TRON (1982)



Older brothers usually get to be know-it-alls (and, of course, we’re usually right), but my Big Bro credibility took a huge hit in the ‘80s when I told my kid brother in no uncertain terms that he was absolutely, completely wrong in his crazy belief that Roger Ebert once gave this Disney science-fiction oddity a four-star review. But, though it pained me then (and now) to admit, my brother was absolutely right: Ebert raved about Tron, calling it a “dazzling...technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun” in its anthropomorphized depiction of the inner workings of computer technology, starring Jeff Bridges as a programmer trapped in a trippy day-glo software universe Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski would surely appreciate. At the time, of course, director Steven Lisberger’s tale of a Master Control Program bent on domination was fairly unique; that and the film’s visual palette were groundbreaking enough to explain why Ebert (and my brother) could forgive the fairly colorless acting and writing...but it was the cool Disneyland theme park attraction and the super-cool video game that finally won me over to the wonders of Tron. Nowadays, of course, it’s the other way around as the Master Control Program that runs Hollywood routinely morphs video games and theme park attractions into run-of-the-mill movies, computers are ubiquitous and CGI long ago lost its new car smell...but, hey, at least good ol’ Roger Ebert still knows how to flummox me with an occasional WTF? 4-star review! (AO)

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How could a space vampire-zombie apocalypse movie with tons of gratuitous nudity not live up to expectations?

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This may be the scariest Halloween in recent memory.

Whatever happens in the election, it's going to be a nightmare for tens of millions of Americans. But until then, we’ve got a few days to dress like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, drink pumpkin-flavored beer and relax with ghosts, vampires and zombies instead of all those scary talking heads on TV.

There was some debate here in the Screengrab Crypt regarding whether this was a list of the BEST horror films of all time or the SCARIEST (or if there’s a difference)...which naturally got us thinking about just what makes a film scary in the first place.

When my mother-in-law was a wee little French-Canadian, she went to a screening of Murders in the Rue Morgue where a theater employee in a gorilla suit popped out when the lights came up, sending the audience screaming into the streets of Nashua, New Hampshire...now THAT’S scary.

On the other hand, there are some horror movies that skip the gotcha! moments in favor of sheer dread, a creeping mood of hopeless, helpless paranoia that haunts your nights long after the adrenalin rush from the guy in the gorilla suit has faded. I remember squirming my way through all the maggots and vomited intestines of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell as a teenager, but what scared me the most was the Italian film’s pervasive sense of inescapable doom...

...not that I have especially fond memories of the film. Just because it scared me didn’t mean I liked it, in the same way I’d rather read a 700-page grad school dissertation on the cultural significance of the torture porn craze than sit through Saw V.

Like comedy, it’s hard to nail down the secret of great horror, but we know it when it lurches up...RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!!!

Just kidding. Enjoy the list, and Happy Halloween from your pals here at The Screengrab!

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Tasha Robinson at the AV Club brings us a brief but very engaging interview with Andrew Stanton, longtime studio pro at Pixar and the director of WALL-E.  In a wide-ranging discussion, he talks about the lunch meeting that produced a decade of the best animated films in history, the development of Pixar from a handful of like-minded creatives to a massive Hollywood studio employing hundreds of people, and his unconventional approach to writing a script in which the main character has no voice.  "I remember reading the script for Alien," he recalls; "It was written by Dan O'Bannon, and he had this amazing format where he didn't use a regular paragraph of description.  He would do little four-by-eight word descriptions and then sort of left-justify it and make it about four lines each, little blocks, so it almost looked like haikus.  It would create this rhythm in the readers where you would appreciate these silent visual moments as much as you would the dialogue on the page.  It really set you into the rhythm and mindset of what it would be like to watch the finished film.  I was really inspired by that, so I used that format for WALL-E."  

One of the fascinating things about the interview is the discussion of how the most high-tech movie studio in history uses some positively primitive methods to actually make their movies.  Starting with the standard lament that computers will always take up all the time you allocate them to solve a problem ("Once you've got more memory, you just want to do more with it.  And you end up feeling it takes just as long to do now the 16 things in five minutes instead of the one thing you used to do in five minutes"), Stanton notes that Pixar always views its films as storytelling challenges, not technical ones (how do you make a cool movie about monsters, as opposed to how do you solve the fur problem in CGI).  He also notes that, with WALL-E, they were attempting to tell a story almost entirely visually, and so looked back -- way back -- for cues:  forsaking Chuck Jones' Warner Brothers cartoons as overly familiar to geeks like themselves, they instead prepared for each day's work by watching a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd silent short every day at lunch for a year and a half.

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