PIG LEGACY

And speaking of Jeff Bridges, I just saw him in Tron Legacy, a movie that’s simultaneously very stupid and quite a lot of fun.  Oh wait, that’s a description of ALL Hollywood movies.

The blogosphere seems to be alive with whining about the movie’s many improbabilities, which of course is pretty much everything in the movie, but a lot of people seem to be fixated on the roast suckling pig scene, and I admit I’m one of them.

If I understood the plot correctly (and I’m definitely not sure that I did) Jeff Bridges has become trapped in cyberspace, aka the Grid, and is living with a hot virtual girl – Olivia Wilde.  It doesn’t seem such a bad life, but now a portal has opened up allowing access back and forth between the Grid and the real world, and Bridges’s son has come through more or less by accident, and now wants to take dad back with him before the portal closes. Clearly there’s some ‘splaining to do and they do it over dinner in Jeff’s gleamingly austere dining room.

We don’t get to see the entire menu of what they eat, but there’s a suckling pig set right there in the middle of the table.  It looks completely untouched but presumably it’s not just a table decoration.  Quite how a pig got into cyberspace is a matter for debate.  Is it a cyber pig?  An algorithm?  We don’t know.  Neither do we know what the blue stuff is that they’re drinking.   Curacao spritzers?

I guess Tron Legacy is taking place in the present rather than the future, but the Bridges pad does have that stark, unlived-in minimalism that the movies used to associate with the future.  I’m thinking of parts of  2001- A Space Odyssey for instance.  I guess it was Bladerunner (1982) that persuaded us the future might be even messier than the present.

A curious footnote for psycho gourmets: the star of 2001 (to the extent that it had stars) was Keir Dullea – that’s him, or at least his character, in the bed below.

Keir has had a long and interesting, if patchy, acting career.  But the movie he made, or was at any rate released right after 2001 was a little thing called De Sade, in which he played the divine marquis.  I admit I haven’t seen the film, there are some poisonous reviews floating around, but if you ask me, any movie that can produces a still like the one below, in which at various women are trying to pour wine down the man’s undies, can’t be all bad.