Bay Lake Tower / A Night at the Movies

Bay Lake Tower

The Bay Lake Tower is the newest addition to the Contemporary Resort hotel at Walt Disney World in Florida. It is interesting how the round structure of the new building contrasts with the straight lines of the original Contemporary tower.

And I think the curving elevated walkway over to the new tower is pretty cool, too.

Photo location: Contemporary Resort, Walt Disney World, Florida
A three-exposure (-2, 0, +2) HDR tonemapped in Photomatix, edited in GIMP

A Night at the Movies

The other afternoon, we went to a movie. Laura and I used to go pretty regularly back in the earlier days of our marriage. But for the last several years, life in general has gotten more busy, which doesn’t leave us as much time for such diversions. Not to mention that there aren’t any movie theaters anywhere close to our house.

We went to see “TRON: Legacy.” Yes, it has been out for almost two months now. But this was finally our chance to see it. Turned out to be a good time to go, too. The three of us were the only ones in the theater. I’m sure that made it easy on the clean-up crew, because we didn’t have any food with us, either.

The movie was still showing in 3D. In fact, that was our only choice for seeing it, which was fine with me. But the 3D wasn’t quite as immersive as in the last 3D movie we saw, “Tangled.” But what really made a difference to me was the digital presentation. Even though the movie has been shown several times since its original release date, it still looked brand new. No dust, no awkward moments at reel changes. Because there is no print to accumulate dust, and there is no reel change. It really looked sharp!

I had enjoyed the original “TRON,” and I thought this follow-up was a worthy successor. Jaylin hasn’t seen the original, and now he wants to. And I’ll be happy to let him watch it at home when we have the time.

But to me, there was one difference between the new movie and the old movie. The new movie looked cool with all of its computer generated graphics and such. But the computerized world didn’t quite have the same “amazement value” as the original movie had. Back in 1982, there was no Pixar, or any other group regularly churning out computer animated anything. In those days, the computerized world of TRON was truly revolutionary, and just a bit ahead of its time. And while it looks slightly dated looking back at it now, it really was something at the time. But the world of “TRON: Legacy,” while in many ways looking unique, wasn’t really all that different from what you would see in most any other sci-fi type movie these days. Not that I was disappointed in any way, just pointing out some differences.

The same thing goes for the music. The score by Daft Punk was really cool, and I have enjoyed listening to it on its own. But it wasn’t quite as different sounding as the original “TRON” score by Wendy Carlos.

Still, I enjoyed the movie, and I’ll look forward to seeing it again on Blu-Ray.