I've been attending a few films at the AFI's Silverdocs festival and have been quite enjoying them. Starting with one of the easier ones to review, the People vs. George Lucas is about Star Wars fans' love hate relationship with the creator of the saga. The film has an enormous amount of fan generated content contributed from the community including parts of a few films that look like they might be worth watching in their own right (e.g. a Misery-style story where a rabid fan has locked up Lucas and is demanding a new version). While there were a fair amount of raging fans on the whole the film was fairly sweet and ultimately stronger on the love than the hate side towards Lucas. There were a fair number of voices of sanity such as Neil Gaiman as well as even vitriolic fans capable of self-critique.
On the whole, I've got to say I ultimately came down on Lucas's side despite thinking he definitely did screw up with the prequel saga. I think the main place where they've got a case against him as an artist, rather than having produced some bad art, is that he 'lost' the original Star Wars reels during the special edition process. The tape of him leading the charge against Ted Turner's plans to colorize old films also serves as an argument against denying posterity the option to view the original. Aside from that case, Lucas seemed fairly good natured about the critiques, he makes sound clips and the like available to fans, hosts remix contests, etc. I'd have liked to learn a lot more about that part and how it compares with the approach taken by other creators.
I'd say this film would be the most fun for Star Wars fans who enjoy the products of the fan community. There's probably a lot to Google afterwards and it sounds like there's literally days worth of material they'll have to choose from as special features for the DVD release. The main weakness of the film was noted by Jen Chaney of the Post; much like Lucas the film could have used a tougher editor. The runtime could probably have been cut by a half while still covering the same ground. For example, Han Solo shot before Gredo did, I certainly back the fan consensus, but I only need so many clips of fans expressing outrage in a variety of ways. That time may have been better spent on old fashion journalism: tell us about how Lucas has supported and constrained the fan community, do more to explore out if kids actually like Jar Jar and whether the Ewoks were just as bad, learn what it's like to work within LucasArts or the like. Many of these issues were raised and discussed briefly by the film, so the creators had the right instincts, but I suspect they were so overwhelmed by the outpouring of material that they received from the community that they had to spend more time processing it than being able to find their own path.
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