Monster March II: The Mummy Returns (2001)

For as much as I love The Mummy – and as much as I loved The Mummy Returns when it came out in 2001 – I haven’t seen it all the way through in many years, and its fortunes only waned in the intervening decades. By the time I got back to The Mummy Returns, after watching all the Universal Classic Monsters films and seeing the 1999 film more times than I can count, The Mummy Returns is so ephemeral, so underwhelming, that it’s hard to believe these are the same filmmakers.

With their ten-year-old son Alex (Freddie Boath) in tow, adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his archeologist wife (Rachel Weisz) accidentally trigger a chain reaction that will awaken the slumbering Scorpion King (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), whose ancient army threatens to destroy the world. Meanwhile, the mummified high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) is resurrected by the reincarnation of his lost love Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez), who wants the power of the Scorpion King for herself.

 

Here’s the thing about The Mummy Returns – Brendan Fraser is having so much fun that it’s very easy to overlook the fact that this film isn’t really very good at all. The first film was lightning in a bottle, clipping along without any dead weight and taking itself seriously enough that the audience could play along too. The Mummy Returns is, plainly put, bonkers; very little of it makes sense outside of the immediate scene you’re watching, and while it does obey its own internal logic, it’s akin to the logic of a dream, where details only connect if you force them together.

 

The Mummy Returns is full of, for lack of a better word, stuff. There’s a trio of brigands who never accomplish their disparate missions before Imhotep summarily dispatches them; an indestructible hot air balloon; a tribe of shrunken-head pygmy mummies; a sinister museum curator who never does any curating; an implicit prophecy regarding Rick O’Connell’s destiny; and no fewer than two distinct reincarnation subplots, neither of which fazes anyone in the film. These are all things that occur, in roughly this order, and no one comments on the fact that these things simply happen. I suppose that, after the events of The Mummy, these characters are well and truly prepared for anything, yet it’s hard to fathom anyone simply accepting this many unexplained phenomena in the span of one week. Recall that everything spectacular in The Mummy came back to Imhotep; here, there are so many supernatural forces jousting that the plot feels like a staged production at Pharoahic Times. 

 

So the plot doesn’t make much sense, a collection of bits rather than an integrated narrative, but I’m not entirely sure that one comes to a mummy film with “coherent plot” high on the list. The action sequences are a notch better than the ones in the adventure-heavy Mummy, and it seems we can’t go fifteen minutes without something spectacular happening on screen. As much of an intellectual chore as the movie can become, requiring leaps of logic and credulity, the action scenes are well-staged, particularly an early banger in which the crew are accosted by mummies aboard a double-decker bus. This flavor of action doesn’t align with the gee-whiz thrills of the first film, but it’s respectably dynamic and worth rewatching out of context. So too the pygmy mummy attack, which makes not a lick of sense in the structure of the film and has no real purpose for being there, but which is nevertheless suitably creepy and electrifying on its own merits.

 

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Mummy Returns is that it is never quite a mummy movie. Imhotep’s reanimation and revivification feels perfunctory, designed to move the character as quickly as possible into position as a comic book supervillain. As much as the film outfits itself with the trappings of reincarnation and dynastic Egypt, it has no larger theme or purpose for these matters beyond the fact that they were principal concerns of the first film. The Mummy Returns is a cliché of a sequel, doing it all over again but only a little bit differently – and losing so much of the magic in the process. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a gag near the climax in which young Alex struggles to read the hieroglyph “Amenophus”; Jonathan gleefully reminds us that he too had the same problem in the first film. But beyond the surface-level pleasure of remembering better days, The Mummy Returns is serving only lukewarm leftovers.

 

Put another way, The Mummy remains one of my favorite films of all time, yet The Mummy Returns is little better than a footnote, as if to say, “Oh, yes, and they made another one, too.”

 

The Mummy Returns is rated PG-13 for “adventure action and violence.” Written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, Oded Fehr, Patricia Velasquez, Freddie Boath, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Monster March II: The Mummy (1999)

If you’re having a sense of déjà vu, don’t be alarmed. We did review the Universal Mummy films back in March, and we even reviewed this remake in 2012. But for an entry on the Personal Canon itself, it deserves more than 270 words. The Mummy is one of my all-time favorite movies. Here’s why.

Thousands of years after the high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) was condemned to an eternity of suffering, librarian Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) and her treasure-seeking brother Jonathan (John Hannah) hire adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) to lead them to the fabled lost city of Hamunaptra. Beneath the sands of Hamunaptra, though, the mummified Imhotep sleeps, and this band of explorers will soon learn that what awaits them is something other than buried treasure – and infinitely worse than death.

 

I’ve long made the joke that The Mummy may as well be called Indiana Jones and the Curse of Hamunaptra. With a similar pace, setting, atmosphere, and attitude, The Mummy needs only a few cosmetic tweaks to sneak its way into the Indiana Jones franchise for good. Brendan Fraser is heroically fun as our cocky swashbuckling protagonist, a kind of early “fortune and glory” iteration of the good Dr. Jones. He’s got the self-aware sarcasm down pat, yet he can flip to sincerity with a well-timed smolder. In short, Fraser is the key to the movie allowing us to have fun – he’s very clearly enjoying himself, too. Like Fraser, the movie is a master of its own tone, zany and madcap at one turn, cavalier and daring at the next, without losing any of its own integrity. The movie might poke fun at itself, but it never makes a fool of its audience.

 

Fraser is the perfect model for what’s going on with The Mummy because the film overall is never boring. If it’s not being funny, it’s ably building tension or hosting a rollicking action sequence, helped in no small part by Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing score. As the old meme goes, Jerry Goldsmith didn’t have to go so hard, but he did that – he did that for all of us. Goldsmith’s orchestral work soars, dabbles in the romantic, and plays around in the Arabesque; it works perfectly in the film, and it’s a darned good listen outside of the cinema, too. Longtime readers of the blog know that a good score is often my favorite thing about a movie, and you can get away with a lot if the music is doing its work right. Goldsmith is trying to do an uncomplicated arrangement a la Old Hollywood, but his use of motifs and swirling patterns mean this score isn’t one to ignore. (And yes, I was listening to the score as I wrote this review. How could you tell?)

 

Among the rest of the cast, everyone is doing their level best to make this world believable, and they do succeed. Weisz and Hannah are divinely cast as bickering siblings – somewhat broadly caricatured, it’s true, but their devotion to the clichés make these characters feel real. Arnold Vosloo, meanwhile, has a real presence as Imhotep, and though he doesn’t say much he’s expressively sinister in the scenes when he has all his skin; when he’s in ‘monster mode,’ Imhotep is creepy and ghastly to behold, which is all the better when the movie needs that quick jolt of terror that only a decaying corpse can deliver.

 

Then there’s the smaller supporting roles, a veritable who’s-who of late-90s character actors. Oded Fehr (who, incidentally, played a terrorist on Sleeper Cell while Vosloo played one on 24) is tons of fun as the dead-serious protector of Hamunaptra, while Kevin J. O’Connor is equally a blast in the role of servile weasel Beni, handily a top goon in the annals of monster movies. And don’t sleep on Erick Avari, indisputably the fin-de-siècle king of “Hey, it’s that guy!”, in the thankless role of fez-wearing museum curator Dr. Bey (not to be confused with Fehr’s Ardeth Bay); in mummy movies, there’s always a guy with a fez, and there’s always a shady museum curator, so Avari is the pristine cherry on top of a perfect sundae.

 

One of the things I’ve always loved about The Mummy isn’t quite apparent in the film itself, though it’s equally impossible to ignore. In 1999, The Mummy comes at the tail end of a decade of period pulp films, which is precisely my favorite flavor of cinematic ice cream. I’m thinking of films like Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow, and The Phantom – all of which I loved as a child and still do as an adult. We can enroll Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman in this pattern, and indeed we might even consider it the progenitor of a host of imitations to follow. At the climax of the decade, The Mummy is arguably the most successful of these period pulps, though I’ll always have an elemental soft spot for The Rocketeer. I’m a sucker for this kind of heightened reality, placed into a distinct historical past, without postmodern cynicism or deliberate genre subversion. Take a story and a time period, and revel in it; that’s what The Mummy does best of all.

 

The Mummy is rated PG-13 for “pervasive adventure violence and some partial nudity.” Directed by Stephen Sommers. Written by Stephen Sommers, Lloyd Fonvielle, and Kevin Jarre. Starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, Oded Fehr, and Kevin J. O’Connor.

Black Widow (2021)

A year without Marvel movies is hard to fathom, but that’s what 2020 gave us. Two years is even more impossible to imagine, and yet Black Widow is, finally, the first foray into Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Spider-Man: Far From Home was, improbably, the coda to Phase Three). Positioned at this odd juncture in moviegoing history, and slotted into the MCU timeline of five years ago, Black Widow is something of an odd duck, and it is for my money the first MCU disappointment in a long while.

Set after the events of Captain America: Civil War, Black Widow finds Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) on the run when a coded message from her erstwhile sister Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) summons her to Budapest. The two Black Widow spies agree to take down the Red Room training program that created them, but they’ll need the help of their two former foster parents (David Harbour and Rachel Weisz) to defeat the spymaster (a ludicrously un-Russian Ray Winstone) who molded them.

 

After thirteen years of Marvel movies, television shows, and short films, the MCU has become almost entirely unwieldy, all but inaccessible to newcomers. I thought about this as I watched Black Widow, precariously positioned in a continuity that expects you to know when and why William Hurt is wandering around the periphery of the plot as Secretary Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. For the true believers (or, as they’ve also been dubbed, “Marvel Zombies”) who haven’t missed a moment, it’s a frisson of continuity glee to see how Black Widow slots into the chronology, but it’s truly groan-worthy when the film reveals – surprise! – the secret origin of the vest Natasha was wearing in Infinity War. Not since Solo felt the need to explain Han Solo’s surname has a prequel bent so far over backwards to explain something no one asked.

 

Hurt aside, there aren’t many opportunities for the film to include any of the major MCU cameos we might expect, and this is actually for the better. A Black Widow movie, especially if it is indeed Johansson’s swan song in the franchise, ought to expand the title character’s world beyond what we already know about her. And on this count, the film both succeeds and fails. We do get a family of sorts for the orphan Natasha, who we learn spent formative years deep undercover in Ohio with a phony family. Then again, where were they this whole time, and where have they been since? (The easiest answer – that they were all “blipped” off-screen – is somewhat dramatically inert.) Rachel Weisz is intriguing but entirely humorless as Melina Vostokoff; unfortunately, she’s given very little in the film to do because so much oxygen is taken up by David Harbour’s excessively hammy performance as Alexei Shostakov, the Red Guardian. I didn’t read many reviews of the film during its hybrid theatrical/streaming release, but it seemed audiences were mostly enamored of Harbour, though I found his acting broad, cloying, and a little desperate.

 

With Johansson sleepwalking through the film, just about the only performance that caught my attention was Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, ostensibly the “new” Black Widow. Pugh is fun, believable, and layered in a way most Marvel fan-favorites are (think The Falcon or Wanda Maximoff, even before they got their own shows). It’s a delight to hear that Marvel has further plans for Pugh, including a stint on the upcoming Hawkeye show, because Yelena could ably fill the void left by Natasha or create her own space entirely in the MCU (however that pesky lawsuit shakes itself out). When Pugh’s on screen, the film really seems to work, however dodgy all the so-called Russian accents might be.

 

I like Marvel movies more than most, and it’s not that Black Widow is wildly incompetent, a theatrical mess like whatever Batman & Robin was trying to be – or, more recently, the tonal hostage situation that was The Suicide Squad. Black Widow has an internal logic, a clear narrative, and a different set of stakes that the Marvel movies don’t always see. It works; it’s fine. But it was the first Marvel movie in years – perhaps ever – where I almost fell asleep. Granted, it was late, and all the lights were out, and I was alone; yet while the movie never lost me, nor did it ever really have me. The plot is predictable and without nuance, a kind of vanilla apology for the second-stringer position formerly occupied by Natasha Romanoff.

 

Then again, Natasha has been so much better in other, better films. She managed to make perfect sense among demigods and super-soldiers in The Avengers, and she was emotionally compelling in Endgame. And she was an absolute vision in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, still the best Marvel movie, hands-down, in part because it left her past as shadowy and oblique. Here, the truth about her childhood ends up making her a supporting character in her own film. In fact, maybe that’s the key. Black Widow doesn’t grow over the course of the film, having already reckoned with her past in other Marvel entries. All we get is a little padding around the edges, which may or may not come to bear on future projects.

 

At the end of the day, Black Widow is one of the lesser Marvel movies, about on par with Thor: The Dark World but never quite as engaging as, say, an Ant-Man or two. The Dark World was fine enough, but it’s never been something I sought out to rewatch. Throughout Black Widow, I found myself wishing I were instead watching The Winter Soldier. Natasha had an arc there, a purpose, and she was darned fun to watch too. Black Widow feels a bit like homework, obligatory for any true believer who’s come this far. Maybe brew a pot of coffee before you dive into this assignment.

 

Black Widow is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence/action, some language, and thematic material.” Directed by Cate Shortland. Written by Eric Pearson, Jac Schaeffer, and Ned Benson. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, Olga Kurylenko, William Hurt, Ray Winstone, and Rachel Weisz.

Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

For whatever reason (perhaps deservedly so), 1939’s The Wizard of Oz has attained a kind of untouchable status, casting a large shadow over any project attempting to approach any adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s work.  But after Disney made a pretty penny revisiting Alice in Wonderland with Tim Burton, now they’ve let Sam Raimi take a crack with Oz the Great and Powerful.

And it’s better than I was expecting.

James Franco stars as the eponymous Oscar Diggs, a selfish traveling magician who is transported from Kansas to the magical land of Oz by way of – what else? – a tornado.  Once his hot-air balloon lands, Oscar (known as “Oz”) meets a trio of witches – Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz), and Glinda (Michelle Williams) – who contend that he is the subject of a prophecy concerning the fate of Oz.  Trouble is, Oscar’s no wizard, even if his flying monkey and china doll companions believe he is...

It may be that I just had low expectations for a prequel to the aforementioned Wizard, but I found myself rather enchanted by Oz the Great and Powerful.  Raimi goes a long way to redeeming himself for Spider-Man 3 (redemption he had begun with 2009’s Drag Me to Hell), and the movie is clearly the creation of someone enamored with the art of filmmaking itself.  Of course, I’m a bit of a sucker for this kind of meta-film, but it’s particularly clever when, for example, we learn that behind the curtain lies a movie camera.

After learning that Robert Downey Jr. was under consideration for the role of Oscar, I was disappointed that it came down to James Franco, but Franco actually does a pretty good job with Oscar, capturing the bogus charisma and accompanying self-doubt that the character inhabits.  I can’t tell if Franco’s clueless perma-smile is the result of good casting or good acting, but it works in the context of the film.  He’s also an effective gateway character, his obliviousness helping us get acclimated to Oz and any dramatic ironies therein.

The witches are perhaps better cast, more interesting because of how recognizable they are from the 1939 movie.  I can’t tell if we’re meant to recognize Theodora and Evanora on sight (so it might be spoiling to say what each one does), but Kunis and Weisz are quite good as two very different kinds of witches.  But I say it’s Williams who steals the show as Glinda, adhering closely to Billie Burke’s iconic performance while adding some of the good-girl-snark that’s become popular these days (see also Peppy in The Artist). 

Younger fans will likely adore Finley the flying monkey (Zach Braff) and the China Doll (Joey King), but for me the standout feature of the film is the way that it pays tribute to some of the 1939 film’s formal attributes without retreading them.  For instance, in a shot that I wish wasn’t spoiled by the trailers, Oscar’s arrival in Oz is marked by a transition from 4:3 fullscreen to 2.35:1 widescreen.  It’s a great way to recapture the magic of 1939’s shift from sepia-tone to color for an audience already ultra-accustomed to that kind of twist (but don’t worry, you still bet a color change, too).  The film also plays up the dual-casting from the 1939 film, with Williams, Braff, and King making appearances in Kansas and Oz; it perpetuates the surreal quality of Oz while also inviting interpretation as to the reality of what’s going on.

It’s to Raimi’s credit that these formal nods never feel like obligatory deferential references.  Instead, they pay homage to the long legacy of Baum’s work while reinventing and/or reintroducing the Land of Oz to a new audience.  All told, Oz the Great and Powerful is quite good.

Oz the Great and Powerful is rated PG “for sequences of action and scary images, and brief mild language.”  This movie is quite tame, appropriate for most audiences; the flying baboons are a bit ooky, and maybe the Wicked Witch might creep some out when she appears, but all in all this is a pretty wholesome flick.

Monday at the Movies - November 12, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-One of “Monday at the Movies.”  
 
The Brothers Bloom (2008) – From Rian Johnson, the mind that brought you Looper?  There are connections, to be sure, but for the most part this feels like a completely different film.  To be honest, that difference isn’t always a positive thing for Brothers Bloom.  Unfortunately, this is one of those con-man movies that is too cute by half, trying to out-indie Wes Anderson by couching unsubtle foreshadowing within overbroad characterization.  Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo star as the eponymous brothers; the depressive Brody wants out of the life, even though Ruffalo’s cons are as intricate and successful as a Dostoevsky novel.  One last con, blah blah blah, Rachel Weisz as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl mark.  You can call this one from the concession stand; where Looper reinterpreted its own dialogue to add meaning to the twist ending, Brothers Bloom quotes itself at the ending as if to say, “What, you didn’t see this coming?”  In praise of the film, Ruffalo’s performance is quite good; from the man who’s done the best Bruce Banner in a decade, I wouldn’t expect less, but it’s a disappointment that the film focuses more on sad sack Brody than on his more compelling brother. As Penelope, Weisz straddles the line between ascetic shut-in and sexually precocious, but the two halves never coalesce into a realistic character worthy of the affection Brody displays for her; her American accent, though, is nonpareil (something we saw in The Bourne Legacy, as well), and there’s a fun turn by Rinko Kikuchi as the mostly-silent Bang Bang.  But The Brothers Bloom ultimately fails to enchant despite its enthusiastic attempts to do so.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

The Bourne Legacy (2012)

As the summer blockbuster season winds to a close, The Bourne Legacy revisits a familiar franchise with a new angle – one of the first “midquels” I’ve ever seen – and a common twist – “Put Jeremy Renner in it.”  Both end up being profitable decisions, as The Bourne Legacy is perhaps more enjoyable than its forerunners, “Bourne again” anew.

Taking place sometime during the events of The Bourne Ultimatum, Legacy wisely sets most of the original trilogy aside and allows filmgoers to focus not on unraveling a nebulous conspiracy but on following one man – Aaron Cross (Renner) – and his attempts to stay one step ahead of government officials (led by an extremely dedicated Edward Norton) who want him dead.  Along the way he meets up with Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), a scientist coming to terms with her own involvement in the supserspy program that birthed Cross – and Jason Bourne.

After stepping into Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and representing the common-ish man in The Avengers, Jeremy Renner is wasting none of his post-Hurt Locker inertia by stepping into yet another big-league franchise.  The decision to focus entirely on Renner is a daring one, since the Bourne name is synonymous with Matt Damon, but Damon’s absence here is barely noticeable, in part because Renner’s performance as an edgy superspy is extremely compelling.  His Aaron Cross is a man forced into a difficult situation, and Renner is a master of switching between lethal force and a killer sense of humor; the transition never feels out of character.

But more importantly, the film crafts an interesting narrative around him that renders superfluous any appearance by Jason Bourne.  Director Tony Gilroy performs an almost impossible feat by making this film virtually stand-alone, never relying on what’s come before but instead guiding us through a new corner of a shared universe.  The film expands on the science behind the secret project that “created” Jason Bourne and goes deeper into the human cost of such a large-scale initiative, but it focuses more on the attempts of the government to roll up the project and obscure its existence – with Cross in the middle.

The highlight of the Bourne films has always been their intense action sequences.  Quantitatively, The Bourne Legacy contains fewer, opting for a slow burn rather than a relentless string of big moments.  When the film does explode, it does so with a few very well-directed sequences.  I won’t spoil any by describing in too great of detail, but there’s a first-rate shoot-out and a breathtaking motorcycle chase that are as well-crafted as anything else in the franchise.

While The Bourne Legacy probably won’t be the greatest movie you’ll have seen all summer, it’s an exceptionally compelling film with thrilling action sequences and a great star who knows how to get the audience on his side.  Although I can’t say for certain without rewatching the original trilogy, this may be my favorite of the Bourne films.

The Bourne Legacy is rated PG-13 for “violence and action sequences.”  That kind of says it all right there.

Monday at the Movies - June 18, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Three of “Monday at the Movies,” a grab bag of movies I hadn’t reviewed yet. 

The Mummy (1999) – As with last week’s entries, The Mummy was a movie very dear to me as a child, and I think I’m sensing a pattern here.  Like the Indiana Jones movies, The Mummy is a period adventure piece mixing action, humor, the supernatural, and 1930s clothing.  In fact, the film could very easily be read as an Indy flick starring Brendan Fraser as a mercenary hired to lead Rachel Weisz to a hidden Egyptian city where an ancient evil mummy (Arnold Vosloo) is about to be resurrected.  The film is fast-paced, very exciting, and entertaining at every turn.  As with The Rocketeer, there’s something to enjoy in each scene, with director Stephen Sommers effectively never wasting a scene; when the plot isn’t advancing, the characters are interacting in fun ways.  While the chemistry between Fraser and Weisz isn’t entirely tangible – a kind of throwback, perhaps, to the early horror trope of the protagonists falling in love – John Hannah’s role as Weisz’s besotted treasure-seeking brother remains one of my favorite supporting roles in recent movies.  The screenplay, though, is surprisingly strong, flirting with the monster movie trope while giving it a modern sense of humor and weaving in a compelling take on the plagues of Egypt (making this film the unlikely love-child of Indiana Jones and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments).  The procedural format of a chain of victims and the accompanying plagues helps the film continue to advance and gather a sense of purpose while our characters band together to fight the mummy.  More than a decade later, The Mummy is still terrifically fun.

Sin City (2005, Extended Cut) – With recent news indicating that the sequel is finally on, Sin City has been on my rewatch list for a while.  The story and the content aren’t for everyone, to be sure; the film is violent and extremely dark, its depiction of women problematic at best, and the dialogue corny in places due to Miller’s hardboiled sensibility.  But what holds the attention more is the unique visual look, which has spawned a bevy of impersonators (I contend that Zack Snyder wouldn’t have a career without Rodriguez’s inspiration, particularly on Watchmen).  The version under review today is the “Recut, Extended, Unrated” version where director Robert Rodriguez added in ten minutes of direct “translation” of Frank Miller’s comics source material but divides the interweaving narratives into their own short films (about forty minutes each).  The only story that suffers from being divided is “The Customer is Always Right,” which stars Josh Hartnett as a hitman-for-hire; the clip’s link to the end of another segment makes its ending stand not-quite-alone.  Mickey Rourke leads “The Hard Goodbye,” in which he plays the hulk Marv on a quest for revenge.  In “The Big Fat Kill,” Clive Owen aims to protect the women of Old Town from the mob.  And, in what would be my favorite segment were Jessica Alba a stronger actress, Bruce Willis seeks out Alba after learning that her former attacker “That Yellow Bastard” is eager for a second attempt.  All three leads are fantastic, delivering the noirish narration with appropriate gravel and world-weariness (it says something that the voiceover isn’t distracting), while the supporting cast (too many A-listers to name) rounds out the film into an enjoyable experience which benefits from directorial expansion.

TRON: Legacy (2010) – TRON: Legacy is one of several rare breeds:  a sequel better than the original, a film that gets better each time I watch it, a film where the soundtrack is a character in its own right... you get the idea.  I have mixed feelings about the original – it hasn’t aged well, the story is a little thin, and not very much happens in between plot points – but I recognize its innovative nature and applaud the sequel for pushing the industry in the same ways as the original.  The look of the film is striking, resulting in another rare film where it looks just as good with the sound turned off; do that at your own peril, however, because you’ll be missing out on Daft Punk’s soundtrack, which was one of the best of 2010.  But the story is intriguing as well, kind of a Matrix done right what with its use of a “digital frontier” and what separates user from program; here, Jeff Bridges (in full Dude mode) reprises his role as Kevin Flynn, discoverer of “The Grid,” as well as portraying the evil program CLU (via CGI rejuvenation).  Garrett Hedlund is Bridges’s son Sam who enters The Grid looking for his father, while Olivia Wilde is charming as a naïve program hungry to learn about the real world.  The characters are more compelling than reviewers gave them credit, especially the elder Bridges, whose paternal compassion is a perfect companion for Father’s Day yesterday (always reminds me of my father, at least).  I’m admittedly a Disney shill, but the more I watch TRON: Legacy (or listen to the soundtrack), I always find something new to like.

Be sure to tune in Wednesday for The Cinema King’s review of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  For now, though, that does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!