Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)

Lock up your childhoods because everyone's favourite no-neck memory molester is at it again.

Georgie's back to sign away his dignity on the latest subtraction from the STAR WARS saga - a flashing fuck-brained ker-ching factory for kids called The Clone Wars.

Frankly I'm at a loss where to begin so I'll start at the beginnning. Actually first I'll start twenty five years before the beginning.

It's 1983, I'm six years old, my school friend are I are staring at a penny sitting motionless on our desk. We are taking it in turns to move the penny across the desk using only 'the force'. So far no luck.

To us 'the force' seemed like something magical but obtainable. As long as you tried hard enough and try we did, often till were blue in the face.

The Clone Wars were a still mysterious period in Star Wars history, the scale and scope of which was defined only by our imagination. General Kenobi fought in them alongside a young Anakin Skywalker, the best star-pilot in the galaxy and a cunning warrior.

Maybe they were so mental you couldn't even show it in a film. Whatever they were they sounded weird and fucking amazing.

The Force, The Jedi, The Sith even the Senate - they were all nebulous notions that our fevered little imaginations could populate for ourselves. Meanwhile the last Star Wars film 'Return of the Jedi' was coming out soon and we had yet to discover the coolness of speederbike troopers and Leia's slave girl outfit. Life and Star Wars was pretty cool.

Flash forward to 2008 where many of lifes illusions have been shattered including the following: The force has nothing to do with effort, you're either born with a load of midichlorians or you're not. The Jedi are actually a bit boring, the Sith are just plain confusing, Darth Vader is an annoying moppet called Annie or a wooden mumbling sulk and the Clone Wars are a kid friendly cgi adventure sandwiched pointlessly between two disappointing films.

Still at the very least we have the concrete reliable aspects of Star Wars. The anchor points. The things that you'd never change.

Never. No matter what.

Things like the 20th century Fox logo and the silent anticipation that accompanies the blue words "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." followed by a blast of the theme music and the iconic yellow text crawl over a starscape.

You'd never, ever change that right?

We've still got that. Right George?

No. No we fucking don't because he's even fucked that up the stupid quiffed cunt. So what do we have instead?

Well first a Warner Brothers logo, which felt odd but not much you can do about that. Then the pause, the blue text and... a wet fart 'remix' of the fucking theme music.

The Star Wars fucking theme music. One of the most recognised themes of all time - which George owns the fucking rights to has been replaced by a shitty sub-bontempi organ version which doesn't even play over an opening crawl of text.

The crawl has inexplicably been replaced by a montage of scenes narrated by an incongruous fast-talking 1930's newscaster.

I know this will sound ridiculous because there are so many other bigger problems here (so, so many) but that pause with the blue text followed by the theme blast IS Star Wars for me.

It's the switch that flips me from real world into the Star Wars universe. It's like a release lever on your imagination, just the right amount of anticipation before a floodgate of memories opens.

But instead I got this, and all it did was open the shit pipe.

It's like expecting an orgasm but doing a shit instead. Out of your mouth.

You're thinking "Oh no, oh God no! What's happening?" But you just keep curling out a big mouth log and frantically wondering why the person you were having sex with is morphing into a big dummy made of shit. On a stinking runny shit bed. In a house made of melting shit.

Less than two minutes in, I was already feeling a bit disappointed, it was mostly downhill from there.

The animation style works well for the wide variety of robots and vehicles, making them look impressively weighty and mechanical. Unfortunately it has the same effect for all the characters. And despite thinking George couldn't get any more wooden than the prequels he continues to amaze - this time developing an aesthetic whereby the characters heads actually appear to be carved from tree stumps.

The soundtrack continues to disappoint ranging from sound library 'moody atmospheric' to some kind of 'funk-fusion' as George replaces Jar-Jar with Wah-Wah.

It's shocking how much John Williams is missed.

But what is more shocking is the decision to replace him with Kevin fucking Kiner who provided the scores for Walker Texas Ranger, 97 episodes of CSI Miami and the unforgettable Excessive Force II: Force on Force.

Even more ludicrous is the plot, revolving mostly around the kidnap and rescue of Jabba the Hutt's son, wait for it, Rotta the Huttlet. He must be retrieved by the Jedi to allow them access to the Hutt run trade routes to the outer rim... ahem.

Anyways before everything really kicks off we open with a big battle scene and the introduction of a new character in the shape of Anakins padawan Ashoka.

Even that collection of words sounds painful, like a Taiwanese 4x4, the Padawan Ashoka just £3,995 on the road.

Ashoka is one sassy teen Torgruta, oh boy. She's all street smarts, quick quips and nicknames. None of which seem to gel with the Star Wars Universe. She proceeds to call Anakin 'Sky-Guy' for the rest of the film.

'Sky-Guy'?

No wonder he flipped out and started killing everyone - Annie? Fucking Sky-Guy? The real young Vader would have pulled a force-choke faster than you can say "I find your lack of faith disturbing."

Instead he resorts to calling her 'Snips'.

I half expected him to snap his fingers and say "Mhummmm Girrrrrl-freeeeeeend, you got it goin' oooowwwww-nnaaahhh" after they dispatched some separatist droids.

On the subject of droids, the 'comedy' talking variety make a comeback here, another case of George removing any mystery or indeed logic.

In the originals some droids spoke English others in bleeps and some even in alien dialects. Like the eyeball thing at Jabbas Palace gate that says what sounds like "Bechoo a-blinkee" in Huttese - you know he is saying "Who are you?" because of the response he gets.

Imagine how shit it would have been if that eyeball had popped out and said "OOoooh, whoooOoo are yoooOOOoo?" in a kind of camp disneyfied robot voice. It wouldn't have stuck in my mind for 25 years. Well maybe it would have but for all the wrong reasons.

Why the fuck would battle droids talk? Shouldn't they be wirelessly connected and co-ordinated? Isn't that the point of a robot army? I'd accept some bleeps and stuff for effect or even a special robot language that we come to understand throughout the films but why would they vocally give each other orders and then say "Roger Roger!" to confirm it?

At one point two robots are sharing one set of binoculars, come on George they're fucking robots they should have binoculars for eyes you stupid beardy bastard.

After a little fight over the binoculars (honestly), one of them gets the co-ordinates wrong "Enemy approaching from sector 44.73.02, no erm 44.73 erm 12, 05 I dunno".

What?! For fucks sake the point of robots is that they make stuff easier not fucking harder.

Hey, hey guys! I've made a confused short sighted battle droid that you can knock out with one punch. Look he's got matchstick arms and matchstick legs and no controls or connectivity - hahah he's great - although if there was more than one all the orders would have to be given vocally and independently to each robot.

Shit wow! Roll out a couple of thou and we'll take over the galaxy, not.

Anyway once we're saddled with Ashoka and the opening battle scene is done it's time to start the story proper, get off into space and head on over to... another battle scene. Having said that, it is the films only genuinely inventive segment.

Sky-Guy and Snips lead an assault on an occupied monastery perched atop of a gargantuan pillar of rock. Starting on the horizontal plane the action soon switches to vertical as the proto-AT-ATs slowly climb the pillar toward their goal. This is where the animation style really shines and at least this scene holds your attention, but it's scant reward for what awaits at the top.


Our heroes discover Rotta who basically looks like a fist sized bowel movement with googgly muppet eyes. He gurgles and farts and Snips drops another head-smackingly shit nickname - 'Stinky'.

The remaining plot basically involves Count Dooku (awooga! fucking stupid name alert) trying to convince Jabba that it was the Jedi who kidnapped his son. Meanwhile the Jedi, with the aid of Padmé, try to convince Jabba that it was in fact separatists.

Sam Jackson crops up as Mace Windu at one point but he's so bland and bald that my eyes and ears slid off him, Yoda says some backward bullshit, Anakin and Dooku have an ineffectual half-duel and the conclusion is inconclusive because the whole thing is just a pilot for a TV show.

Which leads to another massive problem with sandwiching the whole ill conceived proceedings between two prequels. You know exactly who is going to live and die, which pretty much robs the film and the upcoming series of any threat or tension. New characters will presumably die or disappear and nothing serious will happen to anyone else so what's the point?

Will SkyGuy, Snips and Stinky will get back to Tatooine and sort it all out? Does it matter? Does anyone care?

Going in I finally realised what the my major problem is with the prequels. It's that George has taken away all the mystery that I had sub-conciously coloured in over the last 25 years. He took it away and replaced it with disappointing bland bullshit.

Prior to this everyone had their own ideas of how things worked in the blurry historical edges of Star Wars and that let them have ownership to some extent.

I can't help thinking of the saying 'magic is only magic till you know how it's done' George keeps showing us what's behind the original magic and each time he does it all gets a lot less magical.

Everyone has their own Star Wars but it turns out that the one Star Wars nobody really wants is George's Star Wars. The only mystery remaining is why George bothers churning out this lazy lacklustre shit anymore.

The most dissapointing Star Wars yet. Disappointing is too small a word really.

Three words George.

Do. Something. New.

Diary of the Dead (2007)

Bad acting is always annoying but when you allow a bad actress to read a self-indulgent drawling voice over - teeth really start to grate. Doubly so if it's American. If the voice is in its early twenties and starts pointing out ham-fisted cultural observations in a world weary fashion, anger levels start to rise exponentially. Soon teeth start to clench and crack while fingernails slowly dig into armrests.

So then, how would you feel when you realise the voice over belongs to a girl who just finished editing a documentary.

A documentary about the complete and utter breakdown of civilisation as we know it, the end of the world. A documentary in which her own parents are filmed being shot and killed as she watches. A documentary where some of her friends become unwitting murderers while others are shown graphically committing suicide.

A documentary where all our worst nightmares come true and the dead rise again to walk the Earth.

You might think "Holy shit that sounds amazing, or moving, or gory. Or all of the above!"

You might, until she says "I've added some music. To scare you."

Then, you'd either burst out laughing and press eject or you'd waste the next hour and a half of your life watching George R. Romero's Diary of the Dead.

Before I break down this tremendous log of a movie into flushable chunks let me start by simply stating: Diary of the Dead is shit. Absolute unadulterated shit.

Just in case you are thinking of renting it, don't. It stinks like a shit in a microwave on full power. It is, by far, one of the shittiest movies I've seen in quite some time.

It is so shit I expected the actors to walk out halfway through.

When I say actors I mean 'cunts'. Because that's what they are, either for claiming they are actors or for knowing they can act and still taking part in this terrible affront to both cinema and logic.

At the heart of the movie is a simple premise; some film students happen to be shooting a movie when Romero's zombie crisis breaks out. One particularly hateful student decides to document the events on camera as they try to get to safety.

The fact that the movie is edited then introduced by his girlfriend - gives away the fact that he doesn't make it. Any sense of realism leaves shortly afterward with the line;

"I've added some music, to scare you."

In the movie world it is assumed that this scene is filmed after the crisis. So we must also assume that you the viewer will have been seriously affected by it, loved ones may have died. Then come back to life and then been killed by you. In a horrible way.
Sixty to seventy percent of your close friends will be dead or undead. Nowhere is safe. The home-guard and armed forces have given up protecting the public and turned to looting them for survival. Every TV channel and phone connection is out. Soon the power will be. It is literally the end of the world.

But you know what's really scary?

The creepy music on this shitty student documentary. 

Logically this is like saying that without 'spooky music' the footage of mass graves at Bergen-Belsen isn't really that unsettling. Or that without a pantomime DUN-DUN-DUUUHH live execution footage would probably be a bit of a laugh. 

This is the first of many Suspension Of Dis-belief Slip-ups, or SODS for short, that ruin the whole conceit.

Here is a list of just some of the silly SODS in Diary of the Dead:

1. "I've added music to scare you"
   
2. Everyone in the film.
   
3. The fact that the guy who is filming never stops filming, in fact he dies purely because he keeps filming rather than fighting.
   
4. Everything everyone does in the film.
5. The alcoholic Film tutor's 'Thesp' voice. So outrageous it would be more at home as a camp suit of armour called "Sir Knows-a-lot" in a children's cartoon.
6. The alcoholic Film tutor's speech on seeing too much killing in the war. He looks about fifty, and went to Eton so which war involving the British would that have been? 
7. The head smackingly bad line; "Shoot me, shoot me" from our film student when he finally catches one in the neck. He is gesturing to his dropped camera - not the gun. 
8. The awful, awful droning drawling voice over and stock footage montages on video culture that interrupt the mood and bounce you out of the film every ten minutes.
   
9. The abject lack of subtlety in delivering the message.
10. The alcoholic Film tutor arming himself with a bow and arrow because it's 'nicer' than a gun.
    
11. If the phones are out and the TV is out. Would myspace and YOU TUBE be working? Would anyone be logging on?
12. The farmer who gets bitten by a zombie from behind and swings his scythe up through his own head and into the zombies head as well, killing them both.
13. After everything that has happened and considering the scale of the personal and global tragedy that has unfolded, would you really bother editing a movie about it?
14. If you did, which is unlikely, would you sit there and choose which creepy music to add? Where would you do that? Why would you do that?
15. Just in case you forgot: "I've added music, to scare you"

There's plenty more, though you'll need to watch the film yourself if you want to spot them all.

Putting aside the absurd script, amateurish acting, non-story and the unoriginal and poorly executed conceit - there are a few good zombie deaths.

Most notably the crash cart paddles being applied to a zombie nurses head causing her eyes to boil and burst like poached eggs.

Also some good comedy zombies. The found footage of a kids birthday party for example; a clown shuffles into view, kids cheer. The Dad honks the clowns nose which promptly falls off, blood squirts out the nose hole, kids scream and then CoCo turns Dads neck into dogfood.

These parts are few and far between, maybe the worst crime on display here is that it's a zombie movie without many zombies. The best you could do is to get really drunk or stoned and press play fully expecting it to be the worst thing you've ever seen. 

The only thing that shuffles and scares here is the story and the quality of acting. Like the zombies, the movie is crying out for the one thing it really lacks; brains, braaainssss.

If Cloverfield has an ugly younger brother with learning difficulties who wears rollerskates with a grubby tutu and falls over a lot then shouts "Bingo" and shits himself - it is this film.

Speed Racer (2008)

From the creators of the Matrix comes a world built for Speed. And mushrooms or high grade LSD. The Wachowski Brothers are back and this time they've stripped off their S&M leathers, painted their cocks with glowing primary colours and they're gonna fuck your eye holes. Two flashing, fizzing, fat neon cocks relentlessly ramming the windows to your soul for two hours and ten minutes. Still, no matter how desperately they both grip your head, cycle through strobe settings and furiously pump away, Speed Racer has all the emotional charge of a dialling tone.

A lot has been said about the way this movie looks. That until now this couldn't have been made or that you've never seen anything like it before. This is the sort of wild studio based statement that reminds me of when Matrix Reloaded was coming out. Producer Joel Silver said "We've raised the bar so high that there is no bar". Sadly the results looked like a rushed xbox game with a script from an Atari game and a plot from drunken game of consequences.

As far as the race sequences go I'll admit that they are fantastic. There is an avalanche of creativity on screen, explosions of new techniques, multicoloured manga made real, genuinely mind blowing visual flair and innovation. But when Speed takes his foot off the pedal it's not just the car that stops dead. The bits inbetween look like Dick Tracy with sub-Phantom Menace acting. It's a 100 million dollar remake of Flash Gordon by a Vulcan.


I didn't care about Rex, I didn't care about Mom and Pops, I definitely didn't care about Spritle and fucking Chim-Chim. I didn't care if Speed won or lost. I didn't even care if Speed lived or died. About three quarters of the way through I started to stop caring if I lived or died.

Even Christina Ricci can't save it. Everyone plays their part well but somehow their dodgy lines fall flat, never stepping out of the green screened soundstage and into the cartoon world the races occupy. Much like Phantom Menace at first glance the movie seems to have all the ingredients for adrenaline fuelled action and adventure. But they soon make the same mistakes. No-one wants to see a sci-fi adventure movie that revolves around a trade embargo, and, no-one wants to see a racing movie that revolves around a complicated plot to drive up stock prices.

The races themselves soon become repetitive, another spinning car, another upside down shot. The so called car-fu that has been made so much of was so-so but in the grand scheme of things it added nothing - the movie lacked heart and no amount of upside down, spinning, back-flipping cgi cars could replace that.


When I saw it on a Saturday night the cinema was empty except for five people. Which is probably a good indication of how popular this flickering kaleidoscopic turd is going to be. You could always say that really this is for kids, I don't agree. There was a kid sitting behind us during the showing and he didn't get it at all.

Every ten seconds he would ask who or what was on screen and why it was happening. If the sound was louder i.e. during a race he would ask repeatedly, each time increasing in volume. Who is that? Where is he going? Has he crashed? Why has he crashed? Will he get an ambulance? WILL HE GET AN AMBULANCE? WILL HE GET AN AMBULANCE?

Despite the fact that Pops was in the movie from the start - about an hour and forty-five minutes in he bellowed 'Is that his Dad?' 

At one point Speed Racer was talking to an ex-Grand Prix winner who was black. The kid shouted 'Is that his brother?'


Maybe this spastic child has coloured my view of Speed Racer, but, question-tourettes-kid or not this was a shit movie. One reviewer called it 'a hit and run with a box of Crayola' another 'the cgi equivalent of a bukkake movie'. You'll definitely be wiping the cgi spunk off your face for weeks afterwards but you'll have forgotten why it's there before you stand-up.

Incidentally after putting up with it for over an hour we asked the Dad to try and control his kid, repeatedly. Forty-five minutes and numerous inane questions later after hearing him say "When does it finish?' and the Dad say 'Yeah it's boring innit?' I turned round and told him to 'Shut the fuck up because I can't hear the fucking film' to which he replied 'It's a kids film' to which I replied 'Mate, your fucking kid isn't enjoying it and he hasn't had a fucking clue what has happened from start to finish, so why don't you fuck off' to which he just shrugged.

Problem is they're right, Speed Racer is boring and you do wonder when it will finish. For an adaptation of a cartoon about race cars that has to be a major fuck up. If you asked me why I watched the whole thing I'd probably shrug too.