Michael Sheen, David Warner, TRON ... and Craig "Potty Mouth" Ferguson
*sigh* I was depressed, then I was all excited, now I'm depressed again. I've been depressed and really tired for the past several weeks (won't bore you with the details), but I was just about to go to bed tonight as The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson was coming on (you know something's wrong when I'm in bed before 5 a.m. nowadays!) until I saw who the guest was going to be.
In fact, I DVR the show every night just in case someone like Michael Sheen (especially Michael Sheen) is on, which is surprisingly often. Michael has been on Craig's show at least three or four times that I've seen before--and Craig Ferguson seems to be the only chat-show host who even knows who he is (I remember Jay Leno interviewing Helen Mirren about The Queen and asking who that fellow was who played Tony Blair because he's very good ... but do you think Jay ever had the perennial Oscar-overlookee on his show???). In fact, I get the impression that Craig and Michael are friendly off the show as well. (Craig always gets good guests cuz he knows all the cool British actors; he's had Tim Spall on a couple times too; no other American host that I know of has had him on! And all they talked about then was the time Tim had Craig over for dinner and Tim's son Rafe never forgave him for taking all the good meat. And cool rock stars too; he even used to have Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols doing a regular comedy skit lying in a pink, girly bedroom writing in his diary in which you can hear his thoughts as he writes. Oo, oo, I met Steve Jones! [He was a lot thinner then!] That's only three degrees of Michael Sheen, right? Well, one degree if you count seeing him perform on Broadway and the fan letter he replied to with all the extra goodies he jam-packed into the envelope! I had to buy a big shadow box to frame it all! ♥)
Anyway, Michael's usually the last guest on, and he only gets a five-minute segment, and I'm always dying for more. So imagine my excitement just as I was about to *sigh* shut off the TV and saw that he was the only guest tonight! Yep, I got my second wind and recorded it to DVD, and he got 15 full minutes! And what do you think they talked about the whole time? Because Craig, who's normally a pretty good interviewer unless he's talking to a female guest with her cleavage hanging out, apparently forgot to take his Ritalin, all he seemed to want to talk about tonight was masturbation. Of course, Michael, being a good sport, went along with him, and he's a quick wit, but you could tell, being a "nice boy," he really wanted to talk about other things.
So what did we actually learn about Michael in that 15 minutes? Let's see, unlike Craig Ferguson, his entire life doesn't revolve around pleasuring himself, it's very cold and snowy in Wales right now (he kept trying to launch into a story about "a cold, grey day in the South of Wales ..." but being cut off), but he now lives in L.A. (hopefully getting enough of the "right" kind of exposure to win him that Oscar for which he is sorely overdue), he actually enjoys acting in front of a green screen because, he says in an excited, childlike sort of way that perfectly demonstrates that he was just born to be a great actor, it's like when you're a kid playing in your bedroom-- at which point Craig cuts him off for more masturbation "humor." They also both saw TRON when it first came out and couldn't remember what year, but Michael knew he was 12 and it really got him excited about movies, so it must have been '82 (I knew that because David Warner played the villain, and I have his filmography practically memorized!), whereas Craig was 20 (six months older than me) and drunk off his ass.
OK, maybe it's the age difference, but I personally thought it was the most boring movie ever at the time--despite having David Warner in three different roles (Dillinger, Sark, and the Master Control Program), it nearly put me to sleep in the theatre. That was only the second closest I ever came to falling asleep in a movie theatre; the first Batman movie (the one with Jack Nicholson, of whom, coincidentally, Michael's father is a professional impersonator due to their similar looks ... not that that came up in the "interview") literally did put me to sleep--starting with the big Joker sequence in the middle almost to the ending credits! And watching TRON again nowadays, yes, it was innovative and probably technically exciting to 12-year-old boys of 1982 (its claim to fame is, after all, all about the FX and gaming, if that's what you're into), but otherwise, the movie really seems interminable and full of plot holes if you know the least thing about computer technology ... which they could get away with in 1982 when such things were esoteric and the most exciting videogame we had was Space Invaders, but nowadays ... I just hope this one has a better script, now that we're all onto this stuff! In fact, in my not-so-long-ago David Warner-obsessed days, I went on a severe bender and reviewed a whole bunch of his films in a row. I'll post the one for TRON, unedited (written sometime between 2004 and 2007), in a footnote here in case you're interested, for comparison with my upcoming review of the sequel!
[There's been such a dearth of decent movies to see in theatres this year so far (the best being Hereafter, also Secretariat and The Social Network), and now there are so many I want to see all at once, I can hardly keep up: Harry Potter; The Warrior's Way; The King's Speech (the last two both starring Geoffrey Rush, plus Tim Spall in The King's Speech, not to mention Tim's anticipated two minutes' worth of screentime in either this Harry Potter movie or the next); and now TRON ... what else am I forgetting??? Oh, and I missed Geoffrey doing a voice in The Owls of Ga'Hoole (my sister actually went and took her kids to see it without inviting me!) so now I'm keeping my eye on the bargain theatre listings. Not to mention the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie coming out in ... the spring, is it? Oh, and then I missed seeing, I mean hearing Michael (in the role of my default journal icon!), along with Alan Rickman, Tim Spall, and Christopher Lee in Alice in Wonderland earlier this year, having no one to go with, and I keep missing Michael's third turn as Tony Blair in The Special Relationship on HBO! And I don't suppose there's the slightest hope of getting to see Geoffrey's song and dance performance in the indie Australian film Bran Nue Dae over here.]
Oh, we also got to hear Michael play the harmonica ... after hurting himself slapping his knee. (Schuhplattling is not for him! Although he is a sexy dancer! Naughty naughty cheeky monkey, making the poor Secretariat guys put on their horse costume and dance around the stage with no warning!) Come to think of it, he'd make a great replacement for Geoff Peterson, Craig's useless robot skeleton sidekick. Or Craig Ferguson. (Sorry, Craig, but you were extra annoying tonight!)
As for the new movie, TRON: Legacy (coming December 17 to a theatre near you, in the States, at least), Michael revealed that Jeff Bridges (who starred in the original) appears in the film (not a spoiler cuz we all saw it in the trailers) and is aged backwards using the same technology they used in Benjamin Button. They also showed a clip featuring Michael, so finally I got to see who he's playing in the film. What I found ironic was that he obviously plays the villain (I don't suppose they thought to give David Warner a cameo?), and he's all frosty white looking, even his hair, and seems entertainingly unhinged, which totally reminded me of Simon Pegg as the crazed frozen villain in that one modern episode of Dr. Who I actually enjoyed and remember saying at the time that he reminded me of Michael Sheen (and thereby came to admire Simon Pegg)! Oh, and Craig got Michael to admit that his character is definitely "bicurious." (Was Michael still joking along or ... hmm, this could be interesting ... depending on how much screentime Michael gets ... and how many different roles! I so hope he gets to be the new David Warner, only more over the top, if that's possible! Actually, he reminds me a bit of the Riddler in the 1960s Batman TV series!)
Come to think of it, Michael managed to get a surprising amount of information out on his own (and tactfully at that) in spite of Craig's immature commentary and interruptions--alas, probably about the same amount he would normally have shared in a five-minute interview. *sigh* (Oh, and, no, to answer Craig's other question, he's never been to the Playboy Mansion. Such a nice boy :).)
Anyway, here, under the cut, if you're interested, with apologies to David Warner and Michael Sheen, is my predictably grumpy review of the original TRON, "DW" being my shorthand for David Warner. (Overall, I gave it 3 stars out of 5 and 4 "DWs" out of 5--the DWs representing how much screentime David got.)
This innovative Disney film literally started the now-flourishing computer-animation trend and was a clear influence on later films like The Matrix (which is practically a remake). Plus DW plays not one villain but three! Nevertheless, TRON nearly put me to sleep when I first saw it on the big screen. (Literally!) Watching it today, I still have a hard time paying attention to the plot, which is either so complex it went right over my head or so simplistic it doesn't justify the ... hour and a half (is that all??) it takes to unfold. DW is Dillinger, the head of Encom, a computer-software firm, who got to the top by stealing other people's intellectual property, including that of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), author of Encom's blockbuster hit videogame. When Flynn hacks into Dillinger's mainframe to prove his authorship, he is physically absorbed into the computer by the malevolent Master Control Program (MCP) and turned into a combatant in a series of life-or-death games. Unfortunately if you're not into watching other people play videogames, a major part of the film consists of the real-world characters' sentient, byte-sized counterparts competing in drawn-out displays of CG technology. (The actors work in front of a blue screen wearing plain white "armor," which is graphically enhanced with neon blue or red circuitry to distinguish the good guys from the bad, and they're filmed in grainy, high-contrast sepia that, combined with their heavy eyeliner, makes everyone look like Rudolf Valentino!) When the plot did advance, its far-fetched premise generated more disbelief than I was willing to suspend, due to either too much or too little knowledge of computers. The film has a loyal following of gamers who fiercely defend it as the one of the greatest pictures ever made, but it seems to me anyone who's ever used DOS or written even the most basic program would recognize that the language used to communicate with the very primitive-looking computers doesn't even approximate reality: There's no command prompt in sight on their monochrome screens as users type back and forth with the computer in regular prose like they're instant-messaging with an online pal. The MCP also speaks perfectly ordinary Englishexcept for being constrained to end every utterance with "End of line." "Programs" do battle with one another and identify with their "users" as if each program can have one and only one user. (Maybe they really mean "author" or "creator"? But even so ...) Computer jargon is twisted to fit the storyline with little regard for its actual meaning, making for some cute quips, but do they make any technical sense? ("Yes, I'm oldold enough to remember the MCP when it was just a chess program.") There's a religious allegory underlying it all, but it would seem more profound if it had a more believable correspondence to the real world of computing. Still there are entertaining moments, like the straggling bit whose entire vocabulary consists of "yes" and "no." And DW is at his nasty, villainous best (back in the days when he still gave this kind of role his all), and you may find yourself wanting to rewind many of his scenes as Sark, just to savor his stinging sarcasm. (It hurts so good!) But he's not all evil. Though Sark rises to the nefarious demands of his position (quite literally in one scene), he is in the end just a servant of the MCP, even suffering momentary pangs of conscience, which puts him high on the list of DW's most compelling villains. And as the nebulous übervillain, the MCP, his distorted voice will haunt you:
END OF LINE
_
David Warner as Sark
Teaser-Trailer.com's overly eager imagining
of Michael Sheen as Castor
After all my nitpicking, I am so due for some serious karma when, if ever, I get my novel published, I'm not even going to read the reviews (or I'll at least have my agent and/or therapist screen them for me!). (And to answer Craig's tired question in advance, since he frequently interviews authors, no, I never google myself.)
In fact, I DVR the show every night just in case someone like Michael Sheen (especially Michael Sheen) is on, which is surprisingly often. Michael has been on Craig's show at least three or four times that I've seen before--and Craig Ferguson seems to be the only chat-show host who even knows who he is (I remember Jay Leno interviewing Helen Mirren about The Queen and asking who that fellow was who played Tony Blair because he's very good ... but do you think Jay ever had the perennial Oscar-overlookee on his show???). In fact, I get the impression that Craig and Michael are friendly off the show as well. (Craig always gets good guests cuz he knows all the cool British actors; he's had Tim Spall on a couple times too; no other American host that I know of has had him on! And all they talked about then was the time Tim had Craig over for dinner and Tim's son Rafe never forgave him for taking all the good meat. And cool rock stars too; he even used to have Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols doing a regular comedy skit lying in a pink, girly bedroom writing in his diary in which you can hear his thoughts as he writes. Oo, oo, I met Steve Jones! [He was a lot thinner then!] That's only three degrees of Michael Sheen, right? Well, one degree if you count seeing him perform on Broadway and the fan letter he replied to with all the extra goodies he jam-packed into the envelope! I had to buy a big shadow box to frame it all! ♥)
Anyway, Michael's usually the last guest on, and he only gets a five-minute segment, and I'm always dying for more. So imagine my excitement just as I was about to *sigh* shut off the TV and saw that he was the only guest tonight! Yep, I got my second wind and recorded it to DVD, and he got 15 full minutes! And what do you think they talked about the whole time? Because Craig, who's normally a pretty good interviewer unless he's talking to a female guest with her cleavage hanging out, apparently forgot to take his Ritalin, all he seemed to want to talk about tonight was masturbation. Of course, Michael, being a good sport, went along with him, and he's a quick wit, but you could tell, being a "nice boy," he really wanted to talk about other things.
So what did we actually learn about Michael in that 15 minutes? Let's see, unlike Craig Ferguson, his entire life doesn't revolve around pleasuring himself, it's very cold and snowy in Wales right now (he kept trying to launch into a story about "a cold, grey day in the South of Wales ..." but being cut off), but he now lives in L.A. (hopefully getting enough of the "right" kind of exposure to win him that Oscar for which he is sorely overdue), he actually enjoys acting in front of a green screen because, he says in an excited, childlike sort of way that perfectly demonstrates that he was just born to be a great actor, it's like when you're a kid playing in your bedroom-- at which point Craig cuts him off for more masturbation "humor." They also both saw TRON when it first came out and couldn't remember what year, but Michael knew he was 12 and it really got him excited about movies, so it must have been '82 (I knew that because David Warner played the villain, and I have his filmography practically memorized!), whereas Craig was 20 (six months older than me) and drunk off his ass.
OK, maybe it's the age difference, but I personally thought it was the most boring movie ever at the time--despite having David Warner in three different roles (Dillinger, Sark, and the Master Control Program), it nearly put me to sleep in the theatre. That was only the second closest I ever came to falling asleep in a movie theatre; the first Batman movie (the one with Jack Nicholson, of whom, coincidentally, Michael's father is a professional impersonator due to their similar looks ... not that that came up in the "interview") literally did put me to sleep--starting with the big Joker sequence in the middle almost to the ending credits! And watching TRON again nowadays, yes, it was innovative and probably technically exciting to 12-year-old boys of 1982 (its claim to fame is, after all, all about the FX and gaming, if that's what you're into), but otherwise, the movie really seems interminable and full of plot holes if you know the least thing about computer technology ... which they could get away with in 1982 when such things were esoteric and the most exciting videogame we had was Space Invaders, but nowadays ... I just hope this one has a better script, now that we're all onto this stuff! In fact, in my not-so-long-ago David Warner-obsessed days, I went on a severe bender and reviewed a whole bunch of his films in a row. I'll post the one for TRON, unedited (written sometime between 2004 and 2007), in a footnote here in case you're interested, for comparison with my upcoming review of the sequel!
[There's been such a dearth of decent movies to see in theatres this year so far (the best being Hereafter, also Secretariat and The Social Network), and now there are so many I want to see all at once, I can hardly keep up: Harry Potter; The Warrior's Way; The King's Speech (the last two both starring Geoffrey Rush, plus Tim Spall in The King's Speech, not to mention Tim's anticipated two minutes' worth of screentime in either this Harry Potter movie or the next); and now TRON ... what else am I forgetting??? Oh, and I missed Geoffrey doing a voice in The Owls of Ga'Hoole (my sister actually went and took her kids to see it without inviting me!) so now I'm keeping my eye on the bargain theatre listings. Not to mention the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie coming out in ... the spring, is it? Oh, and then I missed seeing, I mean hearing Michael (in the role of my default journal icon!), along with Alan Rickman, Tim Spall, and Christopher Lee in Alice in Wonderland earlier this year, having no one to go with, and I keep missing Michael's third turn as Tony Blair in The Special Relationship on HBO! And I don't suppose there's the slightest hope of getting to see Geoffrey's song and dance performance in the indie Australian film Bran Nue Dae over here.]
Oh, we also got to hear Michael play the harmonica ... after hurting himself slapping his knee. (Schuhplattling is not for him! Although he is a sexy dancer! Naughty naughty cheeky monkey, making the poor Secretariat guys put on their horse costume and dance around the stage with no warning!) Come to think of it, he'd make a great replacement for Geoff Peterson, Craig's useless robot skeleton sidekick. Or Craig Ferguson. (Sorry, Craig, but you were extra annoying tonight!)
As for the new movie, TRON: Legacy (coming December 17 to a theatre near you, in the States, at least), Michael revealed that Jeff Bridges (who starred in the original) appears in the film (not a spoiler cuz we all saw it in the trailers) and is aged backwards using the same technology they used in Benjamin Button. They also showed a clip featuring Michael, so finally I got to see who he's playing in the film. What I found ironic was that he obviously plays the villain (I don't suppose they thought to give David Warner a cameo?), and he's all frosty white looking, even his hair, and seems entertainingly unhinged, which totally reminded me of Simon Pegg as the crazed frozen villain in that one modern episode of Dr. Who I actually enjoyed and remember saying at the time that he reminded me of Michael Sheen (and thereby came to admire Simon Pegg)! Oh, and Craig got Michael to admit that his character is definitely "bicurious." (Was Michael still joking along or ... hmm, this could be interesting ... depending on how much screentime Michael gets ... and how many different roles! I so hope he gets to be the new David Warner, only more over the top, if that's possible! Actually, he reminds me a bit of the Riddler in the 1960s Batman TV series!)
Come to think of it, Michael managed to get a surprising amount of information out on his own (and tactfully at that) in spite of Craig's immature commentary and interruptions--alas, probably about the same amount he would normally have shared in a five-minute interview. *sigh* (Oh, and, no, to answer Craig's other question, he's never been to the Playboy Mansion. Such a nice boy :).)
Anyway, here, under the cut, if you're interested, with apologies to David Warner and Michael Sheen, is my predictably grumpy review of the original TRON, "DW" being my shorthand for David Warner. (Overall, I gave it 3 stars out of 5 and 4 "DWs" out of 5--the DWs representing how much screentime David got.)
This innovative Disney film literally started the now-flourishing computer-animation trend and was a clear influence on later films like The Matrix (which is practically a remake). Plus DW plays not one villain but three! Nevertheless, TRON nearly put me to sleep when I first saw it on the big screen. (Literally!) Watching it today, I still have a hard time paying attention to the plot, which is either so complex it went right over my head or so simplistic it doesn't justify the ... hour and a half (is that all??) it takes to unfold. DW is Dillinger, the head of Encom, a computer-software firm, who got to the top by stealing other people's intellectual property, including that of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), author of Encom's blockbuster hit videogame. When Flynn hacks into Dillinger's mainframe to prove his authorship, he is physically absorbed into the computer by the malevolent Master Control Program (MCP) and turned into a combatant in a series of life-or-death games. Unfortunately if you're not into watching other people play videogames, a major part of the film consists of the real-world characters' sentient, byte-sized counterparts competing in drawn-out displays of CG technology. (The actors work in front of a blue screen wearing plain white "armor," which is graphically enhanced with neon blue or red circuitry to distinguish the good guys from the bad, and they're filmed in grainy, high-contrast sepia that, combined with their heavy eyeliner, makes everyone look like Rudolf Valentino!) When the plot did advance, its far-fetched premise generated more disbelief than I was willing to suspend, due to either too much or too little knowledge of computers. The film has a loyal following of gamers who fiercely defend it as the one of the greatest pictures ever made, but it seems to me anyone who's ever used DOS or written even the most basic program would recognize that the language used to communicate with the very primitive-looking computers doesn't even approximate reality: There's no command prompt in sight on their monochrome screens as users type back and forth with the computer in regular prose like they're instant-messaging with an online pal. The MCP also speaks perfectly ordinary Englishexcept for being constrained to end every utterance with "End of line." "Programs" do battle with one another and identify with their "users" as if each program can have one and only one user. (Maybe they really mean "author" or "creator"? But even so ...) Computer jargon is twisted to fit the storyline with little regard for its actual meaning, making for some cute quips, but do they make any technical sense? ("Yes, I'm oldold enough to remember the MCP when it was just a chess program.") There's a religious allegory underlying it all, but it would seem more profound if it had a more believable correspondence to the real world of computing. Still there are entertaining moments, like the straggling bit whose entire vocabulary consists of "yes" and "no." And DW is at his nasty, villainous best (back in the days when he still gave this kind of role his all), and you may find yourself wanting to rewind many of his scenes as Sark, just to savor his stinging sarcasm. (It hurts so good!) But he's not all evil. Though Sark rises to the nefarious demands of his position (quite literally in one scene), he is in the end just a servant of the MCP, even suffering momentary pangs of conscience, which puts him high on the list of DW's most compelling villains. And as the nebulous übervillain, the MCP, his distorted voice will haunt you:
END OF LINE
_
David Warner as Sark
Teaser-Trailer.com's overly eager imagining
of Michael Sheen as Castor
After all my nitpicking, I am so due for some serious karma when, if ever, I get my novel published, I'm not even going to read the reviews (or I'll at least have my agent and/or therapist screen them for me!). (And to answer Craig's tired question in advance, since he frequently interviews authors, no, I never google myself.)