70 Minute Review: The Phantom Menace

I know this movie is almost ten years old but I just watched the first part of this and I found it equal parts entertaining and informing:

If you’d stopped by the Heeb office recently, you would know how obsessed I’ve been with this 70-minute review of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I was so obsessed that I reached out to the critic himself, Milwaukee-native Mike Stoklasa. His justifiable character assassination of the worst Jedi ever (Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jin) and his overall slamming of the CGI clusterfuck that helped spawn a generation of overvisualized, underdeveloped and downright boring blockbusters is especially relevant today with everyone spewing blue goo over James Cameron’s self-important Smurfs project.

Here's part 1 of 7:


He makes a lot of sense, no? You can watch the other six parts by clicking on the options in the YouTube window (just in case you've for some reason never used YouTube before).

[Update: On the topic of plot and character development being sacrificed for a focus on special effects and technology, I did in fact see Avatar a few weeks back. Meh... Now, the look of the movie was absolutely incredible. Cameron created an entire other world out of digital pixie dust and it was seamlessly beautiful (which is why I recommend seeing it on the big screen while you can) but the rest of his effort can unfortunately be summed up by the following script comparison to Disney's Pocahontas:
Having never seen this cartoon I went with Dances With Wolves myself, although pretty much any flick with Native Americans as the main characters is a valid comparison I think.]