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The People vs. George Lucas

THE PEOPLE VS. GEORGE LUCAS (Alexandre Philippe, U.S.). 97 minutes. Monday (May 3), 4 pm, Innis Town Hall Tuesday (May 4), 11:45 pm, Bloor. Rating: NN


George Lucas enraptured a generation and created a modern mythology with the first three Star Wars movies, then pissed all over everything with those fucking prequels. Alexandre Philippe’s pleasant but entirely superficial documentary examines the fanboy sense of betrayal through interviews with comedians, parodists, YouTube complainers and the occasional academic, juxtaposed with clips of Lucas discussing his artistic vision and excerpts from the thousands of Star Wars tributes and parodies that litter the Internet.

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This is a genuinely provocative subject – Star Wars is a case study of the way art belongs to the audience, rather than the artist – but Philippe is content to shoot fish in a barrel, going for the zany quip rather than examining what any of this means. For whatever reason, he didn’t talk to any of the cultural figures who have repeatedly offered that insight in an engaging way (like, say, Kevin Smith, Patton Oswalt, Seth Green, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Seth McFarlane, Edgar Wright or Simon Pegg, though a couple of clips from Pegg and Wright’s Spaced are included).

And when he interviews producer Gary Kurtz – whose parting of ways with Lucas after The Empire Strikes Back is widely believed to have enabled the sillier aspects of Return Of The Jedi – he doesn’t ask any substantial questions. An interview with Lucas’s mentor Francis Ford Coppola is much more revealing, with Coppola barely able to conceal his disappointment in Lucas’s refusal to quit the Star Wars universe and make those little personal projects he always says he wants to do.

Like the damn prequels – or Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, which is also briefly discussed here – your initial excitement that someone’s actually doing this soon fades into disappointment that they didn’t do it right.

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