I spent the weekend playing D&D. A fine thing. Thirteen hours on Saturday and another 7-ish on Sunday. Returned to the city with no real sense of what the hell was going on or what I had to do next; a blank slate. Consequently, I’ve spent the week feeling like I was always a step behind; nothing bad happened, the whole five days just felt bewildering.
I don’t spend a lot of work weeks praying for the weekend, but on this one, I just needed the clattering to stop.
Deep tissue; deep space
I saw my massage therapist this afternoon for the first time since before Omicron started; she knocked me back into my body like Doctor Strange doing a reverse-Astral slam. Quads, hamstrings, calves; the ridge of tension points up the left side of my spine, and up the right. I’m obsessed with my quads lately, due to a lingering and chronic issue in my QL that I, my massage therapist, and my physiotherapist are slowly driving to the edge of a cliff like crafty cattle rustlers, with the full intention of eventually pushing the bastard to its death.
When anyone commands as much of my physical attention as my therapist did this afternoon, I basically leave the planet Earth. I streak past planets and stars, whole galaxies and nebulae, the microcosm in the molecules of a pond or the cavern at the centre of the All, where the Big Bang happened (probably). The first time this happened was when I was getting my first tattoo; my eyes rolled back and tongue-soft lightning raced down my entire nervous system, sky to ground. The other day I thought of a tattoo that might actually work on my other inside forearm, opposite Serenity Rose. It’s a delectation too devout to be devoutly wished.
I have a theory
And — sorry — it’s about why The Book of Boba Fett is so bad.
Ok so look, whatever you might think of The Mandalorian, it’s competently written and produced. The Book of Boba Fett is not, which seems odd to me, because it’s (largely) the same team. The scripts for BOBF are not poor in the normal way of poor screenwriting; they are poor in a “Screenwriting 101” sort of way that literal film students would be able to get past. They are structured badly; they invest screentime in backstory instead of recognizing backstory for what it is. Tellingly, setups and payoffs do not connect — the sort of base level stuff any professional writer solves in, literally, their first draft. The Book of Boba Fett‘s scripts feel like the unedited rough draft.
And then there are the two “weird” episodes, which are the ones which aren’t Book of Boba Fett episodes at all, but are Mandalorian episodes. I mean, they clearly are. Boba isn’t in them, for one thing; they also pick up the Mando’s storyline where we left it, with him glumly going about Grogu-free life and wondering what the purpose of any of it is. (Hey buddy: I can relate.) Those two episodes are basically what I assumed the entirety of Season 3 of Mando was going to be; separating the pair to bring them back together at the end. Perhaps recognizing a cash cow when they see one, Jon Favreau and his team realized at some point that they couldn’t actually do a Grogu-free season anymore, given how viral he’s gone; so they kiboshed any mooted plans to do so, and decided to put the father and the son back together pronto.
Here’s my theory: episodes 5 and 6 of The Book of Boba Fett were written, and likely filmed, as the first two episodes of the third season of The Mandalorian.
Then the pandemic struck (remember: they were out of production on Season 2 and heading into production of Season 3, when shit got bad in 2020) and they lost a bunch of time; by the time film shoots were “safe” again, they could no longer hit a Christmas 2021 deliverable with (what I assume is) a very ambitious third season of their hit show.
So, they improvised. Favreau sat down at his typewriter and wrote five incredibly shitty scripts to wrap around the two Mando episodes, never even read them back, and then handed them to his assistant to mail to Robert Rodriguez, a filmmaker who has made a literal career (not the good part of his career; the everything else part) of Roger Corman-ing his way to a “good enough” C+ by, basically, refusing to invest in anything as “Hollywood” as professional-level quality.
The Book of Boba Fett as a series was basically: if we can’t get Mando 3 done on time, what else can we give them that they’ll chew on while they’re waiting? Fools, us, for eating it at all.
Useful right now
- Like everyone else in the world this week, Peacemaker. It feels cloying to call something by as established a filmmaker as James Gunn “a revelation,” but, in a lot of ways, yeah. Might be the best thing he’s done. (Here’s a great Matt Zoller Seitz interview with Gunn.)
- Y’all ever tried the Acuball?
- Psycho Goreman 3.75″ action figures by Plastic Meatball. Oh, my heart!
- For those who ever wondered how the Barge gets cleaned, wonder no longer.
- I promised I wasn’t going to play Horizon Forbidden West till I was done Life Is Strange: True Colours and god dammit, I am going to hold to that !
- Glayva. Yes, it sounds like a Frink thing, but it isn’t. It’s a winter saviour.