Tuesday (9/23/08) 8:44am - ... wherein Peter posts a Weekly Media Update.
[Missed a couple of weeks, on account of not watching/reading anything.]
[This is an additional day late because my ISP sucks & provides unreliable service.]
Movies: Tron, The Conversation
TV: <none>
Books: <none>
Tron
It's not a good movie, but it might be a great one.
I mean, by any rational assesment, Tron is not good. Its basic concept -- that computer programs are little sentient people moseying around the 'world' of the computer network -- is just mind-blowingly stupid, and the more you think about it, the more stupid it gets. The characters are simple caricatures even by sci-fi movie standards, and they're not even *interesting* caricatures. Jeff Bridges manages a good performance just by sheer force of personality, with the script doing him no favors.
And the plot? The plot is basically a road picture -- a bunch of people have to get from a to b -- which means the plotting can get pretty sloppy and episodic. You can just string together an arbitrary set of incidents in the right geographical order, and the plot should creak by. That's basically what happens here: they get chased by paranoids and they run through the hills and they meet up with the girl program and this and that and the other... it doesn't really build or accelerate the way a movie script is supposed to.
The rules of the world seem a bit dodgy. Typically in a fantasy or sci-fi story, you want to set down the rules of the universe and adhere to them. This makes the world more believeable -- plus, it lets your audience make guesses about what will happen next based on how the world works. If the audience has expectations, then the audience is *involved*, and you can manipulate the audience by paying off or thwarting those expectations. On the other hand, if anything can happen, then, well, *anything* can happen, and the audience doesn't care.
So we never quite know what Flynn's powers are -- he just seems to be able to do whatever the plot requires at a given point. And because his powers don't make sense, his final action never quite makes sense. It seems like a random, let's-whap-the-TV-set-and-see-if-that-wo
Even the pacing gets logy in places. ("Gee, I hope they show more footage of programmers climbing staircases.")
But for all that, it's still a damn entertaining movie. It's a movie that nearly every geek of my generation remembers very fondly, and it was still a lot of fun watching it this week.
Why?
I think it creates a sense of wonder, something that most movies -- even genre pictures that are, on paper, far better than Tron -- utterly fail at. The movie makes me curious about what the rest of that world is like. I look at the giant plains beyond the IO port, and I wonder what's on the other side. I see the massive ship pass over the field of spider-like creatures, and I wonder what that place is. I honestly can't remember the last sci-fi or fantasy film that did this for me -- Lord of the Rings? Time Bandits?
I'll forgive damn near any amount of crap storytelling if it gives me an excuse to see a world that fascinates me.
So how do they do that?
I think a lot of it has to do with the art direction.
The tools they had available were very limited. 1982 was not exactly the glory days of CGI, and in fact the film only has about 15-20 minutes of CGI in it. What CGI they had was primitive -- more like CAD wireframes than what the Damn Kids Today are used to -- and the live-action scenes were run through complicated, massively-time-consuming rotoscoping techniques that were never used again. Likewise, Wendy Carlos's score used the spacey synthesizers that were available at the time, again forcing a very specific aesthetic. They couldn't make the film look or sound however they wanted -- they just had to push the meager tools available as far as they would go. Earlier movies couldn't do what Tron did. Later movies had better tools, and so they wouldn't bother restricting themselves to Tron's limitations.
And that is how you make a distinct and interesting world.
My main reason for watching this again was the SDCC announcement that a sequel was (finally) in the works. Disney sprung a teaser on an unsuspecting audience, bootleg copies percolated out onto the web, and I started wondering how well the original film held up.
Having re-watched the movie, I think this is one of the most auspicious sequel announcements I've heard in a long time. But it's hard for me to articulate why.
I know part of the reason is that it's great when a work of fiction inhabits a world with a rich past. And Tron 2[1] immediately has a past that stretches back twenty-five years. And it's not just the span of time that's important here -- it's the specific years involved: 1982 - 2008[2] This is a period of time in which almost everything that's happened in the history of computers, happened. Turning on an old 1980s-vintage computer is about equivalent to peering into the entrance of an Egyptian pyramid. And then hearing that computer say something like, "Please enter your command. End of line." -- that's like a mummy showing up. Just the span of time involved in the backstory lends gravity to the current story.
A related point is something I would wankily call 'historical resonance', a phrase which does an utterly crappy job of explaining what I mean -- so let me explain further. I don't believe in deliberately putting symbolism in a story. I side with the writers who say you should just set your characters on their way, let them do what they do, and then you can leave it to tenured professors in small northeastern liberal-arts colleges to figure out What It All Means. But... if your story just gives you thematic content for free... well, I'd never turn that down.
Okay, still not explaining the concept. Let me try again.
Consider Flynn. Jeff Bridges is, apparently, reprising this role in the sequel. Now... what has Flynn done for the last twenty-five years? Did he quit the business and go teach fifth graders, like Wozniak? Did he build up Encom into a powerful company and run it with an iron fist, like Gates or Jobs? Did he set up shop as a benevolent venture captialist looking for the next big thing, like Paul Graham?
What I'm getting at is that whatever Flynn did, I'm going to compare it to what happened to all those hackers from the 80s. Whatever happened to Encom, I'm going to compare it to what happened to the various technology giants from the period. And whatever happens in the story, my brain is going to twist it into some kind of commentary on what's happened in the world of computers since Tron.
And they don't have to do a damn thing to achieve that thematic resonance. They get that for free.
The other big advantage Tron 2 has is that they can steal ideas from computer science.
Okay, I need to explain that a bit. Tron sets up a universe where everything in a computer appears as a thing on the screen. For instance, the movie shows a byte -- in computer terms, a memory location which can store either a 'yes' or a 'no' -- as a little floaty polyhedron that can only say 'yes' and 'no'. Okay, the byte is lame -- but the framework is damned impressive. It lets you show any concept in computer science as just something happening onscreen.
Give me a couple of hours, and I could figure out how to clearly depict RSA encryption in the Tron-verse. Now, why is that important? Is it so that I can be all didactic and say, "This is how your online credit-card purchases work!" Not at all. Maybe your friendly neighborhood geek could buttonhole you after the film and say, "By the way, that one scene? The one where Flynn recovered that magic key? That's based on RSA encryption." No, the important thing is that you can steal this very clever idea and use it to create a situation in the story.
Look: movies steal all the time, and sci-fi movies steal twice as much. "It's like Wagon Train in space." "It's like a wuxia movie, only with non-Asians." And so on. The thing is, movies steal most everything -- settings, plot points, characters -- from other movies. Tron has a chance to steal elements from a completely different field: computer science. And that's a field where lots of very smart people have had lots of very interesting ideas for decades, and there hasn't been a single film with a framework that can make those ideas cinematic.[3]
Do you want to see what a DDoS attack looks like in Tronland? Or a Storm Worm that merges a machine into a botnet? I do. Because I sure as hell haven't seen that in a movie before.
Also promising: John Lasseter has come in as a consultant for Tron 2, and he's been working to make sure the story has a stronger emotional arc. In spite of Cars, I trust Mr. Lasseter to do good work.
One last side note: I really dug the scenes where Yori and Tron wanted badly to kiss, but had no idea *how* to kiss. I guess it's partly that "wanting to and not" is a good way to engage the audience -- but also I've seen the scene where the couple *does* kiss so many times already that maybe I'm a little desensitized. Again: creating a scene with odd restrictions forces you to create a scene that the audience hasn't seen before.
The Conversation
Over the last few years, one thing about movies has consistently surprised me: those big auteur movies from the 70s that film critics go on and on about? They really are as good as the cineastes say they are.
Whenever I come to a film that's universally lauded by people who are smarter than me, I expect it to be arty and weird and inaccessible. I expect "spinach cinema", where you sense you're watching something edifying and challenging but in no way exciting or fun. And the encomiums get piled on so high that when you come to (say) Citizen Kane, you've had a dozen film majors telling you that if you took Mark Renton's description of heroin and multiplied it by a thousand, you still wouldn't come close. And then... the letdown.
Thus I've been consistently surprised by the 70s. Jaws? Actually good. THX-1138? Actually good. Nashville? Actually good. And yet still I came at Coppola's The Conversation expecting spinach.
In retrospect, it makes no damn sense. I mean, Gene Hackman? The 70s? Spying? Paranoia? Of course I'm going to like that.
And once I actually got into the film, it felt in many ways like I had gone back in time and commissioned the film to my exact specifications.
For starters, Gene Hackman nails introversion. He plays an introverted character in a way that feels as accurate as any other portrayal I've seen. Harry Caul is fiercely private, he wants to be left alone, and he has that twitchy edge to his interactions with other people that other actors trying to 'play the quiet guy' never quite get. Keith Phipps talks about it as the mirror image of Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, only with all that restless energy turned inward. It was exciting, because I genuinely hadn't seen this guy before, and naturally I wanted to know more about him.
And then there's the structure of the film. The titular "conversation" is the first scene of the film -- a man and woman chat amiably in Union Square -- and the rest of the movie is about that one conversation. The film keeps looping back to it, filling in bits we couldn't hear before, adding sections that were omitted, explaining references that made no sense on first listen. Of course, I'm a complete sucker for these sorts of chronolgical games (why else would I have stuck with LOST through season two?), so I loved watching the mosaic slowly come together.
In broader terms, I feel like I *need* the movies from the 70s these days. I watch new releases, and they all have this fake sheen to them. Even the best of them seem to emanate from bland movie-land, where all the grit has been wiped clean, or perhaps wiped clean and then artfully re-applied with a spray gun in an 'urban', aesthetically-pleasing fashion. And all the damn kids today cut too damn fast. I want to see long shots and location shooting. I want to feel like I'm transported somewhere, instead of just sitting in my seat staring at something that feels like a commercial.
Maybe the crazy inmates-who-ran-the-asylum back in the 70s -- in that brief, crazy time before it all came crashing down -- maybe they could make movies then that we can't make now. And so, these days, I pay more attention to new TV shows than to new films. *shrug*
I admit, my interest in The Conversation was piqued when I found out that AMC is adapting it into a TV series -- apparently they'd like to follow up critical darling Mad Men with another powerful period drama.
I for one am really excited to see what they do with this material. Generally, I'm much happier to see movies adapted into television series than the other way around. Why? Well, say you start with a TV show and adapt it into a movie. You've got these dozens and dozens of episodes that people love, and those episodes build up an entire world, with a wide array of characters and locations and events. If you make a movie out of that, you've got only 90 minutes available. So you're going to have to take a teensy subset of that world -- and no matter how many millions of dollars you throw at it, you're still going to leave out half the things the audience loved about the show.[4]
Going the other way, however, feels much more natural. A good movie leaves questions trailing off its edges. Where did Harry Caul come from? What other cases could he take on? How many enemies has he made? Going from the narrow canvas of film to the wide canvas of TV, you can *expand*. You can include *all* of the elements we liked about the movie in this larger canvas, and so the audience won't feel cheated. And then you follow all those little questions, and see what other stories they lead to.
And I'm very, very glad they're not modernizing it. There has already been one (failed) attempt to make The Conversation into a modern-day TV show (starring Kyle MacLachlan, believe it or not). But if you make it modern-day, you have two problems. First and foremost, the show becomes about stupid little gadgets. "Ooh, wow, look at this tiny little camera that flies around by remote control!" And now you're not telling a story, you're just filling the screen with tech-porn.
But the other thing is that, if the show is set in modern times, it's harder (paradoxically) to use the surveillance show to comment about privacy and security in 2008. There's too much temptation to be on-the-nose: if I'm interested in Patriot Act security violations, well, I'll just have an episode with counterterrorists in it! And suddenly your script is full of shrill speechifying that vomits out exactly how you-the-screenwriter feel about the issue.
So that's no good. But setting it in the 70s -- that forces a certain distance from today. It forces you to not be on-the-nose. (This is how science fiction frequently gets away with Great Big Message stories -- throw in some aliens, and it's significantly less 'this is how I feel about the world we live in today'.)
But also, in a *modern* story about surveillance, I think the audience would work less at figuring out what the story *means*. In our counterterrorism example, if you asked the audience what the episode was about, they'd say, "Oh, it's about Homeland Security," instead of interpreting it more broadly -- say, "It's about figuring out how much privacy you're willing to sacrifice in order to feel safe." If the story is thirty or forty years removed from your experience, you *have* to interpret it a little more broadly to figure out what it has to say about *your* life.
Thus, I will be optimistic and say that this is going to be a damn good TV show.
For next time: starting to watch MythBusters. More Mad Men. I'll finally watch Team America and I might finish reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. We'll see.
Not listening to classical music lately. Instead, I'm listening to the songs cited in Noel Murray's excellent "Popless" column.
[1] I refuse to write Tr2n. Or... er... I refuse to write Tr2n *again*. Dammit. Bah, you know what I mean.
[2] ... or 2009, or 200-whenever-it-gets-released. (imdb says 2011.)
[3] Frankly, it's kind of pathetic when modern films try to depict computer security: lots of white kids pound away at keyboards while 'edgy' dramatic music plays in the background and absolutely-unrelated floaty 3D stuff flies around the monitor. ("This is a UNIX system!")
[4] Or, worse, you throw the script into all sorts of contortions to *include* as many of those elements as possible. One of the things that made the Serenity script such a backbreaking challenge for Joss Whedon was that he wanted to include all the characters and to resolve all sorts of plotlines when really a movie is about one person with one objective.
Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankthinkg.gif) contemplative · Music: none |
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