Hey Gals, This is the Way

This blog thinks The Mandalorian is good. Good, not great. It's being over praised for very obvious reasons. As Mike Stoklosa of Red Letter Media has said, The Mandalorian is refreshingly 'not bad'. B+. Maybe we're just cynical and jaded. If Disney can really crank out a half dozen B+ Star Wars TV shows we'll be thrilled. 

In the season finale of The Mandalorian, Mando and his pals storm an Imperial battlecruiser. About halfway through we realized that four women* were kicking some serious Imperial butt. We thought cool. Then we thought, they wrote it this way without making a big deal about it. Here's four characters, they happen to be badass women, shooting** the ever living crap out of an Imperial battlecruiser. Also cool.

We have no idea what the writers were thinking. We don't know if they planned this all along, or, as they thought, why not make these characters women? Why not indeed?  The writers didn't pull a Kathleen Kennedy, that's for sure. This isn't liberal art. This isn't conservative art. No message, no points scored. It's just art. If John Favreau has any message at all, it's I'm not Kathleen Kennedy.

*Two Mandalorians, an assassin and a ranger.

**That was originally 'blowing'. Heh. 

Will's Red Letter

Sometimes you wakeup and got nuthin' to say. So you start typing and hope by the time you finish what you're typing your brain will get to where it needs to be and you can start putting together a well written and insightful post.

Nuthin'.

Oh there it is.

Red Letter Media is filming a series about their favorite Star Trek TNG episodes. We strongly suggest them, as we watch Mr. Plinkett's Star Wars Prequel reviews once a year as kind of a warning. One can learn a lot by watching people who actually understand movies take apart the work of a man who does not.* One can glean many creative insights from Red Letter Media. They're a big influence.

And so is Star Trek: TNG. During the summer of 1984 we'd stay up late and watch the old Trek on WPIX Channel 11. We were a fan of the original but ignored TNG for the first few seasons. A good thing actually, because the two seasons run by Gene Roddenberry totally sucked. Roddenberry pretty much just got the band back together, and they wrote episodes like it was 1967. The results were out of place, disastrous cringe-fests.  

Thing really got good during season three. One evening in 1990 we turned on the TV and saw was a bunch of people standing on the lip of a crater. This was the first episode in TNG's two part Best of Both Worlds, in which The Federation fights off a Borg invasion. We were hooked. But more importantly, we were inspired.

That was the moment, the spark across the sky. That's when we saw something we liked so much we wish we had written it. That's when we knew we wanted to write for a living. And so we do.

*George Lucas is a talentless pudge-boy who made an awful movie that was saved in editing by his wife and Richard Chew, who won and Oscar for his trouble. Lucas mostly stayed away from Empire and Jedi, which explains why they're so good. God bless Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand.

Happy Birthday George Lucas...

...We guess.

Once a year we watch the Red Letter Media reviews of the Star Wars prequels and suggest all aspiring writers do the same.

Now is a day for Pizza Rolls. Post in this webzone if you want a pizza roll.

We've noted with shame, from time to time, that when we first saw The Phantom Menace we were enchanted. We don't recall exactly when we decided the Prequels sucked, but know we went into the last movie hoping the series could be salvaged. It couldn't.

Happy birthday, Mr. Lucas. We shake our head in confusion, befuddlement, bewilderment, loathing, depression, sorrow-not anger, anger, more anger, tears, sadness.... 

What Will's (not) Watching

Star Trek-Picard: We didn't watch it, but Red Letter Media did:

The guys argue that Star Trek is being produced and written by people who don't watch Star Trek. Because it's 2020 and Hollywood is Woke, the show's writers are holding up a mirror to society. Hacks.

Gene Roddenberry had a vision.  Star Trek is a post-modern utopia. That's the point. Now, we can argue if that's good or bad, but that's the point. 

Tuesday Tally, Our other Favorite Comedy

We've already noted Red Letter Media's Re-View of Top Secret and our love for the film.

Here's a tally of our favorite lines:

-'Very well. Let me know if there is any change in his condition. He's dead.'
-'What does he want us to do now?'
'You idiot. Nigel's the traitor!'
-'...a moron, who knows only what he reads in the NY Post.'
-'Very well, this is Chevalier, Montage, Détente, Avant Guard, and Deja Vu...'
'Have we met somewhere before, Mssr?'

The George Lucas, The....*

Bad news on the Star Wars front.

This week we're up at the Stroock Northern Strategic Direction, Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Here in 1980 our grandmother took us to a special showing of Star Wars and later The Empire Strikes Back.

So we dug out a VCR and popped in the final VHS releases of Star Wars. You know the ones we mean, from 1994. These are the last version of the trilogy-untouched. Oh you can get DVDs of and stream Star Wars. But these are the Special Editions or versions tampered with by George Lucas is some other way.

These:

Well we have terrible news to report. The last VHS tapes of Star Wars are in terrible condition. Our own have done little but sit on a shelf for a few decades. Even so, the tapes are getting grainy, there are pops on screen and large swaths of Empire have darkened and are getting hard to see. Their just grainy old films now, it's like watching an episode of M.A.S.H.

We have worse news to report. Red Letter Media ** pointed this out and we shall do so too:

Read it and weep: 'final video release'. 

In case you think that's just poor wordsmanship, the video itself uses the word  'final' a few times. 

George Lucas wasn't kidding. 

Which is why he sucks.

*Get the gag, get a book.

**We strongly recommend watching the video at the link.

Re-review The Force Awakens

So we re-watched Star Wars the Force Awakens yesterday.

After seeing Rogue One, which we've previously noted we think is the second best Star Wars movie, we had forgotten all about the Force Awakens. Also we saw Red Letter Media's Half in the Bag review of the Force Awakens. Mike, Jay and Rich liked it so we wanted to give it another go.

Overall we'd give the Force Awakens a B. Half in the Bag called a 'soft reboot' and this seems about right.

A few thoughts:

-We have lots of character in The Force Awakens and the things they do are consistent and make sense.
-It's pretty obvious Rey is Luke Skywalker's daughter. They drop hints all over the place, yo.
-At first we wondered about the whole presentation of Kylo Ren, he seemed like an emotionally disturbed Millennial. But after seeing the Force Awakens again we like him more and more.
-Kylo Ren is irredeemable, right?
-Something bugged us about Han Solo in the Force Awakens and we finally figured it out. Go back and watch it again. Harrison Ford isn't playing Han Solo. He's playing Indiana Jones.
-We lie Rey, Finn and Po a lot.
-We loved the ending scene.

The Force Awakens also represents a clean break with prequels. Ok, there is one reference to the Sith, but that's it.

Thank god.

Star Wars: The Evolution of Thinking the Prequels Suck

The loyal but sadly misguided Marky Mark (please tell me you are actually Mark Wahlberg) made reference to something called Episode II in our previous post about the best scenes in the Star Wars universe.

Like all right-thinking, decent humans we loath the prequels. We loath George Lucas for retroactively fucking up Episodes IV, V, and VI (go on try to watch the scene where Vader kills the Emperor, I dare you).

George Lucas not only raped William Stroock's childhood Star Wars memories, he sold them to a Mexican narco-cartel who put them in a cheap Juarez brothel where they serve Carlos Slim and his fellow Yellow King cultists. Only Mathew McConaughy and Woody Harelson aren't coming to the rescue.

Time is a flat circle, indeed. [Is that Netzsche? Shut the fuck up-ed.]

I'll leave it to Red Letter Media to explain why these movies suck, and why George Lucas should be deported back to Mexico [back? -ed].

Today we'd like to confess something.

We saw Star Wars: George Lucas Sucks his own Ass [you mean The Phantom Menace ?-ed] the day it came out. We wish we could say we thought it sucked, or sucked George Lucas' Ass [what is it with you this morning? -ed]. But this is not the case.

We were enthralled, enraptured, enchanted. We felt our imagination had been recaptured. George Lucas held us by the fire and subtly undid the back of our dress and we felt his hands on our shoulders gently but instantly pressing down...[dude, you really need to get laid -ed].

We loved the Phantom Menace.

A few days after our mother-in-law died, and needing to get away, my sister-in-law, her husband and I saw Attack of the Clones the midnight it opened. We thought it was long [oh I bet you did, homo -ed] but liked it. After all, there were a lot of things in there we never thought we'd see, like Marky Mark's giant Vietnam like battle, Yoda in the light saber duel, etc.

Now, we're not sure what happened between 2002 and 2005, but we know we went into Revenge of the Sith thinking 'Ok, one good movie can save this entire effort'. We came out of the theater thinking, 'Alas it is not to be'.

Any questions? [Yes, when do you get the reassignment surgery? -ed]