TRON (1982) - Avatar

We all have movies we are obsessed with as children. For me, it was STAR WARS. Star Wars the movies, the toys, the computer games, the novels...TRON passed me by. Not so for a generous of incipient sci-fi freaks and computer nerds, not to mention Daft Punk. For those kids, TRON the movie and even more so, TRON the arcade game, are nostalgia-inducing, iconic, pop-cultural artefacts. So, the other night I Sky-plussed the original 1982 movie and finally sat down to watch a movie, loaded with the baggage of knowing that it was iconic, and the slightly odd recognition from having watched TRON: LEGACY on preview earlier in the day. The movie felt familiar and strange - archaic and modern - technical and emotional - all at the same time. I had a truly great time watching it, and while the visual effects might seem old hat today, the sheer beauty and austerity of the design is still impressive, nearly thirty years later.

The plot is simple but works on two planes - reality, and within the grid - with the same people fighting the same battle in both worlds by means of avatars. In the real world, ruthless Dillinger has plagiarised the work of talented computer programmer Kevin Flynn and then forced him out of Encomm. Now, he is being blackmailed by the Master Control Programme he created to run the company. MCP, like HAL, thinks Programmes are superior to Users, and is hacking military computers to gather programmes. Flynn's friend and fellow programmer has, thankfully, created a security programme to patrol MCP, called Tron, and when MCP ruthlessly lasers Flynn INTO of the grid, using another friend, Laura's super-gadget, he will be helped by their avatars, Tron and Yori, to defeat the evil MCP/Dillinger.

Everything about the film must've seemed amazing and pioneering at the time. Just the fact that writer-director Steven Lisberger thought that the guts of a computer would be an interesting place to set a film would've been radical, decades before MATRIX. And while he didn't have CGI, the way in which he mashed up live action, painted animation, roto-scoping, and good old visual effects is quite superb, and still visually striking. And no wonder, when you realise that the creative vision was the result of collaboration between Meobius and BLADE RUNNER's Syd Mead. It's thanks to them that we get the iconic grid structure, light-cycle races, uniforms and discs. But the key strength of TRON - the reason why we still love it - is that the technical wizardry isn't all their is to it. Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird have created characters we empathise with - whether it's the youthful enthusiasm of Bridges' Flynn, or the love story between Tron and Yori, or the most moving scene in the film which - radical at the time - involved the death of what is basically a computer programme.

So, for me, TRON has it all - visual purity, radical creativity, pioneering technology, but always, most importantly, real heart. I can't believe I waited this long to watch it!

TRON was released in 1982. It was nominated for Oscars for Best Costume Design and Best Sound but lost to GANDHI and ET respectively. Apparently it wasn't nominated for an Oscar because the MPAA, in all its wisdom, thought the film-makers had cheated by using computers! This says a lot about how threatened the academy felt by new technology.

FULL REVIEW OF TRON LEGACY 3D WILL BE POSTED HERE AT 10 PM ON SUNDAY 5th DECEMBER

MONSTERS - ceci n'est pas un horror flick

MONSTERS is a movie that has been much-hyped as a totem for how movie-making has become democratised by cheap digital cameras and editing packages. The young British director Gareth Edwards has proved that a talented visual effects artist can create a horror movie that looks every bit as slick and full of special effects as the largest Hollywood studio with a few digital cameras and an editing package on a laptop. I'm not sure what all this fuss about laptops is. I mean, if you have a team of CGI animators and visual effects artists in LA or Soho they're basically just using a bunch of computers. The idea of a "laptop" as somehow impoverished and amateur is nonsense. And I say that typing this on an Alienware M17x with a terrabyte of internal storage and enough speed and power to conquer mainland China. However, in fairness to Gareth Edwards, he's made this point on many a TV and radio show. Indeed, he has also admitted that the budget for his "miraculously low-budget but hi-fi looking" movie isn't as low as people think. This is a little disingenuous though - he is modest but then again he's all over the media talking about how gonzo his filming style was. To hear him tell it, he basically decided to make a monster movie, got two young actors, a translater and a van, roamed up and down Mexico shooting people and places that caught their interest, improv'ing dialogue around a set of pre-defined scenes. I have this Scooby Doo vision of pesky kids harassing Mexicans for access to their tavernas.

At any rate, this is a rather nastier and long-winded start to a review than I normally cobble together, and actually doesn't reflect on my feelings about Gareth Edwards' work but rather for the sycophantic, near-hysterical reception it has received among the mainstream reviewers. They are so proud of themselves for having discovered a gonzo movie - a movie to stick it in the eye to Avatar - that they are positively falling over themselves to praise it. It's as though everything else in the film must be great because, hey, it was made by a plucky Englishman in his bedroom! So, let's all stand back and take a long hard look at MONSTERS and ask ourselves what we'd think of it if we didn't know how it was made. If someone gave us a tenner and told us to pick a movie and we watched it, what would we think? And the answer to that question is, "yeah, it's okay, but it's not really scary, or original is it?"

Essentially the movie is a two-hander between Scoot McNairy and his real-life girlfriend Whitney Able. He plays a rough and tumble photojournalist, and she plays a rich girl who ran away from her fiancé, and whose father has charged the photojournalist with bringing her back home. And so we get a planes, trains and automobiles story where two young good-looking kids discover that, basically, they really really like each other, and that while they both want to get home, they want to get home for each other. This, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing new in cinema. Moreover, it's so obvious, the dialogue so clichéd that it's about as annoying as the heroine's oh so edgy, hipster haircut.

Now, the backdrop for this lo-fi road movie romance is the Mexican-American border. Back in the day, nasty evil alien squid things landed in Mexico and were cordoned off in an "infected zone". When this story begins, aliens are just a fact of life, an ever-present threat against whom the humans lash out, descending to practises that violate basic principles of humanity. DISTRICT 9 anyone? Except MONSTERS wishes it were DISTRICT 9. It creates a walled border between Mexico and America, with aliens kept "outside" and people with passports finding it easier and cheaper to get across. The movie deliberately raises the analogy of present-day immigration politics and then doesn't do anything subtle or sophisticated with it. Where DISTRICT 9 was closely observed, satirical and scabrous, MONSTERS is ham-fisted, amateur and superficial. Essentially, there is no substitute for a script. And, as for the praise heaped upon a lo-fi film for looking good, yes, to be sure, the cinematography is superb. There are scenes of a sunrise on the water that are just breath-taking. And the use of CGI to replace real bill-boards and signs with Monster related iconography is very well done. But the monsters themselves are lolloping giant squid and look about as scary as a Pepe the Prawn.

So, in the final analysis, MONSTERS is beautifully shot and throws up some interesting ideas. But as romance, it's hackneyed, and as horror movie, it isn't scary, and as political allegory, it doesn't even try to get beyond the interest of its initial concept.

MONSTERS played the festival circuit and opened in the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada and Australia earlier this year. It is currently on release in France, Indonesia and the UK. It opens on December 9th in Germany and on January 20th in 2011.

MEGAMIND - A pocketful of Kryptonite

Right, you've all seen Superman? in every episode or comic strip, evil Lex Luthor kidnaps the feisty journalist Lois Lane in order to lure Superman to rescue her. Lex is clever, but truth, justice and the American Way wins out. Superman rescues Lois and she goes back to work with the trusty dull Clark Kent, unaware that he is really Superman. And poor photographer Jimmy Olsen never catches anyone's attention, as the Spin Doctors rightly observed. So, imagine what would happen if one day Lex Luthor actually defeated Superman and took over Metropolis. No Superman, Lois at a lose end, Jimmy tries to make his move, but is rebuffed, and Lex bored without an arch-enemy, tries to create a new superhero by zapping Jimmy with Superman's DNA. Only, turns out Super-Jimmy has been brooding with resentment all these years, as the Spin Doctors told us, and uses his powers for Evil, which of course, gives Lex the chance to...er....do good?!

Of course, you can't imagine DC Comics letting Superman get publicly mauled like this, so instead, you get MEGAMIND, wherein Superman isn't so much spoofed as Alan-Moore'd except, of course, with about a tenth of his wisdom and Tina Fey's jokes. The end-result is a ball of laughs, rather sweet, and definitely worth watching.

Will Ferrell plays Megamind - the Evil Genius who thinks he might just want to be nice for a change, wooing the feisty chick Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey). It's a a role Ferrell has played a number of times in recent years, typically in movies that alternate with his cruder SNL comedy skits-turned-features. MEGAMIND is one of the few films that allows him to be both vulnerable-sweet AND grossly-comical and the mix is a treat. The typecasting continues with the rest of the cast. Tina Fey does her usual sweet, neurotic, charming thing as Roxanne - Jonah Hill does his creepy, slacker, irritating schtick as Jimmy/Hal - and Brad Pitt basically plays Superman, sorry, Metro Man, as Brad Pitt - a famous star tired of the limelight.

The comedy is definitely three steps wittier and more consistent than DESPICABLE ME. I mean, just look at how good the physical comedy is when Megamind is pretending to be Bernard in his Evil Lair. Or just look at how funny the Minion losing oxygen scene is. That stuff doesn't happen without the intervention of a director like Tom McGrath (MADAGASCAR 1 and 2) and actors like Fey and Ferrell. But for all that, Megamind doesn't have the heart of a movie like DESPICABLE ME, and I really wonder how far young kids will keep up with a movie in which a major plot point is that characters can switch bodies at the touch of a wristwatch - or where a large part of the humour, and a major plot point comes from the lead character putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable of words?

MEGAMIND is on release in the US, Canada, Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Egypt, Kuwait, Georgia, Portugal, Argentina, Croatia, Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria, Brazil, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in Australia, Venezuela, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Serbia and Estonia. It opens on Christmas Day in Finland and Sweden, on December 26th in Norway and on January 7th in Poland.

Kids' flick round-up 1 - DESPICABLE ME

So I caught two kids' movies this week - both of which feature an Evil Mastermind who isn't as evil as he makes out to be. In both cases they have minions called Minion, and a Nemesis who out-evils them both. Both movies are set in the kind of juiced up day-glo world only animation can give us, and both try to have their cake and eat it - splicing cuddly feeeeeeelings with pop-culture banter and post-modern winking-at-the-audience in-jokes. And both feature all-star casts. I liked both, enjoyed both, but only one really moved me, and that's DESPICABLE ME.

In the old days, before the Berlin Wall fell, being Evil was easy. You leaved in a creeeepy Addams family house, you tortured people with medieval spiky things, and you affected an accent half-Soviet half Peter-Lorre. But poor anti-hero, Gru (Steve Carell), has been outpaced and outclassed by a young whipper-snapper called Vector (Jason Segel) who lives in a proper shiny evil lair complete with shark-tank and CCTV. Gru is evil, but hapless. Vector is evil, efficient, cocky and a royal pain in the ass.

Of course in our post-modern confessional culture no-one's really evil. Poor Gru had a mother straight out of developmental hell: nothing was ever good enough for her. And poor Vector was picked on at school. Really, these guys are just lovely, squeezy, fluffy little bunny rabbits on the inside.

So, when Gru adopts three cute cookie-selling orphan girls in order to use them to get access to Vector's layer, we know he's going to have his heart melted by them. And when he gets turned down by the Bank of Evil for the loan he needs to steal the moon, we know that his new kids and his minions, called Minions, are all gonna band together and build him a rocket ship anyways, MacGuyver styl-ee. Because, friends, we aren't in the world of Lemony Snicket, but little orphan Annie.

DESPICABLE ME is just, plain, no-nonsense cute. It tugs on the heart-strings. It's corn-dog cheese. But who doesn't love it when Gru does something selfless for the first time in his life and incinerates a fairground stall because the provincial dolt manning in has cheated his little girl out of a stuffed unicorn? And who doesn't cheer when Dr Nefario (Russell Brand) and the Minnions all band together to back Gru and build the rocket - pledging faith against all reason, all hope and all experience?

To be sure, Universal studios have tried to inject some adult-pleasing post-modern wit along the lines of movies such as SHREK and MADAGASCAR, but this is largely a distraction. Having a sign above the Bank of Evil saying "Formerly Lehman Brothers" is hardly Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety. And having Gru use modern colloquial idiom just confuses his character with that of the ruthlessly teen-modern Vector. Nope. The strength of DESPICABLE ME is that we care about Gru and his girls, and we will him to succeed. And while this movie is no TOY STORY, it understands that underneath all the clever design and witty puns, ultimately, any movie, but especially a children's movie, succeeds in direct measure to how far its main characters elicit our sympathy.

DESPICABLE ME is on global release.

Late review - London Film Fest Day 2010 Day 11 - SENSATION

You might recognise Domhnall (son of Brendan) Gleeson, the star of SENSATION, from his role as Bill Weasley in the HARRY POTTER flicks. Well, get that image of wholesome family entertainment right out of your mind, because SENSATION is altogether more bleak, more raw, and more uncomfortable to watch. Domhnall plays a feckless young man who inherits a crumbling, shitty little farm in the Irish countryside, and the first thing he does with his new money is hire a hooker. Nervous and anxious in her company, he soon affects a startling transformation into a pimp - slick clothes, new flat, a couple more prostitutes. The mechanics are shown in a very matter-of-fact way - in particular the way in which new girls are recruited, fitted out, and put to work before they can even catch their breath or form any regrets. As the film reaches its conclusion, we see the rozzers close in on Donal and Kim, and their true colours revealed. As in the way of these movies, the hooker turns out to have more integrity than the punter, and our suspicions about who's really exploiting whom are confirmed.

SENSATION is trying to do a couple of things - it's trying to be a black comedy about an idiot boy turning shark and it's trying to be social realist in its portrayal of lonely rural men using prostitutes. The pace didn't slacken and it was an interesting watch, but I can't say that it was particularly memorable. I think the problem is that it isn't consistently funny enough as a comedy, nor is it gritty enough as a social expose. Moreover, the emotional arc is entirely predictable. So, as much as I admire the film-makers for tackling such a subject head on, I can't say this is a movie that particular deserves a wider release. But I'll be looking forward to director Tom Hall's next effort, and I really liked DP Benito Strangio's bleak cinematography.

SENSATION has no commercial release date yet.

Late review - London Film Fest Day 2010 Day 10 - POETRY

POETRY is a delicate, strange, captivating film about an old woman called Yang Mija, living in contemporary South Korea. Grandmother to a feckless grandson, exploited by the OAP she cares for, and generally invisible in modern society, she finds a kind of purpose and connection by attending a poetry writing class and making friends at poetry recitals. Through poetry, she moves from victim and martyr to agent and creator. Famous Korean actress Jeong-hee Yoon plays Mija as a meek, timid woman with inner strength. A woman who will do the unpalatable to protect her grandson, but who will, ultimately gather the strength to stop enabling him. It's a performance of great subtlety and nuance, and we see this quiet transformation over more than two hours. More than a month after the Film Festival, POETRY still resonates - both Chang-dong Lee's acutely observant direction and Jeong-hee Yoon's central performance. Here is a film about ageing, about reclaiming life, about callow youth, about sexual violence, guilty secrets and sexual desperation. And yet, and yet, it's also a film with flashes of comic brilliance - mostly related to the foul-mouthed, warm-hearted poet Mr Kang (Hira Kim). I can't recommend it highly enough.

POETRY played Cannes and Toronto 2010 and opened earlier this year in South Korea and France.