Freak Engine

Tron is a cheesetastic load of crap.  What a mess!  I even thought so when I saw it as a kid (for some reason I still bought the soundtrack and I didn’t even like Journey) but I wanted to revisit it before the sequel arrives.  What a terrible, terrible mistake.

Nothing works in this movie.  The “real world” segments are plagued with terrible dialogue and even worse performances.  The computer world bits have the strangest visuals this side of Caligari but they have a terrible quality to them.  One might think the human actors were actually shot at the time of Caligari but I fear that’s just not so.  Shouldn’t computer-assisted/generated woo-woo look better?  Cleaner, sleeker, even cooler?  The strange black and white backlit photography on a light box animation stand blah blah blah process was expensive and dumb.  It just didn’t work.  It shows the limited thinking of animators on a real-world set.

The real trick to Tron is the fact that most of what we see on screen in the computer world isn’t CGI at all.  It’s a bunch of age-old studio trickery from matte paintings to traditional cel animation to *yikes* reflective strips on foam *shudder* and spandex *shudder even more* costumes.  Didn’t George Lucas prove that the whole reflective strips thing didn’t work when he tried to create the lightsaber FX in camera?  Very little of Tron is actually CGI.  What is there definitely deserves props.  This was 1982 after all, the era of the Atari 2600.  Entire video games took up less than 4k of memory at that time!  Just imagine.  A 15Gb game for today’s next-gen (sic) systems uses almost four MILLION times as much storage space.  At the time, Tron was definitely the state of the art but it was trying to look like even more.

Unfortunately, the effort put into Tron’s visuals was at the forefront of the picture’s development.  The story seems like little more than an afterthought.  Even Oscar-winning actor (and Dude extraordinaire), Jeff Bridges comes across as a community theatre has-been in this one.  I expect it’s because director Steve Lisberger came to the project from the world of animation where flat characters are the general order of the day.  I wasn’t there but the evidence suggests that he had no idea what to do with living, breathing bodies on a stage.  Even master thespian David Warner comes across as silly.  Maybe it’s the foam headgear.

The art direction for Tron was in some fairly capable hands.  Sci-Fi fans will no doubt recognize the names of Syd Mead and Jean “Moebius” Giraud as conceptual artists on the movie.  Both of these gents have done some stunning work in their careers.  I expect they even did some stunning work on Tron but the art director was left trying to figure out how to bring their lavish concepts to the screen and at the end of the day it just couldn’t be done.  It remains to be seen whether Tron: Legacy will succeed on that count.

I also have to take a moment to bash the score.  Wendy (aka Walter) Carlos was tapped to create a synth score for the pic.  Makes sense, right?  Except for the fact that Carlos’ work was in emulating real world orchestral scores using synths!  WTF?  So they hired someone to do a synth score but make it sound like maybe it wasn’t synths at all?  Huh?  Why not hire Kraftwerk?  Or Yellow Magic Orchestra?  And ditch the Journey marketing push, guys.  Their music just doesn’t fit the techno theme, IMHO.

One good thing did come out of Tron.  It was a kick-ass video game.

I’ve never cared much for Westerns.  I’m not sure why. Yes, there are a few I’ve liked.  I liked Unforgiven and The Quick and the Dead.  I liked The Professionals and I appreciate Leone’s Dollars Trilogy to a point.   I just don’t want to see those sorts of movies very often.

When I was growing up Gunsmoke was on TV every week.  My parents watched it (I think) and I avoided it.  In child parlance, it was booooriiiiing.  I suppose Bonanza was also on during that time but I wasn’t exposed to it.  We ate dinner at Ponderosa steakhouse from time to time but that was as close as I came.

For some reason I was decked out in cowboy chic as a kid and I have the pictures to prove it (see above).  I had the Lone Ranger cap guns and gun belt complete with silver bullets (going for $400+ today) and I played with them often.  I had cowboy quilts on my bed.  I had Zorro toys.  I think I should like westerns but I don’t.

What’s funny is the fact that I loved Star Wars when it rolled around (still do).  It had a lot of the same elements of the classic western but rolled up in a fantasy/sci-fi wrapper.  Take your classic western, add spaceships and lightsabers (and bathrooms and showers presumably) and you get something like Star Wars.  Add crazy cars (but not the bathrooms and such) and you get Mad Max.  Add the Nakatomi building in place of a whole western town (and reinsert said bathrooms and some expensive clothing) and you get Die Hard.  Yippee-ki-yay, etc.

I liked the attitude but not the aesthetics.  Maybe I just burned out because I had more fun playing at cowboys than watching them.  Maybe it’s because of my name.  I recently learned that Lon Chaney Jr. appeared in a series of westerns as a character with my name who also went by the name “The Black Ghost.”  Hmmm.  That has a ring to it.

I think it has more to do with the fact that westerns just sorta played themselves out and their makers couldn’t figure out how to make them feel new again.  Even the best westerns of today (not the hotel chain) have this problem.  The westerns of the 50’s had so much cheese ladled on they might as well have been pizzas.  The 60’s brought us Sergio Leone’s vison of the American west and the whole thing felt exciting again…right up until the point when The Good the Bad and the Ugly ran over three hours and had more of those BIG shots that 60’s filmgoers were looking for.  A Fistful of Dollars was great because of lines like, “I don’t think it’s nice, you laughin’,” not because of beautiful cinematography.

The westerns eventually ate themselves.  They showed us all the horses and towns and brothels and sheriffs a bajillion times and then someone thought, “HEY!  I should make all of those things legit, in the cinematic sense.”  That meant making them look good in that prestige-picture way.  SERIOUS FILMMAKING.  Bleh.  Give me For a Few Dollars More anytime.

I just watched the Steve McQueen actioner, Bullitt, for the first time and I have to tell you I was less than impressed.  Can anyone explain to me why this movie has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes?  Maybe the fact that almost all movies (except for 2001 and Planet of the Apes) sucked in 1968 has contributed to its legendary status.  I just know that watching it last night gave me a big case of “I wanna turn this crap off and finish reading The Dark Tower.”

I get the nostalgia thing.  I do.  I love Hammer horror films.  They’re not good films therefore my love of them must be linked to some nostalgic itch that they scratch.  Maybe it’s just Ingrid Pitt.  Done.  Note that I didn’t rave on and on about the artistic integrity or “fun” of Countess Dracula or one of it’s lesser counterparts in the Hammer pantheon of low budget horror films.  That’s because I understand that these were not great movies.  I may like them but my liking them doesn’t make them inherently great.

No, Bullitt is less than great.  It’s mediocre and sloppy and fairly fucking boring.  I’ve heard over and over how great this car chase is and how McQueen did his own driving.  He did his own driving because there weren’t any impressive stunts or dangerous bits to be done.  I’ve seen more stunt driving on a go-kart track.  Hell, they pass the same green Volkswagen Beetle forty or fifty times in this chase.  That has to tell you something.  The shaky-cam didn’t help either.  Hey, here’s a riddle for you.  What do you get when you mix two 1960’s era poor-handling  American cars, bad camera equipment, and old men mumbling?  Give up?  BULLITT!!!

There’s a reason why an image search of the title on Google almost exclusively shows pics of the two cars in the chase.  The cool cars are about all the movie has going for it.  People love those cars but I daresay they’d love them just as much if they weren’t wrapped inside this crappy movie.  People love the General Lee.  Enough said.

The basic plot of the movie is extremely simple.  Too simple.  I kept expecting the whole thing to be a setup by the mob to get Bullitt put away or something.  Something personal would’ve certainly raised the stakes.  In case you’ve no idea, I’ll give you the short version.  A politician is bringing a mob witness in to testify and he gets McQueen…er, I mean Bullitt…to watch him so the witness doesn’t get shot, which he does.   Bullit gets in trouble then gets himself out of it again, sort of.

That’s the problem.  This movie is filled with sort-ofs.  The politician is sort-of maybe on the take, or not.  He’s also sort-of a bigot but maybe not.  McQueen sort-of lives the bachelor life except for the fact that he lives with Jaqueline Bisset (He buys TV dinners but she always makes food for him in the movie!).  The Norman Fell cop is sort of crooked but maybe not.  I like ambiguity in movies from time to time but come on!  This just starts to feel sloppy.  This isn’t Chinatown after all.  Draw a fucking conclusion so we’ll know who to root for!  It’s like the writer and director had no idea what was going on behind these characters’ eyes and didn’t even care.

I also have to take a moment to rant about the hipster-doofus jazz score.  Whew!  I know that was cool back then so I tried to give it a break but when that’s practically all the music in the film it’s hard to get away from it.  There is no traditional score which for an action-ish movie spells certain doom.  The big runway chase at the end is musicless and, let’s face it, this isn’t exactly the speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi.  The visuals aren’t really enough to hold you in their grip.  We have really long shots of a jet taxiing back to the terminal.  Ooooooo.  I’d put some dramatic music over that (while cutting about 90% of it as well).

That brings up the subject of length.  Bullitt feels padded.  It’s like they turned in their final cut and the studio brass said, “Not nearly long enough, guys!  Longer, longer!”  Shots linger on uninteresting moments so often that it must be a stylistic choice – one chosen to bore the crap out of the audience and wring every bit of suspense out of the proceedings.

Did I hate Bullitt?  Well, hate’s a strong word but yes, I hated it.  It was dumb and boring.  I can take dumb and exciting or smart and boring but dumb and boring together do me in every time.  I wonder what Sergio Leone would’ve done with this material.