The Mandalorian - Season Three Review: This is NOT the Way

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A major disappointing season from this once terrific series.

Season one (2019) and two (2020) of The Mandalorian were as good as it gets in terms of Star Wars storytelling. So much so that a dear friend of mine, the biggest Star Wars fan I know, once waxed poetically to me about how the series’ creator Jon Favreau was the savior of the Star Wars franchise.

Whether you believe that about Favreau or not, the truth is that The Mandalorian undoubtedly set the bar very high for the bevy of Star Wars series that came in its wake. Unfortunately, the majority of them have failed to live up to the standard.

For example, the alarmingly awful The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi fell shamefully short of The Mandalorian’s high standards. Things were so bleak at Mickey Mouse’s money-making machine after the back-to-back egregious embarrassments of Boba Fett and Obi Wan, Disney’s Star Wars television ventures seemed on the precipice of annihilation like Alderaan on the wrong end of a Death Star blast.

Then the top-notch Andor arrived on the scene. Andor was able to equal, and in some ways exceed, season one and two of The Mandalorian’s high storytelling standards and Disney once again felt like the had righted the good ship Star Wars.

But now the roller coaster continues with season three of The Mandalorian, whose eight episodes concluded on Wednesday, which scuttled all the creative and artistic momentum of its previous two stellar seasons and of the superb Andor.  

Unfortunately, season three of The Mandalorian feels more like an extension of the sub-par work of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi than a continuation of the excellence of seasons one and two of The Mandalorian.

Season three is an exceedingly frustrating, irritating, incoherent, dull, lore-desecrating exercise that besmirches the once mighty legacy of The Mandalorian brand, reducing it to just another Star Wars piece of junk in a galaxy quickly filling up with Star Wars junk.

The storyline of season three lacks immediacy and consistency, and instead feels like writers/producers trying to sell Star Wars toys while they kill time waiting for other series, most likely the forthcoming Ahsoka, to carry the Star Wars narrative load.

The (spoiler-free) loose premise of the season is that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his de facto adopted son Grogu – aka Baby Yoda, join with Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sakchoff) to try and return to Mandalore.

The premise never compels, and the villain (I won’t say who it is to avoid spoilers), once revealed, feels like a creative cul-de-sac that is repetitive and redundant and redundantly repetitive.

The series featured the worst episode (episode six – which contains cameos by Lizzo and Jack Black – God help us!!) in the history of Star Wars tv which is an astonishing accomplishment considering the staggering level of incompetence of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi.

The season finale, while not a great finale, was an action-packed episode and was, to a point, entertaining, but it didn’t elevate the series or make it make sense.

As much as I enjoyed some of the action at times in the finale it was also ridiculous to the point of shameful, and it stretched Star Wars lore and the established rules of the series and the Star Wars universe beyond recognition.

For example, earlier in the season Mandalorians chasing a giant monster had to stop because their jet packs ran out of fuel after roughly a half mile. But in the finale, Mandalorians were flying thousands of miles and breaking through the atmosphere of a planet and into space with ease using their jetpacks.

Another example is that in the finale the villain/villains have great powers (I’m doing my best to avoid spoilers) and yet they end up being like every other dopey background actor stormtrooper who gets felled with ease by the good guys.

The biggest problem with season three though is that it felt like it was no longer about The Mandalorian but rather about the WOmandalorian. Female warrior queen Bo-Katan Kryze became the focus of the drama and the hero who continuously kept saving the damsel-in-distress Din Djarin from peril.

Making things worse was that Katee Sakchoff, an actress I loved on Battlestar Galactica, was dreadful as Bo-Katan. In season two Din Djarin worked with a bad-ass woman warrior Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano. Dune was really cool and Carano was great in the role, but then she said something on social media about Nazis that made the Nazis at Disney upset so they fired her. The reason I bring this up is because, and I never thought I’d say this in my entire life, but Katee Sackhoff is no Gina Carano, and The Mandalorian season three suffers under her relentlessly weak performance.

Which brings up another issue that is becoming glaring, and that is Disney’s princess problem. What I mean by that is that Disney made its bazillions by telling female-centric stories for girls about princesses. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and on and on. The problem is that they’ve purchased Marvel and Star Wars, two brands that tell archetypal stories about boys and men for boys and men.

Instead of embracing what made Marvel and Star Wars successful, Disney has reverted to form and gone about dismantling the male archetypes and replacing them with “princesses” - inadequate and inappropriate female characters.

So, in Marvel we get Thor replaced by Lady Thor, Black Panther replaced by Lady Black Panther, Hawkeye replaced by Lady Hawkeye, Iron Man replaced by Iron Heart aka Lady Iron Man…not to mention the cavalcade of female led-projects like Black Widow, Captain Marvel (who originally was a man in the comics) and now The Marvels. In Star Wars the most obvious example was that the center of the latest trilogy was a female, Rey, while the two previous trilogies focused on Luke and Anakin.

I understand Disney’s insipid impulse to feminize everything and even understand its insidious desire to socially engineer through its products, but what shocks me about this is Disney’s incredible misunderstanding of the basics of myth and archetype.

As Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung teach us, the woman’s hero journey (or heroine journey if you will) is very different from the male hero journey. Different narratives and archetypes are needed and necessary in order to tell the heroine’s journey, but what Disney (and most other modern storytelling) is doing is simply replacing men in the hero’s journey with women.

The reason why these stories, on the whole, fail is because they do not resonate in the collective unconscious due to their mythic and archetypal misunderstandings.

This does not mean that women can’t be leads in action stories…quite the contrary, but they must go on a heroine’s journey not a hero’s journey. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien is a perfect example of the heroine’s journey in an action role. Ripley is at her core a feminine mother character (in the first film this – among other reasons - is why the cat is so important – as Ripley must nurture and save it), just like the mother creature she fights.

Another example is Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) from the fantastic 2015 film Sicario. Macer is an FBI agent but she must navigate the brutal world of men all the while knowing that she, as a woman, is more vulnerable than the men she is surrounded by. As much as she wants to be “one of the boys”, she never will be and that is part of her journey…coming to understand the nature of things and the perilous, nearly indecipherable world of men.

While audiences, for social or political reasons, may support these Disney designed female-led hero’s journeys, on a very deep psychological level, they are agitated by them and often repulsed by them and that’s because they are the anti-thesis of our inherent psychological and mythological conditioning.

No doubt there are some who, again for social or political reasons, want to decondition audiences from what they would describe as an archaic view of men and women, but the human psyche and collective conscious and unconscious, don’t work that way as they have been built over thousands of years and don’t bend to whatever is fashionable in the decadent society du jour.

Back in 2015 right after the female-led The Force Awakens hit theatres, I was at a dinner party with a bunch of Angelinos and the movie came up as a topic of conversation. I chimed in and said I didn’t think it was very good and a woman sitting next to me, who was there with her maybe ten-year-old daughter, leaned over and whispered into my ear, “yes, but the message it sends to girls, and to boys about girls, is really important.”

I nearly bled to death biting my tongue in an attempt to avoid a social mis-step. What I wanted to tell this woman was that the privileged life she led, the big L.A. house she lived in with the “I’m With Her” sign in front, and the security of her existence, was built by…men. Many of them ugly, brutish men, who she would despise simply because they were ugly and brutish men. These are the same men who throughout history have eliminated any and all threats to her plush, decadent, million-dollar, echo-chamber existence.

This is the type of woman, a pampered princess, who demands “equality” for women and girls, but when push comes to shove, she only wants the kind of “equality” where she is awarded unquestioned deference and privileges due to her “victim status” as a woman which elevates her above by those deplorable men who intervene to protect her from the vicious darkness of the world.

If this woman lived in Ukraine she would, as did most of the Ukrainian women, leave to go live in other parts of Europe while all the men of fighting age (and well beyond and beneath fighting age) were forced, through force or conscience, to fight, and ended up being slaughtered by the vastly superior Russian military.

This is why Sicario is so impactful, as it shows in the bleakest, bluntest terms, that play-acting as a tough chick won’t cut it in the world of men. Men inherently understand this as we’ve navigated the perils of the brutal world of men our entire lives and know what the real deal is.

Yes, women have been on the receiving end of toxic masculinity…but they’ve also benefitted from men’s sacrifice and masculinity’s ability to protect them in a dangerous world to such a degree that they now feel safe and secure enough to incessantly bitch and moan about how all masculinity is toxic.

That’s a long way of saying that when Bo-Katan saves Din Djarin for like the fifth time in season three on The Mandalorian, it made me laugh at how ridiculous and shameful it was even for a silly, sci-fi series on a corporate streaming service hellbent on promoting a social-political agenda.

It is fitting that Disney now turns its Star Wars hopes to Ahsoka, which hits Disney plus in August and tells the story of the female Jedi who was once the Padawan of Anakin Skywalker. The girl power galaxy strikes again.

As far as The Mandalorian season three goes, it was a major letdown compared to season one and two. The series lost not only its cohesiveness and its competence, but more importantly its purpose and meaning, and there’s no telling if it’ll ever get it back.

Season three of The Mandalorian was so deflating, it left me wondering not only what the future holds for Star Wars, but if it has a future at all.

The cold, hard reality is that The Mandalorian, Star Wars, Marvel, and our entire culture in general, is an utter mess, and it needs to get its balls back and quick if it wants to survive.

As the Mandalorians would say, “This is the way.”

©2023

The Last of Us: TV Review - Zombie Video Game as Prestige TV Zombie

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An uneven show that feels like prestige tv fool’s gold.

HBO’s latest prestige tv series, The Last of Us, is a strange one.

The series, which premiered in mid-January and recently ended its first season, follows the trials and tribulations of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and his teenage ward Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they navigate the perils of a post-apocalyptic, fascist America under siege by fungus-fueled zombies. Considering that description it should come as no surprise that the series is based on a 2013 video game of the same-name.

It seems a bit of an odd choice to make a prestige tv series based on a video game, but thanks to the hard work of HBOs savvy marketing department, the show was well-received by critics and generated a modicum of cultural chatter, no small feat in our scattered entertainment era.

Full disclosure, I’ve never played the video game The Last of Us and in fact had never even heard of it until the tv show came along. This lack of knowledge left me unencumbered by the source material and able to judge the series solely on its value as a tv show not as an extension of the video game.

My thoughts on the series are that…it is…despite some great moments, overall sort of underwhelming. The show is very uneven, as it’s at-times extremely compelling, but also often dull and aggravating. It’s also one of those rather annoyingly trite shows that poses as elevated but is really rather philosophically vacuous and politically vapid.

The first season runs nine episodes and the first episode is easily the best of the bunch. The drama of a civilization instantly crumbling due to a quickly expanding pandemic – a fungus spreading across the globe which turns its victims into zombie extensions of itself, is fantastic and eerily reminiscent of the real-world’s recent tumult. The flashbacks in episode two of how the pandemic started are equally captivating and may have been my favorite part of the series.

Another solid sequence is in episode four and five when Joel and Ellie meet up with a pair of brothers in Kansas City. The four of them must avoid not just zombies but blood thirsty locals. The conclusion of this particular adventure is phenomenal.

The problem though is that the show often feels like…well…a video game. The set ups for most of the adventures feel painfully contrived and uncomfortably like a sequence from a rather simple video game.

The series also has trouble with pacing and with generating and keeping dramatic momentum. For every episode like one, two, four and five where you’re fully invested, the show also has episodes, like three and seven where everything slows down to a crawl and we get stuck in the muck and mire of inconsequential characters and their flaccid non-drama.

It really is purely coincidental that the focus of the drama in episodes three and seven revolves around characters being gay. Even if these characters were as straight as arrows their stories simply wouldn’t be that interesting. Although it must be said that HBO injecting a heavy dose of cultural politics into a story that doesn’t need it is not the least bit surprising in our current hyper-political age. In addition, considering the paucity of people we get to know and spend time with in the series, that close to half of them are gay is sort of hysterical in an absurd way. To quote Kurt Cobain, “what else can I say, everyone is gay!”

The later episodes encapsulate the overall issues with the show as they seem both dramatically lethargic and narratively unfocused. In these last few episodes, a survivalist, charismatic Christian cult comes to the fore and considering the other cultural politics of the show it will not surprise you to learn that they are the most-evil people imaginable.

Despite the first season being much too slow at times, it also somehow manages to feel uncomfortably rushed at its conclusion. It also doesn’t help that the series and its violence become less based in reality in terms of its action as the season progresses, culminating in a rather bizarre 1980s action-movie climax.

The acting in The Last of Us is like the rest of the show, not particularly great. I genuinely like Pedro Pascal and find him to be a pleasing screen presence, and he does solid work as the tortured tough guy Joel, but he’s never really asked to do too much heavy lifting.

Bella Ramsey as Ellie is like nails on a chalkboard. Ramsey is a very unappealing screen presence and she feels completely phony as the struggling teen. Ramsey’s cadence and speech are so odd as to be grating and her entire performance rings very hollow to me.

Melanie Lynskey, an actress I very much like, is terribly miscast in a supporting role as a revolutionary leader fueled by bloodlust and revenge. Unfortunately, Lynskey is so unbelievable in the role as to be ridiculous and it scuttles what is one of the more intriguing storylines.

As for the special effects, the zombies do look pretty cool, and the actors portraying them do a terrific job of being creepy as hell.

On the whole though watching the first season of The Last of Us, despite its occasional high points, felt like a bit of a chore. Maybe I would feel differently if I was familiar with the video-game. Who knows?

In terms of just being a tv series, The Last of Us seems like one of those prestige shows that, like HBO’s Westworld, run out of creativity, lose the plot, lose their audience, and then are quickly tossed down the cultural memory hole never to be thought of again.

Considering The Last of Us seems to have already lost its creative steam (around episode six), I’d guess season two will see a precipitous decline in both audience engagement and critical adoration. It seems to me this prestige drama is a mindless zombie ultimately not long for this world.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

China's Totalitarian Rules for Performers are a Perfect Fit for Unrelentingly Woke Hollywood

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

In honor of China’s Orwellian rules for entertainment industry right-think, I’ve compiled a comparable list for working in equally unforgiving Hollywood

The two global gold standards when it comes to open-mindedness and tolerance for diversity of opinion have always been Hollywood and China.

Like Sauron and Saruman’s two towers in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Hollywood and China are monuments to artistic freedom and freedom of expression, at least I think that’s what the two towers stand for since I’ve never actually read the book or seen the movie because of my egregiously short attention span and intellectual laziness.

China has long had an informal list of rules and requirements, or as I prefer to call them, “right-think guidelines”, that its entertainers must follow in order to stay in the good graces of the totally non-totalitarian government.

Recently, the Chinese Association of Performing Arts made these informal rules official so that performers can better “self-regulate” and avoid punishments that could include a lifetime ban.

As a resident of the People’s Republic of La La Land, I believe that Hollywood should boldly follow this shining example and make their unofficial right-think rules official, so that the crucial cultural trait of artistic “self-regulation” becomes more efficient and effective here in America.

China’s rules, such as its demand that performers “ardently support the Communist Party’s line, principle and policies”, and that they become an “art worker for the new era…by using literature and art to serve the people and socialism” are conveniently very adaptable to Hollywood.

Hollywood already rightfully demands that performers ardently support wokeism and never deviate from the woke party line, principles and policies.

 For example, Gina Carano just got fired from The Mandalorian for allegedly equating woke cancel culture with the Holocaust, while her co-star Pedro Pascal committed the same exact crime but over Trump’s immigration policy with no consequences. Obviously, Carano is a wrong think hate criminal, and I say good riddance to her and to her free speech…oops…I mean hate speech!

And as evidenced by Hollywood’s endless cavalcade of insipidly sub-par yet gloriously diverse virtue signaling movies and tv shows, art and entertainment has thankfully already been thoroughly transformed into a conformist cultural propaganda machine, and thank god for that…or how else would we know the right thing to right-think?

China’s rules also demand that celebrities should “guide minors to establish the right kind of values and actively resist uncivilized behavior”, which is perfect for Hollywood since it has a very long and rich history of guiding and grooming minors that speaks to the industry’s uniquely affectionate and insatiable love of children.

To be blunt, some of China’s rules simply won’t translate to Hollywood…except in reverse. For instance, China bans obscenity, pornography, gambling, drugs, drunk driving and “endangering social morality” for its performers, whereas those things are basically mandatory in Hollywood.

Another Chinese rule that won’t make the cut here is the ban on lip-syncing at live performances. China deems it “deceptive”, but if America bans lip-syncing then 97% of pop stars will be unemployable except maybe as prostitutes…but I repeat myself.

The rest of the right-think rules for working in Hollywood are quite obvious but a bit different from China, so I will state them clearly here.

First off there is the ‘diversity/inclusion lack of responsibility’ rule, which states that if a female filmmaker’s movie is terrible, it’s because of misogyny, and if a black director’s movie is bad it’s due to systemic racism.

Speaking of diversity, every commercial, no matter the product, must always feature either a person of color, or a bi-racial couple, or a gay couple, or best of all a bi-racial gay couple. Every. Single. One.

Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, cis-gendered actors CANNOT play trans characters. EVER. And straight actors cannot play gay characters. Basically straight actors, particularly the white ones, aren’t allowed to act anymore. But gay actors can play straight characters and trans actors can do absolutely anything because we must honor, respect and worship them.

There’s also the Meryl Streep rule, where artists are wholly encouraged to bravely speak up but only when they know everyone in Hollywood agrees with them and it costs them absolutely nothing.

There’s also the straight white guy rule, where straight white guys are punished for the hate crime of being straight white guys. This is self-explanatory, as pale-faced skirt chasers like me deserve to rot in hell for our disgusting heterosexual masculinity, no matter how great our allyship and self-loathing.  

Some may think these right-think rules are dictatorial, totalitarian and draconian, but those people need to be silenced, cancelled and disappeared. The truth is that Hollywood is a bastion of free expression, just as long as that free expression strictly conforms to woke ideology.

For example, Hollywood proudly permits all sorts of vacant, vacuous and vapid virtue signaling around the topics of race, LGBTQ and feminism or any other wokefully acceptable issue. But if some too-smart-for-their-own-good performer dares to malign or denigrate the corporate hand that feeds, or targets American empire or militarism, or challenges the actual power structure in America, namely the military industrial complex and Israel, I promise you Hollywood will get medieval on their ass.

In conclusion, Hollywood should courageously follow in China’s noble footsteps (or is it bootsteps?) regarding enforcement of right-think, because as we all know, artistic “freedom is slavery”, and “ignorance is strength”, which means Hollywood is filled with the strongest people in the world.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Just when you thought 2020 couldn't get any worse - along comes 'Wonder Woman 1984'

 Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

Wonder Women 1984 is the horrendous, man-hating, militaristic, imperialist movie no one wanted but that 2020 deserves.

On Christmas Day the highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 (WW84) premiered in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max. The film, co-written and directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot, is the sequel to the smash hit 2017 film Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman (2017) wasn’t a perfect movie by any stretch, but it was a well-crafted, thoroughly entertaining superhero origin story. The film featured a star making performance from the gloriously gorgeous Gal Gadot and tapped into the anti-Trump feminist zeitgeist of the time and was handsomely rewarded with a hefty $822 million box office.

As for Wonder Woman 1984, it is the exact opposite of Wonder Woman as everything good about the original is bludgeoned to death in the sequel.

In Wonder Woman, Gadot’s character, Diana/Wonder Woman is forced into a fish-out-of-water scenario and must adapt to the rigid confines of feminine etiquette in 1918, a task rife with comedy for an Amazonian warrior princess. This played to Gadot’s strengths as an actress and her impassioned naivety came off as charming and magnetic.

In WW84, the fish-out-of-water is Steve (Chris Pine), Diana’s resurrected boyfriend…and that falls entirely flat and fails miserably. The predictably unclever lowlight of which is a 1980’s fashion montage that features a recurring American flag fanny pack.

Diana is no longer naïve in WW84 but the bearer of burdens, and this shift brutally exposes Gadot as being a wooden, severely limited, remarkably dead-eyed and dull actress.

As for the plot of WW84, it is so incoherent as to be inconceivable. At one point a tertiary character yells out “what the hell is going on here!” and I completely concurred with that sentiment. I had almost no clue what the hell was happening most of the time in this movie, but thankfully the characters were so poorly written and dreadfully acted that I didn’t care.

As for the film’s politics…if you like white male hating movies that feel like two and a half hour long commercials for American and Israeli militarism and imperialism...Wonder Woman 1984 is the movie for you.

Wonder Woman (2017) succeeded because it wasn’t heavy handed in its cultural politics, but no such deftness and delicacy is on display in WW84.  

The film makes perfectly clear that white guys, Steve the lone exception, are irredeemably evil and painfully one-dimensional. To prove this point there are endless scenes of both Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) and Diana being sexually harassed by 80’s guys, all of them white except for an Asian guy who is apparently white guy adjacent.

White guys are even revealed as the reason why the film’s main villain, Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal)- a Latino, is bad. A flashback shows his villainy being born when he was bullied as a child by…you guessed it…evil white guys!

Another group held up as evil are Middle Easterners. There’s an “Egyptian” Emir who’s so bad he wishes for and receives a giant wall that encircles his Caliphate-esque kingdom of Bialya. The giant wall sprouts up and cuts off water to poor people and essentially imprisons them…which sounds a lot like Israel’s West Bank wall used against Palestinians…but of course in a supreme bit of Orwellianism in action, in Wonder Woman 1984 the bad guys creating the wall aren’t Israelis but Arabs.

The film’s unsubtle and unsurprising politics are made shamelessly clear when Gadot, who as a former Miss Israel (2004) and a former soldier in the Israeli Defense Force is a walking avatar for Israel, fights a convoy of heavily armed Arabs, and saves Arab children from being killed by those same evil Arab men.

Ultimately, if you love America’s belligerent foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and in relation to Russia…you’ll definitely connect with WW84.

Repulsive politics aside, this film is just appallingly directed by Patty Jenkins, as it is humorless, tedious and devoid of any drama, tension or notable action.

Jenkins made a name for herself with Wonder Woman, and has since signed a deal to direct some Star Wars movies, but her dismal work on WW84 has exposed her, just like it did Gadot, as an extremely limited one-trick pony.

Jenkins’ inability to shoot a decent fight scene, and to exploit the 80’s for comedy and cultural relevance, are calamitous comic book cinema crimes of negligence.

Jenkins doesn’t even plumb the plethora of popular 80’s music in order to set tone and place and appease her nostalgia-craving audience, a tactic used to great success by recent tv shows like Stranger Things. Unbelievably there isn’t a single 80’s song in the entire film, and that is the most monstrous moviemaking malpractice imaginable!

WW84 saves the worst for last as in its climactic scene Gadot gives a monologue directly to the camera meant to be profound and poignant that is pretentious and patronizing…which is eerily reminiscent of Gadot’s other 2020 misfire, the “Imagine” viral video. In that disastrous effort she and her fabulously wealthy celebrity friends condescendingly sing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem in a tone-deaf show of faux solidarity with those poor little people suffering during the pandemic.

A testament to how unbelievably unbearable this year has been is the fact that the best Gal Gadot movie released in 2020 was “Imagine”. It’s entirely fitting that this awful, dreadful, no-good year should end with a movie as awful, dreadful, and no-good as Wonder Woman 1984.

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dreadfully tedious and idiotic movie that pales in comparison to the first Wonder Woman from 2017.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020