elements – think Vangelis meets Moby. At its best, debut director Joseph Kosinski emulates Kevin Flynn’s aspirations by creating a bold new cinematic frontier.

Unfortunately, neither the storyline nor the performances keep up with the film’s sensorial mega-processor. Most of the younger actors, including Hedlund, are as lifeless as computer-generated automatons. On the other hand, Bridges morphs the elderly Kevin into a Lebowski-esque Zen-master spouting New Age bon mots. And, as the only one seeming to grasp the inanity of it all, the always-terrific Michael Sheen pops up as Castor, a flamboyant, alabaster-colored night club owner.

Unlike others films where 3D is an alternate or even favored viewing option, the only reason to ever see this one is in a 3D theater, preferably of the IMAX variety. Disney succeeds in creating an event film that triggers the primordial impulse that first drove us to movie houses. Once the bombast wears off, however, experiencing TRON: Legacy is rather like watching someone else play a video game. What you get is what you see.

Neil Morris

Alice in Wonderland

Beet juice, Beet juice, Beet juice...

Grade: B –

Director: Tim Burton

Starring: Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Michael Sheen, and Alan Rickman

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

There is a lot about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland that’s curiouser and curiouser, but just not much “muchness.” It is a phantasmagorical fever-dream that is both absorbing and banal, a looking glass that reflects Narnia, Middle-earth, and assorted other child-escapist imaginaria while refracting its source text.

The seemingly sensible argument that Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novella Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland predates The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and similar fare is undercut by Linda Woolverton’s updated screenplay, a mash-up of Alice’s Adventures with Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and the creatures inhabiting his nonsense poem “Japperwocky.” Although these narrative liberties may repulse English majors and Carroll purists, they do allow Burton the freedom to emboss the story with his own unique vision. What the director does with this license, however, is a conundrum worthy of a Mad Hatter riddle.

Ten years after her first trip to “Underland” – which she does not remember – a now 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) finds herself at a personal crossroads. Following the death of her beloved father, Alice is due to become betrothed to a man she does not love in front a throng of family and friends at a Victorian estate party. Problem is, Alice keeps wilting under the pressure and spying a strange white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and a pocket watch which, at the moment of her matrimonial truth, she chases, again, down the rabbit hole.

There, Alice encounters a host of familiar characters: the aforementioned White Rabbit (voice by Michael Sheen); the chain-smoking Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman); the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry); Tweedledee and Tweedledum; and, of course, the tangerine-hued Hatter, played to Burtonesque delirium by Johnny Depp. Seems only Alice can save Underland from the clutches of the cruel, bulbous-headed Iracebeth the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) by slaying the Japperwock and restoring Iracebeth’s younger sister – the kindly, pacifist White Queen (Anne Hathaway) – to the throne.

Burton has always embodied the sentiment behind Alice’s query, “What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?” There is wonder in the film’s unrelenting visuals, comic spark, and intriguing voice works – particularly impressive is the trippy cool of Rickman and Fry, while Christopher Lee is instantly recognizable as the Japperwock’s resonant baritone. But, it is a sense of awe not shared by the surprisingly aplomb Alice. Burton’s 3D pictorial of a young girl’s arrested development and reluctant embrace of womanhood belies the fact that Alice’s entire time underground is spent having one creature after another tell her where to go and what to do. Her path seems remarkably inevitable, yet somehow the Alice that crawls out of the rabbit hole now is a budding feminist with aims of carrying on the family business and blazing trade routes to China.

The pleasingly zany spectacle of it all comes at the expense of the story’s soul. Beyond their collective lunacy – “We’re all mad here,” the Cheshire Cat famously informs – we barely ascertain any character motivation. The audience cranes its neck to hear a lone, brief exchange between the regal sisters, hoping for some nugget of exposition about the germ of their animus. The revelation that the Red Queen felt the need to behead her kingly husband passes quickly and without elaboration, much like the emotional undercurrent to her relationship with the head of her Army, the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover!).

Woolverton previously penned such inoffensive Disney offerings as Beauty the Beast and The Lion King. So, her Alice in Wonderland scrub is not that surprising, nor is the fact that it may well appeal to younger viewers looking for a slightly edgy, mostly palatable diversion – how else to contextualize Hatter’s abominable final act breakdance? Burton has told interviewers that he never felt emotionally connected to Carroll’s work, and here he seems to be trying – and failing –to bring more rhyme, reason, and heart to this familiar tale. However, another Alice assertion proves as apt as ever: “I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.”

Neil Morris

Originally published at www.indyweek.com

The Damned United

This must be what winning an Oscar would feel like

Grade: A

Director: Tom Hooper

Starring: Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, and Jim Broadbent

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

The Damned United may be a sports-related movie, but it’s not the typical “sports movie.”

Screenwriter Peter Morgan adapts David Peace’s novelized account of legendary, enigmatic English soccer manager Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) and his 44-day, ill-fated stint as head of reigning champion Leeds United in 1974. However, perhaps less than five minutes of game-play is depicted throughout the film, much of it snitched-in snippets of archival footage. The audience learns the outcome of matches only by their scores being printed across the bottom of the screen. Indeed, for a pivotal match between Clough’s previous team, Derby County, and rival Leeds, then led by iconic manager Don Revie (Colm Meaney), the camera remains strictly with Clough inside Derby’s locker room, with only crowd’s reaction available to divine the result of a match Clough is too nervous to actually watch.

Likewise, unlike the usual sports film that follows a story arc of adversity, perseverance, and triumph, success turns into failure in Damned United. Scenes of Clough’s heralded arrival as Leeds’ manager – after Revie departs to lead England’s national team – are interspersed with his earlier achievements with Derby County from 1967-1973, during which he took the Rams from the bottom of England’s Second Division to champions of Division One. However, Clough’s abrasive personality and outsized ego ultimately bring about his downfall in both Derby and Leeds, as well as the deterioration of his relationship with longtime assistant Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall).

From a purely sporting viewpoint, the enmity between Clough and Revie is emblematic of English football’s modernization during the late 20^th century. The soccer depicted in Damned United hardly resembles “the beautiful game,” but instead a muddy, bloody, sometimes brutish sport viewed by unruly spectators in dilapidated stadia. These conditions would eventually lead to English football’s decline and the rise of hooliganism during the late 1970s and 1980s, banishment from international play on the Continent. The reform movement that that followed included the Football Spectators Act of 1989 and, in 1992, the top 22 clubs formed the Premier League.

Accordingly, Clough lambasts Revie and Leeds for their violent play and gamesmanship – “cheating” he pointedly labels it – while advocating a game grounded more on finesse and sportsmanship. Prior to Leeds’ first visit to play Derby in 1967, Clough – then an ardent admirer of Revie – scampers about trying to dress up his shabby facilities; he futilely implores his groundskeeper to make the pitch “look like carpet” and the cleaning staff to put a spit-shine on dingy latrines.

Still, this historical backdrop is mere window-dressing for The Damned United’s two primary tableaux. First, it is a character study of the corrosive effects of pride and obsession, embodied in Sheen’s magnificent performance. The seed for Clough’s Ahab-like fixation on besting Revie and, by extension, Leeds is planted during that 1967 visit to Derby, when Revie neglects to even introduce himself to Clough. This slight, intentional or not, sparks a competitive fire that would both motivate and consume Clough, culminating with a Shakespearean fall from glory.

Moreover, at its core, The Damned United is a (platonic) love story. The friendship between Clough and Taylor, who served as Clough’s brilliant talent scout, has the emotional ebb and flow of a marriage, and neither party functions professionally as well apart as well as they do together. It is telling that the only measure of onscreen redemption Clough enjoys is a reunification with Taylor (Clough’s later, even more legendary exploits at Nottingham Forest are only referenced during the film’s epilogue). “I’m nothing without you; please, please, baby, take me back,” incants Clough– on his knees, no less – before Hunter will consider any reconciliation.

Director Tom Hooper (HBO’s John Adams) totally engrosses the viewer within the film’s opening 10 minutes with two monologues by Clough that exhibit his genius, hubris, and susceptibility to self-sabotage. Sheen’s delivery and the way Hooper frames the actor’s maniacal, Cheshire Cat grin bear a fitting resemblance to close-ups of Malcolm McDowell’s Alex early in A Clockwork Orange. Sheen has now superbly and revealingly portrayed three modern British icons: Prime Minister Tony Blair, David Frost, and now Brian Clough. He should have received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Blair in The Queen; he deserves to win one for his spectacular, mesmerizing performance here.

Several of Morgan’s recurrent narrative devices are again on display, including pivotal phone calls between lead characters (a la The Last King of Scotland, The Queen, and Frost/Nixon) and climactic television broadcasts (Elizabeth II mourning Diana; David Frost interrogating Richard Nixon). Here, a televised joint appearance by Clough and Revie on the occasion of Clough’s sacking by Leeds not only brings the two adversaries face-to-face but brightly illuminates Clough’s destructive mania. When Clough caps his list of grievances by recounting the precise date, seven years prior, when Revie refused to shake his hand, the reaction of Revie and others on-set is not unlike looks of shocked pity Captain Queeg and his steel balls receive during the Caine Mutiny court-martial.

The Damned United is an underdog story, but not strictly in the traditional sense of the also-ran that achieves unlikely greatness. It is also about someone whose success blossoms only on fields barren of expectations. Michael Clough is the underdog who didn’t know what to do with the car once he caught it.

Neil Morris

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

The excitement level 2 hours into watching New Moon

Grade: C –

Director: Chris Weitz

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, and Billy Burke

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

Earlier this month, Taylor Swift starred in a Saturday Night Live spoof of Twilight entitled Firelight. Perfectly mimicking actress Kristen Stewart’s mannerisms, Swift’s Bella Swan doppelganger struggled to cope with her star-crossed love for a young Frankenstein and friendship with his rival, a teenage mummy. The sketch was meant to be farcical, but what actually made it so funny was how close it hit the mark. Vampires and werewolves; Frankensteins and mummies – what’s the real difference?

In other words, with its monster motif and twice-baked teenage angst, the film adaptations of Twilight and now its highly-anticipated follow-up, New Moon, have passed a point of self-parody. Think of it as One Tree Hill with fangs. Chris Weitz assumes the directorial reigns from Catherine Hardwicke, but he remains saddled with Melissa Rosenberg’s insipid screenplays adapting Stephenie Meyer’s book series.

Here, a three-sentence plot gets bled over two hours and 10 minutes – if Bella really wants to experience immortality, she should just watch this film because it seems like it’s never going to end. The entire narrative is a series of near-misses and near-kisses, breakups and breakdowns, with a clumsily shoehorning Romeo & Juliet premise for good measure.

Bella (Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) remain madly in love until Edward suddenly skips out of Forks, Wash. to protect her from encroaching evildoers and his urge to accommodate her ongoing desire to join the undead. Bella’s already crippling – and annoying – neuroses spiral into a tailspin until Jacob (Taylor Lautner) seizes the opportunity to strip off his shirt, flashes his pecs, and make his move on Bella…until he, too, gives her the high-hat in order to (you guessed it) protect her. Bella saves Edward, Edward wants back with Bella, Jacob wants back with Bella…on and on it goes, each trying to eventually be the first to pop Bella’s supernatural cherry.

At least the squeals of delight from pubescent fans might drown out dialogue that fluctuates between the monotonous – “So, you’re a werewolf?” “Yeah, last time I checked.” – and the risible – “I just couldn’t live in a world where you don’t exist.” And, the sparse satisfactory acting talent involved is wasted in supporting roles. Anna Kendrick remains relegated to the nothing role of Bella’s gal pal, Jessica. Dakota Fanning’s ballyhooed casting turns out to be a glorified cameo. At least there’s a guilty pleasure in seeing the terrific Michael Sheen, who played the Lycan leader in the Underworld films, cast as the Grand Poobah of a vampire conclave (stationed in Italy, no less).

Otherwise, New Moon is just more of the humdrum, hormonal same. You’d hope for plenty of sucking in a movie about blood-thirsty vampires…just not the figurative kind.

Neil Morris