Smart Words About Cinema
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I gave up my indignation over George Lucas screwing up Star Wars and sequels/prequels by re-editing scenes, adding special effects and rewriting small but central parts of the original experience. That doesn’t mean I like it—I’ve kept my lo-fi, non-anamorphic DVD edition of the original Star Wars, [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 55, September 1977] Relevance has always been the great bugaboo of science fiction film. Among film genres, sf (“sci-fi” is a flippancy coined during the Fifties by people who took the genre less than seriously; those who know and love science fiction call it sf) has been a distinctly poor [...]
Way back in the original Star Wars (before it was branded with a “IV” and subtitled “A New Hope”), it did not escape notice that at the end of the film, it was human heroes Luke Skywalker and Han Solo who got the glory while the non-humans – the wookie, Chewbacca, and the two robots [...]