Greetings, Programs!

When the movie Tron hit theaters back in 1982, my twelve-year-old self was totally obsessed with it. I glommed onto the soundtrack album, the storybook, the action figures and toys ... if it had the Tron logo on it, I begged my parents to buy it for me. I even made myself a "computer world" outfit out of white (actually I think it was a light heather-grey) fleece, using a blue Marks-a-Lot marker to draw the circuits all over it ... even topped it with a makeshift helmet that I fashioned from something I now can't remember ... and of course, I had to have an "identity disk" (frisbee) to complete the ensemble. It was crap compared to the work of art that The Tron Guy came up with, but for me it was just perfect.

So, considering I was so in love with Tron as a kid, you'd think that I'd have been first in line (camped out for days before, even) to see the long-awaited and recently-released sequel, Tron: Legacy -- especially since I'd been wondering for years before it was announced what mind-blowing things they could do with Tron if it were remade nowadays ... but no, I didn't see it until this past weekend, a month into its run. Hey, an adult does have more going on in his life than a 12-year-old does, making "getting around to" things take a little longer, but still, shouldn't I have been chomping at the bit more than I was? I usually only see one movie, maybe two, per year on the big screen, so by that measure I did go out of my way to see Tron: Legacy as soon as I could.

I guess what it comes down to is that I was afraid I'd be disappointed. So many movies nowadays sacrifice the substance of a story for the style of eye-popping digital effects, assuming that the audience won't notice (and, as far as the roughly under-20 demographic is concerned, their assumption would be correct). But it turns out that the writers of Tron: Legacy took the care to provide enough of a story to satisfy those of us who get bored with too much visual razzle-dazzle, and to give it enough continuity with the original film to satisfy those of us who have been waiting 28 years to see whatever became of Kevin Flynn and company.

Now, I knew before I even set out for the movie theater that I wasn't going to be blown away by the visuals in Tron: Legacy nearly as much as I was by those in the original film. After all, digital effects were in their infancy back then, and no movie audience had ever seen anything like Tron before. By contrast, digital imagery has not only grown by leaps and bounds -- if it can be conceived, it can be put to film -- but is also so ubiquitous that it's got to be seriously impressive to make a lasting impression on the audience. But the makers of Tron: Legacy were smart ... they knew that, as far as the visuals are concerned, less is more. Case in point: arguably the biggest light-show of the original film, the main character's transition from meatspace into cyberspace, was understated here -- shortened from over 60 seconds down to about 2, and consisting only of a comparatively colorless but still kind-of trippy 3-D pixelation sort of thing.

Whereas the live-action elements of the computer-world scenes in the original film were photographed on a "blank" stage àla green-screen, with all the digital scenery inserted photographically in post-production (remember: there was no digital film editing back then!), the actor-centric scenes in the virtual world of Tron: Legacy were filmed on actual sets, with only the finishing touches (the glowing trim of the costumes, the digital landscapes, etc.) added in later. That adds a certain "realness" to the scenes that no amount of digital trickery can replicate. The same is true of the digitally de-aged face of Jeff Bridges, used quite necessarily for the Kevin Flynn flashbacks and the central presence of his program, Clu -- impressive and splendidly done, but there's something about the human face that will never be convincingly faked by computers.

All in all, I rather enjoyed Tron: Legacy, and I considered it a perfectly fine payoff for the 28-year wait. It had a sufficiently substantial story, impressive visuals (up to and including the studly Garrett Hedlund himself), and enough nostalgia thrown in to make us '80s kids happy. There was a Journey song playing on the arcade's jukebox (Journey recorded a song especially for the first movie), lines of dialogue from the original film were uttered on a few occasions, and seeing good ol' Bruce Boxleitner reprising his role of Alan Bradley was like seeing a favorite uncle I hadn't seen in 20 years. Sure, it wasn't a perfect movie, but Kevin Flynn wouldn't have it any other way (you've gotta see the movie to get that reference).

End of line.

Irvin Kershner: 1923 - 2010

Sad news: Irvin Kershner, most famous to us as the director of The Empire Strikes Back and RoboCop 2, has passed away at the age of 87. He was also an instructor at the USC film school, and none other than George Lucas was amongst his students. May the Force be with you, Mr. Kershner.



















(Photo found by way of BrickTuts.)

Welcome To The 24th Century

Holy crap! Holy crap! Did you know about this? I didn't until yesterday! Holy crap!! If I'd known about this earlier, I wouldn't have bought the last dozen or so CDs I did buy (well, not necessarily the last consecutive dozen, but a dozen) and would have saved up for this instead! But I still bought it anyway, 'cause I just gotta have it. Seriously, I honestly don't know how I would be able to go on living without having this in my possession as soon as humanly possible. Want to know what it is? Maybe you'd better sit down, 'cause I myself had a geek-out on a transphasic level when I found out about this.

It's a limited-edition box set of not four, not six ... no, not even eight ... no, keep going ... would you believe a whopping 14 -- yes -- FOURTEEN CDs jam-packed with never-before-released music from dozens of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation! Devoted solely to the work of Ron Jones, who traded off scoring duties with Dennis McCarthy through the first four seasons of TNG, "Star Trek: The Next Generation -- The Ron Jones Project" includes nearly every note written and recorded for 42 of the series' first 94 episodes (the score for "The Best of Both Worlds" two-parter is already available on the GNP Crescendo label, so just some bonus tracks from it are included here) plus numerous outtakes, as well as a disc devoted to his work for a pair of Trek video games released later.

The panicked evacuation of the Enterprise in "11001001" ... the tearful farewell of Tasha Yar in "Skin of Evil" ... the appearance of the Romulans in "The Neutral Zone" ... Riker's escape from the Mintakans in "Who Watches The Watchers" ... the terrorist attack on the ship in "The High Ground" ... Lal's tragic demise in "The Offspring" ... the perilous journey across the arid wasteland in "Final Mission" ... they're all cues that I've been waiting 20 years to hear unobscured by dialogue and sound effects, and now's my chance! With this doozy of a package being limited to a production run of just 5,000, I couldn't waste any time in seizing the opportunity to add it to my collection, since the price is certain to only start going up on the aftermarket.

Widely regarded as the best composer that Star Trek: The Next Generation ever had, Ron Jones was known for delivering sweeping, attention-grabbing, feature-film-worthy scores for countless episodes. The problem was that TNG's producers didn't want attention-grabbing music; they wanted the episodes' scores to lay quietly in the background. So after almost four full years of flying in the face of the producers' demands, Jones was fired and replaced by Jay Chattaway (quite a dandy composer in his own right, to give credit where it's due). But I always thought the Trek producers were not only making their episodes just a bit less memorable by taming down the music, but they were also forsaking a perfectly good merchandising outlet. Fans have been clamoring for Ron Jones' scores to be commercially available for years, and I have to wonder how many CD sales they missed out on by missing that opportunity and never licensing retail releases until all these years later.

If you can't live without it, like I couldn't, this incomparably amazing Trek-a-thon of music will set you back a healthy $150 (plus shipping), but at 14 CDs that ends up coming out to less than $11 per disc, which is a great price, especially for something that's a limited-edition collectible like this. It's available for purchase now at SAE and at Intrada, and further information is available from the Film Score Monthly website (and thanks to them for the links to the audio clips!). A friend of mine has all but challenged me to bundle it up in giftwrap when it arrives and not open it until Christmas morning ... but that's gonna be a really tough test of my will.

Your Friend In Time...

It's hard to believe that it's been a quarter-century since Marty McFly hit 88 miles per hour and flux-capacitored his way into movie history with Back To The Future. I can remember when I was a teenager -- much more of a geek than I am now, come to think of it -- and my family and I took a seven-week vacation to Europe. What was one of the few things I can remember taking along with me to keep me company? It was a Walkman cassette player and (along with other tapes, at least I hope) two cassettes onto which I had recorded the audio portion of the entire Back To The Future movie. I must have listened to those a half-dozen times over the course of that vacation, I was so bored otherwise.

Needless to say, I couldn't go without picking up the brand new 25th-Anniversary edition of the Back To The Future trilogy on DVD. I can't wait to see all the deleted scenes and new bonus features they've packed into this set, not the least of which is, finally, long-rumored actual footage of Eric Stoltz in the role of Marty. And of course there's the neatest extra of all -- here's my geekiness shining through again -- digital copies of all three movies, which I can load onto my iPod if I want to! It's full circle in a way ... I have to wonder what my younger self, armed with mere cassettes of only the movie's sound, would think if he could have in the palm of his hand full-color video and stereo sound of not just the first movie, but of many others, not to mention hundreds of albums of music!?!

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. This was a groundbreaking movie series in a number of ways, one of which being that it was the first one for which more than one sequel was filmed back-to-back (The Matrix is the most noteworthy other example), and it was also one of the first -- and certainly the first with such broad appeal -- to successfully integrate science-fiction with comedy to such an extent that the movie can fit neatly into either genre; Ghostbusters, Innerspace, and Men In Black picked up on the idea and ran with it. Part II definitely laid on the sci-fi a bit more strongly, what with its frequent and potentially confusing references to paradoxes and hopscotching between time periods, and Part III was an almost completely different movie altogether, with a decidedly Western feel and an almost fully self-contained story (not to mention a supporting role by the always enjoyable Mary Steenburgen).

But then, I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know about the best time-travel movie ever made. Suffice to say I love each and every chapter of the adventures of Marty and Doc, I'll probably sit down and watch the first of the three tonight ... and I'm very soon going to secure my digital copies, too!

The Whole Planet Houston?

If you're well-versed in the behind-the-scenes saga of the Christopher Reeve-era Superman films, then you know that the producers, Alexander and Ilya Salkind, had hired Richard Donner to film the first and second Superman movies simultaneously -- and that, when budget and schedule overruns got out of control, put the kibosh on the sequel in the middle of its principal photography and had Donner finish only the first film. And you probably also know that said time and money troubles got Donner fired before he could finish Superman II, whereupon the Salkinds brought Richard Lester in as his replacement. Well, ever since then, some fans have been crying out to see Richard Donner's original vision of the movie, and in 2006 they got their chance when Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut was released on DVD.

Well, Superman movie fan that I am, I can't quite say I was one of the "crying out" sort, as evidenced by the fact that I just got around to picking up this DVD a few weeks ago ... used ... for six bucks. It was interesting to watch, and, well ... I don't know if it's just because I'm used to the original Richard Lester version, or maybe it's the fact that Donner, according to his introduction on the DVD, never got around to filming everything he wanted to film back in the day, and thus had to reassemble his vision of the picture as best he could from the available footage (and had to use some footage from that other guy, much as he didn't want to). But, even though I'm quite certainly a big fan of the first film and would even go so far as to call it a masterpiece, I've gotta say that I think Lester's version of Superman II is actually better.

First of all, the editing was somewhat choppier in the Donner cut, particularly the way they kept going back and forth between Clark and Lois at the Fortress of Solitude, and the supervillains' conquest of Earth -- in the Lester version, the sequences were kept in bigger blocks and thus seemed to be more coherent. And then there was the subplot about Lois scheming to "out" Clark as Superman ... the fact that she was smart enough to do so notwithstanding. Lester is supposedly known to have more a sense of comedic directing than Donner, which is all too evident here in that Donner's efforts in this regard come off as a bit more clumsy and forced, while Lester's are more naturally flowing. We can forgive the redundant climax, just because Donner obviously wouldn't have used it for the first movie had he seen the second one through to the end, but it's quite odd that he kept the epilogue in since the climax canceled out the scene it relates to ... don't worry, I'm trying to avoid a spoiler, so if you go and watch it, what I'm saying will make sense, I promise.

I'm still glad that Richard Donner went to what I'm sure was a lot of trouble to re-assemble his version of the film -- as closely as possible, of course -- and I'm glad I picked it up. It's a unique glimpse into a somewhat "lost chapter" of the Superman saga, and has a wealth of what one could call "deleted scenes" from Superman II. Imperfect though it may be (in my opinion, anyway), I'll always consider him a master for the wonderful story he told in the original Superman movie. I do think the Salkinds were wrong to fire him from Superman II prematurely, because I'm quite positive that Superman: The Movie wouldn't have been the blockbuster it was if someone else had directed it.

It's Been a Long Road, Getting From There To Here

As I mentioned in a previous entry, by the time Star Trek: Voyager went off the air in 2001 I'd had my fill of the Trek Universe for awhile ... something that just a few years earlier was inconceivable. So when Paramount chose to crank out yet another series so closely on the heels of Voyager, I was understandably unenthused ... kind-of like being asked to walk another mile after I'd already walked two (even if there were a record store when I got there). Indeed, if Enterprise hadn't starred Scott Bakula (Quantum Leap is one of my all-time favorite shows), I probably wouldn't have even given it a try. But try I did, and boy did I ever try. The pilot episode was entertaining enough, but all too soon boredom set in, and I mustered all the interest I could until I gave up about two-thirds of the way through the first season.

Fast-forward eight and a half years, and I'm on vacation in California. Several times over the previous few months, I'd started to feel tempted to give Enterprise another chance (apparently unconvinced deep down that I could get bored with a Trek show), and had been checking out the prices of the used DVD season box-sets. By the time I'd arrived at Amoeba Records in L.A., I'd decided to go ahead and pick up season 1 if I saw it at a decent price. I still kind-of balked at $35, but took the plunge anyway. (Good move, 'cause the disc trays inside were still shrink-wrapped and ended up being brand new!) I've now re-watched the first nine episodes so far, and must have been really bored back in the day 'cause I didn't remember jack about most of them.

What a difference eight years makes! There I was, putting the blame on what I saw as imperfections in the show -- the way the crew seemed to fall too soon into treating the supposedly new experience of space exploration with an everyday nonchalance ... the writers sneaking in what were essentially phasers by jury-rigging the established continuity and calling them "phase pistols" ... the confusing concept of the "Temporal Cold War", which to this day even a time-travel geek like me doesn't quite get -- when it really was mostly my boredom after all. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite a ways from being "in love" with Enterprise just yet, but it turns out not to have been the dog (sorry, Porthos) I'd written it off as back in '01.

Prequel shows can be a very tricky endeavour, of course. How do you put a fresh spin on a "been-there done-that" concept that we've already seen? Not to mention that audiences today want faster-paced shows, which means you can't slow things down with all the exposition that, with the unfamiliar environment the characters are in, probably ought to be taking place. So in a way we really can't blame the creators and writers for all their sneaky retconning. I mean, having plain old laser pistols, which we now know aren't very powerful, would be kind-of boring, right? And we all know about Captain Pike and the first Federation Starship Enterprise -- not to mention the furor that can boil up amongst fans with the mere mention of the notion that their cherished characters might be re-cast -- and besides, who says there wasn't a Starship Enterprise before the Federation actually came along? I'm hoping that they let up a bit on the use of the transporter, though, 'cause I don't want things to get too convenient for "ye olde tyme crewe" ... besides, shuttlepods are a kind of cool all their own.

Well, anyway, suffice to say that I'm enjoying Enterprise significantly more the second time around, and I might even think about picking up the subsequent seasons when the time comes. I always enjoy watching Scott Bakula, Porthos is just cute as all-get-out, Anthony Montgomery ain't all that bad-lookin' either, and I'm enjoying watching the budding friendships between T'Pol and Tucker, and between Phlox and Sato. And Heaven help me, I'm even pretty-much okay with the schmaltzy theme song. It makes me wonder how many other fans out there just needed a bit of a break from Star Trek, and if it might have run longer than the abbreviated four years it did, had Paramount simply put off its launch for a few years.

Kevin McCarthy: 1914 - 2010

A sad day ... actor Kevin McCarthy, who is perhaps best known to genre fans for his role in the 1978 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but is beloved to me for his delightfully over-the-top bad-guy roles in Innerspace and UHF, passed away over the weekend of natural causes at the age of 96. His resumé according to IMDB stretches all the way back to the dawn of television, with over 200 credits between his film and TV roles. I admittedly haven't seen a whole lot of what he was in, but it's still kind-of like losing an extended relative.