Attack of the Clones Revisited (1999 to 2007)

I think we're going to have to go with shorter reviews. At this rate, I'll get around to reviewing EPISODE III sometime in the summer of 2009.

Anyway, upon second viewing STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES leaves me with mixed feelings. I honestly think Lucas took a long, hard look at some of the problems of PHANTOM MENACE and tweaked them here. Having the (dubious?) honor of being the first film shot entirely in a high definition digital 24-frame system, the film's startling visual effects and locations feel much more organic and a part of the film, rather than a distraction. In fact some locations, such as the "lost" planet of Kamino, look incredible.

The action is ratcheted up a notch as well, especially the chase through the streets of Coruscant after a second assassination attempt on now Senator Amidala, a.k.a Padme, a.k.a Natalie "Fence Post" Portman (see previous post), whom I already railed off about during an admittedly drunken episode of my own last week. Not only that, but in Christopher Lee's Count Dooku, who is part of a larger plot to throw the galaxy into civil war, we finally get a villain who's actually menacing. There's still some silliness and a generous helping of cheese, but overall I think CLONES succeeds more as a STAR WARS movie than PHANTOM MENACE. Especially with cool battle scenes like this:

And yet, the film still leaves you with a horrible taste in your mouth. So, a sequel with better action, more seamless visual effects, and a dip in all the politics and bureaucracy that mired the first film in mediocrity still manages to suck. What the heck happened?

This happened.

If you thought watching Darth Vader as a LITTLE RASCALS meets GOONIES kid was bad enough, wait until you meet him as a dour, sulky adolescent. I can't even begin to understand how this happened. I want to put all the blame on Hayden Christensen, who I think up until then was best known for being in LIFE AS A HOUSE. I want to completely blame him, but I thought he was great in SHATTERED GLASS. The kid CAN act. So where can we place the blame?

Because let's face it, blame needs to be placed. The core of the movie is the budding romance between Anakin and Padme, who we all know will wind up siring the Super Twins, Luke and Leia. It is absolutely crucial that this cursed love makes you believe everything that will happen as a result could be worth it because, dammit, their love is so strong he HAS to defy Jedi law! She HAS to go against all her logic telling her it's a bad idea!

Instead, we get an after-school special enacted by local kids who look as if they've never been to a movie before, let alone acted in one.

A lot of blame can fall to Lucas the screenwriter, but I think an equal amount has to fall to Lucas the director, who uses cliched images and boring shot choices to attempt to show a relationship that has to anchor all the choices that come after it.

A couple other things that get my goat about the movie. Boba Fett is completely wasted. We already saw Vader as a kid, do we really need to see the same thing enacted by our beloved bounty hunter too? I enjoyed the Jango Fett/Ben Kenobi fight on Geonosis; in fact, I think that's one of the best parts of the movie. But using him as bait to change our perceptions of his actions later (he's really just misunderstood! He saw his Daddy killed and THAT'S why he's so bad) is ridiculous. Couldn't we have just left him as the badass he was in the original trilogy?

But for me (and I know a million STAR WARS geeks will scream in rage against me), the worst laugh-out moment was...Yoda's duel with Count Dooku. I know, as soon as the teasers and trailers hit and we got that iconic glimpse of Yoda with his light sabre, the cheers were loud and proud. But upon watching the actual fight, especially when it's against an obvious stunt man with Christopher Lee's face digitally mapped on, didn't you feel kind of, well, silly? All that jumping around with Frank Oz's voice? I think I even saw Ewan McGregor laughing in the scene. I was more content being left in the dark as to how Yoda became so powerful. The Force should have been so strong in him he had no need for actual physical fighting. It's the explanation for the Force all over again. Sometimes the mystery is better than the proof.

That's it. Potential squandered by a few pieces that, ultimately, drag the whole show down. I did like it more than PHANTOM MENACE, which was thoroughly terrible on all fronts. But the errors here are more egregious, and that's a pain that cuts just as deep. My only hope of salvation is that EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH will be able to lift us up from this galactic pit of despair!

* Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...a moment in EPISODE II that is just as BATMAN-cheesy as the one in the previous post! Watch as she runs across the screen! Wheee!

Attack of the Clones Revisited (1999 to 2007)

I think we're going to have to go with shorter reviews. At this rate, I'll get around to reviewing EPISODE III sometime in the summer of 2009.

Anyway, upon second viewing STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES leaves me with mixed feelings. I honestly think Lucas took a long, hard look at some of the problems of PHANTOM MENACE and tweaked them here. Having the (dubious?) honor of being the first film shot entirely in a high definition digital 24-frame system, the film's startling visual effects and locations feel much more organic and a part of the film, rather than a distraction. In fact some locations, such as the "lost" planet of Kamino, look incredible.

The action is ratcheted up a notch as well, especially the chase through the streets of Coruscant after a second assassination attempt on now Senator Amidala, a.k.a Padme, a.k.a Natalie "Fence Post" Portman (see previous post), whom I already railed off about during an admittedly drunken episode of my own last week. Not only that, but in Christopher Lee's Count Dooku, who is part of a larger plot to throw the galaxy into civil war, we finally get a villain who's actually menacing. There's still some silliness and a generous helping of cheese, but overall I think CLONES succeeds more as a STAR WARS movie than PHANTOM MENACE. Especially with cool battle scenes like this:

And yet, the film still leaves you with a horrible taste in your mouth. So, a sequel with better action, more seamless visual effects, and a dip in all the politics and bureaucracy that mired the first film in mediocrity still manages to suck. What the heck happened?

This happened.

If you thought watching Darth Vader as a LITTLE RASCALS meets GOONIES kid was bad enough, wait until you meet him as a dour, sulky adolescent. I can't even begin to understand how this happened. I want to put all the blame on Hayden Christensen, who I think up until then was best known for being in LIFE AS A HOUSE. I want to completely blame him, but I thought he was great in SHATTERED GLASS. The kid CAN act. So where can we place the blame?

Because let's face it, blame needs to be placed. The core of the movie is the budding romance between Anakin and Padme, who we all know will wind up siring the Super Twins, Luke and Leia. It is absolutely crucial that this cursed love makes you believe everything that will happen as a result could be worth it because, dammit, their love is so strong he HAS to defy Jedi law! She HAS to go against all her logic telling her it's a bad idea!

Instead, we get an after-school special enacted by local kids who look as if they've never been to a movie before, let alone acted in one.

A lot of blame can fall to Lucas the screenwriter, but I think an equal amount has to fall to Lucas the director, who uses cliched images and boring shot choices to attempt to show a relationship that has to anchor all the choices that come after it.

A couple other things that get my goat about the movie. Boba Fett is completely wasted. We already saw Vader as a kid, do we really need to see the same thing enacted by our beloved bounty hunter too? I enjoyed the Jango Fett/Ben Kenobi fight on Geonosis; in fact, I think that's one of the best parts of the movie. But using him as bait to change our perceptions of his actions later (he's really just misunderstood! He saw his Daddy killed and THAT'S why he's so bad) is ridiculous. Couldn't we have just left him as the badass he was in the original trilogy?

But for me (and I know a million STAR WARS geeks will scream in rage against me), the worst laugh-out moment was...Yoda's duel with Count Dooku. I know, as soon as the teasers and trailers hit and we got that iconic glimpse of Yoda with his light sabre, the cheers were loud and proud. But upon watching the actual fight, especially when it's against an obvious stunt man with Christopher Lee's face digitally mapped on, didn't you feel kind of, well, silly? All that jumping around with Frank Oz's voice? I think I even saw Ewan McGregor laughing in the scene. I was more content being left in the dark as to how Yoda became so powerful. The Force should have been so strong in him he had no need for actual physical fighting. It's the explanation for the Force all over again. Sometimes the mystery is better than the proof.

That's it. Potential squandered by a few pieces that, ultimately, drag the whole show down. I did like it more than PHANTOM MENACE, which was thoroughly terrible on all fronts. But the errors here are more egregious, and that's a pain that cuts just as deep. My only hope of salvation is that EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH will be able to lift us up from this galactic pit of despair!

* Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...a moment in EPISODE II that is just as BATMAN-cheesy as the one in the previous post! Watch as she runs across the screen! Wheee!

The Phantom Menace Revisited (1999 to 2007)

I spent a good hour or two getting myself in the right frame of mind to re-visit STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE after a gap of about 8 years: no baggage from the original trilogy, no friends around who might influence my thinking, no constant barrage of trailers and commercials and merchandising tie-ins to cloud my judgment. If anything, I was ready enjoy it; in The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film it's clearly evident in early drafts that Lucas had a lot of this mapped out years ago. So over the course of about 3 nights with Baby Jack in tow, we sat down to watch.

Overall impression: It's still bad. The plot's convoluted (disputes over taxation of shipping lanes? Trade embargoes? THIS is what kicks off the greatest space saga in movie history?), and for a franchise that prides itself on its visual delights, there's way too much explaining going on that takes away from the magic Lucas wants to convey. The dialogue is dreadful (although the original STAR WARS really wasn't much better), there are more than a few dialed in performances, it's long, and there's a feeling of distance from the characters and their threads that make it difficult to really invest yourself in what's happening.

It's not all blight and disease (eww): as a purely visual experience PHANTOM has a lot to offer - when it works the effects are jaw-dropping, and a few scenes have as much excitement and energy as anything else out there. There are a couple fun performances, notably Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid, and I'll even throw a bone to Jake Lloyd as the young Anakin Skywalker. If this had been a LITTLE RASCALS movie he would have stole the show. But Natalie Portman - what happened? Fence posts aren't that wooden (or that lovely. HOT-CHA!).

But ultimately there's a lot that gets in the way of what could have been a fun, no holds barred STAR WARS aimed at a younger generation. As great as the visual effects are, you no longer get the sense of physicality, of really being in the film. A lot was made of George Lucas's attempt to render the STAR WARS universe as completely digital as possible, but the lack of anything practical (excepting a few columns and tables) doesn't give the eye anthing to anchor on to in the scenes. I'm already watching the movie on a gigantic screen - why do I want that movie to look like it was projected on a screen as well?

In STAR WARS Lucas made a conscious decision that the environments would look lived in; everything was to feel like this was a documentary (Lucas's background) instead of something that felt contrived. That seems to have been left by the wayside as we are treated to one slick, busy image after another with scarely any room to breathe. When he scales back a bit on what's going on, it works beautifully. The shot below, of the Gungan army slowly appearing out of the fog, is gorgeous in its simplicity:

The problem with the over-abundance of the digital backdrops is , with a few exceptions, you no longer believe anyone is actually there.

And when you are content to simply believe, the movie slips into needless explanations. Why transform something as wonderfully mysterious as The Force into something so ridiculous and contrived that you're shaking your head in disbelief? Midichlorians? So The Force is nothing more than particles that can now be measured and analyzed? I guess that means that potential Jedi Knights are discovered via DNA testing. And as bad as the explanation for The Force is, I won't even begin to touch upon Anakin's "immaculate" conception...

That being said, the Pod Race sequence is fantastic, and one of the best things in any of the new films. There's a spirit of adventure and adrenaline that's lacking in many of the other action sequences. This spirit is also replicated with the light sabre duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon and the much under-utilized Darth Maul. It's a nice set-piece, but you're left feeling like all the potential for Maul was wasted; he skulks for a few scenes behind the Emperor, he rides a weird space Harley on Tatooine, and then after finally getting the chance to demonstrate his badass-ness, he's chopped in half, never to be seen again.

In fact, in PHANTOM none of the villains really work all that well. After re-watching twice, I'm still not sure if it was supposed to be a surprise that Senator Palpatine is the Dark Sith Lord. There's no real palpable (heh heh) sense of evil or foreboding anywhere in the movie. The "epic" battle between the Gungans and the droids is terrible: how did the Federation become so powerful if their droids are so inept?

Any review about THE PHANTOM MENACE can't pass unless mention is made of the aliens, and of one alien in particular. I suppose my heart's softened somewhat to Jar-Jar Binks. He is a distraction in every one of his scenes, doesn't have the sense of being a fully realized CGI character like Gollumn in LOTR or King Kong do (and I'd argue that for both the Peter Jackson-directed version as well as the 1933 original), and many of the jokes fall flat. But looking at PHANTOM as a movie geared towards children, his presence makes sense, and works as a kind of portal for the piles of exposition in the film. The rest of the aliens do feel like bad stereotypes, although the cries of bigotry and malice were a bit much, you would have though Lucas would have had a clearer head on the matter. I would have been perfectly fine with most of the aliens speak in subtitles, although that probably would have made it harder for the age group PHANTOM was geared towards.

While it's certainly not the let-down I thought it to be when it was first released, STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE is still a mediocre movie. Say what you will - Lucas can still conjure up a grand vision, but in this instance the lack of discussion and collaboration that was instrumental in making the others such as triumph (how can it not when you have Steven Spielberg, Lawrence Kasdan and Francis Ford Coppola to bounce ideas off of) is missing, and the George Lucas Show falls a little flat.

Tune in next time to see if lessons are learned and if computer-generating Yoda really was a good idea in ATTACK OF THE CLONES!

* Is it just me, or this one of the most ridiculous images in all the STAR WARS films? It's like BATMAN '66 revisited!

The Phantom Menace Revisited (1999 to 2007)

I spent a good hour or two getting myself in the right frame of mind to re-visit STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE after a gap of about 8 years: no baggage from the original trilogy, no friends around who might influence my thinking, no constant barrage of trailers and commercials and merchandising tie-ins to cloud my judgment. If anything, I was ready enjoy it; in The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film it's clearly evident in early drafts that Lucas had a lot of this mapped out years ago. So over the course of about 3 nights with Baby Jack in tow, we sat down to watch.

Overall impression: It's still bad. The plot's convoluted (disputes over taxation of shipping lanes? Trade embargoes? THIS is what kicks off the greatest space saga in movie history?), and for a franchise that prides itself on its visual delights, there's way too much explaining going on that takes away from the magic Lucas wants to convey. The dialogue is dreadful (although the original STAR WARS really wasn't much better), there are more than a few dialed in performances, it's long, and there's a feeling of distance from the characters and their threads that make it difficult to really invest yourself in what's happening.

It's not all blight and disease (eww): as a purely visual experience PHANTOM has a lot to offer - when it works the effects are jaw-dropping, and a few scenes have as much excitement and energy as anything else out there. There are a couple fun performances, notably Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid, and I'll even throw a bone to Jake Lloyd as the young Anakin Skywalker. If this had been a LITTLE RASCALS movie he would have stole the show. But Natalie Portman - what happened? Fence posts aren't that wooden (or that lovely. HOT-CHA!).

But ultimately there's a lot that gets in the way of what could have been a fun, no holds barred STAR WARS aimed at a younger generation. As great as the visual effects are, you no longer get the sense of physicality, of really being in the film. A lot was made of George Lucas's attempt to render the STAR WARS universe as completely digital as possible, but the lack of anything practical (excepting a few columns and tables) doesn't give the eye anthing to anchor on to in the scenes. I'm already watching the movie on a gigantic screen - why do I want that movie to look like it was projected on a screen as well?

In STAR WARS Lucas made a conscious decision that the environments would look lived in; everything was to feel like this was a documentary (Lucas's background) instead of something that felt contrived. That seems to have been left by the wayside as we are treated to one slick, busy image after another with scarely any room to breathe. When he scales back a bit on what's going on, it works beautifully. The shot below, of the Gungan army slowly appearing out of the fog, is gorgeous in its simplicity:

The problem with the over-abundance of the digital backdrops is , with a few exceptions, you no longer believe anyone is actually there.

And when you are content to simply believe, the movie slips into needless explanations. Why transform something as wonderfully mysterious as The Force into something so ridiculous and contrived that you're shaking your head in disbelief? Midichlorians? So The Force is nothing more than particles that can now be measured and analyzed? I guess that means that potential Jedi Knights are discovered via DNA testing. And as bad as the explanation for The Force is, I won't even begin to touch upon Anakin's "immaculate" conception...

That being said, the Pod Race sequence is fantastic, and one of the best things in any of the new films. There's a spirit of adventure and adrenaline that's lacking in many of the other action sequences. This spirit is also replicated with the light sabre duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon and the much under-utilized Darth Maul. It's a nice set-piece, but you're left feeling like all the potential for Maul was wasted; he skulks for a few scenes behind the Emperor, he rides a weird space Harley on Tatooine, and then after finally getting the chance to demonstrate his badass-ness, he's chopped in half, never to be seen again.

In fact, in PHANTOM none of the villains really work all that well. After re-watching twice, I'm still not sure if it was supposed to be a surprise that Senator Palpatine is the Dark Sith Lord. There's no real palpable (heh heh) sense of evil or foreboding anywhere in the movie. The "epic" battle between the Gungans and the droids is terrible: how did the Federation become so powerful if their droids are so inept?

Any review about THE PHANTOM MENACE can't pass unless mention is made of the aliens, and of one alien in particular. I suppose my heart's softened somewhat to Jar-Jar Binks. He is a distraction in every one of his scenes, doesn't have the sense of being a fully realized CGI character like Gollumn in LOTR or King Kong do (and I'd argue that for both the Peter Jackson-directed version as well as the 1933 original), and many of the jokes fall flat. But looking at PHANTOM as a movie geared towards children, his presence makes sense, and works as a kind of portal for the piles of exposition in the film. The rest of the aliens do feel like bad stereotypes, although the cries of bigotry and malice were a bit much, you would have though Lucas would have had a clearer head on the matter. I would have been perfectly fine with most of the aliens speak in subtitles, although that probably would have made it harder for the age group PHANTOM was geared towards.

While it's certainly not the let-down I thought it to be when it was first released, STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE is still a mediocre movie. Say what you will - Lucas can still conjure up a grand vision, but in this instance the lack of discussion and collaboration that was instrumental in making the others such as triumph (how can it not when you have Steven Spielberg, Lawrence Kasdan and Francis Ford Coppola to bounce ideas off of) is missing, and the George Lucas Show falls a little flat.

Tune in next time to see if lessons are learned and if computer-generating Yoda really was a good idea in ATTACK OF THE CLONES!

* Is it just me, or this one of the most ridiculous images in all the STAR WARS films? It's like BATMAN '66 revisited!

El Topo (1970)

Where do you even begin? Championed by John Lennon and shown for a month straight at midnight, it's not hyperbole to say that Alejandro Jodorowsky's EL TOPO is the progenitor of the fabled "Midnight Movie."

After languishing in limbo for 30 years along with the rest of his films due to a dispute with his producer (and Beatles manager) Alan Klein, the major work of Jodorowsky is finally presented in a beautiful DVD box set, completely remastered and ready to launch its singular view of insanity on an unsuspecting world.

Two days later I'm still woozy.

EL TOPO is a quest for enlightenment wrapped in a Western that's sat in the deserts of Mexico under the boiling sun for too long, fever-dreaming of the blood and semen spilled in the name of wisdom. It's a hyper-violent LSD trip featuring naked monks being ridden bare-back, a duel in a rabbit pen, an underground village of deformed little people, and the single most erotic eating of a piece of fruit captured on film. It's also, at its heart, a desperate attempt by one man to capture the feeling of his quest to attach meaning to his life, and it's no mistake that the title character (translated as "The Mole") is played by Jodorowsky himself.

The opening scene plays as iconic as anything in Sergio Leone's oeuvre: El Topo, the mysterious man in black, rides up to a pole in the middle of the desert holding an open umbrella with a small naked child clinging to his back. The child crouches down and, while the man plays a small recorder, buries his teddy bear and a picture of his mother, the man in black's wife. El Topo gazes at him. "You're seven years old now. You're a man."

Their collective past buried, they ride off, the picture of the mother not quite covered in the foreground: no matter what, you can't leave the past behind.

So far so good, right? Sounds like it's shaping up to be some type of Sergio Leone-style western...but then the pair arrive at a small Mexican village. The dead bodies of adults and children lie strewn in the streets next to the bloated remains of the farm animals. Men hang from the rafters of the church. And as mentioned earlier, strange things are being forced upon the poor surviving monks...

It's here that the film takes one bizarre turn after another, as what was once a film loosely anchored in the Western genre becomes unhinged as a search for experience, and meaning. Jodorowsky makes use of a large array of symbolism, including crucifixes, pagan sacrifices, and more modern symbols: one town has had all its Christian imagery replaced by banners of an eye in a pyramid:

Although the film can at times look like a mess, Jodorowsky impresses a sense of consideration to every scene, whether it's the death of a bunch of rabbits at El Topo's approach or the entire last third of the film, where El Topo, in an effort to free an underground town of incestuous mutants (yes, you read that right), takes to the nearby town as a street mime, performing slapstick routines in an effort to dig a passage from the underground town to the village. he does this with his new love, one of the aforementioned little people.

By the time EL TOPO finishes, you've basically seen something that, for better or for worse, you're probably never going to see again. It's easy to just see this as a "midnight movie" for the geek crowd to cheer and yell at the screen to. But Jodorowsky embodies a deeper sense of purpose to the collection of images in EL TOPO, and as much as you want to shrug it off as exploitation, the craft and vision refuse to hide behind such simple definitions. I can't say I loved EL TOPO; I can't even say for sure that I'll ever see it again. But for something completely different, and done with an uncompromising eye, EL TOPO is a pretty exhilarating experience.

* Despite my positive review for this film, I DO NOT condone any of the acts in the film, with the possible exception of the mime routines. Oh yeah, and the flute playing while the naked chick swims in the water. Totally condone those two pieces.

** I also didn't mention the guy with no arms who had a guy with no legs strapped to his back. Man, that was INSANE!