Phil Albinus = father of three, husband, magazine editor, paperback hound, frustrated drummer, and aspiring novelist. I wear khakis - got a problem with that?
Watching Star Wars last night with my kids - it was Nora’s 16th time and Tim’s first - I realize that the seven-year-old comes to the Trilogy from an assortment YouTube clips, Family Guy parodies and Legos. Han Solo, C-3PO and R2D2 were toys first and movie characters second, maybe even third. Also, Tim may know the outline of the stories but not the details.
I haven’t seen A New Hope in about three years but I always come away with the same thought. For a movie that is blamed alongside Jaws of killing 70s cinema it seems now like a classic piece of storytelling. It feels slow, big and stately and you can now see where a rewrite could build up the characters and he is useless with secondary characters. He got great performances out of small supporting characters in American Graffiti he does nothing with the Luke’s aunt and uncle, the rebel alliance leaders sound like third-rate extras given bad dialogue to rush through and the guards and fighter jocks look like actors waiting for the director to shout ‘Action.’ It’s still fun but doesn’t look like the the movie killer that did in the careers of Paul Schrader, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdonavich, Robert Altman et al. Clearly Lucas and Steven Spielberg realized something that these auteurs did not: The audience wanted pure entertainment.
