Scott's Blog of Doom

The SmarK DVD Rant for Star Wars: The Clone Wars

You know, never let it be said that George Lucas is shy about marketing opportunities or self-promotion. A few years after running his prize franchise into the ground with the prequels, now we get The Clone Wars (which should have been the title of Episode II), which further mines territory that no one cares about any longer except for pre-teens who are seeing the movies for the first time. Really, do we NEED further examination of the time period between episodes II and III? Isn't the fanbase far more interested in what happened to Anakin AFTER he became Darth Vader?

Technically, this is a sequel to the Clone Wars mini-series from Cartoon Network a few years back, rather than a proper re-interpretation of characters who don't need any further interpretation. And really, it's a franchise for kids now, which I think generates a lot of the bitterness and cynicism among the older fans who grew up and watched Lucas take their movies away from them. But is it at least worth watching?

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The SmarK DVD Rant for Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Unrated Collector's Edition

"Did you listen to my demo?"

"Yeah, I was going to, but then I decided to keep on living my life instead."

Judd Apatow has of course been on a hot streak as a producer ever since Anchorman debuted in 2004, and particularly with a genre that he has mostly mastered now -- the romantic-comedy as done from the perspective of the male. Despite the occasional commercial misstep (Walk Hard and Drillbit Taylor immediately spring to mind), Judd has been consistently successful because he's able to make the audience connect with the wacky characters who inhabit his movies by actually giving them human qualities instead of cartoon character personalities. Or at the very least, in ADDITION to the cartoon character personalities.

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Speaking of movies I haven't watched in a while, I got The Frighteners for free with my HD-DVD player way back when and it's been sitting on my shelf since then.  So I figured that I'd get into the Halloween spirit with some scary movies and watched it again for the first time in 10 years.  And amazingly, it was pretty great!  I remembered it the first time as something of a cross between Ghostbusters and Evil Dead or something, and that the shift in tone halfway through the movie was really off-putting.  Well I don't know if the extra 16 minutes in the Director's Cut fixed that or what, but I thought it moved pretty smoothly from the goofy con artist set up into the "Jake Busey trying for the serial killer record" payoff this time around and I had a blast all the way through.  Maybe it's because I knew the change in tone was coming this time, I dunno. 

Of course, there's still major problems with it.  The opening scene makes absolutely no sense in the context of the rest of the movie now (Why would the Reaper be haunting that house?) and overall it feels like he could have very easily made two very good movies out of the concepts presented here instead of smooshing them together into one big idea.  However, the awesome Jeffrey Combs is so much fun as the weird FBI agent and the later scenes with Frank shifting in and out of the hospital flashbacks are powerful stuff, even if the comic relief ghosts at the beginning feel like they're from a different movie by the time you get to the end. 

Definitely deserving of the "cult classic" label and a clear sign that Peter Jackson was ready for bigger and better things at that point.  Check this one out if you're never given it a chance due to the crap reviews it originally got.