The Screengrab : the clone wars

Fantastic Fest Review: “Fanboys”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I think I’ve mentioned this a time or twelve here, but unlike my colleague Andrew Osborne, I don’t have the Star Wars gene. Sure, I loved the movies as a kid – maybe not quite as much as the Planet of the Apes series or anything with Bigfoot in it – but they never became an inextricable part of my life essence and I definitely wasn’t waiting in some smelly tent for Episode I back in 1999. If we’re playing “Star Wars vs. Star Trek,” Kirk, Spock and the gang win out with me every time. So I wouldn’t appear to be part of the target audience for Fanboys, the long-awaited story of four geeks and a gal who take a road trip to Skywalker Ranch in order to be the first to see The Phantom Menace.

Having said that – and despite all the delays, reshoots and controversies over plot points that dogged the movie in recent months – Fanboys proves to be an enjoyable ride for the most part. If you’ve followed the behind-the-scenes machinations, you know the set-up: It is 1998, and lifelong Star Wars geek Linus (Chris Marquette) has terminal cancer. (This is the part the studio didn’t like, but after an outcry from fanboy nation, it is restored.) Along with fellow Force enthusiasts Hutch (Dan Fogler), Windows (Jay Baruchel) and estranged best friend Eric (Sam Huntington), Linus sets out in a van to accomplish the one thing he wants to do before he dies: see the long-awaited first prequel to the Star Wars trilogy. (As an aside, and without giving away whether or not he accomplishes his goal – imagine this is your dying wish and the movie in question turns out to be the freakin’ Phantom Menace. Ah well, at least it wasn’t The Clone Wars.) Road trip hijinx galore ensue, including a pit stop in Austin to pick up top secret intel on Lucas’s fortress from Ain’t It Cool News ubergeek Harry Knowles, a night in jail that will have you rethinking your whole approach to prison pooping, and a rumble at a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas. There are cameos galore, including actors from the original trilogy, Seth Rogan in multiple roles and even the Shat himself, William Shatner.

Stylistically, Fanboys is sort of a mesh between the Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow sensibilities (Smith has a cameo and Apatow oversaw the reshoots and enlisted many of his regulars), but its secret weapon is co-screenwriter Ernest Cline, who has absorbed every ounce of nerdy minutiae from the past 30 years and deploys his vast store of useless knowledge for both punchlines and poignancy. Although Fogler still strikes me as a poor man’s Jack Black, the core cast is engaging, particularly Kristen Bell as the one girl who’ll put up with the geeks.

My main problem with Fanboys is that I wish it had actually been made ten years ago (as per Cline’s original plan), before geek culture became so pervasive and satisfied with itself. After another decade's worth of prequels, merchandising and ubiquitous references, I don't care if I never hear about Yoda, Chewie or Ewoks ever again. In a way, though, that's beside the point. Star Wars is the secret language of these characters – the way they always communicated. In that respect, it's no different than if the movie had been about, say, terminally ill Cubs fans taking a trip to see their team win their first World Series in 100 years – they'd just talk about Ernie Banks and “Let’s play two” instead of Darth Vader and “May the Force be with you.” The story is really about the friendship, the journey and the laughs along the way, and on that level it works even if you don't give a shit whether or not Greedo shot first.

Related:
Fanboys on the March
Fanboys vs. Darth Weinstein

Entertainment Weakly: Attacking EW’s Defense of The Clone Wars

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:21:00 GMT

Okay, I realize it’s dumb to get annoyed by articles in entertainment magazines, but I do write for The Screengrab...and isn’t public venting what the InterTubes are all about? So allow me to respond to Jeff Jensen’s defense of George Lucas and The Clone Wars in the current issue of the usually somewhat less annoying Entertainment Weekly (which at least had the good sense to give the feature-length animated infomercial in question an F). Bemoaning the aforementioned F, the poor box office showing of The Clone Wars and general fanboy discontent with Lucas, columnist Jensen writes, “Missing from the overheated bashing of The Clone Wars was the crucial point that it was made for kids, not the grown-ups for whom the original trilogy remains (ridiculously) sacred.”

Um...okay. Because Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were edgy Scandinavian Dogme 95 films made for grad students and aging Cannes jurists, right? That same "for kids!" argument has been used to defend The Phantom Menace, the Elmo-fication of Sesame Street and the general dumbing down of family entertainment from the time I actually was a kid ‘til now: hey, chill out, Grandpa...it’s okay if insert TV show or movie here is shallow, poorly written and generally dimwitted. It’s for kids!

Now, it’s not that everything I watched as a child of the ‘70s was primo high quality Art. I though Welcome Back Kotter was the height of urbane, sophisticated wit in my formative years, and was shocked to discover how incredibly crappy the program seemed when I caught a stray episode a few years back.

But Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back hold up (and, okay, we can argue later about Return of the Jedi). I may not be as goofy-nerdy-crazy about them now as I was in my pre-pubescent geekery, but I can still appreciate the craftsmanship that hooked me as a child. Yet more important than sheer craftsmanship is the lack of condescension in those earlier films. Lucas took his storytelling seriously then: much of his audience may have been youthful, but he didn’t treat us like kids. He took his goofy, made-up characters and the goofy, made-up world they lived in as seriously as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis or J.K. Rowling all took theirs, without mugging for his young audience like a birthday party clown.

In The Clone Wars, a character refers to Jabba the Hutt’s son as “Stinky.” That’s not dumb because I’m an adult. It’s just dumb. It breaks the fourth wall. It breaks the reality of the storytelling universe, because it’s a cheap, easy, “hip” reference from our world, not the fictional world of the story. And even kids who may like that schtick today (a small number, judging by the film’s box office results) will realize it’s dumb when they get a little older. Nobody has to defend the Harry Potter-verse by reminding adults that, hey, it’s for kids! Adults like Harry Potter DESPITE the fact it’s made for kids...they like it because it’s good.

Later in his article, Jensen informs us that, in addition to thinking aging hipsters (and, I guess, kids) shouldn’t expect quality from kid stuff, we should also realize “Star Wars is a stream of content – books, comic books, toys, micro-cartoons, videogames, DVDs, and, soon, a TV series. This new generation sees no distinction between movies and their merchandise, and that’s just fine with them.”

Which means today’s kids must be dumb as a sack of hammers, except Jensen then goes on to elucidate that today’s biggest movie franchise (Harry Potter) is a “literary franchise [accessory].” Which, as far as I can tell, has no meaning whatsoever nor relation to all the kids out there who actually CAN tell the difference between a certain work of art that moved their souls and, say, a Harry Potter toothbrush from Wal-Mart. “The Clone Wars will not be remembered as a great animated movie,” Jensen concludes, “or an awful one, for that matter. But it might be remembered as part of a larger pop moment that is wiring the future of entertainment.”

On behalf of all the old fogies AND the youngsters of America, I hope to God he’s wrong.

Related Stories: Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip The Clone Wars, George Lucas and the License to Print Money

Morning Deal Report: Harry Potter and the Half-Assed Release Date

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The Dark Knight has finally been dislodged from its perch atop the box office charts. Tropic Thunder took over the number one slot with a weekend total of $26 million. Batman and company fell to second place with $16.8 out of a total of $471 million, which means it has passed Star Wars on the all-time list just as The Clone Wars debuts with $15.5 million. Vicky Cristina Barcelona had a blockbuster opening by Woody Allen standards, finishing the weekend in 10th place with $3.7 million.

Bad news for Hogwarts fans: the sixth movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has been bumped from its November release to next summer. As this AP story notes, Entertainment Weekly didn’t get the memo, despite being owned by the same parent company as Potter distributor Warner Bros. In other kid lit news, a live-action Goosebumps feature is headed for the big screen. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Problem Child) are adapting the R.L. Stine series, per the Hollywood Reporter.

Finally, the Moulin Rouge is returning to the silver screen. Toulouse Latrec fans need not apply, however, as Variety reports The Fabulous Moulin Rouge concerns a short-lived Las Vegas casino “that sprang up in 1955 and closed six months later under mysterious circumstances just as it was gaining momentum and attracting singers such as Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra.” We suspect the involvement of Danny Ocean.

Related:
Trailer Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip "The Clone Wars"

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 9-15, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

You’ve had the dream. You find yourself in a classroom you’ve never seen before, sitting at a desk in your underwear. The professor is passing out the final exam. Your heart freezes, your fingers go numb as you suddenly realize – you forgot to read the Screengrab this week! Don’t let this happen to you. Catch up on all the highlights now, including:

The Top 20 Movies About Movies, Parts One, Deux, Three, Four and Five. These will definitely be on the test.

A moment of silence please for Bernie Mac, Bernie Brillstein, Isaac Hayes, and Elvis Presley and his crappy movies.

You know you’ll be asked about new movies, like Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, The Clone Wars and A Girl Cut in Two. But you should also be prepared for more obscure questions about Mad Dog Time, The Driver, The Last Sign and Summer Rental.

Remaking Rocky Horror: Bad idea or terrible idea?

Is Angelina Jolie playing Catwoman a more enticing proposition than Angelina Jolie playing Tom Cruise?

Woody Allen: Is he a better filmmaker or bronze figurine?

When is a documentary not a documentary?

Study hard or you may find yourself working for Troma.

In Other Blogs: Ernest Borgnine Masturbates a Lot

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:30:00 GMT

I trust we have your attention now? Or at least we’ll have it once you finish vomiting into your wastebasket. Here’s the set-up: 91-year-old Ernest Borgnine appeared on some repulsive Fox News talk show and was asked for the secret of his eternal youth – or if not his eternal youth, at least his continued not-dying. Borgnine leaned over and whispered (on-mike) in the host’s ear, “I masturbate a lot.” I think this is a pretty funny thing for a nonagenarian to say on TV, but Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere doesn’t seem to be amused. “This is a sad occasion for anyone who's ever savored Ernest Borgnine's performance as Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity or Ragnar in The Vikings. With one remark, a respected actor has tainted his reputation for all eternity. I'll never be able to watch The Wild Bunch ever again with the same attitude I had before seeing this clip. I'm half-serious.”

Glenn Kenny at Some Came Running feels that “half-serious” is still way too serious. “I only wish I'd had the balls to have pulled something like that one of the handful of times I was compelled to interact with the sterling personalities on Fox and Friends…I spent a lot of time with Mr. Borgnine on the set of Baseketball a few years back. A real pistol, he was. Just think—he had been married to Ethel Freaking Merman. Which kinds of begs the question of just what it is he masturbates to. Jeffrey Wells seems to have taken this very hard. Or maybe I should say badly…Yeah, Borgnine's irrevocably tainted because he made a vulgar crack on a Fox News program. Okay, if you say so.”

Once you’ve finished scrubbing out your brain with bleach, cleanse your palate by heading over to Beyond the Multiplex for an interview with the lovely Ludivine Sagnier, now starring in A Girl Cut in Two, but forever memorable for “her oft-topless ingénue role opposite Charlotte Rampling in François Ozon's erotic thriller Swimming Pool.” Of her sadly nudity-free new film, Sagnier says, “When we were shooting it, Claude Chabrol would say, ‘It's my first porn movie.’ I would say, ‘Come on, Claude, don't say that. We don't have one scene of nudity.’ He'd say, ‘We don't need that,’ you know, with a smirk on his face. ‘The obscenity is in the head of the audience.’ That's what he liked about this story, to suggest everything.”

Spoutblog has an interview with Whit Stillman – not because he has anything new out, but because you can now watch Metropolitan at Hulu.com. Stillman does claim that those projects I told you about in Vanishing Act are imminent. “My feeling about the independent business is, for one thing, it’s cyclical. And we’re at the low end of the cycle, but I think it’ll go back up. And I think it’s actually very good to launch a project at the low end of the cycle, if you can launch it. And I think that, often, when things are bad, the way I like to look at it to make it seem better is that bad situations are just business opportunities. And there’s just a huge opportunity now to make good independent films and have them successfully released, ultimately, because there’s no easy money now, and everyone, I think, is going to be in a much tighter, more serious game. And I think that the person or the company that steps up to finance our film is going to do very well with it.” Pass the hat, people!

And in List-o-Mania this week, here’s a new blog to us, Topless Robot, with the 10 Most Blatant Star Wars Rip-offs. Oddly the list doesn’t include The Clone Wars, the biggest rip-off of all, but it does stir some nostalgia for crappy 70s and 80s sci-fi. “Galaxina seems to have had a decent budget for alien costumes and special effects, if not for its screenplay (the freighter spaceship is called the Infinity, the buffoonish captain is named Cornelius Butt, suspended animation jokes abound). But hell, no one came to see a flick starring a Playmate for political intrigue or a character study. Teenagers still stricken with their first Princess Leia boners came for Stratten’s come-hither innuendo, gratuitous cleavage shots, and maybe, just maybe, a bit of side-boob. If this trailer’s any indication, most of the male cast thankfully spent the duration of the flick on ice.”

George Lucas and the License to Print Money

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of the upcoming animated Star Wars feature The Clone Wars, George Lucas has emerged from seclusion at Skywalker Ranch to sit for a few interviews and prime the pump. Not that he’d agree with that characterization. ““Honestly, everyone feels you have to talk about yourself all the time,” Lucas tells The Times of London. “They say I’m introverted because I don’t give many interviews. But I don’t give many interviews because I don’t make many films.”

Lucas goes on to demonstrate that there may be another reason he doesn’t give many interviews: because he has a tendency to say some funny things. For instance, his rather grandiose self-described patriarchy of the Star Wars universe. Lucas is the father – the Creator, you might say – and “the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son - and the son does pretty much what he wants.” He laughs. “Once in a while, they ask a question like ‘Can we kill off Yoda?’, things like that, but it’s very loose.” And the holy ghost? Why, I guess I’m part of that right now, since “the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father’s world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way.”

As part of his fatherly duties, Lucas is shepherding both an animated series (following on The Clone Wars) and a live action Star Wars series (“everybody’s dead, basically, or hiding somewhere...there are a million stories in the big city — you’ve only seen one of them”). But what about that other franchise, Indiana Jones, still hanging around in a few of the theaters not showing The Dark Knight? “If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven [Spielberg] wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension.” Here’s a guess that Lucas’s whole different place has a whole lot of green-screen in it.

Related:
To Protect His Stormtroopers, George Lucas Brings on the Scary Lawyers
Screengrab Rant: Indiana Jones in 2008

Trailer Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Paul Clark — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, we were taken to task by at least one of our readers for neglecting to mention Star Wars: The Clone Wars in our predictions for the biggest hits of this upcoming summer. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but for me, one of the main reasons for this was because I hadn’t seen any trailers for it. Now that I have, I’m still not sure I think this will be one of the major hits of summer, but I’d call it a good possibility to be a late-summer sleeper hit. Style-wise, I’m a little conflicted- I’ve always been a fan of stylized animation, but I’m not sure that having Obi-Wan and Count Dooku look like statues on Easter Island is the way to go with this. That said, the backgrounds look cool and scarcely less realistic than the live-action backdrops in the prequel trilogy. More to the point, this thing seems pretty intent on milking the fanboy-drool factor, once again feeding their hunger for a Star Wars movie that actually lives up to the originals. But judging by the trailer this could go either way- this could be the good new Star Wars movie that Lucas himself couldn’t manage to deliver. Then again, it could also be our generation’s Ewoks: the Battle for Endor.

Unfortunately, none of the trailers that are floating around out there appear to be embeddable, so instead I’ll link to one of the higher-quality YouTube ones. Click here to watch the trailer.

Clone Wars, Batman Soars and Other ShoWest Tidbits

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While your quaint little Iraq documentaries and mumblecore movies were unspooling at South by Southwest, the big guns of the movie industry were gathering for ShoWest in Las Vegas. The annual exhibitors convention is all about putting butts in the seats – and making sure the seats are available for said butts by flying in superstars to grin and glad hand with theater owners and show a few clips from their upcoming product. None of your faithful Screengrab scribes were able to attend this year, but fortunately Entertainment Weekly was on hand to run down the highlights for us.

3-D Animation: Two upcoming 3-D animated features were previewed. The Belgian-made (but English language) Fly Me to the Moon “follows three adorable house flies who hitch a ride on Apollo 11 during the first moon landing in 1969…Even ordinarily mundane things — e.g. shards of glass flying through weightless space or dust being kicked up under Neil Armstrong's boots — appear remarkably realistic when seen through those plastic 3-D specs.” EW was even more impressed with the “Ultimate 3-D” footage from Dreamworks Animation’s Monsters vs. Aliens, “which has the effect of bringing the viewer into the world of the movie, rather than having stuff pop off the screen. (Really, you have to see it to believe it.)”

The Dark Knight: Both director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale are interviewed. Nolan talked about raising the bar for the Batman Begins follow-up: “I'd never done a sequel — kind of never imagined I would; it's not something I had really seen myself doing. Even, on completing the first one, it has a great tease for the Joker, but I just wanted to send the audience out with a sense of possibility for what we might see, not specifically as a sequel. It took me a long time to come around, talking to [Batman Begins cowriter] David Goyer and Jonathan, my brother [and frequent collaborator], to figure out that, actually, there's something very compelling there. So what I've tried to do with this film, the only reason was to try and make the best film in the first place. And the great sequels that I've enjoyed and looked up to over the years have managed to do that — there aren't many of them. You know, whether you're looking at The Godfather Part II or The Empire Strikes Back — those are sequels that I think built on what the first ones did really amazingly well. And that's what we're aspiring to with this film.” Meanwhile, Bale is ready for more: “I would, knowing the Dark Knight story, I would like very much to complete a trilogy. And I think that knowing the story of The Dark Knight, it leaves you anticipating something that really can get very, very interesting for a third.”

The Clone Wars: A George Lucas interview finds the Star Wars maven anticipating the upcoming animated Clone Wars feature and series, as well as a separate live-action TV serial set between episodes three and four of the movies. “Some of the characters from the features find their way in there, so it's not completely divorced. It's as if we just went down the street and told a different story. You know, we were doing, I don't know, 24, and now we're going to move down the street here and do The Wire. Same thing, it's just different people doing the same thing in the same city.” George Lucas’s The Wire? We’ll believe it when we see it.