The Screengrab

I think I’ve mentioned this a time or twelve here, but unlike my colleague Andrew Osborne, I don’t have the Star Wars gene. Sure, I loved the movies as a kid – maybe not quite as much as the Planet of the Apes series or anything with Bigfoot in it – but they never became an inextricable part of my life essence and I definitely wasn’t waiting in some smelly tent for Episode I back in 1999. If we’re playing “Star Wars vs. Star Trek,” Kirk, Spock and the gang win out with me every time. So I wouldn’t appear to be part of the target audience for Fanboys, the long-awaited story of four geeks and a gal who take a road trip to Skywalker Ranch in order to be the first to see The Phantom Menace.

Having said that – and despite all the delays, reshoots and controversies over plot points that dogged the movie in recent months – Fanboys proves to be an enjoyable ride for the most part.

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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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The watch scene from THE COTTON CLUB (1984)

Francis Coppola spent the first half of the 1980s despoiling his reputation and laying waste to his bank account by turning out a string of movies that concentrated on technological wizardy and hollow flash to such a degree that involving the audience in what was supposed to be going on became a moot point. Reduced to working as a gun for hire, he signed on to direct this elephantine period musical about the legendary Harlem night spot, and made all the same mistakes that he'd made with his own labor-of-love fiascoes. He and his screenwriting partner, William Kennedy, were not helped by their producers, who signed Richard Gere to star in the movie, and accepted his demand that he get to play a cornet player, before a script had been written. (This meant that Coppola and Kennedy had to vamp their asses off to come up with a story that would be set at a jazz club which only employed black musicians yet had a white musician at its center.) The best scene in the movie is a throwaway moment between the Cotton Club's gangster owner, Owney Madden, and his baleful partner, Frenchy Demange, played by Bob Hoskins and Fred Gwynne, who were not considered to be among the most glittering members of the movie's crowded cast...

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USA Today has been covering George Lucas's attempts to help the Earth's population contain itself in the face of the imminent release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. "When you do a movie like this," says George, " a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming. And it's not. It's just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up." The paper's Scott Bowles suggests that "The remarks appear to be part of a larger strategy to build interest yet temper expectations for the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise. Only one trailer is playing, and when director Steven Spielberg shows up for talk shows, he doesn't bring footage." Longtime George watchers may find it hard to resist speculation that Lucas is actually trying to help himself prepare to deal with the backlash — the bad reviews and moos of disappointment — that might conceivably be waiting to greet him at the end of Indy's latest dig. As if to confirm this, he went on to compare the new movie to The Phantom Menace, a movie that he regards as having suffered unfairly from too-high expectations among the groundlings, even as some of us think of it as proof that if you're packing enough hype, you can get away with anything.

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In recent years, Disney has become notorious for tinkering with the cherished contents of its vaults; you could kill a year or so by just comparing all the various "restoration" versions of Fantasia. But Pixar, the computer-animation division that has been responsible for many of the company's biggest hits and most of its critically revered creative muscle since the mid-1990s, has seemed to be too busy moving forward to spend its time and money fretting over its back catalog. Now it's been announced that the 1995 Toy Story, Pixar's first feature film and first release through Disney, and its fine sequel, the 1999 Toy Story 2, will be "remade" in 3-D, in anticipation of the eventual release of Toy Story 3, scheduled to be made in 3-D. John Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder and current chief creative officer at Disney Animation Studios who directed both films, says that "We thought it would be great to let audiences experience the first two films all over again and in a brand new way...3D offers lots of great new possibilities for the art of animation and we will continue to use this new technology to tell our stories in the best possible way."

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