The Screengrab

If there’s one thing that baffles me about 99% of my generation (which used to be called “Gen X,” but you never really hear that anymore, so let’s say “children of the ’80s”), it’s the unending fascination with Star Wars. Now, I’m not gonna pretend I never had any use for Star Wars (although I was always more of a Trekkist), but for me it’s a movie I liked as a kid, sorta like (as I’ve already confessed hereabouts) Herbie Rides Again or The Return of the Pink Panther. After Return of the Jedi (most of which had been spoiled for me by my asshole biology teacher, whose untimely demise I plotted for weeks afterward), Star Wars and I went our separate ways. I never even saw The Phantom Menace until three years after it was released, when I was assigned to review Attack of the Clones and figured I should get up to speed on all the important trade route issues.

I mention this not to paint myself as being somehow above movie geekdom – I certainly have my own obsessions that are probably much more embarrassing than Star Wars in the grand scheme of things – but merely as a warning to those of you who may not want to read anything negative about your beloved Lucasverse. For I have seen The Clone Wars and it is what the Greeks call “not so good.” To wit:

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My friend and fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak gets nervous when he watches me play Grand Theft Auto, since I tend to skip the missions and just barrel-ass around Rockstar Games’ big, fake virtual cities in a variety of stolen cars, tanks and cement-mixers, randomly killing as many pedestrians as possible until some Vice City or San Andreas S.W.A.T. sniper puts me down like a rabid dog.

While this kind of videogame behavior may demonstrate uncomfortably revealing things about the darker corners of my id, I’ve never been a proponent of the “video games lead to violence” argument for one simple reason: just like online porn is a release valve (so to speak) for those who don’t have the time, skills, money and/or moral inclination to go out and get some actual sex, violent video games strike me as a fairly harmless method for polite, law-abiding citizens like myself to unleash our pent-up road rage and fury at all the bad drivers, asshole co-workers and neo-conservative Executive Branch turd blossoms we have to suffer in real life. If I were an actual sociopath, I’d be out doing real crimes and/or running for higher office instead of sitting around playing with my computer.

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With every entertainment section, film magazine, and industry website racing to fill up their top tens and year-in-review articles, Variety takes a somewhat different and altogether refreshing tack:  Timothy Gray and a number of staffers combine resources and give us an equally informative recap of what didn't happen in 2007. Among the more important non-stories of the year:  familiar movie franchises that were expected to bomb over the summer didn't; the Writer's Guild of America defied industry expectations that they would wait until after the holidays to strike; a number of predicted mergers and acquisitions (including GE divesting its entertainment division, Time Warner spinning off America OnLine, and the proposed sale of Yahoo!) didn't take place; and the high-definition DVD war never reached a satisfactory conclusion and looks to drag on for at least another year.  One Variety non-story -- the delay in releasing Grand Theft Auto IV -- seems like a bit of a stretch; while the game was expected to drop this year, delays were always possible, and other huge sellers like Halo 3, Call of Duty 4 and Rock Band more than compensated for the lost holiday revenue the latest GTA iteration was supposed to produce, and all in all, 2007 was the most profitable year for the video game industry in history, with over $10 billion in profits (outperforming movie industry growth by a staggering 44%).  Which, we suppose, makes it a non-non-story.