Good Is The New Bad – Film Reviews And More

Dedicated readers will recall my displeasure with the overly-cute “Be Kind, Rewind“. The central gimmick of that film was low-budget re-creations of big-budget Hollywood spectacle, which falls flat because using a big budget to simulate a small budget recreation of a blockbuster is dishonest – the cinematic equivalent of trust-fund hipsters slumming it in deliberately ill-fitting pants.

This project, on the other hand, is fascinating. Starting in 2009, Star Wars fans around the world began a shot-for-shot recreation of the movie, and the finished project is viewable here:

STAR WARS UNCUT – The Fan Version

As experimental video projects go, this is incredibly fantastic, with extra kudos to editor  Aaron Valdez (http://www.aaronvaldez.com) who must have sifted through unknowable piles of footage of wildly varying quality to craft this. Paper hats, action figures, feminist Darth Vaders, CGI, legos and tin foil all run together into a massive labor of love. The genuine ingenuity and occasional re-invention will suck you in and turn a thirty second curiosity-glance into five minutes of “how are they going to accomplish the next scene.”

Well done, gentlemen. Well done.