Tag Archives: Samuel L. Jackson

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

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Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie poster

 

After writ­ing and direct­ing three pre­quels between 1999–2005, it’s easy to for­get that Star Wars god­fa­ther George Lucas opted out of direct­ing Episodes IV: The Empire Strikes Back and V: Return of the Jedi back in the 1980s. Now Lucas appears once again to be ced­ing con­trol over his most famous baby. He’s back to shep­herd­ing along splin­ter projects like The Clone Wars from the more aloof role of Exec­u­tive Producer.

For any­one else con­fused, as I cer­tainly was, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a feature-film sequel to the 2003–2005 Car­toon Net­work tele­vi­sion series “Star Wars: Clone Wars,” in turn fol­lowed by a sec­ond series with the same name as the movie. Got that? There are much big­ger dif­fer­ences than swap­ping a colon for a defin­i­tive arti­cle, start­ing with the visual look itself. The best thing about the orig­i­nal series was its bold, strik­ing visual style, real­ized in a hand-drawn line-art look sim­i­lar to Gen­ndy Tartakovsky’s pre­vi­ous show Samu­rai Jack. From what lit­tle I under­stand of the process, CGI ani­ma­tion cre­ated in 3D can still be ren­dered in a flat 2D style, giv­ing it the look of tra­di­tional hand-drawn cell ani­ma­tion. So the char­ac­ters in the orig­i­nal at least appeared hand-drawn even though they prob­a­bly weren’t.

Ashley Eckstein and Matt Lanter in Star Wars: The Clone WarsAnakin trains a young propellerhead

How­ever, the fea­ture film sequel looks like direc­tor Dave Filoni opted to skip that step and ren­der the char­ac­ters with full 3D shad­ing. The result resem­bles a rough ani­matic or a throw­away videogame cut scene. Filoni gets kudos for not aim­ing for pho­to­re­al­ism, which becomes very creepy when approach­ing the uncanny val­ley — the point where ani­mated char­ac­ters look almost, but not quite, like real humans. Look with fear upon the night­mar­ish zom­bie hor­ror­shows Final Fan­tasy: The Spir­its Within, The Polar Express, and Beowulf (the lat­ter being a huge step for­ward, but still not quite there yet). But The Clone Wars’ par­tic­u­lar brand of styl­iza­tion just seems cheap to me; I would have pre­ferred the cool-looking 2D char­ac­ters as they appeared in the TV series.

The Clone Wars is canon within the Star Wars uni­verse, but no one (prob­a­bly not even Lucas him­self) would ever con­sider it as pri­mary as its six older sib­lings. One advan­tage to being rel­e­gated to the sec­ond tier is a free­dom to vio­late ven­er­a­ble Star Wars tra­di­tions. The clas­sic open­ing crawl is gone, replaced with a Cit­i­zen Kane-style news­reel catch­ing the audi­ence up with the key facts needed to make sense of what’s going on in between all the ‘splo­sions. That par­tic­u­lar change is a shame, but brace your­self for some heresy when I admit I find another change rather wel­come: Kevin Kiner’s very non-John Williams-esque score. As much as Williams’ music was the sound­track of my child­hood (my entire gen­er­a­tion can sing the Star Wars, Jaws, and Indi­ana Jones themes a cap­pella, on cue), I had long since tired of him. The point at which I lost it was the wall-to-wall blan­ket of redun­dant music that threat­ened to drown out the already almost over­whelm­ing Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan.

The Clone Wars series and movie are both set chrono­log­i­cally between the events of Episodes II: Attack of the Clones and III: Revenge of the Sith, a razor-thin slice of time in which noth­ing of import really hap­pened in Star Wars con­ti­nu­ity. The movies already showed us how the war began and ended, so The Clone Wars movie and series are basi­cally war sto­ries. This is actu­ally a good thing in light of how the pre­quel tril­ogy often became bogged down in tedious polit­i­cal pro­ce­dure involv­ing inter­plan­e­tary trade routes. The series was by its nature a string of vignettes, but the fea­ture film still feels like an episodic tour through a num­ber of spec­tac­u­lar bat­tles. A par­tic­u­larly grip­ping and excit­ing bat­tle takes place on a ver­ti­cal cliff face, “shot” with a hand-held “cam­era.” Lucas was sure to con­ceive of his two armies as droids and masked clones, allow­ing for car­nage and huge body counts with­out a drop of blood (not to men­tion the eco­nom­i­cal reuse of cos­tumes, and now, dig­i­tal mod­els). I remain puz­zled, how­ever, how clones and droids can have names, ranks, and vary­ing skill sets. This Dork Reporter grew up with the orig­i­nal tril­ogy, and still has trou­ble accept­ing stormtroop­ers being on the side of the good guys.

Tom Kane in Star Wars: The Clone WarsYoda’s look­ing more “kit­ten” than “tur­tle” today

The TV series focused mostly on the bat­tles, but the movie squeezes a frag­ment of a plot in between the action set pieces. Anakin Sky­walker is incon­ve­niently charged with train­ing Ahsoka Tano (Ash­ley Eck­stein), an annoy­ing teen “padawan learner” (a Luca­sism for “appren­tice” that still sounds very much like a George W. Bush mala­prop­ism). I still find it dif­fi­cult to accept that the Anakin we see here and in Episode III is so close to the tip­ping point to absolute cor­rup­tion that he will soon betray the Rebels and become the embod­i­ment of evil, Darth Vader. At this point, he still seems a merely moody and impetu­ous kid horny for the girl­friend he left behind on Naboo. Being respon­si­ble for the spunky, good­hearted Ahsoka cer­tainly does lit­tle to help him attain the state of emo­tional detach­ment Lucas equates with goodness.

Even though there’s no doubt a great deal of very expen­sive tech­nol­ogy behind this kind of ani­ma­tion, it’s still cheaper than mount­ing a live-action pro­duc­tion. Ani­ma­tion, where any­thing is pos­si­ble, is also the best way for the Star Wars fran­chise to expand the sto­ries of its exist­ing char­ac­ters, when the orig­i­nal actors have aged, become too expen­sive, dis­in­ter­ested, or passed away. So why focus only on the pre­quel char­ac­ters? Why not tell more tales star­ring the trin­ity that every­body really loves: Luke, Leia, and Han? Is Lucas afraid that mess­ing with the canon­i­cal heroes gen­er­a­tions of fans have taken to heart is to risk fatally wound­ing their deep emo­tional con­nec­tion to the mythos? Or to be cyn­i­cal, he may always uti­lize the var­i­ous masked char­ac­ters (Chew­bacca, Boba Fett, Jabba the Hut, Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2) in any­thing at any time with­out clear­ing actors’ like­nesses. That said, some of the orig­i­nal cast do lend their voices to The Clone Wars, includ­ing Samuel L. Jack­son, Anthony Daniels, and Christo­pher Lee. James Arnold Tay­lor does an excel­lent impres­sion of Ewan McGregor’s excel­lent (in turn) impres­sion of Alec Guinness.

One last thing: it wouldn’t be Star Wars with­out at least one offen­sively char­ac­ter­ized alien. Jabba’s uncle Ziro the Hutt (Corey Bur­ton) is inex­plic­a­bly voiced as an old South­ern queen.

Offi­cial movie site: www.starwars.com/theclonewars

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Spirit

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The Spirit movie poster

 

At last, finally another entry to The Dork Report’s hal­lowed pan­theon of zero-star unholy cin­ema atroc­i­ties. Frank Miller’s The Spirit is far more than just merely bad. Like the most infa­mous movie dis­as­ter of all, Ed Wood’s Plan Nine From Outer Space (read The Dork Report appre­ci­a­tion), it veers wildly from stun­ning weird­ness to unin­ten­tional hilar­ity, inter­spersed with fre­quent stretches of insuf­fer­able bore­dom. But what truly lands The Spirit among the rar­i­fied com­pany of true cin­e­matic crimes against human­ity is that it is the insane and unhinged prod­uct of a uniquely obsessed auteur mind. The only dif­fer­ence is, Miller was handed a great deal more money and resources than Wood ever man­aged to wrangle.

Not that he didn’t have to work for it. Miller is one of the best-known (and most ripped-off) rock stars to grad­u­ate from the sweat­shop that is the comic book indus­try. He has writ­ten and/or illus­trated some of the best-selling and most influ­en­tial series of comics’ mod­ern age, includ­ing Wolver­ine, Dare­devil, Ronin, Elek­tra: Assas­sin, Sin City, and 300. Much of this work has long been ruth­lessly pil­laged for raw mate­r­ial for Hollywood’s lever­ag­ing of comic book intel­lec­tual prop­er­ties. The unmatched one-two punch of his 1980s Bat­man graphic nov­els Year One (with David Maz­zuc­chelli) and The Dark Knight, together with Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, became the basis for Tim Burton’s Bat­man (1989). That first major comics-to-movie block­buster not only bor­rowed Miller’s par­tic­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tion of the char­ac­ter (itself a highly dis­tilled ver­sion of its sur­pris­ingly dark his­tory), but also his over­all visual style (going to far as to visu­ally quote indi­vid­ual panels).

Gabriel Macht in The Spirit“I’m gonna kill you all kinds of dead.”

Over a decade later, Mark Steven Johnson’s Dare­devil (2003) unfor­tu­nately fum­bled Miller’s most famous orig­i­nal char­ac­ter, the Greek ninja assas­sin Elek­tra. But Miller was soon to cease being merely some­one from whom Hol­ly­wood stole paid homage. In 2005, Miller jumped media bar­ri­ers to co-direct a fea­ture film adap­ta­tion of his orig­i­nal graphic novel Sin City with Robert Rodriguez. The two crafted an exact­ingly faith­ful recre­ation of the book, essen­tially treat­ing the orig­i­nal comics as sto­ry­boards. Miller’s pro­file only rose as Zack Sny­der pulled a sim­i­lar stunt with Miller’s 1998 graphic novel 300, pro­duc­ing an even big­ger (and slightly con­tro­ver­sial) smash hit.

Credit to Miller for absorb­ing count­less lessons from the sea­soned indie mav­er­ick Rodriguez, enough to helm an entire fea­ture on his own. The Spirit’s visu­als are often extra­or­di­nar­ily beau­ti­ful, exploit­ing the thin bar­rier between ani­ma­tion and live action blurred ever since the largely green-screened Star Wars: The Phan­tom Men­ace (George Lucas, 1999) and Sky Cap­tain and the World of Tomor­row (Kerry Con­ran, 2004). Like Sin City, nearly every shot is highly processed to effect a styl­ized evo­ca­tion of noir lit­er­a­ture and movies.

But together with Miller’s sig­na­ture brand of stark, chiaroscuro images and pur­ple, pulpy noir dia­logue, it doesn’t look or sound any­thing like the real osten­si­ble real source mate­r­ial, Will Eisner’s orig­i­nal Spirit comics. The leg­endary Eis­ner is con­sid­ered the inven­tor of the graphic novel. The DVD edi­tion includes a must-see bonus fea­ture: “Miller on Miller,” in which Miller talks of him as a teacher, and took many of his apho­risms as lessons, includ­ing the essen­tial sen­su­al­ity of ink­ing (which Miller took rather lit­er­ally). Eis­ner (and oth­ers such as Neal Adams) may have inspired Miller in the first place, but Miller’s ver­sion of The Spirit in Chucks and cape-like trench­coat more closely resem­bles his own cre­ations, espe­cially Dwight from Sin City (Clive Owen in the film) or Dare­devil as he appears in the 1990 graphic novel Elek­tra Lives Again.

This Dork Reporter read Miller’s comics as a kid, and cer­tainly never expected the guy would one day be a bank­able force in Hol­ly­wood. Look­ing back­wards, it’s plain he hasn’t changed much. His obses­sions and pre­oc­cu­pa­tions are now only ampli­fied and enhanced: his mod­ern comics (and now movies) are mostly com­prised of homo­erotic bone-crunching acro­batic fights (if the entirety of 300 isn’t proof enough, might I refer you to Daredevil’s bat­tle with the naked, big-dicked Bulls­eye in Elek­tra Lives Again), volup­tuous femmes fatale (no skinny waifs for him), and pulp fic­tion and film noir-inspired odes to his beloved New York City. Also on the DVD, Miller expounds on all his favorite talk­ing points, from his detailed knowl­edge of comics his­tory, his love for New York City, and his hatred of cen­sor­ship (he’s famously prone to cas­ti­gate the comics indus­try for weakly cen­sor­ing itself instead of fight­ing back against — or even ignor­ing — Con­gres­sional pres­sure in the 1950s).

Scarlett Johansson in The Spirit“I’ve known some pretty strange women in my time but this one, she’s got the final word on strange.”

I’m not famil­iar with Eisner’s orig­i­nal Spirit comics, which appeared as inserts in 1940s Sun­day news­pa­pers. But from what I under­stand, Miller took a great deal of lib­er­ties beyond jet­ti­son­ing Eisner’s col­or­ful visual style in favor of his own Sin City look. Miller adds a meta­phys­i­cal aspect miss­ing in the orig­i­nal, mak­ing The Spirit and his neme­sis The Octo­pus both inde­struc­tible and quick-healing (per­haps inspired by the char­ac­ter Wolver­ine, to which Miller had a hand in pop­u­lar­iz­ing in the early 1980s). The pres­ence of Samuel L. Jack­son can’t help but rec­ol­lect M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreak­able, an infi­nitely more sub­tle exam­i­na­tion of the super­hero archetype.

The action is set in an unnamed fan­tasy urban land­scape like that of Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998) and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995): filthy, sur­rounded by water, soaked by con­stant pre­cip­i­ta­tion and fog, and in per­pet­ual night until the sun finally rises at the end. Miller’s script con­spic­u­ously avoids men­tion­ing the year, but the auto­mo­biles and fash­ions are clearly of the 1940s while the char­ac­ters employ the cell phones and inter­net of the 2000s. This is Miller’s home.

The Spirit sports an unusu­ally eclec­tic cast, with the unknown Gabriel Macht in the epony­mous role with much better-known stars Jack­son and Scar­lett Johans­son in sup­port­ing roles. The per­for­mances range from the dis­tracted (Sarah Paul­son as a good girl besot­ted with The Spirit) to the bor­der­line lunatic (hi, Sam!). One can hardly blame the actors, for surely they were at the mercy of the screen­play and Miller’s rookie coach­ing. Stana Katic is enter­tain­ing as Mor­gen­stern, a gosh-golly gee-whiz rookie cop that goose-steps from scene to scene like a sexy robot. ScarJo rocks horn­rimmed glasses like no bad girl before her, but it’s just plain uncom­fort­able to see her in Nazi fetish­wear and jackboots.

The Octo­pus is a mad sci­en­tist con­duct­ing all sorts of med­ical atroc­i­ties in the name of mutat­ing him­self to god­like pow­ers. He deems one of his mis­fired exper­i­ments as “just plain damn weird,” a phrase apro­pos of the movie itself. It’s oddly slap­stick, and often out­right silly. Unex­pect­edly, it’s much less vio­lent, or rather, gory, than 300 or Sin City. It’s also slightly more play­ful in nar­ra­tive terms; the Spirit’s noirish voiceover often brazenly breaks the fourth wall by speak­ing directly to the camera.

And finally, some trivia gleaned from the credits:

  • This comic geek thought I rec­og­nized a con­tri­bu­tion by fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Geof Dar­row (Hard Boiled and Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot), and I was proved cor­rect in the end credits.
  • The end cred­its them­selves, designed by Miller, are stunning.
  • Miller is also cred­ited for the sto­ry­boards, which must be some­thing to see.
  • Miller cameos as a decapi­ti­ated cop, the head of whom The Octo­pus wields as a weapon. He also appears in Sin City, Dare­devil and Robo­Cop 2, for which he wrote the screenplay.

Offi­cial movie site: www.mycityscreams.com

Buy the DVD and the book The Spirit: The Movie Visual Com­pan­ion from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Menace II Society

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Menace II Society movie poster

 

Let me just come out and say it: I utterly and totally loathed Men­ace II Soci­ety. The Dork Report’s 1/2 star rat­ing is reserved for true cin­e­matic crimes against human­ity, movies that I think the world would have been a bet­ter place had they not been made (zero stars are for those rare and spe­cial cases, beyond the pale, where bad trans­mutes into good, like the per­versely enjoy­able Plan 9 From Outer Space — read The Dork Report review). Of course, I’m a rel­a­tively priv­i­leged white boy from sub­ur­bia, so it’s going to be tricky for me to explain my pas­sion­ately neg­a­tive reac­tion to a movie about African Amer­i­cans trapped in racist, drug-infested Watts, South Cen­tral Los Ange­les. The cheap way out would be to claim I’m not the tar­get audi­ence, but that itself would be a kind of racist copout.

Menace II Society

The best way to explain how I feel about this movie is to com­pare it to two of the best works of fic­tion I’ve ever seen: Do the Right Thing (1989) and The Wire (2002–08). Men­ace II Soci­ety opens with stock footage of 1965 Watts riots, and then fast-forwards to Watts in 1993. It’s a cheap and crass stab at social rel­e­vance that only movies like Spike Lee’s mas­ter­piece Do the Right Thing have earned. I don’t know how much fac­tual or bio­graph­i­cal truth is in Men­ace II Soci­ety, but every­thing that fol­lows strikes me as exploita­tion; which is to say, the worst, most sen­sa­tion­al­ized depic­tions of drug cul­ture dra­ma­tized to scare the bejeezus out of sup­pos­edly civ­i­lized cin­ema goers. Do the Right Thing pre­sented one of the most com­plex views of racial ten­sion ever seen in the movies, but Men­ace II Soci­ety is a mere low­lights reel of relent­less vio­lence and deprav­ity that seemed to me to be racist itself. Caine (Tyrin Turner), O-Dog (Larenze Tate), and Tat (Samuel L. Jack­son), not a sin­gle char­ac­ter can speak a sin­gle sen­tence with­out at least three n-words and two f-bombs.

The Wire is one of the only TV series to approach the level of lit­er­a­ture, and like Do the Right Thing it counts race among its many deep themes. Many of its char­ac­ters are also under­priv­i­leged African Amer­i­cans on the wrong side of the law. But not once did I ever sense The Wire was exploita­tive or sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic in any way. Men­ace II Soci­ety barely deserves to be men­tioned in the same para­graph as The Wire, but I did note a very sim­i­lar scene in both: in the sec­ond sea­son of The Wire, Bodie and Sham­rock take a rare road trip out of Bal­ti­more and, unable to find any hip-hop on the radio, instead find them­selves lis­ten­ing to NPR’s A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion in baf­fled silence. Like­wise, the best scene in Men­ace II Soci­ety is of an African Amer­i­can fam­ily at home on Christ­mas Eve watch­ing It’s a Won­der­ful Life, and utterly unable to relate to or derive any plea­sure from it.

Menace II Society

Men­ace II Soci­ety (1993, New Line Cin­ema) is the debut film from twin broth­ers Albert and Allen Hughes, who would later go on to direct From Hell (2001), and com­pletely miss the point of the source mate­r­ial: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel. In direct con­trast to John Singleton’s sim­ply, clas­si­cally shot Boyz n the Hood (read The Dork Report review), Men­ace II Soci­ety is a slickly pol­ished pro­duc­tion (which, I believe, only con­tributes to its glam­or­iza­tion of the thug gangsta lifestyle). But it’s a clumsy film in other ways, with ter­ri­ble voiceover nar­ra­tion stu­pidly telling instead of show­ing. But it pays off in the end with the real­iza­tion of the only inter­est­ing device of the film: it’s nar­rated by a dead man.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.