Tin Cage Lining: Favoritest Movies of 2010 (So far!)

My wife didn't think much of Tron. Okay, she derided it in it's entirety. Why would I be fond of a sequel that was so derivative of the original, that it was little more than an almost an exact rehash of the original plus jets?
Here is the plot outlines of both movies: Spoilers in italics

Our protagonist sneaks into a place in the middle of the night and sits in front of a laser and goes into the computer world. He is given a disc, and put into the games. The first game his opponent falls through the floor, subsequently this is followed by a Light Cycle scene which ends with going off the grid. Here we regroup, consume sustenance, and share exposition establishing on how to resolve the plot. We'll wind up on a vessel sailing on a beam of light, towards a larger perpendicular beam of light, through canyons and encounter the enemy battleship. There will be a final confrontation of good and bad guys, a big explosion and traveling home up that big beam of light to a sunny and happy ending.

This describes both Tron movies. If I deleted a few dozen words, it'd be almost every Final Fantasy game from the '80's and '90's. The less words you use to describe any story the more it sounds like another.

Tron is about a guy needing... a piece of paper. While for the whole time I've known my friend Matt, a fellow fan of the original movie we've used "Greetings program!" as a greeting. Yes, we are huge dorks. But, in all the times I've ever been looking for a piece of paper, I've never felt or even thought of Flynn.

Tron Legacy is a father and son movie. "You're messing with my Zen thing man." No movie, that I've ever seen, has put all the internal contradictions of being a parent into one line so efficiently just so it can get to megalomaniacs trying to do their Ming the Merciless impersonations, only to have the heroes escape (with a shot riffing the departure in Jaws) and do a cover rendition of the Falcon escaping the Death Star; kicked off with the female character saying "Here they come!"

If a movie is going to be a hack rip off, it tries to hide it more. This movie was nostalgia squared, cubed... Hell, nostalgia ad infinitum! When I look at my kids, I see little derivative copies of us. And this movie, better than any other of these ill thought out movies, born out of our childhoods, gave us (nerds at least) one to share with our kids. I love that my kids love the Transformers movies, I loved Transformers and still do. But I look at these movies of the past few years, and while the Blu-rays of them make my TV look prettier, and remind my how loud my sound system can get... I'd rather watch Springer and Arcee push that launcher into place against Devastator. Well, maybe Dark of the Moon will top the post this time next year! This year was about Tron... other than that, it was kind of meh.

Now, there are a number of movies I'm really looking forward to seeing that I haven't yet; The Social Network, Tangled, Megamind, The Other Guys and plenty more.