TRON: Tarnished Legacy?

Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a good TRON sequel movie, perhaps even several different good versions out there, but this isn't one of them.  We saw it in 3D in the theater, which neither helped nor particularly hurt the experience, but did induce a little eyestrain and made an already dark movie even darker.  I will probably not be going to another 3D movie anytime soon.

Like Tycho, I have a lot of questions and concerns, from the worthiness of the bad guys compared to Dillenger/Sark and the MCP from the first film, to the number of scenes that have no energy/don't add anything in terms of character development or plot (I'm looking at you, dinner party and bad guys searching Flynn's place, to name two), to the fact that Zuse's nightclub brought on painful flashbacks to the Merovingian.  It's a shame, really, because while I liked the actor who plays Zuse in Frost/Nixon, he's wasted here.  Likewise with Jeff Bridges.  I can't tell whether he's disinterested or has lost a step, but the great spirit that helped carry the first film out of mediocrity is gone, and he appears caught between playing his original character (with a dash of the Dude) and Obadiah Stane.  Garrett Hedlund is all right, I guess, but his character is a poor mix of Bruce Wayne and the Chris Pine Kirk.  It's Olivia Wilde who comes off best in their scenes together, and I'll actually be looking to netflix something else with her in it.

Off the grid, it's a crime that Cillian Murphy doesn't have more to do.  I really liked his cameo and think that his role is expanded in one of the good versions out in the multiverse.

Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (Estrin, Mark) 2002

The visitor sipped his tea, and after a while found himself describing another fire he had witnessed as a child in Prague, a synagogue burning in Josefov, the Jewish ghetto, the grand playfulness of arson.

My favorite book read this year is the eight year-old debut novel of a Brooklyn transplant to Vermont.  I've been meaning to read Estrin since the enticing Seven Days review of The Annotated Nose appeared 2 years ago, and perhaps may have even checked the Nose out of the library and didn't make much headway for a variety of reasons; now that I've made it through Insect Dreams, I can start working through his other stuff.

Estrin takes Kafka's protagonist, gives him a religion (Judaism), years of study and introspection to give him sufficient intellectual depth, and finally takes him on a tour of the first half of the 20th century, using his metamorphized state as a metaphor for the alien, both to give him a sense of kinship with the social outsiders and distance to "typical" Americans.  Gregor's experiences are almost too broad for the novel to have much focus, heading toward Forrest Gump territory with the number of historical figures he rubs elbows with, but avoiding it (somewhat ironically) because of Gregor's simple humanity.  

Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)

Scarlett Johansson perfectly captures the pose of Vermeer's model, and there are some good scenes where Vermeer (played by Colin Firth) talks about his craft, but... the film oozes with melodrama and Johansson's character reacts to everything with the same dumbstruck look of surprise.  We must be starting to scrape the bottom of our Netflix backlog.  Thankfully they keep making new movies.

Nora (2000)

An aspiring writer and his lover leave Ireland to live together in Trieste and try to lead a life away from the constrictive social norms of County Galway.  We follow their trials and tribulations as he discovers she's not the muse who can discuss literature (and particularly *his* writing) that he'd been hoping for, becomes jealous of the possibility that she is seeing other men, grows distant from her and their children (born out of wedlock), and ultimately forge a lasting and loving relationship... and somehow it's utterly boring.  


The acting is fine, but the script is not.  From the start, their relationship works on a physical level, but they don't really connect intellectually.  By the end, it's not really clear how they've managed to become friends as well as lovers.  Certainly nothing that happens on screen suggests it, until they are walking contentedly together down the lane while text appears to tell us they stayed together happily until they died.

To Thule or not to Thule on the family year-end trip

Every year end, we travel to see all the grandparents.  Christmas occurs during the trip and so we take all the gifts with us.  We also used to take the stroller because that was the only way Finn (and previously, Connor) would nap during the day (and sometimes the only way they would sleep), so we would put a hard shell carrier on top of the car for the trip.  This year we won't be taking the stroller on the trip for the first time since before Connor was born, so the question is: do we need to take the car top carrier?  The pros are that the gas mileage is better and the sound of the air rushing between the car and the carrier is unpleasant.  The cons are that we might have to mail some gifts home if we run out of room.


Based on data gathered from the past 14 months, the round trip is a little more than 1600 miles, and we make just under 25mpg with the car top carrier (or 65-70 gallons of gas), and just over 30mpg without (or 50-53 gallons of gas).  If gas is $3/gallon (it's more than that right now in Burlington and I'm guessing it will be more on the highway in NY, and less locally in NJ and western PA), then taking the carrier costs roughly $45 more, or more than it would cost to mail a couple packages home.


Record-keeping and simple data analysis win!  No turtle.