The Shield: The Complete Series Collection (Sony) – The Shield debuted on the FX cable channel early in 2002 and almost immediately shook up television by pushing the boundaries of violence and sexual content on commercial cable and blurring the line between good cop and bad cop with the most morally spellbinding character on TV. Michael Chiklis took home a well deserved Emmy Award for his fearless performance as maverick officer Vic Mackey, head of the controversial strike team and a man at once corrupt and dedicated, violent and protective, and utterly passionate in his job even while he’s skimming the evidence. But he’s just one compromised character in squad room swirling with conflict and contradiction: the politically ambitious Captain Aceveda (Benito Martinez), who uses command as a stepping stone for political advancement; Dutch (Jay Karnes), an intellectual social geek in a blue collar station whose abilities are ridiculed until he proves his chops in a painful interrogation; officer Lowe (Michael Jace), a church-going cop tortured by denial and self-repression; Vic’s best friend and loyal (if not too smart) second Shane (Walt Goggins), a hillbilly badass who can’t quite pull off Mackey’s balancing act of good cop/bad cop and allows his bad behavior to sink him in real trouble; and Detective Wyms (CCH Pounder), the rock of the station who wants nothing more than to take the reigns of leadership herself and shut down Mackey and his crew for good.

Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his Strike Force strike

The show ended its seven-season run in 2008 with a brilliant final season and one of the greatest series finales ever broadcast: every evil act and dirty deed that Mackey and his Strike Force ever perpetrated comes back on him as Shane goes on the run and his wife is confronted with the truth of his legacy. In between, creator Shawn Ryan and his crew kept the audience off balance with dramatic turns, dynamic characters and a portrait of the eco-system of urban crime and local cops, all without compromising the integrity of the show, the characters or the world they live in. There are some thrilling storylines, notably the “money train” heist and the Russian mob’s revenge, but the most interesting stories came out of the complications created by Mackey and his crew as they walked both sides of the street. And as the show gained respect, it attracted some high-powered talent that signed on for arcs lasting an entire season—Anthony Anderson as a firebrand gangleader, Glenn Close as a new boss in the barn, Forest Whitaker as an obsessive Internal Affairs officer—to add to the drama stoked in the regular cast. There are no saints in this squad, even among the most well-meaning. This is a show revels in the contradictions and compromises of the characters, but it understands exactly where everyone draws their moral lines. They just happen to draw them in different places.

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I’ve just joined together with some other Seattle-based film writers to launch a collective site: Parallax View went live this week. I just wrote a piece for it, expanded from some ideas I sketched out here a couple of days ago, on the veneration of colonial politics and imperialist attitudes in his Star Wars films, culminating in the new animated sequel.

What began as his paean to the innocent attitudes of the old sci-fi serials and the swashbuckling thrills of classic Hollywood adventures and pirate movies feels more and more like Kipling in the stars. “Long, long ago” is right. For all the “democracy” of the interstellar parliament, it’s built on aristocracies and monarchies and authority granted as a form of privilege, and the “Senators” (were they really elected, or simply appointed?) all act like it. The films have all the cultural egalitarianism of Gunga Din, with Jedi knights in place of the British soldiers, bringing their benevolent leadership to the battle. Jar-Jar Binks is the most egregious example of the lesser race. Even if he didn’t channel the worst shuffling, babbling, subservient stereotypes of demeaning African-American roles in the thirties and early forties, he’s a child, a happy idiot adopted by the mature human races. Is it a coincidence that, in Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, he’s the dupe manipulated into giving the Chancellor all the power he needs to make himself Emperor?

Read the complete piece here.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (dir: Dave Filoni)

Call it Star Wars: Chapter 2 ½, or Stories from the Clone Wars, or The Continuing Adventures of Obi and Anakin: When Darth Was a Boy.

I think we can all agree that the thrill left the Star Wars franchise a long time ago – the technology that once propelled the adventures increasingly started propping up Lucas’ desultory scripts and faltering direction and eventually became the entire reason for being, the author of the spectacle – but this animated sequel/prequel/TV series promo is really just going through the motions. The story – set between the live-action films Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith – is a bland boilerplate adventure. Young Jedi master Anakin (not yet seduced by the dark side, merely cocky and insufferable) is sent to rescue the kidnapped larva of Jabba the Hut and discovers an elaborate (well, actually fairly simplistic and bland) plot by Count Dooku (remember him? the bad guy in the last couple live action films?) to frame the Jedi with the kidnapping and thus prevent a treaty and blah blah blah. Oh yeah, he’s also saddled with a headstrong trainee, an orange-hued character with floppy dreads and doll eyes destined for action figure immortality, and together they fight their way through one laser-battle after another, escape, and then do it all over again on the next level. You can almost see the hit points counting down the side of the screen.

Pretty colors, pretty stiff

What’s really distasteful about the whole thing, however, is the way Lucas films feel like colonial dramas of superior races deigning to take charge of armies of lesser beings. Droids are cannon fodder, dim-witted robots who are not even considered worthy of regard. They may talk like people and have a modicum of personality but they are treated like tools and blown up for easy laughs. For all the “democracy” of the interstellar parliament, it’s built on aristocracies and monarchies and authority granted as a form of privilege, and they act like it.

I review the film for the Seattle P-I:

The computer animation, while adequate, is a far cry from the richly textured and endlessly inventive standards of Pixar. The stylized designs have a comic-strip look to them and the mechanical action is right out of Japanese manga, but the character animation and body language is stiffer than the actors in “Revenge of the Sith.”

It might be impressive as a made-for-DVD production, but coming from producer George Lucas, it makes for a cheap excuse for a big-screen spectacle.

Read the complete review here.

The Edge of Heaven (dir: Fatih Akin)

Much more moving and human than Lucas’ feature-length toy commercial is The Edge of Heaven.

In Fatih Akin’s compassionate and affirming drama, a professor of German literature (Baki Davrak) travels to Turkey to atone for his father’s crime while a Turkish political activist (Nurgul Yesilcay) flees to Germany and finds refuge and love, but at a cost. The film travels freely between cultures and countries but ultimately finds its place somewhere between the realm of identity (of both ethnic Turks in Germany and ethnic Germans in Turkey) and the embrace of human kinship beyond ethnicity. Akin doesn’t hide the fatal destinies of major characters – he titles the first two chapters with death announcements – but it’s the lives of the survivors and how they choose to carry on that carry these crisscrossing stories.

Read the complete review here.