Feature
DVD weekly: clones, Bones, but no Capones
TV Feature
Ed Williamson
17th October 2011
For some reason I was under the impression that Boardwalk Empire season one was out on DVD today. Perhaps because season two is already showing on Sky Atlantic and it would seem an opportune time for a release. Turns out it's not, and we have to wait till bloody January for it. I'm still using a slightly modified version of the headline I've been planning for the last three days though.
Released: Monday 17th October 2011
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I like Star Wars well enough, but I'm not the biggest fan in the world, unlike Matt, who would happily pay fifteen quid for a turd if George Lucas packaged it with Chewbacca on the front and told him there was eight seconds' worth of unseen footage in it. So maybe I'm not the best person to be writing this, given that The Clone Wars animated series seems to me to be largely aimed at ultrafans.
That's not to criticise it; just set it in context. What you're looking at with this series is a bridge between episodes 2 and 3 of the film saga, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, which I can't pretend is a gap I ever thought needed much plugging.
Within that setting, though, it's really impressive. The animation is excellently rendered in CGI, and crucially it's very cinematic: epic in scale and not afraid to put in the hours required to bolster even short scenes with amazingly detailed backgrounds. It's consistent with the characters you're familiar with, too: the friendly pupil/mentor jibes between Anakin and Obi-Wan pick up from where Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen left off without missing a beat.
Where it falls down for me, and I'd imagine other casual fans, is in a focus on lesser characters. Of the handful of episodes I saw, the main arc revolved around Asajj Ventress, an apprentice of Count Dooku's, and her recruitment of a Darth Maul-like creature called Savage Oppress. Most of one episode shows the training regime he goes through. At this point, with Dooku the only recognisable character from the films in this arc (and even he arguably less so than those from the original trilogy), you're drilling down a good three degrees of separation from a character you know or care about that much, and the end result is all too often a big shrug.
Still, other than a healthy chunk of cliched dialogue ("Surrender!" "Never!" during a fight scene; an evil overlord saying "You have failed me for the last time", and so on), which I think kind of lends itself to the genre anyway, and some confusing voice acting choices (there is a group of witches who are evil but also a bit sexy, so of course they have to speak with Russian accents - riiiiiight ...) it's enjoyable enough, but no more than that for non-hardcore fans.
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I always said Bones off Star Trek should get his own spin-off show. His character was always too strong to be playing third fiddle to Kirk and Spock like that. Must say, I can't see DeForest Kelley in the cast list for this anywhere though. You'd think he'd be somewhere near the top. Instead this seems to feature Angel off Buffy and Zooey Deschanel's sister quite heavily. Must be some mistake.
This might come as a shock, but I've never seen an episode of Bones. Sounds like the kind of thing I'd like, though. It's centred around a forensic anthropologist (that means 'bone inspector') who solves murder cases for the FBI by inspecting remains. Her contact in the Feds is Angel, and it looks to me like they have a big will-they-won't-they thing going on, which every show needs, of course.
If I were writing the poster tagline for this, it would be 'Fringe with real science'. Or perhaps 'Ready for another boning?' Frustratingly, writing poster taglines was precisely what I told my school careers officer I wanted to do. She didn't seem too encouraging. Sometimes when I'm drifting off to sleep, I can still hear her scream.
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This has run for seven seasons? I hope they took the Hollyoaks approach to when kids finish school but you still want to keep them in the show, which was to just turn the school into a university and hope no one notices.
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