Via Newyorker.com:
It’s nice to see George Lucas get a little love (as Bryan Curtis noted this week). Yet this retroactive recognition is nonetheless proof that a filmmaker can be both rich as Croesus and assured of a place in history while still remaining a misunderstood and unappreciated artist. Lucas’s great achievement isn’t the conception of the “Star Wars” saga, the inauguration of the franchise, or his consignment of it to Disney for cloning ad infinitum. Those are for the movie books, for the pundits who reduce movies to such sociological oxymorons as “collective imagination,” the cultural counterparts to industry analysts who talk only about box office. What endures for the critics and their lay associates, for aesthetes who live for the beauty and the pleasure of movies, is Lucas’s directing—of two films, “Attack of the Clones” and, especially, “Revenge of the Sith.” If Lucas had done nothing else in his life, he’d have an honored place in my personal pantheon for that work.
It’s easy for me to say so, because I only just saw those films now, after a few days of not-quite-binge-watching of the Blu-ray set of the series. I’m nearly a “Star Wars” newbie. Prior to viewing “The Force Awakens,” I had seen the first film in the series (the one belatedly renamed “A New Hope,” from 1977) some time in the nineteen-eighties, and none of the others. That’s because I was utterly underwhelmed by “A New Hope,” impressed solely by the world-making of the script—the delivery of a ready-made but minor mythology—but neither moved nor fascinated nor at all delighted by the filmmaking. Rather, I was shocked—that the director of “American Graffiti” could have constrained himself to create such a turgid, stilted, flat, and textureless movie. I wasn’t working as a film critic or journalist at the time (or when any of the subsequent five films came out). I went to the movies guided solely by pleasure, even curiosity, and nothing in the viewing of “A New Hope” induced me to catch up with the then-recent releases of “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi,” nor to follow along with the three prequels.
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