mlr | The apotheosis of Jeff Bridges



Tron: Legacy is worth seeing. It's a visually beautiful movie. I liked that it was an homage to the earlier movie - and also to the popular aesthetics & music of the early 80s. Like a good homage, the references were only a pool for fueling its own imaginative world. Jeff Bridges played two roles - one of which was a virtual character played by a virtual Jeff Bridges. This older/younger Jeff Bridges duality was a cause for reflexion. He was just beginning to be recognized as an important actor when I was a senior in high school. His remarkable films from that year - The Last Picture Show, Fat City, and Bad Company - planted themselves into my consciousness. (I think I wanted to be Jeff Bridges.) All three films explored sobering & harsh realities. In each he played different versions of an iconic working class hero. The Last Picture Show was particularly significant for me in that it explored the social world of a small Texas town, and was based on an autobiographical novel by Larry McMurtry. If you have never seen The Last Picture Show, you should!