Online.

Vinnie, you suggested that I write a general-purpose blog, focusing on culture and commentary.  I'll continue to maintain other blogs related to personal goings-on and mad brainstorming, but I'll talk here about things I see.

Tron: Legacy was wide-released last friday with a per-theatre average revenue of greater than fourteen thousand dollars.  I'd seen the first movie when I was in pre-school, and I'd read the picture-book adaptations even before that.  I played the video game in arcades back in New Jersey and again in Toronto. Twenty-five-plus years ago I was riding my BMX with bright yellow tires around the track near my house, pretending that the yellow line was the bike's Light Wall.

Was I excited to see the film?  Well, I'd seen the trailers, particularly the first major theatrical trailer, set to the tune of Daft Punk's magnificent new track from the soundtrack album, "The Game has Changed."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9szn1QQfas

This is the track, and the set of images, to which I keep returning when I think about the film.  The movie has a very transparent set of tropes -- MacGuffin, Dragon, "Yeehaw" Dogfights -- that don't add a lot to the core story, and in some cases drag it perilously close to "Star Trek: Generations", a movie made out of reverence for an old cast, with only a subset remaining, and an ill-defined conflict dragging the previous hero to his nemesis.

Nowhere near that bad, really.

But what I would have done to make the whole thing more satisfying at the climax?  Put the laser discs back into the pivotal scene, man.  Quorra was a frisbee superstar.  I would have liked to see her step up into that role, and given Tron and Flynn a final "Greetings, Program!" moment that we'd been waiting for since we first heard that they were actually getting Bruce Boxleitner and Jeff Bridges to revisit their iconic 1980s computer superhero characters.  And really, not give CLU claim to that line.  That's Flynn's line, dammit.

So, occasional emotional and dramatic missteps aside, I am glad that the movie was made and that I saw it.

Cheers,

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