The Mandalorian

I just watched the second episode of “The Mandalorian.” Oddly, it didn’t suck. It didn’t look like it was written and directed by a maturity-stunted 13-year-old trapped inside the body of a 20-something.

As you know, that’s probably as high of a compliment as I can give anything modern. The Mandalorian himself is a bounty hunter. His accouterments make him out to be a Predator-like being. He’s got a quite robust suit of armor with a few gadgets embedded into that suit.

His most redeeming quality thus far is that he doesn’t like Jawas. This is definitely not the kind of garbage that the 10-year-olds loved when George Lucas temporarily went insane and invented Jar Jar Binks. In one scene, the Mandalorian comes across some Jawas and their sandcrawler. He immediately takes his sniper rifle and starts picking off a few of them. We can only hope he makes his way to the Ewok forest and does a few of them as well.

The basics of directing are solid. There isn’t a bunch of stupid jumping around with the camera as some artless directors do trying to substitute motion for a plot. The basics seem pretty solid. Like the story or hate the story, director Dave Filoni (episode one) and Director Rick Famuyiwa (episode two) do not come from the Directorial School of Schmucks and Talentless Dumb-asses.

I know. From me, that is high praise indeed. Imagine watching anything on TV that isn’t infected by the kind of hyperkinetic directorial nonsense so common from the Juvenile Crowd. My only beef with episode two is the rather lame recreation of one of the moments from the first Indiana Jones film where he jumped onto a moving tank from his horse, falls to the side of the tank, and then is threatened to be crushed between the tank and the canyon wall. They recreate that with the Jawa sandcrawler with The Mandalorian jumping on it and trying to get in. Call it an homage, I guess. But it was unimaginative and somewhat came across as a cheap knock-off.

For some reason, I got it into my head that they would be releasing new episodes once a month. Maybe I read that somewhere. But the schedule is to be one per week for this first season of however many episodes that may be.

In this second episode, “The Child,” the Mandalorian is transporting the child back to get his reward. But he runs into a few complications, including the Jawas. This second episode was rather brief at 33 minutes. But it’s much smarter to be brief than to make the ubiquitous error of trying to pad things as most of even the good series do.

Jon Favreau (never heard of him) is the mastermind behind The Mandalorian. It’s easy to see that (so far, at least) he’s a traditional Star Wars fan. Oh, I wholly expect that he’ll eventually insert a bunch of stupid “girl power” stuff or bludgeon us over the head with cute droids. But so far the series has balls. This is the opposite to the prequel which lacked any kind of balls after the opening sequence of The Phantom Menace with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan boarding the Trade Federation ship. And that was all of about 15 minutes and the rest of the prequel could be flushed down the toilet.

George Lucas may be listed as executive producer (or whatever), but clearly his degenerative influence has not tainted this latest effort. We can assume therefore that he is merely a figurehead.

I wish I could say that the way The Mandalorian gave those lines was powerful and inspiring. But it sounded more like he was reading off a fortune cookie.

But I agree with Jim about the essence they were trying to portray with that line:



An interesting interpretation. The only place I differ was that the head chick did not say it in an authoritarian way to shut off all argument. It was more like (as you picked up) a religious-like reference to stir the heart and certainly not a Romanesque Roma locuta est, causa finita est.

Well, thank you. I’m just telling it like I see it, with all the baggage and prejudices attached. But I try to be fair.

And regarding the Madeline Kahn reference (which I’m sure you got) you can find in this outtake reel:



God bless that lady. She was so enormously talented. Mel Brooks mentions this in a video I saw recently:

It’s a legitimate question whether Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein is Madeline Kahn’s best movie. Obviously she's more central of a character in Blazing Saddles and has much more to do.

Ranker has it this way: Young Frankenstein / Blazing Saddles.

That surprises me because, push comes to shove, I’d have to admit she’s probably more memorable in Blazing Saddles even though I think Young Frankenstein is the better movie. But the ranking (for what it’s worth) is close.

Clue is listed at #3. I’ve never seen that. I’ll have to see if I can find that.

I think it was something like that. I think of this more as a Cloris Leachman film — the slightly disturbed nurse. An interesting thing about this film that I certainly didn’t know was the Mel Brooks consulted Alfred Hitchcock on the script. He even considers him a co-writer. You can find it in part of that interview posted above.

Brooks thinks Hitchcock is the greatest director ever (something he said Billy Wilder did not appreciate hearing). And so he didn’t want to offend Hitchcock in any way. He didn’t. When he first got in contact with Hitchcock, Hitchcock suggested parts that he thought would be best for parody.

Brooks even offers an idea by Hitchcock that never made the film (supposedly for budget considerations). I’m not sure what movie this comes from or whether it’s just a one-off. But Hitchcock has a man being chased through three streets by some thugs who obviously want to kill him. He’ve finally driven to the end of a dock where a ferry is about 12 feet from the shore. The man takes a gigantic leap and lands safely on the ferry. But what he doesn’t know is that the ferry was coming in to the dock. It was hilarious the way Brooks told it.

Yeah, that The Birds parody scene is terrific. There are no doubt many Hitchcockian references in High Anxiety that go right over my head.

The Mandalorian: Episode IV: “Sanctuary”. It could have been titled “Totally Awful”—at least the first ten minutes of it which is where I stopped to pen these thoughts that were bursting to come out of my head.

The episode starts with a scene that looks like it’s right out of “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.” And although I liked that series, it was self-consciously campy. And that was part of the fun.

Here we start off the episode with a peaceful (presumably) hunter-gatherer tribe gathering blue shrimp in a bog. They are all obviously brown-skinned innocent “people of color.” Then a bunch of savage alien-species hooligans come barging in. (I don’t know if they’re Republicans but they could be.) Of course we’re totally in awe of the writers hitting us with the “child separated from the mother during the scuffle” theme. Mother and daughter hide in the river while the space-hooligans rampage.

Cut to the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda in his spaceship. Baby Yoda is beginning to make the Ewoks seem palatable. He is precocious and cute except for the fact that he (or she) isn’t. It’s forced upon us. And the Mandalorian suddenly becomes another cliche, the father who loves the little tyke but can’t quite control him.

This series started with some promise that it would at least be intelligent. But in the first 10 minutes it’s nothing but a string of cliches. And get ready for the biggest one yet. Although it’s commendable that it took as much as four episodes, we’ve just run into the ass-kicking female. And the scene of the Mandalorian and the ass-kicking female fighting is straight out of “Xena: Warrior Princess,” including the way she is dressed.

We’ve seen all this kind of stuff before. And even if it was new and clever, it’s clear this is aimed at the thirteen-year-old adult-juvenile mindset. I’ll report back on the rest of this episode. Perhaps it picks up. I mean, it can’t get any worse.

I actually saw part of an episode of Xena once.  It was the one involving Odysseus/Ulysses returning to Ithaca despite the hostility of Poseidon (who actually makes an appearance).  I picked up a strong interest in the Greek myths due to my 6th grade teacher's enthusiasm for them, so that one naturally appealed to it.  Not enough to start watching it after that.