TFT 105 / 35 mb MP3 / 72 minutes /
SPECIAL GUESTS: GLENN KENNY / ARMOND WHITE
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
AVATAR / JAMES CAMERON / SILENT RUNNING / 3D / ROBERT ZEMECKIS / WALL-E USED CARS / XENOGENESIS / SUMMER HOURS / A SERIOUS MAN / STAR TREK / THIS IS IT / CRANK 2: HIGH VOLTAGE / NEVELDINE AND TAYLOR / NEXT DAY AIR / PRECIOUS / LEE DANIELS / BELOVED
Jul 24, 1999 – CNET News Story – Pixar and Disney Collaborating on a new Tron film:
Pixar Studios to remake Disney’s Tron?
It set the scene for a generation of hi-tech sci-fi movies and, arguably, inspired some of the best films of the genre. Tron, the legendary Disney movie loved by the thirty-something generation, is rumored to be in the re-make room with some very serious backers, including Steve Jobs.
Jobs, on stage this week with the iBook, also has another day job, running Pixar Animation Studios (Nasdaq:PIXR), maker of “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life.” According to one source, Pixar may be working on a remake of the classic ’80s sci-fi film.
The source, who asked not to be identified, said Pixar is trying to decide whether to remake the original or create a sequel. It will begin work on the project once Toy Story II hits the theaters November 24. John Lasseter, Toy Story’s director, will head the production.
November 1st, 2009 – The ‘Tron’ sequel never sees the light of day – we don’t know why. But now comes word that work on the film was far further along than anyone suspected. A soundtrack was commissioned. Now, 10 years after conception, that soundtrack has been released, free for all in multiple formats:
In late 1998, I was commissioned to compile and produce the soundtrack for a sequel to the film “Tron”. A draft of the story had already been written and early filming had begun (as reported by ZDNet on July 27, 1999). As I understand it, the film was kept in great confidence with the producers as Pixar was still in negotiations with Disney about the responsibilities of the production teams.
“Rise Of The Virals” was a fantastic, but much darker storyline from the original — different from the “Into The Machine” pitch made to Disney by another party. It involved updating the ENCOM universe to a networked system (thanks to the Internet), but also created a darker world — full of programs abandoned as buggy systems (or “mutants”) and abused by corrupt users as viral systems. Furthermore, the story included the death of Flynn and presented questions about the digital life of programs lasting beyond the mortality of their creators — the users.
My task was to compile great underground artists to create a new soundtrack for this darker world of Tron. After the completion of the initial tracklist and first production draft of the soundtrack, it seemed as if negotiations between Pixar and Disney had broken down. Funding for the project was eventually pulled.
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I don’t know how much, if any, of the above quote is true. But what does it matter? What is meaningful here is the music. It’s being pitched as the soundtrack for a lost film – and as such while listening one cannot separate oneself from the sense of the elegiac; from a sense of nostalgia for a future that never was. A world of the future from 1999 – in which we’d strap in/plug in to a virtual reality that promised…what? Now, instead of escaping into a virtual world, the virtual world has seeped into real life. We’re beginning to craft a virtual world around us using the hive mind technologies of Twitterbook and the like.
So are we, in fact, moving into the ‘inverse future’ of what would have been promised by ‘Rise of the Virals’? And, if it had been made, how would it have changed how we use and view technology today? We can’t know – but listen to the music. You can just about feel it – as if you had a fleeting, hazy glimpse of a some parallel universe that just might be around us, all the time.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter if we can’t reach that parallel world – maybe in memory an unfinished film can become more present to us than it ever would have been if it had been completed. If ‘Rise of the Virals’ had been made we’d have digital copies of it in whatever format we wanted at any time we wanted. But how can digital be something real, real to us as analog creatures; how could it be something remembered? Digital copies are exact – there is no change in the information, 1 is always 1, forever – this isn’t memory – memory degrades – digital is something else.
Memory is analog – memory moves and resculpts and disappears.
Strange ramblings I know on a late Sunday night this November 1st – but that’s what the ‘Viral’s’ soundtrack stirs in me. It’s the future we never had.
Steven Soderbergh has managed to build an enviable career – he gets to make fun, huge projects like ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, and alternates these with smaller, self-consciously serious films such as ‘The Underneath’, ‘Kafka’, and ‘The Girlfriend Experience’, which I saw this afternoon at the Chelsea Clearview next door to the Chelsea Hotel, in, as you might expect, Chelsea. Name of the lead character of this movie? It’s an easy guess – my sense is that Soderbergh’s protagonist, played by an adult film actor called Sasha Grey is supposed to represent an entire social cohort as well as an individual soul. In that regard, naming her after a part of New York City known for its cultural creativity and sociological excess seems not only obvious but just right.
‘Just right’ is how I felt about most, though not all, of the film – Grey is a sex worker who hires herself out for something more than sex: she approximates relationships, for an hour, or a night at a time. She has a boyfriend called Chris at home, who’s also trying to sell his body – he’s a personal trainer. It would not be unfair to say that her job eventually creates domestic tension.
The story is set against the cultural shift that was the US Presidential election of just over six months ago. Let me say it again: Just Over Six Months Ago. In that sense, it already feels dated; although that’s not a criticism, just an indicator of how quickly things change, or give the appearance of changing.
And so, it’s about the moral impetus of privatised capitalism (if I wanted to sound less pretentious I might translate that as ‘it’s about what happens when the love of money drives our sense of pleasure and satisfaction’), the status anxiety that is the shadow side of telling each other that we can achieve anything, and then defining that ‘anything’ purely in terms of materialism or celebrity, and something else that might sound even weirder: a hidden yearning for a return to pre-industrial society. One where it’s easy to imagine being part of a community that actually did share its possessions, that actually did offer people much of what they needed, that simplified relationships, didn’t idealise the nuclear family, didn’t force people to create insatiable appetites for things most of them could never have.
Now I know it’s easy to overstate the benefits of the past, the good old days and all that. So let me say this: I know that disease and violence were characteristic of the pre-industrial age, as much as any romanticised notion of extended families living together in pastoral bliss. But I also strongly suspect that the rates of depression, disappointment, and inability to sit still and think for a few minutes that seem to be characteristic of our contemporary culture have something to do with how we interpret what it means to be human. If we believe that the ultimate end of our lives is only to become fully self-actualised individuals, then the wider community will suffer.
What Chelsea in ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ does for a living is not the main point of interest here: she could just as easily have been an actor or a model or a salesperson on the floor of Macy’s; because the movie is suggesting that we are all prostitutes; or at the very least, we are all subject to the impersonal forces of an economy that has abandoned gift exchange in favour of fast buck selling to the highest bidder. Or at least an economy that thinks it has the upper hand; it has pulled the wool over its own eyes. Because behind the stories of companies too big to fail and ‘where’s my bailout?’, communities everywhere are rediscovering what a social structure based on mutuality could look like. We are only enslaved by money if we put our wrists in its shackles. Chelsea is a slave. So is Chris. So is everyone in this movie.
So, while it’s gorgeous to look at, and amusing when it’s observing the games people play (casting film critic Glenn Kenny as a self-appointed sex reviewer is funny and smart, and not just because he’s great in the role), ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ is depressing. And if it represented what life is really like, instead of the delusions that we know can be cast away, and are in fact just waiting for us to see through them, we’d all have reason to be depressed too.
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Other thoughts on ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ at The Film Talk: ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ and ‘Anvil! The Story of Anvil’
Once upon a time, as a graduate student. I spent three years studying people who believe the pope is the antichrist, a mythical figure referenced (with surprising infrequence) in the Bible, and who over the centuries has inspired some of the strangest speculation and religious behaviour. From the 12th Century mystic Joachim of Fiore who changed the date for the end of the world as often as his undershirt, through the fact that Isaac Newton believed that his discovery of logarithms would speed up the calculation of what the Number of the Beast meant, to apocalytpic frenzy at the time of the French Revolution, right up to more recent doomsayers such as Hal Lindsey (the bestselling ‘non’-fiction author of the 1970s), who might have felt rather conflicted when 1988 came and went without the earth being destroyed, and now Glenn Beck, who seems content to encourage eschatological surmising about President Obama. They’re all wrong, of course; and it’s obvious that end-times guessers have tended to be socially bigoted too. Certainly it’s the case for some that naming the antichrist has been, as one of its foremost students has said ‘an obsession’.
And now along comes Lars von Trier, a director whose work indicates for most critics either genius or madness; or he may be a court jester; or someone who is projecting his depression on screen. What I think is this: ‘Dogville’ was compelling but did not describe the world as I experience it; ‘Breaking the Waves’ grasped the horror of grief and suggested that life on earth is a stepping stone, a preparatory ground, a purgative moment before eternal grace takes over. I think if I re-watched either of them, my opinion might reverse itself. Last week, at Cannes, he added his name to the not-so-illustrious role of those who have appropriated ‘antichrist’ for themselves.
His film, imaginatively entitled ‘Antichrist’ has caused the kind of controversy not seen at the festival for some time. People are terrified, embarrassed for the actors, overwhelmed, distraught, disturbed, angry, entertained, unintentionally made to laugh, or provoked to think about the nature of existence. It seems that some reviewers both love and hate it at the same time. It’s not certain whether von Trier is using the title literally – if he really intends to comment on the notions that captured Joachim, Isaac, et Hal; but the word can’t be divorced from its history. ‘Dogville’ and ‘Breaking the Waves’ seemed to me to be produced by a person disagreeing with himself – putting Willem Dafoe, one of the most striking Jesuses on film in a movie called ‘Antichrist’ seems entirely in keeping with von Trier’s way of playing the audience. I’d like the film to be a serious exploration of grief and suffering – the accounts in so far suggest it is anything but; in fact, it may be the big screen equivalent of the kind of painting done by one of the severely traumatised patients in a war veterans’ home (although he and his cast look happy enough in the photo above). On the basis of the words written about it already, and the track record of the director, I both can’t wait to see it, and am not sure that I will be able to watch it.
Three reviews below:
Koyaanisqatsi, that tremendous collage of images and music directed by Godfrey Reggio with an astonishing score by Philip Glass is now available for viewing on ad supported Hulu.com.
This make for a strange, unsettling experience. There we are, ensconced in the strange beautiful world of Koyaanisqatsi – a non-verbal mediation on nature and the imbalance caused by man’s technology and then BOOM! A commercial for Alltel telling us to ‘come and get our love’ interrupts the viewing.
For me, the effect of this was startling.
By breaking up the film with commercials and placing ads near the viewing frame, (see the ‘Life on BlackBerry’ spot in the upper right hand corner of the framegrab), the viewing experience becomes transportative – it’s as if the terrifying visions of man’s effect on Earth have leached out of the computer and become real – it’s in your face.
That might sound like hyperbole – but the seven commercial spots are so unsettling and yet so in keeping with the themes of the film that this is now my preferred way to watch the pic. The effect of watching this movie on Hulu is the perfect showcase for, as the definition of the word Koyaanisqatsi reads:
‘crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living.’
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See below for a fascinating documentary on the making of Koyaanisqatsi, the film itself on Hulu, and at bottom, the film free from commercial interruption on Google Video.
