Eccentric Flower:201012/Bits From Sick

Last night I slept a particular type of solid sleep (and still woke up feeling exhausted) which should have clued me in that I'm getting sick again. When I get sick, I sleep a particular way which I only half-jokingly said on Twitter this morning "is my body attempting to go into hibernation so it can repair itself."

Of course this is absolutely the worst time in the world to get re-sick, especially since I never completely lost the cough I had from getting sick at the end of November. If I'm sick when we go do our one family thang on the 24th, that's tolerable; if I'm sick when we have dinner with Marc on the 25th, that's passable; but if I'm sick for my trip to Philadelphia right after that to see a whole bunch of Internet Friends, most of whom I've never met, that's unacceptable.

I'm tired of winter becoming one long, low-level head cold. It wears me down, and frankly there is already more than enough in a Boston January/February to wear anyone down. I didn't need more. You know, seasonal disorder never made sense to me until I moved north.

I still wouldn't trade back for Louisiana Augusts, though.

I'm feeling too tired right now for any sort of Serious Commentary, but I'd like to note that I saw TRON: Legacy on Sunday, and I'm mystified by the various bad-to-lackluster reviews of it I read. Really, what sort of movie were those people expecting? Had they not seen the original?

I gather, actually, that one common problem was that they had not. Of course I am a big TRON fan, and I'm sure that has affected my perspective on the matter. But here's the deal: The original TRON was not that good a movie. It was a movie designed to make nine-year-olds say "wow" (which, let's face it, is kind of a low bar). It had visual effects which are still astonishing even today; it had an amazing soundtrack by Wendy Carlos; it had Jeff Bridges and David Warner having a good time and Bruce Boxleitner being utterly wooden and Cindy Morgan being mostly unused and Barnard Hughes being the Sage Old Fart. It did not have the most fabulous script in the world. Nor did it need it.

Frankly, the film is cheese. Why should the new one be any different? TRON: Legacy exceeded my expectations; I was going to see it on the basis of nothing but the visuals and the soundtrack, and got a few pleasant surprises.

The first was the extent to which the film respected its predecessor - the acknowledgement that a substantial number of the people who'd be seeing it saw the first one when they were kids. (The hero's bedroom as a child in the film's opening sequence is a treasure trove of 1980's Disney SF trivia; quite a few lines from the original film surface in places expected and unexpected.) It's true they didn't give David Warner a cameo (hard to see how they could have written Dillinger in, actually), but they did put in an overt reference to him at the ENCOM board meeting. (There is also an extremely subtle joke elsewhere in the film on Hughes' character Dumont. I'll let you find it. Hughes could not have made a cameo; he died in 2006.) Boxleitner turns out to have learned not to be wooden, and is one of the best things in the film, even if his computer-world counterpart gets shortchanged badly.

Biggest surprise is the kid, whom I had dismissed as the Flavor of the Week and from whom I did not expect Great Things. Turns out he either had the instincts, or was coached well, to underplay the part. Some critics did not like this; I guess they were expecting him to do more Macaulay Culkin style mugging. I personally am glad he didn't, and I'm glad he didn't go the Shia LeBoeuf route either. I don't need that smug crap.

His cute Björk-pixie love interest is reasonably good too, and a lot of fun to watch even if she's not given much to say. She is written to be a capable character who mostly does not need rescuing and does not swoon, which is always refreshing (she does have some serious hero-worship of Flynn the Elder, but that's hardly surprising under the circumstances).

The bad points come in surprising directions. The internal logic of the computer world makes far less sense than in the older film; the visual effects, while very good, do not seem to make as striking an impression as the ones in the first film did, or is that just because we're all older and more jaded now? But most of all, the problem is that Jeff Bridges - whom I expected to be the only actor in the movie I was going to have fun watching - is given a really horrendous script as his older live-human self - we're talking lines that even Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan couldn't have pulled off without snickers - much worse than what he's called upon to say while playing his digital non-aging counterpart Clu. Clu has a different problem; the reverse-aging technology they used to make Clu look some thirty years younger than Bridges' actual well-worn face doesn't quite escape the Uncanny Valley, and while it's not fatal (after all, he is a computer program), is just a touch too distracting.

The real problem is that Clu, while he talks a good line of vicious, is not actually the film's main antagonist. The main antagonist in the film is faceless; he/she/it wears a dark, completely obscuring helmet the entire time. After the film, Nonelvis and I both confessed to each other that we had taken to thinking of the character as The Stig. "Oh, here comes the Stig to attack them again." It's hard to build much character interest when you don't have a face.

While I am on show news, I think I should mention that if you aren't following the saga of Julie Taymor's Broadway disaster, "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," you should be. I'd say "this is going to end badly," except that it's already well past badly and it hasn't ended yet. Four people have been injured; the fourth was injured on Monday. The Spider-Man stuntman was supposed to run to the end of a platform to rescue the falling Mary Jane character. He isn't supposed to jump off the platform, but he gets so close to the edge as the lights go dark that he has a wire restraint to keep him from falling off.

On this page you'll find a video clip. I don't usually believe in linking crash-fetish footage, because unlike the Times I have standards, and I also don't like to encourage people recording bits of stage performances on cell phones, but the short clip is instructive. What you see is: Mary Jane dangling; the "Green Goblin" (a mechanized bit of set) moves, gesturing toward her; she descends (you can see her rope); Spider-Man runs to leap after her; and his restraining wire just outright breaks.

Depending on who you believe - accounts differ and the Times is surely understating - he fell from ten to thirty feet into the pit. He'll live, and he apparently has no spinal injuries, but still.

I have a fair amount of bizarre respect for Julie Taymor because, while I think she is insane, she is insane in interesting ways. But I'm not sure how this show has been allowed to proceed despite all its mishaps. This goes well beyond "We are having problems with overcomplicated tech" - and we will save the question of whether that much wire work really belongs in a Broadway show at all for another day - and into general incompetence. One wonders what kind of bargain-basement rigging crew this extremely expensive show is using; did they shoot all the money on the costumes? Where I come from, riggers test wires, possibly before every show, and there's no excuse for a wire just breaking like that.

You know my feelings about lawsuits which I feel have even the slightest whiff of victim-culture-gravy-train about them. So mark my words on this: Someone right now is advising stuntman Christopher Tierney about lawsuits, and frankly I sort of wish he would; one lawsuit would, I think, be more than sufficient to get Taymor's backers to finally stop pouring money down this hole and eat the loss. This show should not go on.