Day 30: Happy Friday Funny and an Intergalactic Trek through "Star Wars: The Clone Wars"

Happy Friday! I hope it finds you all well and ready to indulge in a little late-night, only slightly naughty humor.

One of Darren and I's more recent habits is DVRing "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" (it's on at 12:35 a.m. here, after Letterman), then watching it over breakfast. It's how we still pretend we're night-owl hipsters. Anyway, we started shooting cereal milk through our noses this week when Ferguson, instead of doing his usual 2 min. teaser stand-up, decided to get a bit creative. I'll warn you now. S&M yodelers and puppets are involved.

Enjoy!
Monday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u70QOxzM_IE (I thought of Gene all day.)
Tuesday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lbekts52TI&feature=related
Wednesday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL8ip_F2A5s&feature=related (for all you '70s easy listening and shark fans)
Thursday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Nv-9FpB4s&feature=related (Completely clean and probably the funniest of them all. Sigh - I dream of Julie. And Amy, you're welcome.)

Can't wait for tonight's! This is what funny is all about, at least to a slightly skewed mind like mine.

But in the meantime, I'm off to get new tires and leaving you in care of...

Film 25: “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” (2008)

Written by Henry Gilroy, Steven Melching and Scott Murphy based on characters by George Lucas
Directed by Dave Filoni

After the disaster – in my opinion – that was Episodes One-Three of the once-royal Star Wars universe, I had blissfully low expectations of this animated story – as in Center of the Earth’s Core low. Its PG rating and new look, however, intrigued me, and I found that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stay away. So, Tuesday, after a long day of plumbing failure and grown-up, homeowner woes, Darren and I sat down with a couple of drinks and popped this flick into the machine. And I have to admit, we felt a lot better afterward.

“The Empire Strikes Back” it is not. Nor does the film seem to make any pretension to that status. In fact, it just serves as the launching pad for the current Cartoon Network series, and in spite of the rockin’ animation and obviously huge budget, this really feels more like TV than An Epic Movie to me. Considering my disappointment in the more recent franchise efforts at Being Big, though, I think this is a good thing.

The story is thin – almost small – at least in Star Wars terms. Anakin Skywalker, now a full Jedi, and Obi-Wan Kenobi must rescue Jabba the Hut’s child, who has been kidnapped by a rival clan on Tatooine. Jabba’s still a fairly bad dude, but the Jedi feel forced to befriend him to ensure safe passage of their troops through his space. Just to keep things interesting, Yoda dispatches a new Padawan, Ahsoka, for Anakin’s tutelage. That’s it. That would seem to indicate a lot of room for banter and battles, right?

Right. That’s about 85% of this movie’s content. I’m still not sure how they got away with a PG rating on this, since I counted less than 10 minutes of celluloid without guns shooting. If it had been a live action film, it would definitely have received an R rating. But since it’s mostly robots that are being killed, and since even the people who die are cartoons, I suppose the censors couldn’t be bothered. No language worries, but if you’re concerned about your child becoming inured to constant battle violence, this probably isn’t the movie for you. (If your kids are regular Nick or CN watchers, this shouldn’t bother them.) There are new, cool robots, weapons and ships galore – all a lot of fun – but for me, a bit overdone. The first battle scene – though quite cool – lasted 30 minutes. It was almost a case of, “We get it. Lots of clones dying. Lots of droids kaput. Let’s get on with it.”

That leaves the banter. The Lucas world has never been overly witty, but the groaners have long been part of the fun. That feeling of ‘he probably would have really said something that lame’ stays true here, and still, these writers manage to raise the bar on Episodes 1-3’s dialogue by about 300-fold. I loved the idea of Anakin becoming a teacher, especially to someone just as anti-authoritarian as he was. I felt like Ahsoka had big shoes to fill, and she did – especially for someone probably 14 years old and suddenly in battle all day and all night.

The commentary – which, typically, I couldn’t get more than 15 minutes into before becoming so bored I had to switch it off – does reveal that the writers consciously wanted to show the Jedi’s discomfort with suddenly being war leaders, instead of peacekeepers. Thematically, it was what I found myself thinking about most: ‘When did these ultra-zen, passive resistance guys become Achilles and Hercules?’ Pondering that, and seeing Anakin in action, both revealed a great deal more of his inner struggle than anything I saw in the prequels. After all, he’s come of age in an era of violence. Not only does he believe you should fight against evil, he’s spent his entire life doing exactly that – physically. It made me wish that this strand of reasoning had been explored more in the earlier movies, with less time spent on his inexplicable attraction to despotism. I know Lucas made small moves in this direction, and it makes me hanker all the more for What Might Have Been, had he hired real writers to flesh it out sooner. And a director that can get great performances from actors, as Filoni does here. Sigh.

Anyway, I’m now quite attracted to seeing the TV series on Cartoon Network, some of which I’ve already caught but didn’t quite understand, because I hadn’t seen this yet.

I do have the nagging thought that this is fairly problematic material disguised in easily marketable packaging. But I well know (thank you, Jacob) that 6-year old kids will love it without thinking that hard about it. So I suppose it just works on one level for them – good vs. evil – and another for me.

Or maybe I just need to grab a light saber and kick some Trade Federation butt…in the name of peace of course….