Tron: Ares, Eleanor the Great and Good Boy are all in cinemas
In the footnote of Monday’s newsletter I said, “Reader, there is only the most basic of plans but there is plenty of vision” and yesterday proved that even those basic plans are subject to interruption.
I lost a day yesterday because my phone wouldn’t connect to WiFi — not at home, not anywhere. More productive people would have just parked that problem and got on with writing but I find it difficult — impossible, even — to focus on anything when something so basic as that isn’t working.
It took 12 hours — and eventual support call to Apple in Sydney — to resolve it. After restarting the home network, clearing all the network settings on the phone, factory resetting the phone and restoring from backup, it turns out that the problem was caused by a VPN profile on the phone that I hadn’t even used for ten months!
The Apple guy went straight for that as the culprit but I was flabbergasted that something you aren’t even using could suddenly cause such a fundamental breakdown in functionality. The good news is that I don’t have to bit a new phone. The bad news is that this new releases newsletter is even later than usual.
Back in the day, many cinemas had illuminated marquees where the names of the pictures playing were displayed using individual letters that had been slotted in by hardworking candy bar hands or less hardworking projectionists. I wish this era was still with us so I could have sneaked out during the night with a ladder and changed the spelling of Tron: Ares to Tron: Arse. What fun!
While I enjoyed the bells and whistles of the film — especially in the 3D and IMAX incarnation which is its best showcase — the film is, in fact, a bunch of arse. Reheated thematically from the likes of Blade Runner, Terminator 2 and — more loosely — its own two predecessors, the film struggles to find any kind of emotional core. As Ares, star (and producer) Jared Leto doesn’t bring anything to the table, apart from self-conscious cheekbone awareness, and Greta Lee as human protagonist Eve is hamstrung but the fact that everything interesting about her happens in flashbacks about her dead sister.
Ares is a digital creation of the Dillinger corporation, an AI security program who can be 3D-printed into the real world courtesy of some ridiculous technology called a “particle laser”. Which appears to be able to go two ways, also sucking humans into the machine. (Incidentally, when we meet the original star of Tron, Jeff Bridges as Flynn, inside his own antique server later in the film did everyone wonder as I did, how a digital version of a human being could age like a human?)
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The antithesis of Dillinger’s desperate attempt to corner the authoritarian freedom-hating corporate market is Eve’s ENCOM, attempting to find the secret to keeping these digital artefacts alive in the real world for longer than 29 minutes and thus feed the starving and fix out global infrastructure deficit. Ares watches versions of himself get sacrificed over and over at military demos and starts to wonder if there isn’t a better — more human — future himself.
None of that’s the point of the film. It’s the chases, explosions, flying and the production design — fun physical props delivered with the support of Wētā Workshop — and I was reminded that once upon a time, 3D was a thing and with a new Avatar arriving before the end off the year, it will be again.
While I am being nostalgic for old school cinema marquees, I am reminded that present day movie star June Squibb’s mother used to play piano for silent films. At the age of 95, Squibb’s Indian summer as a marquee name of her own continues with Eleanor the Great, the feature directing debut from Scarlett Johansson.
Eleanor lives in a retirement community in Florida and her best friend is her roommate, Bessie. Bessie is a Holocaust survivor, still traumatised by her wartime experiences and the lack of people to tell her story to. Eleanor converted to Judaism for her husband back in the mid-50s and is the only person who will listen.
When Bessie passes way suddenly, the quick-witted and non-fool suffering Eleanor goes to live with her daughter and grandson in a New York apartment. Left to her own devices, she stumbles across a local Jewish support group and joins in, only to discover that its a group form Holocaust survivors and they want to know her Holocaust story. Except the only one she has belongs to Bessie.
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Having taken Bessie’s story as her own, Eleanor feels like she can’t walk it back and the hole she is digging is getting deeper and deeper, especially when a journalism student — also recently bereaved — takes up her story and it looks like she’ll become a media sensation.
Johansson has taken Tory Kamen’s simple story and empowered her actors to tell it. Squibb is as marvellous as ever, but young British actor Erin Kellyman is excellent also as Nina, the grieving student, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as her TV newsman father needs no introduction.
The New York locations feel genuinely lived in and the film is sensitive to how it is that a decent person can find themselves doing something awful and then have no easy way out. Recommended.
This week’s horror is Good Boy by Ben Leonberg, a hit at the SXSW festival earlier this year and rushed into cinemas ahead of a long life streaming on Shudder.
Unapologetically told from the point of view of Indy (Wikipedia tells me that Indy is a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever), companion animal to a very ill young man named Todd (whose face we do not see until nearly the end). The perspective is the point because we only focus on what Indy thinks is important rather than what an average human viewer would want to see and the 73-minute story is therefore quite hard to follow.
Has Todd been demonically possessed, like his father had been in this cottage years before? Are there messages coming through the black and white television that always seems to be switched on? What’s in the storm basement where Indy isn’t allowed to go?
The big claim to fame for Good Boy is the superb performance of Indy (Leonberg’s own dog) — unaugmented by supporting VFX — but that performance is also what made me for an uncomfortable watch as pets-in-peril stories seem to hit me harder than boring old humans.
