Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

When it came out, I thought Attack of the Clones was better than the first prequel, because I was 15 and it had MORE ACTION. But it's really not true. Is there some rule that people named Hayden have to be bad actors? Panettiere is pretty crappy on Heroes and Christensen is the same here. I hesitate to blame the prequels' badness on him because I honestly don't dislike that guy, but what else can you say when he's the star? I lay most of the blame at Lucas' feet, but a great Anakin could have done a lot of salvaging of the emotional core that makes these movies even close to relevant to the other ones. Without them being the story of Anakin's downfall, they're really just typical brainless science fiction. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here, really. I've heard that Christensen has been pretty good in other movies, and no one really seems to do their best on a green screen sound stage with Lucas' ability to direct actors being unknown beyond saying "faster and more intense!", so I'll go with my nerd instincts and blame it all on George.

I really don't hate any of these movies that much. Besides The Clone Wars, I mean. I can enjoy a silly movie with entertaining action scenes. And that describes Attack of the Clones pretty well. It's just disappointing to see the heart get slowly sucked out of a beloved series. Making Yoda digital is probably what really got the ball rolling. Yeah, seeing him flip around with a lightsaber like a mad man is hilariously entertaining, but at what cost? Why is doing so many extraneous tumbles through the air anyway. I prefer the old days when the fights weren't quite so elegant but every move had a purpose besides looking neat. Luke was trying to beat Darth Vader, not do the better triple salchow. The overreliance on computer effects is really what gets me more than the silly things that change the series' tone. Besides some background elements, they're rarely convincing, and it just pulls you out of the experience. And as the movies go on, they're pretty much all that's left.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Episode I confirmed for long-time Star Wars fans what they feared after seeing the Special Editions of their beloved series: George Lucas doesn't know what a good movie is any more. I didn't really notice this when it came out, because I was 12, and I could relate to annoying little kids, and I liked sword fights, especially ones with glowing magic swords. And watching it again now, I don't see it so much as the beginning of the end for Lucas, but a funeral for his good sensibilities. In retrospect, it's the best of the trilogy, and not just because it contains the two best action scenes: the pod race and the fight with Darth Maul. Sure, it introduced many of the things that made the prequels shit on the old movies. Turning Jedi from people naturally attuned to the universe's mysticism into people with a larger infestation of parasites than others was a tragedy. Making everybody know everybody for the sake of cute winks to the audience (Haha, Darth Vader built C-3PO!) is stupid, and just hard to believe when your setting is a galaxy filled with turmoil and not a small town. But it did some things right, before the sequels continued the vicious cycle of more and more visual effects and absurd characterization until we ended up with The Clone Wars, also known as when Star Wars died.

Hell, Yoda's still a puppet in this one. Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor are two completely likable actors from the British Isles, Natalie Portman is somewhere between cute and gorgeous (Did you know she was born in Israel? Just found this out.), and the three form the nucleus of a decent adventure movie. Yeah, Jar Jar Binks sucks and is mildly racist. Yeah, Jake Lloyd is one of all too many kid actors who piss off grown ups in one or two movies and are never seen again. But the Battle Droids are just soldiers with digitized voices, not an army of fucking clowns. A lot of the sets actually existed in real life. "Duel of the Fates" is probably my favorite piece of Star Wars music. There's still a soul in the production somewhere, and as long as the main characters are good, you have a watchable film. I would not call it a good movie, because as I said earlier, George Lucas forgot what that is. But it's not that bad.

Batman Begins

I haven't been posting lately, mostly because I've been rewatching some old movies. No reason I can't talk about them, though.

Somewhere in between its release in 2005 and seeing The Dark Knight, I forgot that the first Christopher Nolan-directed Batman movie was as good as it was. I still think Knight's better, but Begins is damn solid in its own right. What's impressive is how he manages to make films that capture the coolness of Batman and comic books in general without having particularly good action scenes. They're a big part of what makes the Spider-Man movies (at least the first two) great, which is the only super hero movie franchise I've enjoyed on the same level as the revived Batman, and usually what carries action movies in general, but they really aren't what makes Batman good. Sure, the fights are there, but they're pretty poorly filmed; lit too dimly, shot too close, and cut too fast. This is partly a stylistic choice to make Batman more secretive and menacing, but it doesn't make for particularly entertaining sequences. Both movies have had decent car chases, but it's really the characters that drive the show, and that's what makes them so much better than the other riffraff.

When Begins came out, origin stories were all the rage, and they still are to some extent, it's just that more properties are already established. A good origin story can be very compelling, the problem is they end up being similar and you can only see a guy accidentally gain powers and adapt to it over the course of an hour so many times before it gets boring. But that's what makes Begins interesting; not only is it a story we haven't heard before, it's one about a character's motives, not the magic MacGuffin that turns him into a freak. (Note: I intentionally misused the movie term "MacGuffin" here, because the next several films I'll be talking about are directed by a man who has no idea what it actually means. Guess who it is!) Showing Bruce Wayne's slow transition into Batman, one he makes because he comes to feel a true need to help people and not because he's strong enough to throw trucks now, is a truly interesting one, and then we get to the second half, which is a pretty darn good crime story besides the somewhat ludicrous doomsday device. The cast is obscenely good, with nearly every significant part played by a well-known talent, and despite the hate she got I think even Katie Holms was competent. Liam Neeson plays a good mentor, but he shows here that he can do other things as well. Besides the fights, the film's only failing in my eyes are the attempts at humor later on, which seem somehow more frequent as the drama builds and usually fall flat. Gordon's racing to get into place with the new Batmobile and stop the bad guys from destroying the whole city, do we really need a cutaway to a random bum telling him he likes his car? In any case, it's not perfect, but it's exactly the reboot Batman needed to fit into this era of a more serious super hero.

Deadwood - Season 2

The second season of Deadwood continues the show admirably, keeping what makes it interesting while expanding the cast and preventing the story from getting stagnant. It begins a little crazier than the show ever was in its first run, with the arrival of Olyphant's family coinciding with a fight that turns into an all-out brawl leading to several characters in various states of recovery for quite a while. McShane in particular has a tough time, especially after another ailment hits even worse, which produced scenes with the most painful thing I've ever had to watch that didn't actually appear on screen. It's not that long though before he's back and as mean as ever.

There's plenty of drama to go around, with the arrival of new people whose business interests conflict with established personalities. Plenty of blood ends up getting spilt, but as it was before, those are momentary diversions from the show's real meat, the backroom deals and conversations laced with venom. It's impressive how they can make characters as slimy as EB Farnum likable just by making their choice of words so uniquely entertaining. The women get into it too, not as gruffly as or as vulgarly as the men, but in their own fun way. Deadwood doesn't have the family or social aspects that make it as relatable as HBO's other top shows, but it's still a good intellectual watch.