Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

The label “The Clone Wars” has always confused me. Victors get to name wars so “The Clone Wars” makes it sound like the Republic is fighting clones. Instead, they are fighting with cloned soldiers, which makes the name of the war non-standard and in my opinion, really dumb. That’s just one of the reasons why I can’t keep this early Star Wars universe history straight.

The movie turned out to be better than I expected though. There are no major gaffs, but there are many things they could have done better.

Job one would have been to speed up the pacing. The story needed editing, and as a general rule, once you hit the climax, the rush to the end of the movie should be headlong and breakneck. The talk-fight-talk pattern may work for video games, but in this movie, it just made everything drag.

That would be my basic critique of this movie—It felt like a story that was written for a video game. The mission is strong. The political and military strategies are surprisingly sophisticated and coherent. But after every fight sequence, there’s a lot of talking that sets up what we’ve just learned and what still needs to happen.

Look-wise, the main detractions are the characters. A lot of the fighting machines looked really cool and were well designed. The landscapes and cityscapes are passable. But the characters, especially the human ones, looked wooden and strangely carved.

Still, there is a fair bit of humor in it. And it is Star Wars. So I did not mind buying my ticket. I’ll probably go see the next one too.

Tags: Movie by M
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Wow, a non-X-Files post?

I walked out of the new Batman movie with a furrowed brow. The movie was a great roller-coaster ride. It had spectacular shots and lots of amazing action. I also really enjoyed seeing Chicago barely changed for the movie.

But the last voiceover. It disturbed me.

The plot is pretty complicated for a summer blockbuster so I hope my shorthand is going to make sense. There are two targeted villains in the movie: the mob and the Joker. Through a long-term sting operation, the forces of law are about to bring down the mobsters by taking away their money.

So if the mobsters are villains who still operate by a code and within certain rules, they are the state actors (North Korea, Iran, etc.). By denying them their money (economic sanctions), the good guys (U.S. and its allies) are able to curtail their behaviors. Despots can be dealt with because they have one main directive—to stay in power.

The Joker doesn’t care about money. He doesn’t have a code or behave according to a set of rules. There’s nothing that anyone can do to him through the proper channels to dissuade him from pursuing his primary objective—to destroy the order and stability of his targeted society. As Scully said in the first X-Files movie (I can’t just quit cold turkey can I?), “The rational object of terrorism is to promote terror.” So the Joker is the non-state actor (Al-Qaeda) that just wants to watch the world burn.

Harvey Dent, the best of us all, the one who wields the weapons of light and right, stood up courageously to the mobsters and was about to win. But he was destroyed, twisted, by the Joker.

Without the white knight, the voiceover said, we need the dark one. Oh, we’ll disavow the vigilante. We’ll hunt him. We’ll curse his disregard of civil rights, but this jurisdiction-less hero who operates in secrecy and beyond the law, he is just what we need.

Batman sacrifices his reputation and becomes the outcast. He’s willing to take the slings and arrows if it means that society can still go forward with faith and hope. For Batman, his great hope is that one day, the world won’t need him anymore.

I’m thinking that if there hasn’t been one yet, a White House screening is going to go over big.

Tags: Governance, Movie by M
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Over the last few days, I’ve read a lot of blogs and reviews about the movie. For the most part, they express disappointment. Some say it wasn’t big enough. Some wanted more of the paranormal. Some say it didn’t feel XF enough. Some say it’s homophobic. Some just befuddled me.

But joyfully, I found at least two reviewers who sees things (at least partially) the way I do.

Roger Ebert also says that the movie is a rip-roaring thriller. His review applauds the realism of the movie, and this is something I really enjoyed. Instead of visiting Mulder and Scully in their world, I felt as if Mulder and Scully were operating in mine. For me, the “realness” of the crime made things that much scarier.

MaryAnn Johanson adds to this by pointing out that the changes we see are the result of the passage of years. I’m not the same person I was six years ago. I don’t expect Mulder and Scully to be the same people I got to know.

They’ve been on the run. They’ve tried to adapt to their new lives. They’ve learned to live with each other. And also, they no longer are a part of the X-Files world. I see the disconnect from that fictional, fantastical XF world. They have been mundane, ordinary, in hibernation.

Quick sidebar: To me, one of the most intriguing things in a hero’s saga is what the hero does after meeting and being left by the divine (god, wizard, what have you). How do you live after you’ve been touched by such power? (An even quicker plug to watch the new Doctor Who.)

As far as the subject matter, I think the movie is consistent with the series. XF has always held that humans can be far worse than the most devilish of monsters. To this day, I cannot see Nick Chinlund (Donnie Pfaster in “Irresistible” and “Orison”) without wanting to jump behind the couch. And humanity’s science has resulted in some of XF’s most memorable monsters (Flukie, Eves, the Great Mutato).

The accusation of homophobia is harder for me to address. I can only offer my reaction—which is to say that it didn’t occur to me while I was watching the movie. Oh, I saw the parallels, but I thought about the elements in totally different ways.

Unless it’s going to be a fake TV evangelist, a pedophile priest is pretty much the only religious sinner game in town. I thought they made the bad guys married to show the depth of their commitment to each other. As the heterosexual couple put their son through hell and went to questionable lengths to keep him alive, the homosexual couple also made the same decisions to maintain their love.

The use of women’s bodies is very problematic. I can’t help but think that Chris Carter just wanted the shock factor and didn’t think any further than that. Part of me wants to believe that he’s making a call back to Silence of the Lambs, since Scully owes a debt of existence to Clarice Starling. But CC has demonstrated that he has trouble with women in his stories. He could have easily made one victim male and one victim female to avoid this issue.

If there was a message that being molested will turn you gay, I totally missed it. For me, they needed a connection from Father Joe to the bad guys, and this was the answer with an added bonus of suggesting God’s hand. All this, of course, is just my opinion and what I experienced.

Finally, let me defend Amanda Peet and Xzibit. I thought Amanda Peet did a heck of a job eye-acting underneath all those hats. Her character came off as tough, professional, and not-entirely-but-only-thinking-about-whether-or-not-she-should flirt with Mulder. Xzibit had a clench going that would have made Skinner proud. His character was more one-note than hers though. I was tired of Agent Drummy by the end, but I’m hardly going to fault the actor for tackling a character that was always going to be less than Doggettt, less than Spender.

Tags: Movie by M
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