DVD REVIEW: D.E.B.S.

Premise: "D.E.B.S." is a secret government organization that uses a code hidden in the SAT to recruit beautiful college-age girls as master spies. Under the guise of an elite private academy, the "D.E.B.S." agents carry out their missions in form-fitting "schoolgirl" uniforms (yes, plaid skirts and kneesocks just like your thinking) and battle supervillian Lucy Diamond, who is also a stunning college-aged young lady (didn't ya just know it?) When a raid goes bad, top D.E.B.S. recruit Amy confronts Lucy solo and makes three amazing discoveries: A.) Lucy is a lesbian. B.) So is she. And C.) They've both fallen madly in love at first sight. Heroine and villianess thus begin a secret courtship of covert hanky-panky behind the backs of their innevitably-dissaproving respective "sides."

Having read that premise, what kind of movie are you imagining "D.E.B.S." to be? What sort of audience do you guess it was made for? Surely, based on the above description, and the obvious market appeal for gun-toting lipstick-lesbians in fetishized schoolgirl costumes, you'd be totally within reason to conclude that "D.E.B.S." is softcore porn, another "skinemax" offering from the Seduction Cinema crew with Misty Mundae scissor-kicking her way through another glib spoof of genre film.

You'd be totally within reason to conclude this... but you'd be wrong.

What a delightful little surprise, indeed, that this film is almost a full-fledged opposite-number to the kind of straight-to-DVD masturbatory aide that it's premise would suggest. "D.E.B.S.", instead, unfolds as a sweet-natured PG13 teen comedy. It's "sex" scenes are so innocent and chaste that, were the participants a heterosexual couple, it could easily achieve a PG rating and a rotating spot on the Family Channel with the deletion of a few minor curse words. It's characters may indeed be costumed as objects of male fantasy, but the story they inhabit and the gags strung around it are aimed squarely at girls the approximate age of the heroines, and maybe younger. It's visibly low-budget, and it's "comedy" renders the "Austin Powers" cycle a paragon of subtlety by comparison, yes... but damn if it isn't infectiously smile-inducing.

Equally remarkable alongside the film's eschewing of explicit showiness in it's lesbian romance angle is it's wish-dream lack of concern with the "lesbian" part of the equation: Few of the characters are ever surprised at Amy's outing, and those that are express such as a momentary "huh, how 'bout that?" manner and move on. At no point in the film are we given the indication that anyone is really bothered or even especially interested that Amy's love-interest is another woman, (save for Amy's bewildered former boyfriend, who pronounces the predicament "kinda hot,") the sum-total of their objections are that Lucy Diamond is, y'know, their mortal enemy.

I'm not, you may be aware, usually prone to talking up a movie based on it's possible use a tool of social-benefit, but y'know something... there are a lot of gay teenage girls and young women out there. Many of them are confused and even scared, despite all our much-touted strides toward tolerance, I can't help thinking that they may not exactly be filled with reassurance or confidence at their own normalcy or ability to lead happy lives by, say, the dark nihilism of "Bound," the "lesbo-show-for-the-guys" mentality of "Girls Gone Wild" or the gloomy soap-opera of "The L-Word." (And how do you think young gay males see their futures as "related" by the films of Gregg Araki or David DeCocteau?)

But here is a movie, as frothy and silly as any "normal" romantic comedy, as lighthearted and youth-appropriate as "Legally Blonde" or "Mean Girls," where the lesbian characters are presented as just a cute, more-than-a-little-ditzy couple. There's no lumbering monsters of intolerance to slay, no horrible hateful society to overcome. In the world of "D.E.B.S.," the idea that there could be anything "wrong" with Amy or Lucy's sexual preference just doesn't seem to exist. So yeah, it's a fantasy. But it's a fantasy worth working toward, and it's a fantasy that I'm willing to bet a good number of young women would like to see made real... or at least as real as a jokey movie they can rent. Now, here it is.

Oh... speaking of fantasies made real (and in case you be misled that this film has nothing to offer a male audience) one of the sidekick D.E.B.S. is played by Devon Aoki, late of "Sin City." Miho, "the one with the swords." Yeah, now you remember. Anyway, she's playing a sexaholic recruit who, while Asian, is apparently French and speaks with a "Fringlish" accent.

Yeah, you read right: Asian goddess, schoolgirl uniform, French accent. Guys, if you need to take a minute or two on that one, I understand :)

FINAL RATING: 7/10

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REVIEW: Lords of Dogtown

Ever since "Boogie Nights," the default arc for recent-history biopics has been as follows: The hero(es) begin living lives of utopian happiness in the "carefree" 1970s, and come crashing down once their various lifestyles are tainted by the stain of 1980s capitalist "greed." Previously, the "empty" hedonism of the Disco Age was shown as the "dark finale" of the "peaceful" 60s, as seen in the 80s fantasy musical "The Apple" where 60s-style folk singers lead a rebellion against a facist Disco-themed world government. That may have worked before, but to a generation for whom the "flower children" have grown up into "the system," it just no longer washes.

And so we have the "Boogie Nights" model: The sex, drugs, glitter-fueld and responsibility-free 70s are the days of wine and roses, and if only they could've gone on forever instead of being cut down by recessions, Reaganomics and AIDS. The heroes are happily living out perpetual adolescence, only to be "cruelly" smacked down by sudden and horrible adulthood. How perfectly this resonates with a certain bulk of "Generation X," so often raised themselves in utopian extended childhoods by hippie-turned-yuppie Boomer parents only to be shocked upon entry into the real world, has everything to do with why the model keeps getting used.

"Lords of Dogtown" tries, with varying success, to press into this model the story of the rise of modern skateboard culture through the eyes of the "Z-Boys" skate pioneers in Venice Beach, California. The characters and rough outline are sketched from an excellent documentary from a few years back, "Dogtown & Z-Boys," which should be considered required viewing if you wish to understand a single thing that happens in this film and are not already intimately familiar with the Venice Beach skate culture.

Briefly: The "Z-Boys" are Venice Beach surfer teens who, upon the invention of eurythane wheels, learn to "surf" on concrete with skateboards. Their feats of acrobatic derring-do turn skateboarding from a niche non-sport into a cultural phenomenon, but it also turns them into marketable celebrities. Eventually endorsement deals, shifting loyalty and the pressures of grownup life destroy their innocence, break the group up, contribute to the dreaded "commercialization" of the skate culture and yadda yadda yadda...

Meanwhile, the "Boogie Nights"-mandated soundtrack of classic rock hits blares on over the soundtrack, and eventually the film becomes and endless swirl of skateboard terminology and name-dropping. Certainly, those with a pre-existing fascination for the sport and this formative era may indeed find all this fascinating, and I enjoy a good show of skateboard stunts as much as the next guy... but it's finally just hard to care about much that happens here.

Which is not to say that the material can't be made interesting. On the contrary, writer Stacy Peralta (one of the founding Z-Boys) directed the "Dogtown" documentary which was riveting because it featured the real participants in the action, and their nostalgia was infectious. Here, with actors in the roles and a narrative drama-structure imposed, it's just hard to develop a lot of interest.

Yes, very sad and very happy things happen to the characters, but it just can't escape the problem that a story of a niche sport going mainstream is not in itself really very interesting to watch. It must have been fascinating to live through, and the documentary allowed the audience to experience that. The film, while earnest and made with great sincerity, just cannot accomplish the same thing. It's like watching people's vacation videos: No matter how interesting a place they may have traveled, the footage almost never conveys what it must have been like to be there.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

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REVIEW: Cinderella Man

Let me get this out of the way first: Now that the "superhero" movie is a full-on part of the mainstream Hollywood genre quilt, it's time to reconsider the use of titles that end with the word "Man" for 'normal' movies. Yes, yes, I know that it's what the actual guy was nicknamed, but still... even having seen the film, I can't hear the uber-serious trailer naration solemnly intone "Russell Crowe IS... Cinderella Man" and not immediately picture some bizzaro-world cinematic image of Crowe, clad in some Neal Adams imagining of a pink ball gown and magical power-granting glass slippers leaping toward the screen amidst a pounding Hans Zimmer hero theme announcing the arrival of Cinderella Man to strike fear into the hearts of similarly-costumed evildoers. But that's just me.

And hey, y'know... Cinderella Man might even be a pretty amusing superhero in his own right, no? Think about it: His powers could only last until midnight, his car/jet/motorcycle/whatever could transform into a pumpkin, the Fairy Godmother could hang around for sage advice like Shazam does for Captain Marvel... hell, the whole secret-identity thing is even already right there in the story!

...or not. Aaaaaaanyway, regarding the actual movie:

You've probably seen the trailers, and you've probably heard the buzz, so then you probably already know the pitch: True-life story of how over-the-hill, down-and-out prizefighter James J. Braddock's amazing comeback was taken as an inspiration to fellow poor common-folk during the Great Depression. "Seabiscuit" for boxing. "Million Dollar Biscuit." You also, thusly, are aware that it's directed by Ron Howard, who's natural knack for telling these kinds of stories is immediately in it's favor even as his occasional tendency to overdose on sentimentality often makes such stories precariously-balanced as actual films.

Everyone's "genre acumen" is different, but most American filmgoers by now generally "know" what to expect from inspirational Great Depression movies: Gray, high-contrast exteriors and hazy, muddy hued interiors that serve to make the film look "authentic" (read: reminiscient of grainy photographs of the era that form our only remaining link to it,) plucky proletariates pontificating pugnaciously in exaggerated ethnic dialects (so that we remember that this takes place in the time before Italians, Irishmen and WASPs were grouped singularly as "white guys.")

Also making their mandatory appearance are cigars, breadlines, riots, unionizing, begrudging charity-accepting, kids playing in alleys, throwaway dialogue about shantytowns and Commies for the history teachers in the audience, and LOTS of tough-looking actors in wool caps modeling five o'clock shadows while stomping "determinedly" from place to place. And since it's additionally a boxing movie, you can bet the film remembers to meet it's quota of slow-motion, slow-claps, hushed crowds rising to their feet, bar patrons going wild during the radio broadcast and my personal favorite: Press conferences edited to the rythym of flashbulbs.

Just like no one is surprised anymore when a hand-held camera is employed in the midst of a war movie, no one should be surprised that the above genre-staples make up the bulk of "Cinderella Man's" technical side. What's surprising, and frequently delightful, is how expertly Howard has used nearly every trick in the Depression movie book to such full effect: Everything about the look and feel of the film is so cozy and comfortable that it immediately becomes "real" in a way that a more offbeat historical biopic couldn't be. It makes you feel like you've "been here" before, via the watching of previous films about and from the era, and in no time nearly all lingering vestiges of movie-ness vanish; Notions of soundstages and Russell Crowe give way to Madison Square Garden and Jim Braddock, and we're off to the races.

Those who take joy in pointing out that Howard is no kind of cinematic innovator consistently miss the point: What he is is a cinematic refiner. While the vanguards of the "film school generation" (sing it if you know it: Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas, Coppola, etc.) that shepherded his entry into the directing game are one-by-one settling into their "grownup" roles as auteurs, Howard remains Hollywood's ultimate sorceror's apprentice: The director-as-professional-student. His best films unspool as the sum-total of lessons learned about the genres, styles and techniques he works in; and "Cinderella Man" plays like his Master's Thesis on Depression-era underdog tales.

In the leads, Howard has assembled a top-tier cast that are all so profoundly well-suited to their roles that the very phrase "on the nose" seems far too loose to apply: Renee Zellwegger inhabits period dress and spits out lines with poverty-class spunk with a naturalism lately found only in British starlets. Paul Giamatti, always the best of character-actor sidekicks (even in films where he stars,) who needs only the proper hat to instantly "belong" in any historical era. And of course Russell Crowe, who's name immediately leaps to mind for the role of a hard-bitten Depression-era boxer who gains a punishing left hook from doing shipyard work one-handed for a damn good reason. If these folks weren't already such well-known talents, one could easily be forgiven the assumption that the filmmakers had cast the roles strictly on who most perfectly looked the part and got great actors as a bonus.

As with much of the film's technical mechanics, the actual arc of Braddock's story will come as little surprise to anyone who's seen an underdog boxing movie before; the fact that the tale has all the right beats of mythic familiarity is the reason a film was made out of it. This isn't a film that wants to surprise or shock from scene to scene, it mainly wants to direct our attention to the manner in which largely "innevitable" sequences play out: Instead of trying to turn the various decisions Braddock makes and the direction in which they drive the film into a succession of twists and "think about it" gotchas, we're invited to pause and consider the logic and personal morality that informs them.

(A lone, and I think necessary, exception to this occurs early in the 3rd act, in a scene where Braddock is shown fight footage of heavyweight champ Max Baer killing an opponent in the ring in order to discourage him from facing Baer for the title. As others avert their eyes, Braddock insists, stone-faced, on seeing the footage again and again. At first it appears the film is indulging in a moment of "Billy Jack"-style "this-guy-is-a-badass"-ery, but the eventual payoff is far more revealing and interesting. Trust me on that.)

The film does sport one curious thematic decision, bound to be it's most controversial element and possibly it's only serious semblance of a flaw, in it's presentation of heavyweight champ Max Baer as a showboating sadist. It's understandable that the film would require it's only human "villain" (the real "heavy" is, of course, the Great Depression itself.. but as Braddock says in the film "you can't fight stuff you can't see") to be a first-rate heel in order to properly offset the almost overwhelming goodness of it's hero. (Jim Braddock is the sort of biopic hero who "must" really have been like this, because no screenwriter would ever invent a character of such Job-like moral resolve and expect to be taken seriously.) But some have questioned, not without cause, if the Howard etc. have gone too far in turning Baer, a colorful figure with his own movie-ready tales of sports heroism behind him before the events of this film, into a more-or-less one dimensional bad guy.

Let it be said of the character that the filmmakers at least demonstrate a working awareness of the historical Baer's more nuanced qualities: The Jewish Star of David he had emblazzoned on his boxing trunks following a career-making takedown of a German champ touted by the emerging Nazi government as the embodiment of Aryan superiority remains intact (if not ever made an issue of) in the film, as does Baer's noted preference for celebrity and public-spectacle over actual pugilism (he wanted to be an actor, and eventually starred in several well-regarded boxing movies.) And actor Craig Beirko does a fine job of imbuing the character with flickers of greater depth than afforded by the screenplay or his relatively limited screentime.

NOTE: A few years back, Baer's match against the German champ was made into an HBO movie called "Joe & Max," which is an overlooked sports film in it's own right and makes a fine companion to "Cinderella Man." It's available on DVD.

What will remain the primary bone of contention over the character is the film's imagining of Baer taking a certain sadistic pleasure in having "killed" two opponents, the "extreme" end of his well-documented class-clown antics. Baer's real-life son, Max Baer Jr. (yes, Jethro from "Beverly Hillbillies") contends that his father's antics actually resulted from guilt at having taken a life in the ring. For me, it comes down to this: Giving more nuance to Baer as a character would probably have made "Cinderella Man" a better film, but choosing not to has not made it less of a good film.

Minor issues (issue, really) aside, this is a movie thats every bit as good as it so earnestly wants to be, and often times a lot better. Far and away the first solid awards-season contender of the Summer cycle, and very much worth your time. Reccomended.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

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REVIEW: The Longest Yard (2005)

The original "Longest Yard" is one of those fun 70s comedies pitched sharply at the angry young-male audience which is today somewhat obscure because it was made in the 70s, when angry young-male films still sported the "harsh" vocabularly and visual sensibility OF angry young-males, and thus is now unable to be replayed into classichood on TBS. You may, or may not, remember that the film starred Burt Reynolds as an imprisoned former NFL star roped into assembling a team of fellow convicts to play an exhibition game against the prison guards.

Reynolds, viewed as he was at that point in his career as an icon of the old-fashioned alpha-manhood which was visibly dying out in the popular culture of the time, was perfectly cast at the time, and the film (while imperfect) struck a certain cynical chord: The prison as a microcosm of an increasingly socially-regimented (what would come to be called "politically correct") modern society, guards as the ultimate image of The Authorities, and prisoners (embodied by Reynolds) as the rugged American individualist of old, struggling against both to retain manhood and the last semblance of honor.

The remake has Adam Sandler in the Reynolds role, and moves the story to the present where a "rugged iconoclast" like ex-Quarterback Paul Crewe would be even MORE out of place and, thusly, the story should probably be even MORE cynical, bleak and harsh about it's comedy. Especially considering how much more... "dark" our collective view of prison is after "OZ." But, then, you knew that wasn't going to happen: Despite the decidedly R-rated "sophistication" and sensibilities of the average 13 to 18 year-old audience that Sandler caters to, they're barred from R-rated movies.

Thus, we here have a film set in a prison, with a cast that is collective supposed to range from 30 to about 80 years-old, featuring "prison bitches," billy-club beatings, and a football game featuring steroid-juiced guards versus a gaggle of psychos, arsonists and thugs... thats been forcibly nuetered down to only the most broad implications of it's real story and events. In other words: Here's another "PG-13" comedy that's really only in theaters as an infomercial for it's own "UNCUT AND UNRATED!!!!" DVD double-dip six months from now.

Drummed out of the NFL for alleged point-shaving, Crewe is jailed after taking out his frustrations on the expensive car of the haughty society gal who'd claimed him as a trophy husband. The warden, (James Cromwell,) wants him to get the cons together as a test-team against his semi-pro Guard squad. At first he's just going with the flow, but wouldn't you know that Crewe finds identity and redemption in turning his motely crew into athletes. And would you be surprised if I told you that, at the height of this redemption, Crewe is suddenly faced with a choice that not only mirrors his past indiscretions but might even enable him to atone for them? Didn't think so.

The biggest issue here is that the filmmakers seem convinced that EVERY sports film automatically must be eventually uplifting and heroic... and thats against the nature of the material here, which is only partially-heroic but mostly belongs in the realm of angry cynicism: The whole edgy appeal of the prison movie genre, the graying of societal structures and concepts of "good" and "evil" in an entire community of criminals, is swallowed up in a structure that wants to be (the teen-boy comedy version of) sentimental and life-affirming. It just doesn't fit: You can't make "Saving Private Ryan" out of "M*A*S*H*".

This isn't to say that it's not funny, it is, but completely forgettably so: There's nothing here that sticks, not even when things start to get all "serious" in the last act. Most of the time, the film is underrcut by the "mandates" of being "an Adam Sandler film" instead of "a film with Adam Sandler": Fat jokes, gay jokes, genital-slapstick and the obligatory Rob Schneider "you can do it!" cameo all show up to distract and derail. Reynolds is also here, now aging gracefully and playing a character who must be pushing 70 but still looking more like an NFL player than Sandler can manage to, another BIG flaw.

Not bad, not even awful... but just not much at all, sadly.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

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About cloning, movies and cloning movies...

Been watching the news these last few days? I sure have. Been seeing a lot of John McCain on TV? Me too.

McCain is on the tube these days for two big reasons: Showtime has a movie about him, "Faith of Our Father," coming out; and he's the big-brain behind this "fillibuster compromise" business. The big-picture translation of all this television convergence around the media's favorite Republican not named Schwarzenegger is, of course, that the race for the 2008 GOP presidential nominee is ON in a big way, and McCain wants to be IT.

More power to him, I say. I like McCain. Nice fellow. He's completely, utterly wrong on the censorship issue, but aside from that I like the guy.

The fillibuster fight has been one of the more unfortunate political spectacles of recent months, as it's mostly boiled down to the following: The Democrats holding up the vote a smattering of judicial nominees via fillibuster, a somewhat underhanded use of Senate loopholes to get their way. The Republicans responded with the threat of using their own somewhat underhanded use of Senate loopholes to get their way. Just because Democracy works doesn't mean it's always pleasant to watch. In any case, McCain got together 7 of his guys and 7 of the other guys, enough votes to lay a smackdown on either side, and hammered out a deal by which the GOP agrees to jettison 7 out of 10 of the contested Bush-nominee judges, and the Dems agree that they can keep using the fillibuster but ONLY in "extraordinary circumstances."

Naturally, no one in the Senate or media would be crass enough to actually use the word "Abortion" in any of this, but thats exactly what this is ALL about. The whole of Washington is still largely convinced that it was the combined forces of anti-gay and anti-choice "values voters," (aka "The Religious Right") that won the day for the 2nd Bush term, and tops on the list of the "values" gang's wishlist is the dream of Dubya appointing an anti-choice justice to the Supreme Court. Everybody got that? Anyone who tries to tell you that any of the other Conservative got-to issues have got jack to do with this is misinformed or blowing smoke up your tush: Bush (and, by extrapolation, his likely judicial picks) is in terms of economics the equal of any Democrat on government spending, and he stands to the left of Hillary Clinton on illegal immigration. The GOP agenda right now is almost-entirely devoted to pleasing religious "conservatives". To any of y'all who consider yourself old-school, mainline, small-government conservatives, the GOP does not care much about you right now.

So, then, the judicial fight is all about judges who may or may not bring religious fundamentalism into their decisionmaking, and with the McCain "deal" the anti-choice side basically loses this round big time. Anyone with political saavy or an inside track in this can spell it for you: "extraordinary circumstances" translates nicely to "the moment Bush nominates a 'pro-life' judge to the Supreme Court." I'm not telling anyone how they should feel about this, but me, I'm exhaling a big sigh of relief. If you've been reading this site for awhile, you're not surprised.

Anyhow, that was the start of a really bad week for the so-called "religious right." Gut-check #2 came today, as the House passed a bill to expand embryonic stem cell research. You remember embryonic stem-cell research, right? It's the bold new field of medical research that scientists strongly suspect may hold the secret to curing all kinds of massive health problems, currently under severe restriction in the U.S. (thus leading us to fall rapidly behind much of Europe and Asia in terms of this science) because the president and the ideological fundamentalists with which he keeps company believe that life begins at conception. Remember that? Well, the House has voted, largely across party-lines, to strip away much of his restrictive ban. Bush has threatened a veto, which would be his first. CNN has details here:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/05/24/stem.cells/index.html

Now, I wouldn't dream of suggesting that holding back beneficial medical research for everyone in the name of some people's personal religious beliefs is at all wrong or grotesquely un-American, but to my mind we should really be level and fair about this: If we can hold up medical science because they believe embryos might have souls, where can I fill out a petition to ban all logging and construction in the pacific northwest because the woodlands there might be the home of Bigfoot? (and before you zip on down the "comments" button, yes, I do in fact believe in God. And Bigfoot.)

The terms neither side wants to use in regards to the stem-cell issue is "cloning." Most of the stem-cell scientists agree that the eventual easiest and cleanest way to get them would be to clone embryonic-stage cells to harvest stem cells en masse, (it's called "theraputic cloning") but as this would involve the dreaded "human cloning" notion it's still under heavy ban because, um... well, because cloning is "spooky" and makes people think of mad-scientists and bad movies. And speaking of bad movies...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/trailers

...into the cloning fray comes the latest from Michael Bay, a "serious" Science Fiction film called "The Island." Essentially a complete knockoff of a forgotten 70s scifi-paranoia stinker called "Parts: The Clonus Horror," here we've got a film where an eeeeeevil corporation is keeping copies of the rich and famous on an island so they can chop them up for parts as needed. This is, of course, a Michael Bay film after all and the trailers make it abundantly clear that this is mainly the setup to get a cast full of otherwise-talented actors into car chases, always right around sunset.

But hey, I'm sure that "The Island" will be met by the American people with rationality and calm, and that the country certainly will understand that islands full of xeroxed Ewan McGregors getting vivisected is exactly the opposite of what theraputic cloning entails, and that the opportunistic Religious "Right" will definately not invoke the name of this film whenever they try to hold back the medicines which could one day save MY life, or yours, or your loved ones. Right?

I mean... wherever we fall on this issue, the majority of us are intelligent enough NOT to derive our socio-political beliefs from Michael Bay movies... aren't we?

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Time Magazine's new Top 100 list

Time Magazine got it's main film critics, Richard Schickle and Richard Corliss, together to do yet another one of those "Top 100 Films" lists. By this point, these usually aren't all that interesting, as you're mostly just going to see the same 95 "mandatory classics" crop up alongside a sampling of 5-or-so "offbeat" picks over and over again. But this time, using their own subjective criteria and eschewing numerical rankings, Schickle and Corliss have come up with one of the better lists I've seen in a long while.

Check it out here:
http://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/the_complete_list.html

The usual "shocker" with these is what gets left off the list, here the pleasant surprises are what got ON there: "Aguirre," "Drunken Master II," "The Fly," "Lord of The Rings," "Brazil," "Once Upon a Time in The West" and "A Touch of Zen" all made the cut, which is pretty darn cool if you were to ask me.

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REVIEW: Star Wars - Episode III: Revenge of The Sith

Minor SPOILERS follow.

How do you do this?

How do you find SOMETHING new to say about "Star Wars" that no other reviewer, especially on the web, has said before? By now, everything... every experience of every type of fan of every age of every concievable style of "entry" to the series has been stated, crystalized, dismantled and analyzed to the point of pure repetition.

Yes, the original SW was the film that changed everything. It created the modern film world we now occupy, it turned scifi/fantasy into THE blockbuster genre, and so on and so forth. Is there anyone left who doesn't already realize this? That isn't already sick of hearing it? The Joseph Campbell connection? The Buddhist influence? Is there really nothing left to say about "Star Wars," the defining film of my entire generation, other than to simply review the "last" installment and then walk away?

I'm afraid so. The fact is, Star Wars: The Phenomenon had already been picked to the bones of all it's deeper meanings, ramifications, etc. long before the mid-1990s rolled around and brought with it the lamentable "Special Editions," in which series creator George Lucas literally hacked the soul out of his creation in what now seems like nothing less than ritual slaughter fortelling the disaster of the Prequels.

And since then, it's all been downhill. The Prequels have been an unmitigated calamity, Lucas threatens to wreck the originals even more in the future, and now even as Episode III finally arrives to give us the first/last word on Vader, the Universe and everything not even the greatest filmmaking effort of all time (which Ep3 most certainly is not) could not change what now seems to have been the unhappy ending we've been on course for since Greedo fired first: What used to be the lynchpin franchise of sf/f filmmaking has toppled from Cinema Olympus and is now limping to an all-to-mortal close. The only thing left to say is goodbye.

So then, we come to Episode III, and it's my sad duty to report to you that while this is indeed far and away the very best of the Prequel Trilogy, that's still not to say that it's "good." All of the things that were "good" in Eps 1 and 2; the effects, the action scenes, the art design, are all still good. All the stuff that was bad; the dialogue, the pacing, the characters, the script, the plot, the continuity, thats all still bad. Ep3 works better than it's predecessors for no better reason than that it contains "more" of the good and "less" of the bad by volume. So, while we still have a pretty sorry excuse for a "Star Wars" movie, we also have a good-enough excuse for a summer action entry. At this point, thats all even the most fervent fans can realistically hope for.

What's most refreshing about Ep3, in comparison to the other prequels, is the enjoyable pace and which it moves: It has a lot of ground to cover, does so with great efficiency, and only gets boring in small spots. In fact, this strength on it's part probably hurts the whole notion of the Prequel Trilogy more than anything: EVERYTHING major plotwise that has occured over the arduous first and second prequels is either re-capped, re-staged or discarded as unimportant here, and essentially the process renders "Phantom Menace" and "Attack of The Clones" as largely pointless in the long run. Anakin Skywalker's "fall" happens here based entirely on events that happen within this one film, with the BAREST mention of anything thats come before. The whole "important" arc of his character happens here, and as a result our prior adventures with him now seem to have just been marking time. Death of his mother in 2? Promise to free all slaves in 1? Nope, here it's a reccuring nightmare about an entirely new tragedy that mainly leads to the Dark Side. Those lingering mysteries about, say, Sifo Dyas? Apparently not worth answering.

What works are the action scenes, the big-scale sequences of laser-rifles and lightsabres. And even these, while impressive, are strictly "pretty good" for the modern action canon: The big scale fantasy battles just can't clear the bar as raised by the now-completed LOTR films, and the saber-duels, while a lot of fun, are starting to look just this side of "so what?" after "Hero" and even some of the more stylish moments of "Kill Bill." Often, Lucas has devoted so much time to the dancing details of his elaborate digital backdrops that the action scenes become confusing jumbles of bouncing pixels. The big final duel between Anakin and Ob-Win, set on a planet of boiling lava, packs the expected visual punch thankfully... so long as niether of them are talking.

The dialogue... oh, the dialogue. If you thought Ep2's romantic dialogue was tin-eared and trite, just get a load of the musings on political theory on display here. Congratulations, "The Interpreter," you no longer sport the dopiest exchanges over action versus diplomacy in any film this year. It's expected that this stuff bogs down the senate scenes, but for it to become the base-argument for the big lava-world sabre fight fans have been so eager to see is a bad decision squared.

But, dammit... it's not all that bad. "Star Wars" is fallen, yes, but that happened waaay back in 1997 with the special editions and it can't be laid entirely on this film. It all ends with a whimper, not a bang, but it's worth seeing overall.. and yes, that last shot is pretty killer.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

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