Damian--

Whatever ``anger'' you may have detected in criticisms of ``Episode II'' is
not emotional, and not really anger at all, since I don't think those (like
myself) who haven't liked Lucas' work for years actually feel much toward
him at all. It's rather difficult to work up much emotion for a highly
successful toymaker, which is what Lucas fundamentally is. I don't view him
as a filmmaker, but as an extremely canny and shrewd businessman. In this
regard, I think all of the references to Kurosawa et al., though relevant at
the time of the first ``Star Wars,'' are quite beside the point now. The
clear parallel to Lucas is Walt Disney--a man with a fine set of creative
ideas whose real gift was to package those ideas inside a magnificently run
business, complete with franchises, merchandising and advancement of
moviemaking's technical tools--and the best toymaking machinery to date.
When I first read Lucas' interviews at the time he was making ``THX 1138''
(a priceless one, which I long ago lost and ran in ``New West'' magazine,
was more expletive filled than Nixon's Oval Office jeremiads) I thought I
was reading either the rantings of the next new radical of American movies
or a really, really angry guy--or both. What that guy put on screen made me
go back and see a dozen times. Only later (when I saw ``Star Wars'' with an
excited bunch of USC students) did I realize that this Lucas, the pre-toy
Lucas, was the one I had attached to as a teenage moviegoer; that the
toy-era Lucas was the one a younger group of teens was attaching to in the
late 70s. If you were old enough, in other words, and able to track Lucas
from his USC days to his ``Star Wars'' days, you were able to trace his
shift from filmmaker to toymaker.
And toymakers are fine. They are good people, making something that brings
children joy. What is merely depressing (though, again, not really angering)
is watching a toymaker try to make a movie again, since he has so clearly
lost his touch. Watching ``Episode II'' with a generally excited press
audience in Los Angeles, I sensed that the excitement was not only the
anticipation of catching the next installment in the series, but the hope
that Lucas would get it together. (The spectacle of the car-wreck--an
appropriate image for the automotively inclined Lucas--of ``Episode I'' was
also drawing some people in: Would we, like folks who go to NASCAR and
Formula One events, see another crack-up?) I wanted to see a re-bound,
perhaps a shift into a new, unforeseen dimension of ``Star Wars.'' I see
enough bad movies in the course of my work not to ever wish ill on any
filmmaker; to the contrary, I always enter a cinema--like most moviegoers
do--with the hope that this time, it will be good.
    I think the reference to the conspirators killing Greenaway's
``Draughtsman'' isn't at all apt, for that would imply that Lucas is an
artist (like the Draughtsman) who is uncovering truths, exposing secrets and
otherwise subverting the placid surface of the status-quo, and that there
are those agents of the cultural status-quo who are out to get him. If
anything, that formula is actually reversed: It is Lucas who represents the
status quo of Hollywood's current ``tentpole'' and franchise strategy, and
certainly represents for many in Hollywood the model of the way to go, for
he is (rightly) most admired in this town as a businessman. Lucas' critics
come from every conceivable direction, and, as far as I can tell, carry no
ideological, aesthetic or other grudge. I know critics who disliked
``Episode I'' and like ``Episode II''; critics who felt mixed about ``I''
and can't stand ``II''; critics who dismissed ``I,'' admire the technical
qualities of ''II,'' but dislike the rest of the film. I admire the
toymaking (that is, the creation of the various creatures, the design
elements, the fabulous spaceships) in ``II,'' and dislike everything else.
There is no one line among critics of ``II,'' as there usually isn't on any
film. Those who want to defend the film in terms of the series' past seem to
be in the greatest quandary, since memories of the 1977 film keep flooding
back while watching ``II,'' particularly the mirroring of the
rescusing-the-damsel and hero-and-family storylines. And in those memories
is the realization of how much humor, vigor and human friction was in ``Star
Wars,'' and how all of that is drained from ``II.'' Only the toys have life.
Robert Koehler