1/20/05

Star Wars graces the cover of Vanity Fair this month. Miriam bought me a copy. What a thoughtful wife she is! Anyway, the cover is cool. You know how Vanity Fair has those unfolding covers, so the cover picture is a wide shot with tons of people on it? Well, it's pretty cool: they did that with Star Wars, so it unfolds and has pretty much every important actor in the history of Star Wars (excepting Sir Alec Guiness) on it, as well as George Lucas of course. Anyway, the article is pretty good too.

There was one part in particular that I got a kick out of. As many of you may know (or may not know), I am a total loser. The reason I say this is because one of my secret "things I want to do" is to write a paper on Star Wars, particularly to deconstruct Anakin's hero journey. Anyway, I wanted to title the paper "Fathers and Sons." So check out this quote from the Vanity Fair article:

"'It's the missing link [Episode III],' Lucas says. 'Once it's there, it's a complete work, and I'm proud of that. I do see it, tonality-wise, as two trilogies. But they do, together, form one epic of fathers and sons.'"

See! I was right! Not that it takes any genius to figure out how big of underlying theme the father-son relationship is. I don't think Lucas meant to be subtle naming his main character Darth Vader. Anyway, it was nice to see some validation.

The rest of the article is good ... sometimes even insightful into the story process of Star Wars as a whole. Actually, the DVD set of the original trilogy is also good for that. TK lent me his copy over the holidays, and I got to see the 2 1/2 hour documentary on the first 3 movies. It's really good, so much interesting stuff in it. If you watch it, you can't help but feel bad for George Lucas during the filming of the first Star Wars movie. Pretty much everything goes wrong, and he just looks super stressed and unhappy the whole time.

The other trippy thing about the DVDs is that it has the original trailers for Episodes IV, V and VI. Man, they are so weird! It's pretty amazing how far trailers have evolved in the last 25 years. SN: Miriam and I think that whoever worked on the trailer for "Hitch" did a great job. It makes me laugh every time I see it.