Fanboys: Inconceivable!

Anyone aware of the mild-mannered secret identity of Bongo (or Bingo and Bango) knows that I am in fact genetically engineered to love this movie,but even I was surprised of the extent to which I loved it: this is my cinematic soulmate, thus a brief review to get you fine readers to the theater soon:

Having followed the long circuitous route this movie has taken to theaters, I was quite relieved when the film finally got released in Cambridge (our fair city). This truly is the love letter to Star Wars and all things Lucas-ian (or in many cases, all things late 90s...mmmm tub-thumping). The dialog is littered with constant references to the holy trilogy and the types of trivia contests and debates that have acted as geek handshakes for 30 years now (What is Chewbacca's home planet? How didn't Luke know that Leia's his sister?) that put even the richest Kevin Smith movies to shame. 

The movie's ostensible plot is the road trip of four geektastic friends on a cross country journey to steal an early cut of the Phantom Menace in the Fall of 1998. The journey, in the hands of uberfan director Kyle Newman, becomes a wonderous odyssey of self-discovery and friendship not entirely different from other mainstays of 80s childhood like The Goonies or Stand By Me.  While the comedy is not flawless, the jokes are so rapidfire that the rough ones disappear under the funny ones and even the funny ones pale beside the hilarious ones. Throw in a huge number of cameos (Star Wars and not), some good down-home Trekkie bashing and Kristen Bell as the cutest fangirl ever (gold bikini: check) and you'll never believe how far the ride takes you in a mere 90 minutes. 

It may not be a brilliant film, and it probably won't ever even see wide release, but if you have the oppoortunity to throw yourself back to the moment when you saw Star Wars back on the marquee for the first time in 20 years and have a damned good laugh, absolutely do not let it pass you by. Bongo, Out. 

Clone Wars More Fun Than a Barrel of Huttlets

First, everyone needs to CALM DOWN. This movie is neither an affront to nature nor to Star Wars lore. It is not the disaster that all the critics say it is. It is, in fact, very fun to watch.

It is also not, however, to be equated in any way with any of the star wars sagas already in existence. The fact that this is a precursor or a primer to the new animated television series coming to Cartoon Network next month (October 3rd) sets a whole new tone for Star Wars - nowhere to be found, for instance, is the classic stoicism and pontificating that fans have come to love. Instead, we get the adventuresome, playful, and roguish side of the franchise. Think of the rakish charm of Han Solo, the banter of a rag tag gang under fire, and expand it out from the occasional moment of comic relief to an entire film. It's "I've got a bad feeling about this" times 100, and it's great.

This new slice of Star Wars suits Anakin Skywalker particularly well, as it allows him to branch out beyond naive little boy wonder and angsty teen sith. I'd even go so far as to say that this phase of Anakin was missing from the episode 1-3 arc, and could have made him a character to whom we got more attached. Or... maybe Hayden Christensen should have just stuck to Canadian soap operas.

Anakin's apprentice, Ahsoka, vacillates between a perky teeniebopper who's trying too hard and a fiesty young woman deserving of a Skywalker's attention. Overall, her character adds more than it subtracts. Kids will relate to her, and Star Wars fans will welcome her into the fold.

The biggest treat for fans will be a closer look at the Hutts. Jabba the Hutt became such an iconic figure after Return of the Jedi, and now we come to find that he can have....children? I'm sorry, huttlets. Let's just say part of me wants to keep one as a pet. The appearance of Jabba's uncle, Ziro the Hutt, also plays an important role in establishing the Hutts as a mafia family, expanding the universe in, again, a FUN way.

I was determined to not let my deep appreciation and loyalty for Star Wars blind my better judgement. I was ready to accept this film as a failure (although still hopeful that I wouldn't have to, of course!). I mean, who can argue with a 20% freshness (or rottenness, rather) rating on RottenTomatoes.com? But Clone Wars has been grossly misunderstood, methinks. Extremely episodic in its tone and structure, Clone Wars, in many ways, should have simply been a long pilot for the televisions series, only airing on TV. Perhaps then, in its proper context, it would have been better understood and better received.

Let's Get Digital: A Clone Wars Review

It’s hard to review this movie without at least responding most briefly to the criticism out there:

What Clone Wars is not: The next Star Wars episode, photo-realistic cg (a la Beowulf), a franchise reboot, a stand alone story or intended to be someone’s first exposure to the Star Wars mythology.

What Clone Wars is: A remix of classic Star Wars action in a sleek stylized animation that, while honoring the original Star Wars saga, brings the mythology and fun into a new form of story-telling that will continue this fall in the animated series on Cartoon Network (or TNT for HD).

Make no mistake, Clone Wars is not and was never intended to be, of the same scope and style as the other theatrical Star Wars releases. From the different opening logos (Warner Bros!) to the absent opening crawl, this movie is a different beast all together. A more apt comparison is to the classic stories of war movies. The audience, joining en medias res, is thrown onto the battlefield and experiences the action on a personal level surrounded by the cocky general (a pitch-perfect Obi-Wan), the fiery rogue with unconventional methods (Anakin), the battle-hardened by-the-book soldiers (Commander Cody, Captain Rex and the other clones), and most importantly the fresh-faced just-off-the-boat rookie, wide-eyed and way over his (or her) head (Ahsoka). These archetypes are mainstays of the war movie genre, and though these characters are mostly not new to Star Wars, the roles may have shifted slightly during travel.

Visually, every single frame of this film is impressively eye-catching and even beautiful at times. The teals of Cristophsis melt away nicely to the purples of Teth and the familiar browns and tans of Tatooine. The scenery is clearly of Star Wars pedigree (some even developed from previously unused Ralph McQuarrie concept pieces) and yet pops with a vibrancy that befits the war. The characters, wearing the war garb familiar to fans of the Tartakovsky Cartoon Series are expanded and adjusted to give each character (and especially the clones) a unique and customized look that fits their personality and battle-style. Anakin, Ahsoka and Obi Wan are defined with rounded Jedi appearances while the separatist leaders Dooku and Asajj Ventress have much more angular forms, showing how incompatible these forces are, and hardening the conflict visually (interestingly the starships of each side show a similar, though reversed, visual divide).

At no time do the animators attempt photo-realism in the characters or environments. The hair and beards of the characters doesn’t move, nor does the cloth flow ripple or billow. Instead, the characters take on an almost stop-motion look…the realization of every action figure battle you held in your backyard growing up. Though purportedly anime-inspired, the look is much closer to the other source of inspiration, the marionette show Thunderbirds. This influence is especially clear when looking at the design of Anakin, but also in the movement and physicality of the characters in their environments. The hits in this film are hard, and the audience feels many of the clones cut down in ways never even approached by the prequels.

Like the Prequel trilogy, the Clone Wars presents a tangled political web that is being worked and manipulated from two ends by the soon-to-be Emperor Palpatine. While considerable mental energy would be necessary to understand the full motivations behind the machinations surrounding the kidnapping of Jabba’s son, the movie doesn’t really ask for that level of investment. Instead it gives you a MacGuffin in the shape of a smelly wriggling huttlet and lets you enjoy the chase and action of the characters fighting over it. Like that other Lucasfilm franchise, the heroes and villains fight over the MacGuffin from Act II onward, and in the end it doesn’t matter what that object is or does, but rather what the characters do to control it. What unfolds is a roller coaster ride of action and thrills as the characters duel, chase and backstab each other to be the first to deliver young “Stinky” to his father.

However, gone from the prequels-era Star Wars is the clunky dialog that grates upon every fan (“I hate sand…”) and the sulky love story of Padme and Anakin (their brief encounter is snappy and double-edged subterfuge…like Alias at its finest). Perhaps most importantly though, Padme is much closer to her Episode I-II personality, that is, she doesn’t just sit around a cry, but is pro-active in her attempts to rescue Anakin, and resembles, in both her dialog and acts, the verve that we know will come in the next generation of Skywalker women (and the one after that, Jaina).

In its essence, this film is a love letter to fans...the casual theater-going fan but more importantly the action figure buying, novel reading, card game playing, Forcecast listening fans who have stuck by this franchise since its inception, or like me, its renaissance in the early 90s. The film features Easter egg “shout outs” to those fans (Admiral Yuhlaran, R2-KT, the Max Rebo Band logo) and in doing so welcomes the older fans to the new, perhaps a bit more kid-friendly Star Wars. As one of those fans, I adored the gift they gave us by releasing this film theatrically, and letting us experience it initially on the theatrical scale.

The absolute best part of this movie is that, at its core, it is simply the Pilot episode for the new series. Like all Pilots, it will display the first shapes of the great series that I’m sure is to come, but not represent the level to which the series can progress. This is the starting line for this series and it can only improve from here. If rumors are to believed (and I sincerely hope they are), the series will have a strong emphasis on character development, taking aim at fleshing out Jedi, Troopers and Seperatists that, while existing only in the periphery of the Skywalker story, can take center stage here. Kit Fisto hunting down Seperatists with a Mon Calamari padawan? The origins and evolution of General Grievous’s robotics? Prototype Y-wings? The fate of Ahsoka? I’m in.

Clone Wars continues this fall with the same level of quality and perhaps a greater level of plot. I honestly believe that fans who have skipped this movie are going to regret not getting in on the ground floor of this endeavor. Director and show-runner Dave Filoni is, above all else, a fan, and we could not ask for a better guide to take us through this new series. Anecdotes from cast and crew suggest that even while working on Clone Wars, Filoni spent his lunch breaks making a peg check at the local Toys R Us.While admittedly I am feeling a bit of Star Wars fatigue (Clone Wars, Force Unleashed plus all the tie-ins give me wallet-ache!), this is the most excited I have been in my history of Star Wars fandom (including pre-Episode I). The cynics will continually deride George Lucas and point to the whole endeavor as being nothing more than a means to sell more toys (animated-style action figures=awesome, btw) however, true fans know that this is a movie for them, and that, as always, the force is forever.

Your Servant, Bongo

P.S.- Obi Wan Kenobi is still the man.

The Clone Wars: It Sure Takes Me Back

In March 1977, I turned eight years old. One night that May I went to see Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope with my dad and little brother. My life hasn't been the same since. That summer, I spent all of my time pretending to be Luke Skywalker, wearing a brown belt over a long t-shirt in an attempt to replicate his Tatooine tunic and chasing my friends around the neighborhood with a stick (these were the days before Force FX lightsabers and the like) . My first SW action figure was R2-D2--a simple doo dad by today's standards--but I was transported by that piece of plastic and the meanings it represented into a world of imagination that previously did not exist for me. My enthusiasm did not die down when I turned nine, or ten, or eleven, or twenty-five, or thirty. Though I now consider The Empire Strikes Back to be a superior film to ANH in nearly every respect, nothing has ever replaced the sense of absolute wonder and enchantment I experienced in the summer of '77.
It is now the summer of '08. George Lucas has presented the latest addition to his universe with The Clone Wars, an animated adventure set between the events of SW episodes II and III, focusing on the battles of Jedi Knights Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker against the evil Count Dooku and his Separatist armies. Obi Wan and Anakin, with the help of Anakin's young padawan Ahsoka Tano, attempt to rescue the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt in an effort to secure Jabba's cooperation with the Republic in the Outer Rim territories. One of the first things I noticed about this film was its obvious insistence on unreality--the animation, rather than following the (sometimes) unfortunate pattern of verisimilitude attempted in animated features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to Wall-E, celebrates its difference. The artists and animators have created heavily stylized versions of well-known SW heroes and have refused to be faithful to accepted norms of representation, from the long hatchet-face of Dooku to Obi Wan's unmovingly perfect coif to Padme's impossibly slender figure. These unorthodox representations may act as outward manifestations of each character's personality, but they also look $%^&* good--I hesitate to use the word "art," but if the shoe fits...
Even for a SW movie, all laws of physics and mechanics fail to apply--Republic tanks scale a sheer mountain cliff and Anakin leaps hundreds of feet through the air to shred Separatist battle droids into junk. This is a film that knows it is telling an unlikely and fantastic story, and tells it with gusto and nearly relentless momentum. It doesn't matter that scientific laws are broken in a universe of infinite possibilities. Naturally, there are numerous battle scenes in the film, and they don't disappoint. The battles scene on Christophsis recalls similar scenes in WWII movies such as The Longest Day, and the partnership between Anakin and Ahsoka parallels that of Han and Luke nicely. Obi Wan's light saber battle with the foul Asajj Ventress is also particularly well-done.
Some critics have complained that there is too little character development to make the film completely successful. Bongo and I agreed that war movies, and TCW is a war movie, are not vehicles for character analysis; they are not elaborate costume dramas that allow for long interludes of soul searching and emotional exploration. Here, the old characters are re-introduced, the new characters meet up with them, and together they undergo a series of adventures. If this sounds familiar, it should--the same thing happened in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. TCW is simply following in a long Lucas tradition of continuing adventures in which the characters are swept up in an epic story of triumph, failure, and redemption.
There must be a few kids who will turn eight this summer-- The Clone Wars was made for them. Forget about all the aging fans who insist that the original trilogy should have been left alone, the haters who say that Jar-Jar Binks should be killed off, and the legions of rapacious collectors who are only interested in the market value of their collections. This is not their movie. It belongs to the eight year old kid who genuinely believes, as I did in '77, that SW can change the world. If the film generates for them a fraction of the excitement that the original Star Wars did for me, then it will have been successful.