Thursday, May 12, 2011
A funny comment from Joel today on Facebook: "As soon as someone throws a chicken leg, IT'S ON!!!" Breakfast at home: nonfat vanilla yogurt with Grandma Goodie's honey maple almond granola and fresh, diced pink lady apple. Rode my bike to work. Linkchecking, Flickr work, kiosk work. 1-on-1 meeting with Susie. Short web team meeting. Eric and I visited the Living Green Fair in Millberry Gym. Web steering lunch with Ed C and (joining us at NKRB) John K. Among other things, we talked about CTSI Faculty Profiles, MyAccess, Shibboleth. IT Services meeting: John G steps down, Patrick P will lead starting next month, 2nd Annual Tech Forum: A View From the Ground Level. Rode my bike home. Quickly ate some leftover orecchiette in marinara. Drove to Oakland International Airport, getting lost along the way I claim due to poor freeway signs. Picked up Danny and Phil, newly arrived after traveling in Philly, Boston, and New York City. Dinner with Danny and Phil at Miss Saigon. Bought gas on the way home. Will met me at home. Watched Tron: Legacy (2010) on Netflix DVD with Will. I liked this film for its visual beauty, but in many other respects I was very disappointed in it. I think the film's biggest failing was that, like Tron (1982), the story was weak. I didn't really care about the characters, I didn't see how Flynn's discovery would change the world or do the amazing things he said, and I didn't think the threat they were fighting was a real threat to meatspace. Many of the plot elements were very similar to or identical to Tron (1982). I understand if the makers of Legacy wanted to pay their respects to the earlier work, but when so many elements are mirrored, why bother making a new film? The film stole lines from other films, such as "The only winning move is not to play" from Wargames. The film also stole plot elements from lots of other films—not in ways that could be considered homages. I think that trying to follow in the now-hokey footsteps of Tron (1982) crippled this film, and I would have preferred to see either a completely reimagined reboot of Tron (1982) or for a sequel to not feel like it has to honor an earlier film with a weak story—something with more social relevance to today than the same fantastic save-the-world plot you see quite commonly throughout science fiction. I loved Tron (1982) for what it was but in a sequel I would have more appreciated a story that spoke a little more seriously to one or a few longstanding issues in coders' lives such as data security, data privacy, the stifling of innovation, information freedom, how programmers balance lives with families. The closest Tron: Legacy came to this is getting the shell screens to have realistic commands (but in a completely unrealistic scenario). Coders have grown up since 1982, and it seems Disney and the filmmakers somehow didn't realize this.