The Mandalorian: In-Depth Discussion & Review.

off topic
could we put together a top 10 list of vegans who have ruined their lives through youtube right like people for whom youtube or youtube fame or even youtube success has been or brought about their ruination like obviously obviously nicotto avocado is gonna rank in the top ten right henia mania obviously gonna rank at the top debatably though kristen leo kristen leo suicidal in her splendor in her rags and her riches nevertheless suicidal miserable like it's a gilded cage right i mean you could do a general global top 10 list of people who have ruined their lives by succeeding on youtube but then like the vegan the vegan top 10 list could be could be an interesting one okay how did i end up watching the mandalorian i was drawn into this step by step through a series of false assumptions i think the first time i googled um how much does it cost to get one month out of disney plus was just because of this kind of ethical question of people asking for support on patreon vegans especially but youtubers and generally asking you to donate it's like hey look guys if you can buy the entire history of disney intellectual property for 8.99 a month what sense does it make to be donating 10 and 20 to a youtuber and a lot of these youtubers upload one video a week or less right like how do you how do you score this in your mind and then since then it nagged at the back of my mind could it be could it be that the disney corporation is translating and subtitling its schlock movies into chinese and i googled around and i saw people commenting on reddit or commenting on twitter i couldn't find any firm information this but it seemed to me i should be able to study chinese educate myself journeys improve my chinese by watching these terrible films made by the disney corporation with chinese subtitles chinese dubbing now in the case the mandalorian in particular i knew the format i knew the aesthetic i knew the pastiche even because it is in some ways a pastiche of wild west and samurai movie elements i knew that this is going to be a sweeping drama populated by men of principle men of much violence and few words that they were going to be terse profound statements uh in overwrought yet emotionless english you know i knew exactly the aesthetic the right ears were going for and i thought that would be interesting to work through in chinese and indeed so having now seen it this is not a spoiler it contains such vaguely spiritual catchphrases as this is the way uh it might be interesting to see how you render that in chinese and indeed as with the catchphrases of the original star wars movies from the 1970s and 1980s there are these peculiar dao west overtones or perhaps taoist undertones throughout this is the way is the catchphrase here whereas in the very first film you know may the force be with you i thought this could be an interesting way to study and practice chinese and obviously you could switch back and forth between the chinese and the english i was wrong a gamble of 8.99 i'm very glad i didn't sign up for one year of service so far i have not found a single thing within disney plus that offers chinese subtitles and dubbing but the mandalorian in particular had no chinese whatsoever nevertheless i watched the mandalorian and also by the way then i was thinking second best maybe i could at least use this to practice french but i would want both subtitles and dubbing and it didn't have that kind of thing said only one of the others wow they seem really uh they seem really committed to like the finnish and the swedish market for some reason and that is about it like it's it's just very strange what you do and don't get in the the subtitles and dumming and yes i mean shout out to all my viewers from finland and sweden the size of the chinese market is compel the number of people who speak chinese even within california is a huge market so it is very surprising how little of the chinese language is to be found there and yeah this may seem strange to you but if you're studying chinese or trying to motivate yourself to put more hours into chinese you can't really do game of thrones in terms of vocabulary and so on you can't really do game of thrones in chinese a lot of stuff in terms of chinese fable and fiction that originates from china the type of vocabulary and the type of sentence structure and so on can be wildly irrelevant to the modern era okay so this hasn't been said um i actually wrote and published an article in chinese i could write another one now specifically with the mandalorian the article i already wrote was really asking the question what was the appeal of star wars in the first place and one of the main points i made was this there was a time when it was really startling and new to think about the future in terms of a return to feudalism and a return to slavery now george lucas absolutely followed the cue of the very first dune novel and the author of the very first new novel is a very strange guy and when the first novel only came out most people i think imagined this was satirical so yeah i'm sorry i forget i think this is the in the first and the second novel both uh there's a sort of repeated mention that oh don't worry about democracy um people prefer to live under a tyranny they prefer to have a government that they hate and it's a very very strange set of examinations of and reflections on um tyranny in the islamic world both back then 1960s and 1970s and and a hundred years earlier in 1860s 70s and still applicable today but also part of what dune was responding to was the then still unfolding history of the british empire put it this way in the 1960s there were a lot of people alive who had really been part of the british empire in their youth who'd been part of the unapologetic uh period of over british imperialism and that included very strange encounters between british european attitudes and the kings of exotic unfathomable deserts and ocean ports on the edges of those deserts and so on there was this strange shadow cast now um the author of dune whoever was not british he was a white american and he was also fascinated by desert ecology there are a few other elements that came together there now the precise history of the haphazard way in which george lucas took these elements together and ended up stumbling into the first star wars movie is incredibly well recorded it's incredibly well documented um sort of the intermediate stages of the development of the script have been preserved and ossified you can compare and contrast them the influence of other people that came in through the editor's room and how the significance and structure of the plot was changed between when the film was like the first draft of the film and the final product um it's in a very spontaneous way the differences between dune and the final product of the first star wars movie they increased over time in in an unplanned unforeseen spontaneous george lucas himself didn't really have a clear idea of how this film would end up or you could say the way the film ended up was very different from his original clear idea um in looking at the mandalorian probably the greatest praise i can give it is this should have been the second star wars film i really feel that everything else in the star wars canon in the star wars universe after that very first film was garbage or at any rate represented a tremendous decrease in quality inspiration and interest including the fact that the political potential the first film played with is discarded and comes to nothing so mention this very briefly a lot of you probably saw this but didn't really think about it in the first three films meaning the 1970s 1980s trilogy what do you mean by the first team fellas what you mean by the first three films maybe a bit confusing the original trilogy people like to say in those first three films luke skywalker has a dream he sees his enemy decapitated but then when he takes the mask off the captain it's his own face right so he sees his own face that he himself had become darth vader right there was a stage in the development of the scripts again this is preserved for history perhaps to the embarrassment of george lucas perhaps his delight i don't know how he feels about it but the fundamental concept of the original trilogy was that luke skywalker would go from being the hero to being the villain that he would become himself the despotic ruler of the universe replacing darth vader and uh the emperor and that never happened right like you would discover that uh he had become what the revolution had been holding against this also has a certain kind of meaning for american history it could have all kinds of all kinds of different implications now where did that idea come from before even the second volume of the dune series was published to my knowledge the author gave interviews discussing the contrast between the first volume and the second volume and where the plot was going i have seen one of these interviews so i believe even before the second book is is in print people knew people have been explicitly told this is this is the big theme that those books are playing with now again the dune books i forget how many there are more and more sequels and it deals with more and more themes but at least in the first two books this was one of the striking issues and again people thought it was satirical in those first couple of dune books this notion like oh don't don't worry about democracy people prefer to have a government they hate and present people prefer to live under tyranny and for most white americans the dune books were the first time they had heard words like jihad right the whole vocabulary of muslim fundamentalism appears there with very very slight changes in spelling i i assume out of political sensitivity but this is a bleak glimpse into you know religious fundamentalism in in the future universe religious fundamentalism or extremism even and return to feudalism return to slavery return to arranged marriages returning to you know political arrangements of who rules who's in charge and who's who is a commoner or determined by arranged marriages it's you know my what do you mean so in the future we all go back to the the dark ages what a what a stimulating or shocking uh concept now in star wars again from the very first star wars film there is no strategy there is no storyteller's conceit there is no point in this really strange stubbling way george lucas took these ideas that were maybe already in kuwait or disorganized in in dune and made them even more of an incoherent jumble and presented the audience now i'd say in the very first film it is stimulating it is interesting um i would point out that in in the dune books fundamentally the religion of the emperor is the one true religion it goes on one of the later books is called god emperor of dune so the religion is real the magic is real you know like the magic of the the spice and the hallucinations caused by the spider all this crap it like there's no ambiguity like the magic that they believe in in this religion that ultimately rules the universe it's completely real and you have no choice but to submit to it like your intellectual attitude towards it doesn't the very first star wars movie by contrast presents us with a universe where the true religion of the force is one that nobody believes in it has somehow become incredibly obscure or forgotten nobody seems sure if the jedi knights really existed or if they're just a fable it's openly said on screen many times that the force never it's just an idea nobody believes in it it's just crap you know this kind of thing now there are inconsistencies toward the very end of the first film before they go out in the final heroic mission the leader of their army the rebel army says may the force be may the force be with you he says this thing out of the the jedi which is it totally is incoherent it totally contradicts the in-universe you know uh structure of the plot wait leave it you know this isn't supposed to be like the catholic church in the 15th century where they give a blessing to the army before they go off this is supposed to be this kind of obscure forgotten and persecuted religion it's also hinted at many times that something has happened where the jedi knights have been persecuted into obscurity or vice versa and so on and then again it's also uh there's tension surrounding the fact that one of the senior finger figures on the empire side darth vader is part of this despised old-fashioned religion that openly nobody else takes seriously okay now that's interesting that's a lot more interesting than dune right uh dune is the the role of religion dude is fundamentally banal i mean it's just fundamentally not interesting in my opinion and this is a much more stimulating notion that there is this vague force in the universe which you could say is borrowed from really bad english translations of daoist texts that were available in the 1960s i want to say this to you straight up the actual text of the chongza and the lietz and the laozi you will not find this religion in the in the real uh ancient chinese texts but definitely there were a lot of groovy 1960s attempts to popularize uh taoism and you know it was a bit some inspiration in the air at that time so this is a bastardized westernized version of the the force of slang profaning the universe okay so what do we have in the mandalorian what's so refreshing what's so stimulating is that we get back to those fundamentals that made the very first film worth seeing and in in my opinion the absence of those fundamentals make the more recently created films not worth seeing so like i'm referring to like the prequels to me it's unforgive unforgivably terrible filmmaking badly because it's just absolutely nothing about the prequels or not even once don't even take your kids to see them a lot of people say they're still good as kids movies i i wouldn't even say that all right so in the mandalorian like i i sort of wish this had come out second like you had just the very first star wars movie and then nothing and then we have the mandalorian and what's interesting is in in some ways it is engaging in what in the province of our time what's called fan service like it is making copious needless references back to the canonical lore of the first uh first several films like beggar's canyon is mentioned for no reason there are all these different places most eisley they're all these watchwords and illusions and stuff i'm cursed with a good memory really it's not that i'm a star wars fan but while i was watching it i this was my i was remembering all these ridiculous place names and made up alien catchphrases what do you want to say the jargon of the earlier films is still loaded in there there are these kinds of references the precise technology and so on but in season one they have discarded entirely um you know the jedi religion the jedi worldview and they've started again with this other religion um the religion of the mandalorians and it's fundamentally interesting in the same way in this case you have to say the mandalorians are in the position of being not just a despised minority but a persecuted minority living in hiding so some of you might compare this to the status of jews being persecuted by christians in the 20th century you could also think about catholics under protestant majority countries in the renaissance europe or protestants under catholic majority countries in arizona i mean it's it's like many scenarios historically of uh one religion being persecuted to the brink of non-existence by the other they you know they their temple is in they meet in secret and so on you know uh the origin of this idea of mandalore and the mandalorians very briefly has come about again to use my favorite image like a can of tomato soup rolling down a staircase to a series of unplanned and spontaneous adaptations it actually begins with the star wars holiday special and in a world full of absolutely terrible star wars movies that always tops the top 10 list as the absolute worst thing ever created with a star wars name or logo on it but in that there was a short animated film about a character they came up with called boba fett attempt after attempt was made to make boba fett and his storyline into something interesting and certainly something that would sell toys or sell happy meals and that could be commercialized and i believe the most important transformations took place in the cartoon series the clone wars cartoon series and then to some extent also in the comic books i don't think in this case it was in the novels maybe also where eventually what they came up with was a way to redeem the design of this character by saying okay boba fett himself was not a mandalorian but he must have killed a mandalorian and stolen a mandalorian's armor and this armor has a special significance for this religious order called the mandalorians and then they could go from there and start inventing this new mythos surrounding this this new religion okay so we have been returned to the sort of fundamental assumptions that made the very first film interesting and worth watching in the first place before we watched the first episode i said to my girlfriend because at this time i was only interested in this as a way of studying chinese or practicing chinese i said they were look no matter how good this is no matter how much other people may praise it fundamentally this is space pirates you know like this is going to be a crappy laser gun action movie there's not going to be a lot here to appreciate by that standard i can say hey it's better than it's more interesting than uh space pirates and clearly we have foreshadowed in the second season we're going to get some kind of meaningful contrast between the world view of the mandalorians who have been established as the sort of anti-jedi as the opposite of the diametrically opposed faction their religion is in some sense profoundly the opposite of the worldview of the jedi and the jedi themselves and the character who's been most exploited commercially the baby yoda character is some kind of uh naturally gifted jedi character who will draw these two world views together okay i'm interested all right the bad news is there is quite a lot of bad writing and quite a lot of bad acting if you are going through this scene by scene does it matter yes especially given that these are sort of veteran producers veteran showrunners veteran directors given the vintage of the talent it was shocking to me that kind of i think every actor under the age of 30 was just abominably awful like there were plenty of older actors where you go oh wow okay this guy knows how to read a script this guy knows that there were several points where i said to melissa oh this guy knows how to do a table reading where he takes a badly written set of lines and makes them sing makes them work as if it were well written you know where again these are these are some actors 50 years old and older you know we really felt that they were veteran actors who did a good job there is quite a lot of bad writing there is quite a lot of bad acting and there were a lot of things that were objectively wrong with it in that sense where it's like how did this get past the workshop stage how did this get past the table reading why didn't people sit and say okay let's rework this let's do this a second time and make this work in the year 2020 with a big budget production like this that that it was so flawed in that way uh came to me as a big surprise with that having said um you know what what are the all-time best batman movies you're comparing any given batman movie to the reality of what other batman movies are i say okay you come with the top two you know the very best batman movie may still objectively be a bad movie but it's just better than all the other batman movies i would absolutely say this is in the all-time top two list for star wars and you know what some people i think really you could give this number one you could really say that this is the single greatest star wars film taking season one together and regarding it as one movie you could say it's better than the original film a bit of a strange comparison but at any rate it is in my opinion either number one or number two and look guys what can you accomplish in mainstream fiction you know i think what you can do is take a crowbar to the window of bourgeois conformist ordinariness in the society you're living in like people are living inside this hot house and you come along with a crowbar and you try to open up that window just a bit and say hey this there's another way of looking at life it's another way of thinking about the world you know what i mean there's something i can do to try to you know jilt you out of this kind of conformist reverie you're into to try to look at things from a new angle and it's it's very interesting that a book as utterly kind of politically eccentric as the original dune had this shocking effect on a whole generation i don't think by the way in 2020 i think the new film is going to be a complete artistic failure this respect i don't think it will accomplish that partly because it's 2020 it's not the 1960s or 1970s anymore you know things really changed and partly because i don't believe in the director and for other miscellaneous reasons okay but you know yes the original star wars film it really led to people asking new questions and it still is moving i mean it is emotionally moving and it is intellectually moving for me as a cynical old man just to have depicted men of principle people who say this is my word on my honor this is what i'm going to do this is fundamentally what life's about and we live in a society where you could you could live your whole life in california and never meet never meet even one man of principle you could never meet anyone who has any principle that they value more than their own short-term self-interest their own selfish self-indulgence for lack of a better term and in bringing together these medieval aspects like nightly honor living by a code of honor like a night in medieval times allegedly you know put in the asterisk but in the footnote that well that wasn't really what medieval times were like regardless like fiction the fictionalized account of medieval times you know presenting that in a futuristic setting and raising those questions for how we live our lives today what is worth fighting for what is worth dying for what is freedom what is slavery what is empire what is a republic what is a democracy what is freedom it's all there and that in short is what makes the mandalorian worth watching