The latest chapter in the Star Wars saga arrives this week at Disney’s Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World as Star Tours: The Adventures Continue blasts off to all new destinations.
Replacing the old 1980s Star Tours ride, which took passengers on an aborted flight to Endor (and can still be seen at Disneyland Paris), the [...]

The fundamental story-telling problem with the ‘Star Wars: the Clone Wars’ is that the end is already locked down. It has to end with the characters in place for ‘Revenge of the Sith’.

Our hero is a farmboy, raised in a desert by his Uncle. He meets an old comrade of his Father’s who tells him his Dad died a hero and that he should follow in his footsteps… sound familiar, at all?

As the original theatrical cut of ‘Star Wars’, unseen for nearly thirty years, makes its way onto DVD, Jim Smith looks back at the movie’s genesis and production.

The most notable feature of the disc is the transfer which is one of the first live-action films to be sourced directly from the digital files, with no telecine or film prints involved whatsoever. This gives a clarity and crispness that, while greatly beneficial, only drives home that these films are really meant to be [...]

It’s only logical that ‘Sith’ has the same strengths and weaknesses as its five stable mates. It’s the product of the same hands, working with the same tools, after all.

Aaaah, do you remember the bad old days of Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies? Somnambulistic actors, insultingly deabsed versions of beloved characters and only the sight of Alicia Silverstone in a grey pleated miniskirt to keep one awake?

It’s fast, it’s loud, it’s melodramatic, it’s gory, it’s a rollercoaster
ride, it’s packed with eye candy, kids will lap it up and if you don’t
realise those are all good things, you shouldn’t be going to the movies in
the first place.

Lucasfilm always put out good DVDs, the ‘Willow’ edition of last year was impressively lavish given the film’s utterly unloved status and here at shinyshelf we fully expect the three disc boxed edition of the Ewok TV movies to be announced any day now.

In 1998 Peter Biskind’s ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’ was published, taking as its subject the explosion of innovative, eccentric and electric filmmaking in 1970s America…

In 1970 a young film academic and teacher called George Lucas, whose previous filmwork had been restricted to documentaries and prize-winning shorts, made a very strange film about LA in sixties.

Trailers for movies and blurbs on the back of the DVDs often throw around superlatives. The ‘Star Wars’ boxset is almost self-effacing.

This boxset – nice and shiny with four amaray cases with uniformly bad covers inside it – contains two five star movies and one four-and-a-half star movie which, between them, constitute half of cinema’s premiere own-generated property.

Watching ‘Clone Wars’ gives me an understanding of why people inject hard drugs. It makes me insanely happy for three minutes – and then I want to do it again.

The gap between ‘Star Wars’ movies is being filled by the usual mixed bag of toys, books, games and comics. Perhaps the most ambitious, or at least the most novel, is the ‘Clone Wars’ animated series…

They need a big box just to fit that title on…

It has become almost an annual tradition to lambast the quality of Hollywood’s summer output. Key to this is the guaranteed use of the phrase ‘Summer of Sequels’, with all the associated critique of laziness, complacency….

Attack of the Clones has a constant sense of pace, of events rushing ahead faster than the characters realise, of things getting closer and closer to the terifying conclusion we all know is coming….

The new Star Wars is excellent, but it’s also long, dark and schizophrenic… If the prequel trilogy had been made and released first, would Star Wars be as popular as it is today? Did Lucas plan it this way?

Only time and repeated viewing will tell us whether Attack of the Clones is a better film that its predecessors. The one thing which is certain is that it’s significantly stranger.