Word: tron
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...some clever production design and the splendor of a fight between two gorgeous women, Diane Lane and Joan Chen--Judge Dredd couldn't have worse timing. For one thing, it surfaces at the end of a 15-year line of dark sci-fi films; imagine Blade Runner inside a Tron video game. For another, the movie tries for the same combination of facetiousness and majesty that Batman Forever mined only two weeks before. Dredd, written by Michael De Luca, William Wisher and Steven de Souza, plays like an instant clone of the Gotham Gothic...
Computer graphics as movie art form -- a technical advance that leapfrogs over the wondrous and cumbersome stop-motion puppeteering of such effects geniuses as Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen -- is just a decade old. The Disney film TRON, which took place inside a video game, was the first to explore the new technique. In the Steven Spielberg-produced Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), a computer-generated knight wielding a sword leaped out of a stained-glass window and menaced a priest. Morphing, the big news in special effects, made its debut in Willow (1988): a reclining tiger is smoothly transformed...
Even in the live theater, computer technology can work its wonders. George Coates' Invisible Site: A Virtual Sho, a mixed-media phantasmagoria now onstage in San Francisco, tells a story like TRON's or The Lawnmower Man's: of travelers and hackers in a virtual-reality video game. But from the first moment, with the image of a huge (computerized) concrete chute belching (the image of) computer-generated smoke, the effects are the real story. The audience, wearing 3-D glasses, watches a live actor getting poked by a giant computer-generated glove, or scenery changing with the tapping...
...sheer convenience of the entire place is designed to make fans soft. There is a 272-by-96 foot Sony Jumbo TRON screen so that the fans don't even have to watch the game live. The seats are designed five inches wider than those of other big league stadiums, a move clearly motivated by those who would profit from our sloth and obesity. There is also an extra half-foot of leg room, which promotes the exact sort of relaxed lounging that causes bad posture. The bullpens are elevated so fans do not need to strain themselves...
Getting into college will completely change. Stanley Kaplan will probably go out of business. High school angst will have to be totally re-oriented. Scan-tron may never recover...