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

You're Welcome World! Academy Awards Courageously Save Earth From Global Warming

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 31 seconds

Hollywood has been averting doomsday scenarios in movies for decades - but now the Oscars are serious about it, brandishing a ‘sustainable’ plant-based menu for the cream of the virtue-signaling celebrity crowd.

Hollywood has an extended and rich history of depicting mankind in peril from various existential threats.

If you recall, it was Hollywood that showed us the nefarious nature of robots, like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Skynet and their T-1000 killer robot minions (that speak with a strange Austrian accent for no apparent reason) in the Terminator franchise, and the dead-eyed evil of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.

Hollywood also raised the red flag concerning the threat from other worlds. Alien, Signs, War of the Worlds and Independence Day are among the many films that show what will happen when E.T. phones home and his dastardly reinforcements arrive to even the score.

Hollywood’s most accurate depiction of humanity’s inevitable destruction was shown to us in the various Planet of the Apes films. Watch the news long enough and you will surely stumble across some supposedly heart-warming story of an ape learning sign language….but don’t be fooled, that Helen Keller wannabe mini-Kong is a stepping-stone to mankind’s slavery under brutal ape overlords. I guarantee you that if enough of these monkey bastards learn to sign we will all end up wearing leashes and loin cloths and yelling at some descendant of Harambe to “take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”

Which brings us to global warming…oops…I mean climate change, that scary storytelling device Hollywood adores. Movies like The Day After Tomorrow, Geostorm and Al Gore’s Oscar winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth have told the all too frighteningly real story of the climate crisis and how it will impact mankind.

Hollywood has taught us that climate change will inescapably lead to a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max type of world where we must wage endless resource wars that include some pretty spectacular car chase battles with Mel Gibson or Tom Hardy, in order to survive.

Thankfully though, the Academy Awards, showcase of Hollywood’s best and brightest, has solved the climate crisis and eradicated it forever as a threat to humanity.

What is the Academy Award’s plan to stop the climate crisis? Well the noble geniuses at the Oscars have declared that instead of serving meat-based foods at their annual luncheon for nominees and in the theatre lobby on the night of the awards, they will instead serve only plant-based foods!!

Take that climate change! Go straight to hell global warming!! Way to kick ass Oscar and you are very welcome Mother Earth!

To be fair, the Oscars weren’t the first to come up with this ingenious plan, as it is the same plan the Golden Globes put into effect at their most recent awards show in early in January. After seeing the tremendous impact the Golden Globes magical vegetarian menu had on the earth over the last month, it is nice to see the Oscars deciding to double down on the effort.

The impact of the vegan Oscar menu is impossible to over estimate. It seems extremely likely to me that by serving Tinseltown’s elite vegetables instead of chicken, not only will the Academy Awards halt global warming but also bring about world peace and maybe even end the scourge of physical ugliness so prevalent in non-famous regular people.

Just imagine how much better earth and all of its inhabitants will feel when self-satisfied movie stars fly to Los Angeles from across the globe in their private jets and then cruise in their first world limousines past the hordes of homeless that literally litter every nook and cranny of third world La La Land, and then go to an Oscars ceremony with its plant based menu which these stars won’t eat anyway because they’re fasting so they look thin for photographs in their glamorous outfits. A complex problem like climate change doesn’t stand a chance in the face of that kind of total sacrifice and complete commitment.

I personally think serving a mostly vegan menu at an awards show is so much better for the environment than say, living a simple and sustainable life, or refusing to do any business with carbon based energy companies, or better yet, divesting from one of the worst degraders of the environment, The Pentagon, and deciding to stop being the propaganda wing for American Empire.

How about this Hollywood… instead of self-congratulatory awards nonsense why don’t the Academy Awards have a full and healthy menu, but as an alternative to serving it to narcissistic actors who won’t eat it because they don’t want to look bloated in photos, take it into the streets of Los Angeles where 60,000 poor, tired and ill homeless people struggle to find access to clean water, food and sanitation as they scratch out an existence in tent cities beneath nearly every underpass and in every open space in the city. Maybe then the Oscar’s plant-based menu would make an actual difference in the real world instead of just in the delusional minds of self-centered eco-poseurs.

I’m just kidding…let them eat cake!! Just as long as it is an environmentally sustainable and 100% vegan cake!

Speaking of the Academy Awards, “and the Oscar for Best Faux Eco-Friendly Virtue Signaling goes to…”

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

High Life: A Review

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

My Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. But be forewarned, even though it is in English, it is a very “French” film and is definitely at home in the arthouse. If you have conventional tastes in movies, this one is not for you, but if you are a cinephile defintely check it out in the theatre.

High Life, written and directed by French auteur Claire Denis, tells the story of Monte, a young man who is caring for a baby on a mysterious voyage into deep space. The film stars Robert Pattinson as Monte with supporting turns from Julliette Binoche, Andre Benjamin and Mia Goth.

Claire Denis, the writer/director of High Life, is the critical darling of French cinema and the American arthouse. Denis has a distinctive film making style that appeals greatly to film critics but that the general public often finds impenetrable. A good example of this is that her last film, Let the Sunshine In (2018), which starred Juliette Binoche and could sort of be described as a French/arthouse romantic comedy, has an 86 % critical score and a 29% audience score at the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.

Part of the problem with Denis work, at least for American audiences, is that if you market a film as a romantic comedy, Americans will expect a rather simple Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan cute fest and not the verbose philosophizing, existential thesis that is Let the Sunshine In. Expectations play a big part in audience perceptions and thus in the ultimate success or failure of a film.

High Life may face the same marketing struggle as Denis’ other films, at least in terms of the general public. High Life is being sold as a sort of action-thriller, science fiction, space movie…in the vein of Ridley Scott’s Alien. High Life is a lot of things, but action-thriller is not one of them, and if audiences are aware of that and understand how to digest the film, they may come away with a greater appreciation for it…because there is a great deal to appreciate.

High Life is not Alien meets 2001, but rather is a beguiling, at times bewildering, dark, moody, existential and philosophical meditation on the meaning of life and what it means to be a human. The film is Claire Denis at her very best, using her signature style to create a deliberately paced, deliriously claustrophobic, non-linear dream/nightmare that is intentionally disorienting.

The film opens with Pattinson’s character Monte caring for baby all by himself on a space craft. The film then unwinds and reveals the who, what, when, where, why and how this strange combination of Monte, a baby, and deep space, came to be.

Being a parent is hard. Being a single parent is a Herculean task. Being a single parent in deep space is a circle of hell that Dante could never have dreamed up. Monte’s struggle to care for this baby is palpable, and as the child’s cries pierce through Monte’s space suit to his core, they also cut viewers to the bone. This scenario of the deep space single parent and the vulnerability of an infant, intensifies the suffocating sense of claustrophobia and heightens the ominous sense of foreboding that permeates the entire film.

Pattinson’s work as Monte is extraordinary. Monte is a psuedo-monk, struggling to control his human desires in order to, ironically enough, stay connected to his humanity. Pattinson gives Monte a very specific internal intentionality that illuminates his every action and drives him through every scene. Pattinson is an actor I never would have given a second thought to after those dreadful Twilight movies, but his fine work in the not so good The Lost City of Z (2017) made me take notice. Here in High Life he commands the screen without ever demanding attention, in fact, it is Pattinson’s use of introversion bordering on camera shyness that make him so intriguing and compelling in this role.

The rest of the cast do solid work as well. Juilette Binoche as the witchy Dr. Dibs chews the scenery like a starving women hurtling through the universe looking for her final meal. Mia Goth also does notable work as Boyse, a destructive and self-destructive anima figure, the polar opposite of Monte.

Claire Denis knows what she is doing when it comes to making movies, and High Life is a testament to that. The film is technically first-rate, as the cinematography, particularly the framing and lighting, as well as the editing, are superb but never overwhelm the tone and theme of the movie.

High Life is deliberately paced, and may be too slow for more conventional tastes, but I found the film to be captivating to the point of hypnotic. Denis’ ability to disorient the viewer’s perception of space and time was a master stroke that simulates for the audience the psychological, emotional and philosophical vertigo that Monte must struggle with and through as he goes along his hero/anti-hero’s journey.

High Life asks a lot of questions but gives no clear answers, which is maybe why I liked it. There were no easy escapes from the void of space or the existential issues raised. Ideas as varied as human value, spirituality, morality, physical purity, incest, humanity, witchcraft v. science, and even cats v. dogs, all come up in the movie and propel the philosophical narrative forward, backward, up, down and all around.

At the end of the day, High Life, like most space movies, is really an homage to, and imitation of, Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. High Life is no 2001, but to Claire Denis’ credit it is a very distant, but worthy enough, cinematic step-cousin, as it wrestles with the same question of human evolution and being born into, and cast out of, the Garden of Eden with nothing but our humanity to guide and protect us.

Space is cold and forbidding, and the struggle to maintain life amidst that black void is colossal, but not nearly as gargantuan (or heroic) as the struggle to maintain humanity. Monte’s evolution…which may result in being reborn the Starchild from 2001 or left to an eternity in the empty void of nothingness, lies on the other side of a black hole. He isn’t sure he is ready to make the trip…are you?

If you have the courage, and the open mind, I recommend you set aside your expectations and conventions and make that journey with Monte. Yes, there are some bumps along the way, the most noteworthy being a rather odd scene with Juliette Binoche (you’ll know it when you see it - it was the catalyst for two sixty-something women in my screening to make a hasty exit) that serves a certain and minor purpose but which goes on for a distractingly and interminably long time. But if you can simply get into the rhythm of the film, and not try and figure it out as it washes over you but rather experience it and all of the good and bad that comes along with it, I think you may find it as satisfying a cinematic experience as I did.

Again, this movie is not for everyone…even though it is in English, it is a very, very French film, and it reeks of the art house, so if you simply cannot or will not overcome your cinematic conditioning for clear narratives and resolutions, then you should skip this one. But if you are feeling adventurous and in the mood to contemplate the meaning of life and humanity amidst the unrelenting sea of darkness that is space, then gear up, strap in and take the plunge. You may find you enjoy the high life.

©2019