Well… that was mediocre.

Okay, here’s some background:

(1) I am quite willing to stand up and defend the prequel trilogy films as being diamonds in rough. I feel that watching those films is roughly equivalent to watching the Special Edition versions of the original trilogy: There are good-to-great films buried in there, but they’ve been ruined by George Lucas’ inability to edit himself. The only difference is that we’ve seen the original versions of the A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi — that makes it (relatively) easy for us to ignore the crap Lucas has shoveled on top of those films. With the prequel trilogy, we’ve never seen the version without the fart jokes.

(2) The original Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series was broadcast on the Cartoon Network. It had a story by George Lucas, but the project was largely spearheaded by Genndy Tartakovsky. This series was single-handedly responsible for rekindling my love of Star Wars. After years of abusive mediocrity, I had literally forgotten how much I loved this universe. After watching Clone Wars, I tracked down high quality versions of the original versions of the original trilogy and, watching them, I realized just how much I still loved these films and how much damage George Lucas had inflicted on his own creation.

(3) I wasn’t alone. The Clone Wars series was so popular it got extended for a second series. And when that was a success, Lucas decided to turn it into a full-blown TV series. The animation was “upgraded” from 2D cell art to 3D CGI, and then Lucas felt that was going so well that he took the first several episodes and packaged them into a feature film for theatrical release.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line Genndy Tartakovsky didn’t make the cut. (He’s apparently working on the sequel to The Dark Crystal, a fact which fills me with glee.) The loss of Tartakovsky is unfortunate because, frankly, Star Wars: The Clone Wars doesn’t capture the same magic as its progenitor. (Note the difference between Star Wars: Clone Wars and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Thanks for the crystal-clear titles.)

Basically, here’s the run-down:

(1) Visually, the animation style is surprisingly effective and often incredibly beautiful.

(2) Unfortunately, from a cinematic standpoint, the directing and visual storytelling just doesn’t cut it. There are lots of battles, for example, but none of them are particularly compelling or memorable.

(3) But certainly part of the problem the director has is that the script just isn’t that interesting. The story never manages to make me care about what’s going on (which is largely because nobody in the movie seems to care all that much), the dialogue is cliche-ridden, and the whole thing is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies. Plus, while there’s often a lot of sound and fury, the author doesn’t find anything particularly unique to do with it. So in the battles, for example, there are lots of lasers being fired and lightsabers being swung around… but it’s just visual noise. Very pretty visual noise, but still utterly forgettable.

(4) Perhaps most disappointingly, the characters are largely flat (with one exception which I’ll note below). The only reason I even vaguely care about any of them is because of their previous appearances in other films. The argument could certainly be made that it would be difficult to do anything meaningful with characters who’s stories have already been told from beginning to end in the original six movies, but I can literally point directly at Tartakovsky’s work in the original animated series as an example of how you can always find fresh dramatic material.

(5) The pacing of the film is also very poor. But that leads me to a larger point, which is that this material was not originally intended to be a single feature film… and I think it shows. Amidala, for example, doesn’t show up until the third act of the film, and then plays an almost deus ex machina role in wrapping up the plot.

I suspect that if I had been watching this as three episodes of a television series, my reaction might have been more positive. (So I’m probably going to give the TV series a shot when it premieres.)

(6) It’s almost as if Lucas intentionally tries to find something incredibly stupid to put into his films. In this case, it’s Jabba the Hutt’s flamingly homosexual uncle. I just… I wish I was making that up.

(7) On the other hand, the one thing I did like was Anakin’s padawan, Ahsoka. Her initial introduction left me skeptical, but she rapidly grew on me despite the weak and repetitive nature of the script. She’s the one character that the film, on its own merits, makes me care about. And I’m mildly interested to see if the series can develop the serious dramatic potential in the relationship between Anakin and Ahsoka.

I’ve seen a few people trying to defend the weaknesses of this movie by saying that it’s “aimed at kids”.

Well, even if we ignore the PG rating of the film: So what? There is a difference between “aimed at kids” and “stupid”.

When I was a kid I could tell the difference between the stuff that I actually liked and the stuff that was created by some adult trying to patronize me. I don’t think I was alone. And I reject out of hand the flawed logic that “it’s OK that it’s bad because it’s just for kids”.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars isn’t a mediocre movie because it’s aimed at young teens. It’s a mediocre movie because it’s a mediocre movie.

Recently, for a project I’m intermittently working on, I’ve been reading a lot of primary feminist theory. Since my thoughts on such matters have been getting regularly stimulated by this reading, it means you’re going to have to put up with me sharing some of them… particularly the ones which little bearing on my project and, thus, have no other outlet.

So let’s start with Freud’s concept of penis envy. Boiling it down to its most basic form, Freud’s theory goes something like: At some point during puberty, girls figure out that they don’t have penises and boys do. The girl, discovering this, becomes jealous that the boy has a penis and she doesn’t.

This is stupid enough — since it implicitly assumes that a vagina is the mere absence of a penis — but Freud isn’t done yet: Because the girl wants a penis, she naturally wants her father’s penis. This translates into a sexual desire for her father. And since this sexual desire for her father is forbidden, she defensively shifts her sexual desire from her father to men in general.

Freud had issues. This much is clear.

(Please note, I am not making this up. It should also be noted that, since a vagina is not the mere absence of a penis, it would make just as much sense — using Freud’s logic — to say that men are possessed of “vagina envy”.)

Which brings me to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan makes a pretty much indisputable argument that Freud’s theory is abject bullshit: If a woman in Victorian Europe envied a penis, she did so only insofar as it represented the social justice and opportunity which was automatically afforded to men and denied to her.

In other words, Freud was a product of his time… and a sex-obsessed one at that.

However, insofar as Freud was describing in sex-obsessed and metaphoric terms a legitimate psychological facet of women in Victorian Europe — i.e., their envy of the social opportunities men possessed and they lacked — there can be valuable insight gleaned from Freud’s theory.

Because, in point of fact, Freud still isn’t done: Penis envy persists after the woman matures into a socially acceptable sexual love for men who are not her father. (I feel silly just typing that.) A woman eventually satisfies that penis envy by having a son, and thus coming into possession of a penis of her own. (I feel even sillier typing that.)

Okay, let’s strip away Freud’s sex-obsessed silliness. Metaphors aside, what the heck is he talking about?

Friedan makes the very compelling argument that, when a woman finds her own growth as an individual cut off by social injustice, she will attempt to find other outlets through which she can express herself.  And one of these outlets is through her own children: Unable to live her own life fully, the mother tries to find fulfillment through the accomplishments of her children.

In truth, we can strip the words “woman” and “mother” out of the preceding paragraph entirely: It remains equally true for all human beings. And certainly we are all familiar with both fathers and mothers trying to make their children live out their own thwarted dreams.

This is bad enough in itself, but Friedan makes the wider point that — in post-war America — the oppression of woman had reached a point in which the common housewife was becoming literally infantilized. (Her argument is lengthy, well-documented, and, frankly, horrifying to my modern eyes, even though I was already largely familiar with the societal injustices she was describing.)

In that environment, the natural impulse for women to try to live out their thwarted dreams through their children becomes even more severely damaging to the child’s psyche: The dreams and goals of the mother, having become infantilized, arrest the child’s ability to mature into an adult. The result can be grossly summarized as a “momma’s boy”.

Which brings me to the relatively random thought I wanted to share with you: I wonder how much of this emergent social phenomena in the late 1940’s, 1950’s, and early 1960’s — as revealed in painstaking detail by Friedan — resulted in both the creation and popular resonance of Psycho. In Psycho, Norman Bates is so literally trapped in an infantilized state as an extension of his mother’s will that he becomes her to some very real extent. When a woman becomes desirable to him — a symbol of sexuality and potential maturity which would break his pyschotic connection with his mother — he kills her.

To what extent did Psycho grow out of the deep social discontent that Friedan documents in The Feminine Mystique? And to what extent did audiences, experiencing that social discontent in their own lives — whether they recognized it for what it was or not — find the traumas of their own lives writ into the tragedy of the film?

Of course, on the other hand, the film can also be read as subconsciously supporting the darker side of the culture which gave it birth: Norman’s victim is portrayed, however briefly, as a successful and independent woman pursuing a career outside of the house… a direct threat to the feminine mystique of a woman finding her complete fulfillment in the duties of wife and mother. Having posed that threat to “proper womanhood”, she is violently “put in her place” by the male killer.

Did those supporting the malfunctioning society of the 1950s find as much satisfaction in the film as those who were consciously or unconsciously rebelling against it?

I thought I’d written this on here before, but apparently I was just imagining that. In regards to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:

I would like to thank George Lucas for making the Star Wars prequels. Without the valuable training I have gleaned from those films, I would have found it much more difficult to ignore all the ridiculous foibles of this film and enjoy it as much as I did.

The trick, you see, lies in being able to instantly assess that something is both incredibly lame and completely irrelevant to the film. You then jettison that information instantaneously and go back to enjoying the rest of the film (which is rather good).

Michelangelo is quoted as saying, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

I have a theory about George Lucas: He’s like Michelangelo. Except he’s gotten lazy and he doesn’t bother carving away all of the marble necessary to reveal the angel. The portions of the angel that you can see are still pretty awesome, but there’s all this other marble — the absurdities, the bathroom humor, the extraneous nonsense — getting in the way.

And, as I say, the Star Wars prequels trained me pretty well in the “fine art” of ignoring all that excess marble Lucas leaves lying around. So Lucas throws in some stupid scene with Shia LaBeouf swinging around like Tarzan and leading a tribe of monkeys, and I promptly reach into my brain, grab that idiocy, throw it away, and pretend as if the film existed without that scene (or the many other scenes like it).

And I’m happier for it.

Of course, the film itself is still flawed. But at least this way I can enjoy — in a somewhat marred fashion — the angel that could have been.

So, long story short vis-a-vis Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: A decent enough flick. I was hoping that Spielberg would be more successful in reining in Lucas’ excesses, but despite that it’s enjoyable enough. I mean, it’s not even close to being a Raiders of the Lost Ark or an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but it’s fun enough.

While putting together the compiled version of the Playtesting 4th Edition essay, I realized it probably made sense to compile the essays I wrote on Dissociated Mechanics, too. So I went ahead and did that.

As a reminder, these essays were originally written in May of this year, before the 4th Edition rulebooks were released. My general analysis, it turned out, was pretty much right on the money, even if there are a few individual mechanics which aren’t precisely the way they were previewed or the way I assumed in the final product.

And, of course, my general conclusion vis-a-vis dissociated mechanics (they’re bad and they’re antithetical to roleplaying) remain as valid as they ever were.

There is a pretty fundamental political mistake being made when it comes to McCain’s energy plan and it sounds a lot like this:

You can inflate your tires to the proper levels and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil we get from John McCain drilling right below his feet there… Wherever he was going to drill.

BARACK OBAMA
August 5th, 2008

What Obama says there is absolutely true. And the broader point he made a few sentences later was equally true: “They’re making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant. They think it’s funny that they’re making fun of something that is actually true. They need to do their homework. Because this is serious business.”

But there’s also something very important that’s being missed here. You can see it being missed even more widely in this frontpage Daily Kos posting where the author mocks McCain for being for both wind power and off-shore drilling.

Here’s the problem: There is absolutely nothing incompatible about being for both off-shore drilling and wind power. And nuclear power. And biofuels. And solar power. And proper tire pressure.

The defining quality of the energy plan McCain is selling is, quite simple, “I will try absolutely anything if it might reduce energy prices.”

There is a real and growing sense of desperation in America right now and, if McCain can successfully sell that message, it will find resonance with that desperation.

Of course, anyone with half a clue about these things knows that off-shore drilling is a joke. It isn’t going to have any impact on gas prices for at least 10 years and, even then, the effect will be minimal and very short-term. Al Gore delivered this message as a powerful political punch on July 17th when he said:

It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they’re going to bring gasoline prices down. It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it. If we keep going back to the same policies that have never worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again. But the Congress may be poised to move in that direction anyway because some of them are being stampeded by lobbyists for special interests that know how to make the system work for them instead of the American people.

If you want to know the truth about gasoline prices, here it is: the exploding demand for oil, especially in places like China, is overwhelming the rate of new discoveries by so much that oil prices are almost certain to continue upward over time no matter what the oil companies promise. And politicians cannot bring gasoline prices down in the short term.

However, there actually is one extremely effective way to bring the costs of driving a car way down within a few short years. The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline.

But this is not the consistent message being sent by Barack Obama, the Democratic party, or the progressive blogosphere.

McCain is, on the one hand, openly embracing every possible solution to the emerging energy crisis in this country. (Whether or not he’ll actually follow through on anything not approved by his lobbyist buddies in the oil industry is another story, of course.) On the other hand, the Republicans are successfully turning off-shore drilling into a wedge issue.

And the result, as seen over the past couple of weeks, is that, according to national polls, McCain is now considered the better candidate on energy issues than Obama — a result so absurd that I wouldn’t have believed it possible two months ago.

The problem here is the false “either-or” argument being used by progressives. As long as progressives keep framing the issue as “either you’re for renewable energy or you’re for off-shore drilling”, then McCain’s message of “I’m for both and for anything else that will help lower energy prices” is going to win. And win big.

And the reason he’ll win big is that, if off-shore drilling were truly a viable solution, then we probably should be doing it.

The reality is that it isn’t a viable solution. And, therefore, the correct response to this nonsense is to simply point out that it is, in fact, nonsense. Accurately attack the viability of the non-solution.

Because in the battle between the guy saying “you can have a piece of cake or a piece of pie” and the guy saying “you can have both cake AND pie”, the guy with the bigger dessert tray is going to win… unless you point out that that the pie is actually a mirage masking another handout to the big oil companies.