Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Ridiculousness

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8.6
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9.1(14)
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9.0
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10.0
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Going back over old reviews I noticed that someway, somehow I never gave this a review? Oops. I can't explain it, but apologies. Maybe I did one and it got lost somehow. In which case, now there are two of them.

Anyway, though I watched this a long time ago and before any reviews were in (live stream - good times), now there are so many reviews that I'm not sure what to say that hasn't been said already.

Basically, this edit is hilarious as all hell. As with the first, there may be a few jokes you don't get, but that doesn't matter, because there are so many jokes that you're sure to be laughing constantly anyway. Also with the first, the dialogue replacement can be a bit shoddy just by nature, but the skill behind it has certainly improved to near seamlessness in some cases. My biggest gripe with TRM was the length, and AOTR definitely improves on this with a trimmer runtime. Again, maybe a little too long, but that's fine. More laughs.

If you haven't seen this yet... what is wrong with you?

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(Updated: July 19, 2014)
Overall rating
 
9.6
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10.0
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10.0
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10.0
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9.0
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9.0
A worthy sequel! And a quick cameo from TV's Frank in a TV's Frink fanedit!
All the praise I heaped on part 1 goes for part 2 as well. I would have to say, maybe this gets a little carried away with scenes turning into full on music videos a little too often. And I would have enjoyed hearing "Now, there are two of them!" about 1000 more times! That never seemed to get old to me in the first one. But in this edit, I especially thought the Seinfeld diner scene was inspired, and using Crusty the Clown's voice was the PERFECT voice for that character---one clear improvement over the first movie. I also wish Daffy Duck's voice was featured even more than it was. The "Hey, look over there" line was a little more surreal in this edit, frequently emanating from nowhere. I loved Gob Bluth again, and the call out to Arrested Development's call out to Charlie Brown with the excellent quick usage of The Vince Guaraldi Trio. I also applaud the Rear Window footage, short thought it was!
I had never been able to sit through this movie (or any of the 3 prequels) until these two edits. There were things I preferred in the first one, and things I preferred here--I couldn't give either the edge (which is a good thing; I remember watching the 2nd War of the Stars and being disappointed that it lacked so much of the crazy that was in the first one. It also wasn't done in the same grindhouse style. I'm glad you kept to the vision of the 1st one with this sequel.)
This may not be the place for suggestions for your third sequel, but I would love just one scene where perhaps the MST3K silhouettes appear, watching the movie with us, and maybe use a second or two of the audio from Rifftrax's riff of Revenge of the Sith? Just a stray thought.
Again, I am def recommending this and looking forward to the 3rd one!

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(Updated: April 13, 2014)
Overall rating
 
9.2
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10.0
Audio Editing
 
9.0
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10.0
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8.0
Enjoyment
 
9.0
Oh, hai.

Frink has indeed grown indeedishly powerful, as he turns yet another Star Wars prequel into richer, creamier, higher-quality material, i.e., into comedy. The humor comes at the viewier from every which way—footage from elsewhere, gonzo subtitles, overly dramatic transitions, courtesy fast-forwarding done without the viewer's needing to lift a finger—but the audio gags (and there's a mind-boggling number of them) notably take on more epic. . . epically. . . epically highish. . . fuck it, indeedish epicnish compared to the first Ridiculous outing, as the audio transitions are massively smoover.

A strong, clear vision of what a Star Wars prequel should be. Respectful of film history, including Spinal Tap. Endlessly absurd if you play it on a loop.

Enjoyjoy: 9 rising obelisks.

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Yes
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Overall rating
 
8.4
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10.0
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7.0
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9.0
Narrative
 
9.0
Enjoyment
 
7.0
A/V Quality – 10/10 – No problems here.

Visual Editing – 9/10 – Making the aspect ratio consistent would have been nice, but that’s probably more personal preference than anything.

Audio Editing – 7/10 – To be honest, if this was any other edit, the audio editing rating would be even lower, but the jokes here present such a daunting audio editing challenge that I have to give you props for doing it as well as you did, even if it’s still very choppy at times.

Narrative – 9/10 – Didn't notice any especial problems with the plot, and trimming down the runtime was a good call.

Entertainment – 7/10 – It’s funny, but unfortunately I never thought it came close to the hilarity of The Ridiculous Menace. There is some really clever humor to be found, but there are also some segments that drag for a little while without anything notably funny. Or maybe those segments just didn't have my type of humor, I don’t know. Obviously a lot of work went into this, and I definitely think it’s worth watching once, even if I won’t be re-watching it several times like I did with The Ridiculous Menace. Definitely looking forward to the third installment.

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Overall rating
 
8.0
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10.0
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6.0
Visual Editing
 
10.0
Narrative
 
7.0
Enjoyment
 
7.0
Frink continues his noble quest to "ridculous-ize" the Star Wars Prequels, and like many sequels, this edit should make fans of his first effort happy due to Frinks' comedic talent and originality.

Before I enter my full review of this edit, I must caveat it with the fact that I personally find Star Wars Episode II - Attack of the Clones the very worst of all the Star Wars movies, and perhaps one of the worst movies ever made (factoring in the huge budget and how much damage it did to a much beloved franchise). I would never again watch this movie in an unedited form, and truthfully, I find this movie almost impossible to fix, even with editing due to the insane amount of plot holes, terrible acting, and awful writing. The fact that I was able to watch this edit from beginning to end does mean something positive with regards to Frink's talent and abilities.

With that out of the way, let me proceed! :-)

AUDIO/VIDEO QUALITY: 10

I am rating this based on the source material, which was the DVD. Generally speaking I found this edit to be equivalent quality to the original source. All the additional video and audio material included (and there is A LOT of it) were also of equivalent quality. One minor problem I had with some added audio was the new voice of Jango; it was noticeably hard to hear as compared to other voices, and the quality seemed to be a bit muffled. Perhaps Frink did the best he could with whatever the source was for this, but it was not at the same level of quality as all the rest of the audio. Nonetheless, I am not compelled to remove points here since this is perhaps a technical audio editing issue.

VISUAL EDITING: 10

I noticed no problems with the visual editing aspect of this movie. As with TRM, I loved the fact that Frink purposefully used silly transitions in place of the standard Star Wars ones, and it really had the ridiculous feel of someone who is editing a home movie and thinks that using every single out-of-the-box transition is a "good idea."

I'd also like to point out that in this edit, Frink used more visual montages than his TRM release, and all of them were very well executed from a visual editing perspective.

All an all, a very fine job in the visual editing arena!

AUDIO EDITING: 6

As with TRM, this is where I had the most problems with the edit. While some of the audio editing was terrific and well done, there were far too many dubs that were jarring. I understand that part of the goal of this edit was to make the comedy more important than audio editing, but at a certain point, the distraction caused by the sheer number of these types of edits became too much for me to ignore.

I do want to point out that Frink again did some excellent audio work in terms of integrating sound effects, replacement voices for non humans, as well as new sound track material.

But the big problem for me were the audio dubs that just completely did not fit and felt like they were jammed in there for the sake of a joke. And unfortunately in this edit, I felt Frink went even further in this direction than in TRM, so that it felt like almost every single speaking line had an edit of some sort, most of them noticeable from a technical perspective.

NARRATIVE: 7

I have to admit that I really couldn't really pick up a real narrative in this edit. There were individual "ideas" that cropped up here and there, but I just didn't feel like I could see anything that pulled the whole thing together. That said, the original story is a complete mess anyway.

Although I had to rewatch the beginning twice to really "get" it, I did enjoy how Frink incorporated Ric Olie into the narrative by having him be the pilot of Padme's ship that gets blown up, and thus become part of the Force. That was a great idea and once I understood it, worked very well throughout the rest of the edit.

I also think I had some trouble due to the feeling that I was missing a lot of the editor's intent due to jokes I just didn't understand, perhaps because they refer to material I'm just not familiar with.

ENJOYMENT: 7

Let me first start off with saying my enjoyment of the original movie would probably be around a 2. So, I certainly enjoyed this edit much more than the original! I also appreciated that Frink had a heavier hand when cutting things out this time around, so that the runtime was shorter than TRM (even with the source movie being a bit longer).

I think by far the very best scene in the movie was Frink's approach to the love (well, "sex") scene -- absolutely brilliantly executed! Seriously, in my opinion this is a true comedic gem, successfully incorporating a montage of various footage including perfectly placed clips from other sources, including other Star Wars movies. Really an excellent, excellent job Frink! It's highlight reel stuff, in my opinion.

Other things I really enjoyed were:
* The first "love" montage between Padme and Anakin, which used footage from the first movie as well as moving forward in time with clips later on in the movie. I thought this was a great example of how the framework of being intentionally "ridiculous" can easily allow such "discontinuities" and make them actually be great choices.
* Using Krusty the Clown as Jar Jar (complete with the squeaky clown walking sound effects) was genius and perfectly executed. I hope Frink uses this if he revisits TRM (as he has recently implied he might).
* The Ric Olie "look over there" moments were also really great.
* The first "I think I'm a clone now" montage was another highlight for me. Have I said yet that Frink does some really nice montage work?
* As in TRM, almost all the subtitles (especially for R2) were a true highlight, and made me laugh out loud multiple times. Very, very funny stuff.
* While it was brief, there was one great use of "bleeped out" words during the scene when Anakin is re-transmitting Obi-Wan's message to the council, and the ensuing instructions that Mace gives to Anakin regarding what to do with Padme.
* I also liked the "FF" effect used during one of the scenes, though I wish it had been used either more, or in a better place (as opposed to an already boring deleted scene).
* Using Seinfeld audio for the Diner scene was also really well done (though having Ob-Wan's voice be taken over by Seinfeld's made it slightly less enjoyable…I can understand why that it might not have been possible to only use George though).
* Anakin's mother's death moment
* and there are other small moments I know I am forgetting to mention…

There were other things that just didn't tickle my funny bone, but of course that is true with all comedies -- you can't find everything funny (well, Arrested Development notwithstanding!) And I see no reason to list them.

Ultimately for me, the most damaging aspect to my enjoyment was the increased use of audio dubbing when it clearly felt like it didn't fit in. Also this time around, a lot of the newly replaced dialog just didn't make sense to me. Again, for whatever reason, I just didn't get the joke sometimes. And since there was no real narrative to fall back on (which TRM had because by it's nature, the original movie had a better narrative), I was left slightly less entertained than TRM. But again, I must re-iterate that the source material for this movie is just horrible.

So all-in-all, I have to give Frink a lot of credit for creating a version of this movie I actually watched to the end, and that I did find a lot of entertaining moments in!

OVERALL RATING: 7.5

Again, I want to applaud Frink for taking a brand new approach to the PT, and providing us with some excellent comedic moments!

My one suggestion would be that perhaps EVERYTHING doesn't have to be funny, and if something can't work (especially with regards to a technical aspect -- and more specifically, the audio), I think it would make the edit stronger to just not include it; there is so much great stuff already, for me, there really was no need for some of the running audio-based jokes such as Obi-Wan calling himself Obi-Wan all the time, or Padme saying she is a senator randomly. The problem (for me) is that these replaced voices just don't "fit." And that (for me) makes the edit feel less professional, even though there are countless (see above) examples of extremely well done comedic sequences that DO come off as very professionally done. Maybe that would create an edit that would only be 60 minutes long. But would that be bad if it was 60 minutes of comedic gold?

I of course understand that one of the assumptions regarding Frink's approach for this series of edits is using extensive audio replacement, even if they are noticeably distracting from a technical perspective. So take what I said above as just a suggestion to think about if/when you decide to revisit any of the edits in this series… and of course this is a completely subjective point of view, not meant in any way as a criticism of your work or artistic choices, both of which I immensely respect.

Thank you Frink, for providing the community with this edit, as it is truly unique and I believe shows off some great talent!

RECOMMENDATION:

While I can't "officially" recommend this edit, I can nonetheless strongly recommend this edit to anyone who enjoyed Frink's first entry (The Ridiculous Menace) -- if you enjoyed that one, I think it is worth your time to watch this one!

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