The People V. George Lucas Hits SXSW

The South by Southwest film and media fest is underway and Twitter is alive with positive vibration! Well, not really. The fest, it would appear, is spread out and busy so there isn’t a lot of concentration of specific films at the moment. However, The People vs. George Lucas appears to have some appeal, but maybe that’s just because it has the name George Lucas in the title.

EW spent some time chatting with the film’s director, Alexandre O. Philippe who has some observations on George:

But that’s the great thing about George. At the end of the day, he baffles us all; and I think that the love people have for him far outweighs their frustrations and disappointment.

Personally, I’d like to see him return to his early experimental roots. I’d like to see him take risks, and surprise us again with something new. That said, I also realize that he has nothing left to prove to any of us, and that he probably has other interests now. No matter what he does, he will always be the great George Lucas; and I think the debt we owe him is easily measured by imagining what our world might be like if he’d never existed. I’m glad he was around, and I’m glad he’s still around. And I wish him well in everything he does.

Meanwhile, Filmschoolrejects’ Brian Salisbury offers up this review:

Ultimately the biggest triumph of the film also serves as its biggest failure. The director/writer spends the first 2/3 of the film providing incontrovertible evidence that Lucas is a film making war criminal and succeeds in definitively crucifying him. But then the last part of the film is clearly designed to be the counterpoint wherein the interviewees laud him for the world he created in 1977 and how it has unalterably impacted their lives and who they are as adults. But the problem is that attempts to absolve him by pointing out he made Star Wars and wrote the original Indiana Jones films are a impotent when compared to the case against him they’ve already presented. It feels more like backpedaling than a gesture of respect.