AE Biography special on George Lucas

Pretty cool. Good insight into a man we know little about outside of his handiwork on the silver screen.

His life story is the essence of the American Dream - young geeky kid who daydreams a lot and reads comic books, trudging through adolescence as a horny teenager who cruised town in his Fiat looking for chicks, survives a tragic car accident, goes on to college to discover his true passion in life, faces financial & professional difficulties, and then has a grand vision which makes a profound & lasting impact on pop culture and makes him a very wealthy man. Gives us all hope that our dreams are only limited by our imagination & hard work & determination. The only sad chapter in his life was his wife of 14 yrs. running off with another dude and takin all his loot....typical greedy broad. He's a great father, too....those lucky kids get to play at Skywalker Ranch for cryin out loud!

Funniest line - when young George told his Dad he wanted to attend film school and his barked 'Nobody in this family gonna be an artist....there's no money in art, boy!'

I dont know when they will replay it, but it's worth a watch. A&E is profiling Star Wars actors all this week at 9pm EST.

Yes, I just watched it. It's given me more respect for his vision.

It's true that perhaps TPM and also AotC could have been a little better had there been some other input into the process. But what form could that input have taken? It's hard to change a movie drastically after the fact... at least for the better.

No one else has done, no one else can do, what he has done.

One can't expect him to be able to do everything perfectly, and yet filmmaking is a profoundly personal and creative act.

While I consider the original Star Trek TV series to be something in another league, because it is serious science-fiction, most of what has come after is just ordinary entertainment. And look at those movies. They didn't have one visionary creator who had a firm, inflexible vision...

The first movie was so-so; the new director's cut is a big improvement, as in this form it works for non-fans as a movie.

2, 3, and 4 all 'clicked'.

5 (Final Frontier) was pretty bad. 6 (Undiscovered Country) was exciting, but empty. 7 (Generations) tried to be a serious story about loss and acceptance, packed with too many in-jokes to be taken seriously.

8 (First Contact) wasn't bad, both exciting and funny 9 (Insurrection) was reasonably OK

The even-numbered movies were slightly better (and more action-oriented) than their neighbors, resulting in the 'odd-even' myth, but the larger pattern to me was three good ones in a row and then three awful ones in a row.

Compare that to Star Wars.

Not a bad movie in the bunch. Some were excellent, others were only great fun. But with the Star Trek movies: V was the worst of the bunch, but VII, the second worst - the *whole movie* was like the love story between Anakin and Padme. Maybe not *quite* that bad, but it came close.

Three movies in a row that fall flat. That don't click. That don't have 'life' in them.

Compare that to the record of Star Wars. TPM may have been a bit weak, a bit too much for the children, but it was still definitely a member of the same group as the original trilogy. AotC was solid entertainment from start to finish. (Slow? I didn't find it slow anywhere.)

Yes, it wasn't perfect. A _lot_ of plot had to be crowded into it. (It was (I guess) too late to renumber the original trilogy.) And George Lucas, the risk-taker, put in some in-jokes of another kind - a novel kind for this series - to the entertainment of the audience, to be sure. The special effects verged on the tour-de-force region.

The overall plot made sense. The love affair was weak? It wasn't supposed to be respected: remember where it's taking Anakin. It was too narrowly physical. And Anakin would naturally be socially inept in this area. (Think 'Charlie X'.) Mystery and double-dealing led to the events of the movie, as the plot of the bad guys worked on several levels.

John Savard

Star Trek is what it is (or rather was) because of TOS and TNG, and not because of the movies.

- Faramir

Uh, TNG only exists due to the success of the movies...