Tron Legacy

(Originally posted on December 22nd, 2010) I found Tron Legacy to be a lot of fun, in a leave your brain at the door kinda way.  The movie definitely gets an A in the spectacle category.  The visuals are nothing short of spectacular, the characters were fun and engaging, and even the sound had old school arcade nods that managed to give an especially modernized flick a quaint flare.  

That being said, the director bit off more than he could chew with CGI Jeff Bridges.  The rubber-mask looking Clu had such a limited range of facial motion that it kept bringing me out of the movie.  I just couldn’t help but think how horrible it looks.  On the other hand, the animators did manage to get rid of that annoying lower lip thing that Bridges does when he talks, so there was less of a distraction there. The movie acknowledges some of the more interesting aspects of entering the grid, such as ending famine, changing religion, and possibly doing away with death all together.  But I really would’ve dug exploring those ideas instead of merely identifying them.  How cool would it have been to hear a bunch of people replacing “amen” with “end of line”?

It’s still art

Some Mass Effect 3 players have been in an uproar for a while now about the game’s ending.  You can read more about it here, but the argument, nutshell style, is this: Why does a game that bills itself on choice have such a complete lack of choice at the end?  A significant number of this disgruntled audience started a child’s play campaign hoping to get the creators’ attention. Defenders of Bioware, the game’s publisher, generally claim the ending is what the writers’ intended and the game would cease to exist as true art if the child’s play campaign initiates some sort of change to the ending in the form of a downloadable add on.

I get both sides of this argument, but if a change does take place, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time art has been changed to please an audience.  Movies have test audiences.  Television shows add or take away characters to meet the needs of actors, producers, or because the audience just doesn’t seem to be digging it for whatever reason.  That doesn’t mean that everyone artistically involved in works such as Good Expectations, Two and a Half Men, Transformers 3 (yes, I said it), and ME3 don’t continue to produce art.  They just produce another kind.

Alex finally arrives …

Well, it’s been years in the making, and I’m sure it will be years in the marketing.  The former started the first time I watched Clash of the Titans (the original starring the creepy dad from Vernoica Mars–not the new one starring Jake Sully).  The latter starts today.  You can buy Alex directly from Rogue Phoenix’s website by clicking here.  You can buy it through the Amazon store here.