Tron | Kevin Barrett's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Tron’

Call Me To Escape

Posted in General Comments, Movie Review, Movies, Reviews, tagged A Vigilante -- movie review, Atomic Blonde, Ava, Charlize Theron, Domestic Violence, Enough, General Comments, House, Jennifer Garner, Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Chastain, Justice, Krav Maga, Moderate To Strong Movie Recommendation, Monster, Morgan Spector, Olivia Wilde, Peppermint, Queen Latifah, Reviews, Spousal Abuse, The Equalizer, Tron on May 30, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Today’s review is for the 2018 female action / drama film: “A Vigilante” staring Olivia Wilde as Sadie (abused wife / “vigilante”) and Morgan Spector as Sadie’s husband (abusive husband / villain).

Background: I bought this movie as one of a group of random-pick “action” movies. I knew nothing about the film and assumed it was going to be similar to Charlize Theron’s “Atomic Blonde” or Jessica Chastain’s “Ava“. In fact, it turned out to be more like Jennifer Lopez’s “Enough” or Jennifer Garner’s “Peppermint“. That is, more of a female revenge / action film, but this movie is long on troubling story (drama) and short on action (Queen Latifah in the TV show “The Equalizer” – lite, but an even “lighter” version).

Plot: After escaping her own violent domestic relationship and seeing her son die at the hands of her husband, Sadie dedicates her life to help victims of domestic violence escape from their abusers while also tracking down her own abusive spouse “for justice”. She trains in martial arts for some unspecified amount of time, joins a support group to gain leads to women she can help and then proceeds with her “mission” of delivering justice. Sadie helps both women and children victims of domestic violence. She doesn’t “ask” for payment, but she accepts whatever the person helped can give her. Sadie lives out of a room in a run-down motel and keeps a map of a national park on the wall. The map contains a grid map of the park and she colors in each grid square as she completes a search of that grid.

The movie is slow! Intense, but slow. Most of the movie is spent in the support group meetings to provide the background “justification” for Sadie’s violence. Sadie promises herself she will never kill anyone, but after beating up an abuser she threatens that if he / she ever goes near the victim or a child, she will kill him / her (sometimes the abuser is female). She ends with: “I WANT to kill you.“

In a flashback to one of the support group meetings, Sadie opens up to her therapy group about her husband, a brutal / violent, manic survivalist, who stabbed Sadie repeatedly, and killed their son when the son tried to protect her from the knifing. There is a another flashback to discovering a book about Krav Maga (a martial art) and leaving a note for the group counselor saying Sadie will help other women if they are referred to her in confidence.

Unknown to Sadie, she is recognized in her park-search by her sadistic husband, who tracks her back to her room, overpowers her and takes her back to the his cabin in the wilderness / park for continued torture / abuse. Sadie escapes and (ultimately) kills her husband. Sadie is called by her attorney, who tells her the police found her husband’s body but no other evidence of an obvious murder and they don’t intend to look further into the case. With a body “found”, her life insurance claim is processed, and she leaves the attorney to go back to helping others.

Is the movie any good? So-so for me. If you need an introduction to (or a reminder of) the subject of domestic (spousal or parent-to-child) abuse, this is a profound (if disturbing) movie. If you are looking for an “action” movie where the bad-guy gets justice meted out, this ain’t it. If I were just reviewing this film as an abuse “faux-doc”, I’d say the movie was outstanding to excellent. But, I am not, and it isn’t. It is ridiculous (IMHO) to give folks (particularly women) the impression they can learn a martial art from a book in a short period of time with no training partners or and with no experienced trainer. To get around this, the movie has only two “fights” which combined total about one minute (maximum). Not to belabor the point, but the climatic fight with her abusive spouse never happens. One second they are facing off and the next they are on the ground and she crushes his throat. There was NO fight shown AT ALL.

What about the acting? I have never seen Spector in anything else but he makes quite a creditable maniacal / threatening abusive spouse. In my mind, it is Wilde who makes or breaks this movie with her performance. Precisely because there is so little martial action in this film, it has to be evaluated by the performances of the women in the support group sessions and (by extension) our ability accept Wilde in this role. The supporting cast of women are excellent and Wilde is on a “near” Theron / “Monster” level in this performance. Seriously! Wilde is THAT good. Other than the “House” TV series, TRON (sequel) and some Rom-com (I don’t remember), I don’t recall seeing much of her work. I will definitely need to re-evaluate any future roles with this one (film / role) as her new standard.

Final recommendation: moderate to strong. This movie is rated “R” – appropriately, for subject matter, not for violence (little), sex (none) or language (a little swearing). If you can get past the disturbing nature of the subject (domestic abuse), all of the supporting role performances are very good to excellent. And, again, Wilde in particular is excellent. I am a bit surprised I’d heard nothing before about this film or her performance. As background for this review, I noted the “professional” critics generally felt it was (to that date) the best performance of her career. The general audience reviews seem to have been less impressed. I’m not sure why, except that it’s definitely a “drama” movie and not an “action” movie, so it may have been just audience expectation. One last observation: This is not “great” cinema. It’s slow-ish, a bit disjointed in the timeline / flashback scenes and unrealistic in the “action”. But I was surprised by Wilde’s performance and moved by the women’s stories in the support group meetings. In other words: the movie is moderate for entertainment, but the performances are strong for emotional delivery.

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Click here (30 May) to see the posts of prior years. I started this blog in late 2009. Daily posting began in late January 2011. Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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More Classics

Posted in Movies, Music and Concerts, Serendipity and Chaos, tagged Amy Madigan, Geek Favorites, Highly Recommended Movie, I Can Dream About You, Michael Pare, Rock & Roll Fable, Serendipity and Chaos, Streets Of Fire - movie review, Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young, Troff, Tron, Tron - movie review, Willem Dafoe on September 30, 2012| 10 Comments »

A little while back I re-watched the original “Tron” movie (1982). I picked it up with the latest version, “Tron: Legacy“, some time ago, but have not sat down to watch them both together. Well, I still haven’t. But I did watch the first to see what I remembered – not much. Well, not much about the movie anyway. What I took away from the re-viewing was the sense of deja vu from knowing but not remembering a movie.

The word “tron” comes from the programming contraction of “trace on”, which is a programming tool for helping to see what’s going on in a running program. “Tron” turns the process on and “Troff” turns it off (“trace off”). Yes, programmers are an original lot when it comes to naming things. None of this is mentioned or explained in the movie. That would have been TOO geeky for the average audience.

Anyway, I went to see the movie at the theater (back in ’82) because I was (am, but less so now) a computer geek. A programmer.

Setting aside the geek factor, is Tron a good movie? No. Not even for its day. Did that really matter to me? No. Not even to this day.

It’s a “cool” movie with reasonable special effects which incorporates a number of Sci-Fi and Computer Science related terms and I loved being on the “inside” of knowing what it (the movie) was about.

The real question is can I give the movie a “High” or “Strong” recommendation or not. Well, if you’re of a certain age and certain background (geek), you will probably really enjoy the movie the same as I have. If you’re not a historic geek (too young) or not a computer geek (a user not a programmer), you probably won’t get much out of the movie except as the prequel to the “Legacy” version. So, where does that leave me… I highly recommend this movie because it reminds me of what it was like to be geek before geek was normal. We knew we were “cool”, before our future became everyone’s present. (Resistance was futile…)

Somehow, looking back like this only makes me feel older… Maybe if today had happened sooner, I’d be able to enjoy it longer (still).

Today’s second review is: “Streets of Fire“, which came out in 1984. This is a “rock & roll fable”. I’m not sure what that means, but that’s how it was advertised to us way back then. It’s a simple movie: girl gets kidnapped by bad-guy, girl gets rescued by good-guy, big fight at the end. Simple. What’s good about the movie? Well, aside from the stylish filming, there are a couple of well done fight scenes – a short one at the beginning to introduce the hero, and a longer one at the end – the crescendo.

There’s also a couple of pretty good songs (MTV videos in the old days) in the movie. The best one (“I Can Dream About You“) is the main song for the lead-in group and the final song is “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young“) is performed immediately afterwards with the lead-in group singing and dancing backup. Because of a bizarre twist of fate, “I Can Dream About You” was showing on MTV all the time the year I met my wife, I fell in love with her, she went back home to England, and it (the song) became my theme song until she returned to me. Twenty-eight years later and I still dream (day dream) about her…

If you’ve never seen this movie, it’s well worth the viewing. If nothing else, you get to see a young Michael Pare (good-guy) and a young Willem Dafoe (bad-guy).

It also has Amy Madigan in a terrific supporting role as good-gal, side-kick. She almost steals the movie.

I highly recommend this movie for anyone interested in early adaptations of MTV to movie cross-pollination’s. If you haven’t seen either song in the movie, both are available on YouTube. I highly recommend “I Can Dream About You“, but then I would, wouldn’t I?

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Click here (30 September) to see the posts of prior years. I started this blog in late 2009. Daily posting began in late January 2011. Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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Wall Street – Movie Review

Posted in Faith Family and Friends, Movies, Uncategorized, tagged Family, Family and Friends, Gordon Gekko, Greed is good, Michael Douglas, Moderate Movie Recommendation, Movie Review, Movies, Oliver Stone, PowerPoint, Shia Labeouf, Tron, Wall Street - Movie Review on September 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) — movie review
I must admit I’ve really been looking forward to the release of this sequel. I’ve only seen the original (maybe) three times in full, but everyone has seen Mike do Gekko, “Greed is good!” a million times.

I took along my youngest (Sarah), unfortunately – for her.

Visually, the movie was appealing to me in a TRON / PowerPoint kind of way. Using the NY skyline as a backdrop for stock market ups and downs, and the roads as ticker runs was good.

Greed and excessive wealth were on display – but both lacked emotional appeal. The characters kept saying “It’s not about the money”, when clearly, it was all about the money. There were long, slow pans of skinny, tanned, bejeweled ladies and fat, mostly older, white guys. …And lots of stiffs in suits.

I did enjoy the “finding family” aspects of the film even though they were not particularly believable, but then it’s entertainment not real life!! I’ve not followed Shia LaBeouf before (other than Transformers), but I now think he can act.

I think the movie will reach a certain crowd – those who saw and understood the first movie and those who have followed (and understand) the economic problems of the last decade. Unfortunately, I don’t believe there are very many folks in either group.

I think the liberals will vilify Stone (again) for not explaining the problems government (Bush and Obama) had or at least offering any evidence there were viable options. Nothing but the bailout or economic collapse are given as options – black and white (binary) in a world of nuance. I think the conservatives (and Tea Baggers) will vilify Stone (again) because he presents a harsh look at the new corporate greed – which is offered as FAR worse than individual greed (but doesn’t explain why).

The film is a lot of investment banking and Wall Street bashing, pure and simple. I don’t have a big problem with that, per se, they are big boys who can take it, and they did screw up (and are continuing to do so). The shortfall of the movie is it was a missed opportunity to be a learning moment: it could have said more about what happened, why it happened, why it was allowed to happen, and what were some of the other options (for future reference).

Sarah’s review – if the chairs were more comfortable, she’d have fallen asleep after about 20 minutes. (From the mouths of babes…)

Final recommendation: if you are one of those two groups mentioned above, or if you love Oliver Stone (hate the government, hate the rich, hate the corporations), you’ll probably enjoy this film. As a film buff, I’ll wait for the X-mas twin pack to come out and re-watch them both. (Life is hard for film nerds!)

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Click here (26 September) to see the posts of prior years. I started this blog in late 2009. Daily posting began in late January 2011. Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.