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BY Steven D. Greydanus Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999) Eagerly anticipated after a 16-year hiatus, the first installment in a new trilogy of Star Wars “prequels” has justly been both praised and derided. No Star Wars film is more flawed — and no film has taken us to imaginary worlds at once so boldly conceived and so grandly realized. Character design is worthy of the legacy of Darth Vader and Jabba the Hutt, from Vader forerunner Darth Maul, cutting a satanic figure as a horned, red-skinned Sith lord tough enough to fight two Jedis at once, to obese, spluttering Boss Nass and pratfalling Jar-Jar, to a host of wacky creatures intended, like Ewoks, to appeal to kids. Unfortunately, these kid-centric elements aggravate other problems. Why is the tone so serious and weighty, the dialogue so formal and devoid of lighthearted banter? Despite its flaws, The Phantom Menace remains an enjoyable film, one that establishes the foundations of the Star Wars universe for the rest of the films. Content advisory: Stylized sci-fi battle and combat violence. Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2002) Though it still doesn't recapture the charm of the original trilogy, Attack of the Clones improves on its predecessor, The Phantom Menace, combining more enjoyable characterizations and dialogue and better-paced storytelling with even more dazzling imagery in its continuing tale of the lad who grows up to be Darth Vader. Once again, spectacle is paramount, and Clones offers a more satisfying look at the astounding worlds only glimpsed in Phantom Menace. There's a lot of action, of course, including two sequences (a dizzy aerial chase scene and a big coliseum sequence) that, more than anything in Star Wars history, evoke the series’ matinee inspirations, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Clones also offers intriguing moral implications. Marriage and celibacy are both depicted as valid institutions (the Jedi are celibate, and there is a wedding, complete with two witnesses), and the film even touches, on its pulp level, on concerns about human cloning that promise great benefit but end in dehumanizing reality. Content advisory: Stylized sci-fi battle and combat violence. The Shop Around the Corner (1940) Who but Ernst Lubitsch could have pulled off a winning romantic-comedy classic starring Jimmy Stewart that dares to include tragic undercurrents as a frank subplot involving adultery, attempted suicide and the collapse of a marriage? The delicacy and sureness of the “Lubitsch touch” may never have been more crucial to the success of any picture than The Shop Around the Corner, a delightful film with an excellent ensemble cast and a classic mistaken-identity premise that has inspired a number of lesser films. The shop in Shop is Matuschek & Co., a retail shop inexplicably set in Budapest, where the largely American cast have names like Kralik (Stewart), Klara (Margaret Sullavan) and Matuschek (Frank Morgan). Head clerk Kralik is Matuschek's right-hand man, but he gets off on the wrong foot with the unemployed Klara, who's looking for a job and surprises Kralik by getting herself hired by Matuschek. From the get-go Kralik and Klara rub the other the wrong way in person — yet they soon connect anonymously via a lonely-hearts ad, and unwittingly discover that there's more to the other than meets the eye. Content advisory: An offscreen extramarital affair; a thwarted suicide attempt; romantic complications. http://www.ncregister.com/info/email-a-friend/weekly_dvd_video_picks

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BY Steven D. Greydanus Finally on DVD: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi As The Wizard of Oz is the quintessential American fairy tale, Star Wars is the quintessential American mythology. If The Wizard of Oz is Snow White re-imagined in a land of cornfield scarecrows and sideshow hucksters and repackaged as a Hollywood musical, then Star Wars is The Lord of the Rings re-imagined with saloon shootouts, World War II dogfights and1950s hot rods — and repackaged as a space-opera swash-buckler in the tradition of the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon stories. Critics have derided George Lucas's stereotypical characters and situations, his B-movie dialogue, his simplistic morality-play vision of good and evil. Pundits extolling the first three-quarters of the ’70s as the apex of Hollywood sophistication have blasted Lucas for ruining American cinema, turning it away from mature fare like The Godfather, Taxi Driver and Annie Hall toward the romanticism and spectacle of the likes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park and The Lord of the Rings. But this is unfair, not to say misguided. To begin with, Lucas's characters and situations aren't so much stereotypical as archetypical — deliberately so, as Lucas consciously drew upon Joseph Campbell's analysis of common patterns and structures in myths and mythic stories in his influential The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Stereotypes work by exploiting popular cultural prejudices and assumptions. For example, Titanic exploited stereotyped notions of the rich as snobbish, repressed twits, of the poor as life-loving free spirits, of passionate love as transcending moral or social rules, and so on. Archetypes, by contrast, work by connecting with primal or basic categories. Archetypal figures and situations in the Star Wars movies include the hero (Luke Sky-walker), the wise old man (ObiWan Kenobi), the call to adventure, the “belly of the whale” (the heroes are “swallowed” by the Death Star) and so on. Lucas breathed new life into these familiar patterns by relocating them in a galaxy far, far away — a galaxy of laser swords, landspeeders, remarkably non-anthropomorphic aliens and other super-cool sci-fi conceits. He also played with his mythic patterns; for example, the “rescue of the maiden” motif is modified by making Leia not a helpless maiden in distress but a pistol-packing, take-charge Rebel leader. What's more, Lucas invented a new vocabulary of action cinema-tography predicated on a breakthrough computer-controlled camera technique. The Joseph Campbell influence in the Star Wars movies can be seen not only in its mythic archetypes, but also in the vague mysticism of “the Force.” Taken literally, the idea of the Force would clearly imply a pantheistic worldview. The Force is said to be an “energy field” generated by living things and binding the galaxy together. It has a good side and a dark side, and while it's established that the dark side isn't stronger, it's never stated that the good side is stronger either, allowing for the possibility of a yin-yang balance of good and evil. Yet the films' moral outlook — including the climactic triumph of good over evil, especially in the daring redemptive twist at the end of Jedi — suggests that evil isn't really on an equal footing with good. On a literal level, the Force is make-believe, like the fantasy magic in The Wizard of Oz; taken metaphorically, the Force is a symbol of the unseen, of mystery. This long-anticipated DVD release of the original Star Wars trilogy is controversial because of Lucas's deeply disappointing decision to release only his most recently tweaked special editions, depriving fans of access to the original versions. But this is unlikely to be permanent. Sometime after next year's release of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, I predict another DVD release of the original trilogy in its original form. Content advisory: Stylized scifi combat violence and menace. http://www.ncregister.com/info/email-a-friend/weekly_dvd_video_picks

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