#I can talk about the larger implications and politics at play in Star Wars sure

[unhealthily-obsessing]

I always see people argue about Star Wars cannon and what the “right” way to interpret the story is and like man I’m just here for the vibes.

Me: Cannon? What’s cannon? Never heard of her. I live in my own Star Wars world.

[princepondincherry]

The Tragedy of “The Wrong Jedi”

The first time I watched the Jedi Temple bombing arc in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, I was kind of uncomfortable with how it played out. I felt like it misrepresented how the Jedi Council would have handled the situation, that Anakin was going too far and uncomfortably close to the Dark Side, and that Ventress was handled strangely. But after reading a whole bunch of posts by tumblr user gffa and others about how the Jedi didn’t handle it too terribly, I’ve had to rethink my view. Thinking about it more, it’s definitely even more tragic than I realized.

I’ve got a lot to say (seriously, a massive wall of text) and, even though this is a really old show, I might as well put spoilers under the cut.

Okay, first of all: Ahsoka might not have been found innocent if she stayed in jail, but I bet she would. Barriss knocked out the guards and left Ahsoka a keycard to break out of her jail cell. As soon as she used it to break out, Ahsoka fell into the trap. If she’d just sat in the cell, eventually order would have been restored in the prison, and there would have been some sort of evidence that someone else was trying to frame her. Unless Barriss managed to spin it so it looked like Ahsoka broke out, killed some clones, and then returned to her jail cell? Seems unlikely. The genius of the trap was that breaking her out was exactly the sort of rule-breaking she’d expect Anakin to do, so I can’t blame her for falling for it.

Actually, taking a step back, the frame-job only worked because Ahsoka was an impulsive Padawan. I tried imagining how other Jedi would have reacted, and a few of them would have ended up much better. Anakin probably would have been screwed too, but a lot of more-experienced Jedi would have just begun meditating calmly in the cell and been able to follow the promptings of the Force to end up with a better outcome. In particular, Obi-Wan probably would have laughed about the key card and managed to talk his way to some sort of advantage with the clones who came to investigate. (And, of course, someone like Yoda might have just sensed Barriss like Tarkin said Ahsoka should have been able to.) None of this is Ahsoka’s fault, of course--she’s a great Jedi; she’s just in training still, and not the calmest.

Moving on, the Jedi Council expelling Ahsoka *really* bothered me, and I don’t think that’s an uncommon opinion. Other people (gffa, again) have talked at length about how they were under great pressure from the Senate, and so it wasn’t entirely their fault, but I still thought it was a terrible, if understandable, decision. They brought that the Senate was concerned they wouldn’t be impartial, but I thought, “Let the Senate be concerned. The Council *know* they’re impartial, so if Padawan Tano is guilty, they’ll find her guilty and punish her. Which, of course, is what the Senate wants. And if she’s innocent, they should support her no matter the political consequences.” But then I realized that the evidence against her was so strong at that point that the Council was probably assuming any trial would find her guilty, and the only real point of contention would be the punishment. The Jedi would probably decide on a punishment that wasn’t strong enough for the Senate’s liking. So instead, they decided that expelling her from the order *was* their punishment. It’s my opinion that this was either discussed in offscreen Council deliberations or just understood by the Councilmembers, who’ve worked together for a long time. The episode probably just didn’t make this explicitly clear because we’re intended to emotionally be on Ahsoka’s side, feeling betrayed like her, and only figure out the larger implications later with more thought and analysis. If this is true, it totally worked on me. You could definitely make a good argument that they still should have made a stand, but with public opinion and the opinion of the Senate turning against them, they had to pick and choose their battles.

                                                     THE TRIAL

The real thing that convinced me to write this post was the emotions and framing of the end of the trial, when Anakin brings Barriss forth and gets her to confess. The whole trial makes masterful use of oppositions. First, Tarkin and Padme are prosecutor and defender. They literally enter from opposite sides. Symbolically, since we know these characters, this is Grand Moff Tarkin supporting his vision of punitive control (he calls for the death penalty!) versus Senator Padme Amidala, supporting the rights and freedoms of an innocent. The symbolism and conservation of characters is nice enough that I can overlook how stupid it is that an Admiral and a Senator are the ones arguing this case or that the Chancellor of the Republic is also overseeing a trial. (Also, a Jedi accused of sedition is a BIG DEAL.)

Palpatine, of course, gives a grand speech about how Separatists have fooled the Republic before, laying on the irony as thick as he can as he accuses Ahsoka of being part of a plot to tear the Jedi Order apart. There’s an interesting interaction when Anakin breaks his stride right before he declares Ahsoka guilty, and I imagine he was torn between annoyance and his desire to have Anakin like him. And then when Barriss starts her big speech about how the Jedi have lost their way, he must be thrilled that these sentiments are getting such traction among the populace that even a Jedi espouses them and gets such a public stage to proclaim them.

Because--and this is the important part--Barriss is WRONG. - “The Jedi are the ones responsible for this war.” -- INCORRECT - “We have so lost our way that we have become villains in this conflict.”--INCORRECT. One thing that bothered me is that so much of the anti-Jedi argument is that they’re killers, but we almost always see them fighting droids. This is the most bloodless war ever, even assuming there’s a ton of offscreen collateral damage. ONSCREEN we see the Jedi avoiding collateral damage as much as possible. - “We are the ones that should be put on trial; all of us.”--No, literally just Barriss should be put on trial, for her senseless crimes. - “My attack on the Temple was an attack on what the Jedi have become--an army fighting for the dark side.”-- Incorrect on two counts. Others have explained how the Jedi are CLEARLY the good guys in this show, and more than that, her attack on the Temple was pointless murder that failed to even make a clear statement. She killed Jedi, non-Jedi workers, and clones, so I guess she was just symbolically opposing the war effort, but considering she had to explain herself before anyone guessed her motives, I don’t think she did a very good job.

Once you accept that Barriss is wrong, this becomes extremely tragic. - Anakin’s clearly struggled with the dark side over this whole arc, but he hasn’t Fallen. He’s still firmly a Jedi, firmly rooted in the Light. He lets Ventress go when he realizes she’s not responsible (which may have been a bad decision ethically, but it was probably better than just killing her), tries talking calmly to Barriss first, and sees justice done. He works within the system by making sure Ahsoka is arrested. - The music is just SO GOOD. When I was believing Barriss, the dark, dramatic music just made me more uncomfortable (”ahh, the bad guy is right?!”), but now it’s just sad. - This trial has been taking place in a Senate courtroom with the Imperial logo prominently displayed on the wall, Tarkin prosecuting, and the future Emperor presiding. But when justice is truly served, it’s by Anakin Skywalker, a Jedi Knight opposing Palpatine, and four Jedi Guardians escorting a prisoner. And...look, in terms of iconography, those guys are awesome enough to challenge all the Imperial paraphernalia, with their masks, armor, and special yellow lightsabers. Seriously, I’m surprised over the strength of the feelings I’m having about the clash of icons here. The failing Republic/future Empire is about to perpetrate a great injustice, but in march the traditional guards of an ancient peacekeeping order in full dramatic procession to bring true justice.

Barriss and everyone else taken in by anti-Jedi propaganda fail to realize that the Jedi aren’t the cause of the problem--they’re just a bandage struggling to help people like Padme hold a failing Republic together as crime syndicates, the Sith, and more base forms of evil such as corruption tear it apart.

I’ve written waaaay too much already, so I won’t talk about it too much, but Ahsoka’s arc in season 7 supports my thoughts. Basically, that arc starts with her realizing how the common people often have at least semi-legitimate reasons to dislike the Jedi, and it ends with her realizing that she’s been acting like a Jedi the whole time (and the one hostile Martinez sister realizing that since Ahsoka’s basically a Jedi, she’s been judging the Jedi too harshly).

[aion-rsa]

Star Wars: The Bad Batch Episode 10 Review: Common Ground

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This Star Wars: The Bad Batch review contains spoilers.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch Episode 10

This week’s Disney+ blurb offers a promising subject for an episode that mostly lives up to it: “The Bad Batch has their ideology challenged.” 

The Clone Wars, The Bad Batch‘s spiritual predecessor, often tried to explore a key element of the Prequel era: there were heroes on both sides of the war. Whether or not that show succeeded isn’t the subject of this review, but The Bad Batch does effectively argue for why the citizens of the Separatist systems are more than their Sidious-adjacent mustache-twirling leaders. 

We don’t see humans in the Separatist forces much in general, and the aliens at its head are often portrayed as greedy, corrupt, or bloodthirsty. But it has always been canon that there is a Separatist public somewhere, with average people who have legitimate grievances against the Republic. Padmé was even friends with one of them, Mina Bonteri, a senator who demonstrated some of the concerns of the Separatist civilians in The Clone Wars. But the actual people affected by this war have remained in the background. Even the way the Separatist Senate has been referred to has been inconsistent, with the name sometimes being Separatist Parliament or Separatist Congress until very recently. 

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The Bad Batch offers some clarity on all of that as the Empire comes to wipe away the distinct identity of Raxus, the capital of the Confederacy of Independent Systems (CIS). Senator Avi Singh (played by Star Trek‘s Alexander Siddig) speaks out against the Empire and is imprisoned and tortured for it, while his trusty protocol droid GS-8 (Fleabag‘s Sian Clifford) reaches out to Cid for help. Meanwhile, Omega, already a veteran at her young age, uses her tactical skills to play strategy games against Cid’s clientele for a hefty pot of money.

The show’s foray into Separatist territory makes for some interesting world-building, albeit quite late in the saga compared to when the CIS was actually a force to be reckoned with. Imperials are definitely using clones as stormtroopers now, and while the Batch are resigned to this, there are still some left-over Clone Wars pains. Echo suspects his fellow clone troopers will care that he’s using a Separatist code to pass the planet’s guards — but they don’t.

Echo is the most skeptical of helping a Separatist, the most convinced the war will go on in some shape or form the way it used to be instead of all of it being rewritten by the Empire. He is still clashing with the rest of the Batch a little bit. Echo’s also the one who reacts the strongest to their client actually being the droid, although the others are also surprised. While I wish some of this had been voiced more clearly instead of being left as subtext, it makes a ton of sense that Echo would be the one most judgmental of their new client. Not only was he a “reg,” but he was used as a living algorithm by the Separatists, his body fitted with the cybernetic jacks he still wears.

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The planet Raxus isn’t explored much beyond the government complex, the aforementioned public mostly voiceless. It’s still a pleasure to watch scenes on the planet because it’s so gorgeous though, the buildings washed in soft sunlight. Both the flowers and vines in the streets and the composition of the shots were beautiful. The animation overall remains stellar, and it’s worth watching what characters do in the background: see Echo peering confusedly at Omega’s snacks, or Wrecker being the first to greet Omega on their return to the bar.

This episode both feels distinct from the long sequence on the junk planet but also isn’t filler. Sure, the Batch are still doing this essentially to get paid, and without Omega, there isn’t as much of an emotional center to this episode. But a clash between Echo and the rest of the Batch adds something of a replacement for that.

The major way in which the episode doesn’t live up to its lofty description is with the role of the senator. Siddig plays Avi Singh as soft spoken and polite even in battle. But that’s a matter of affect, not action. He says “you’re going to have to trust me” in a moment of battle, but never gets time to talk about what the experience of any of this has been like for him. What were his grievances against the Republic? Does he believe the Empire is just the same, merely a continuation of the Republic? How does he feel about the defeat of the Separatists? About working with clones? We never really learn any of this, except for the implication that Singh is grateful to have been saved from torture. Instead of a confrontation between Singh and Echo, the two simply have a gentle moment of decision, when Echo convinces Singh he needs to leave his people to live to fight another day.

In the end, the promise of the crew having their “ideology changed” still doesn’t quite pan out. No one gets the chance to voice what their ideology even is, and Echo’s grievance and change of heart are both subtle. But despite that, this feels like a complete episode, albeit as complete as we can expect from the legacy of The Clone Wars. It even serves to move the larger plot along, with Omega paying off the Batch’s debt to Cid. Despite wanting the script to dig in more, this episode was a pleasure to watch.

The post Star Wars: The Bad Batch Episode 10 Review: Common Ground appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[mrmichaelchadler]

True/False 2019: Caballerango, American Factory, The Hottest August, Finding Frances

One of the best films at the festival, Juan Pablo González’s “Caballerango” captures spare haunted moments in Milpillas, a rural Mexican village that has been reeling from a series of suicides. A horse vacantly stares in the camera. A woman pulls the skin off chicken legs. Two men have a sprinting contest while a group places bets. People work while the world changes around them. The landscape remains the same.

These scenes have an indefinably eerie quality that stems from González’s choice to make his camera as invisible as possible. He lingers on events longer than most filmmakers, illustrating the passage of time as much as the action in the frame. He interviews people discussing the various losses that have affected them and their community—a son’s suicide, his sister’s miscarriage, his brother’s friends’ deaths—but the focus in “Caballerango” remains productively unstable. The suicides are treated as individual tragedies while also serving as microcosms for the economic deterioration in the area, an avenue that González would rather gesture towards than didactically explore.

González employs a creative rhythmic strategy to communicate his empathy towards the Milpillas community. He conditions his audience to observe the mundane at length, to “experience the frame instead of someone editing,” as he explained in Filmmaker Magazine to describe his short film “The Solitude of Memory.” Thus, when the unexpected invades the frame, it engenders surprise or awe, like a late-night vigil that stalks the streets. It’s an attempt to inure the audience into the pace of life in Milpillas while also demonstrating how ghosts, metaphoric and literal, permanently disrupt everyday lives. The spectral drives “Caballerango” while the people themselves reside at its center.

“American Factory”

Netflix bought Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s “American Factory” for under $3 million following its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year. This might be a drop in the bucket for a streaming service that essentially prints its own money, but it still ostensibly represents a belief that a documentary about a Chinese-owned car-glass manufacturing company in Dayton, Ohio can garner a sizable audience on their platform. Given that the film directly engages with Recession-sourced working class plight, unionization in face of indifferent corporate superstructures, and the difficulties of reconciling different cultures during the height of globalization, Netflix might have made a good bet.

In 2014, Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang opens up a Fuyao manufacturing plant in Dayton. For the locals, this represents a bright new opportunity, especially after General Motors shuttered their factory in 2008. At first, “American Factory” focuses on the humorous side of the culture clash: the Chinese workers, transplanted from the safety of their homes and families, learn about the nuances of their American peers in classroom settings, while the Americans deal with the Chinese workers’ hyper-detail-focused nature and staunch work ethic on the job. Yet, tensions quickly escalate as Chinese management become frustrated with their American counterparts as well as the country’s labor laws. Lax safety standards and the looming threat of automation spark union talks amongst the workers, which erodes all previous good will. The film becomes a chronicle of the age-old war between labor and management, only this time with easily drawn global implications vis-à-vis Chinese economic control and America’s bleak manufacturing future. The metaphors invent themselves when you’re watching irreconcilable worldviews engage with each other in real time.

Bognar and Reichert’s film maneuvers between different tones at ease. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy one moment and a searing indictment of hellacious corporate practices the next. This casual tonal shifts allows the film’s truly horrifying moments to pop, like when an American supervisor tells his Chinese peer that he wishes he could tape his workers’ mouths shut so they wouldn’t talk as much on the job, or Dewang’s underlings expressing disbelief at the idea of Americans not working weekends. There’s probably one too many threads at play in the film, but even the most digressive elements contribute to a modern portrait of American labor fighting upwind against a culture that has all but abandoned them.

What keeps me from wholly embracing “American Factory” lies in Bognar and Reichert’s macro-structural decision to provide everyone, from the factory workers to Dewang himself, an equal platform. On paper, the choice is sound, a necessary step to providing a full picture, but when the film shifts focus to the unionization efforts, it occasionally scans as a blatant attempt for obvious villains to save face. Bognar and Reichert provide a steady, neutral presence, which obviously helps with access and trust, but their inability to express a strong critical viewpoint becomes a liability. Everyone is human, yes, but when certain individuals have the expressed goal of continually putting workers in harm’s way to save a buck, maybe some are more human than others. 

I walked out of “American Factory” thinking that no one could possibly watch that film and come away believing that unions are anything less than a necessity. Sure enough, two people behind me were talking about how unions “made sense for a time,” but they ultimately bred laziness and stifled innovation. I don’t for a second doubt Bognar and Reichert’s intentions, but because “American Factory” plays to all time zones, it will inevitably confirm whatever pre-conceived biases you already hold. Granted, it’s not the job of “American Factory” to change minds, but at some point, the choice not to take a tougher political stance weakens the film.

“The Hottest August”

Brett Story’s “The Hottest August” technically focuses on the dark specter of the impending global climate disaster through the voices of New Yorkers over the span of a month, but its larger aim is to encapsulate the sense of dread that currently permeates the world. In August 2017, Story traveled across all five boroughs, either going to a specific event in the city or posting up at a single location, to film conversations about “the future.” Different anxieties fill the air—economic, social, racial, political—and the testimonies directly engage with the ineffable sense of catastrophe that feels like it’s lurking around the corner. Sometimes the responses are measured while others are tossed off. Trump’s recent inauguration hangs over the city, not to mention the violent aftermath of Unite the Right rally as well as the solar eclipse, which Story uses as a structural bookend. In between these interviews, actress Clare Coulter provides clinical, semi-otherworldly narration; she reads excerpts from Marx, Zadie Smith, and a “New Yorker” essay by Annie Dillard. Story’s film scans as a long-form exploration of the most chilling line from Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed”: “This social system isn’t built for multiple crises.”

Story and her editor Nels Bangerter visually and aurally communicate the low-grade terror that now fills our lives quite effectively. “The Hottest August” is freewheeling by its very nature, jumping from topic to topic similar to Story’s borough hopping. The collective fear, and the ways in which it’s expressed, mostly keeps the interviews connected. It’s how a young college graduate worried about job prospects can feel in line with middle-aged Staten Island bar patrons discussing racism, even if the expressed anxieties are diametrically opposed. Story lets her subjects talk freely and jumps in to further the conversation or question the answers. (The best example might be when she questions an art collecting hedge fund manager about the value of capitalism.) She encounters these New Yorkers at a critical point, and while all are self-aware about the respective despair, none feel particularly hopeless. Systemic collapse doesn’t necessarily crush individual hope.

Story clearly reverse-engineered “The Hottest August” from the numerous interviews she conducted, and though that’s a valid creative strategy, the project feels unproductively diffuse at times. It lives and dies by the charisma of her subjects, which vary wildly, and certain participants, like a futurist performance artist, just simply aren’t engaging enough to justify the time spent with them. I couldn’t help but wonder if the film would have a stronger impact on me if the scope were limited exclusively to climate change. At the same time, “The Hottest August” succeeds as a portrait of New York in crisis and I can easily see myself coming around to certain digressive elements on a second viewing. It’s a colossal film, one that I predict will be major if distributed, that bottles up our depressing zeitgeist with maximum insight, and yet I still felt underwhelmed. Maybe just living in this culture will do that to you sometimes. 

“Finding Frances”

Though it never occurred to me when it was airing, “Nathan For You,” the satirical docu-reality series co-created by and starring comedian Nathan Fielder, is a perfect fit for True/False. Fielder’s elaborate, counterintuitive marketing proposals for struggling businesses—offering a gas station rebate that’s almost impossible to claim; exploiting the fair use doctrine to rebrand a struggling coffee shop as Dumb Starbucks; using a theatrical construct to help a dive bar get around a smoking ban—always straddled the line between performance art and non-fiction storytelling. Fielder and his team employed many of the principles of documentary filmmaking to pull off their stunts, finding humor in the gaps between their noble-but-misguided intentions and the participants’ willingness to go along with them. “Nathan For You” raises many of the standard philosophical and ethical questions that “serious” documentarians grapple with during their own projects, plus some legal ones as well. (A friend pointed out that Fielder must have kept Comedy Central’s legal team very busy over the course of the series.) All of these qualities make “Nathan For You” pure, unfettered True/False bait.

I won’t restate the plot of “Nathan For You’s” brilliant series finale “Finding Frances” in this space; it’s readily available to stream and you can read multiple recaps or reviews if you wish, including one penned by Errol Morris. However, I will say that watching the film/episode (I’m not getting into this debate) in the Missouri Theatre, where all 1,200 seats were filled with either Fielder acolytes or curious newcomers, was a genuine event. In retrospect, it was a perfect fit for the festival: an audacious crowd-pleaser that not only pushes Fielder’s project to its limit but also vibes neatly with the rest of the programming lineup. It’s no surprise that True/False has apparently been trying to get Fielder to come out to Columbia for some time. Sure enough, the crowd treated Fielder like a rock star when he arrived for the Q&A (the guy sitting next to me jumped to his feet and screamed as if Mick Jagger strolled across the stage). He answered multiple questions in his wonderful deadpan cadence and screened some deleted scenes for the audience. “Finding Frances” illustrates that True/False can indulge in its populist side without abandoning its principles. 

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