It's not uncommon for directors of movies that were once nominated for a best-picture Oscar to drag the films back into the shop for tinkering. Dances With Wolves, The Last Emperor and Apocalypse Now have all been issued on DVD in extended director's cuts. What sets George Lucas apart is that, being independent from the studios, he had the power to say that his revamped 2004 version of 1977's Star Wars (and of 1980's The Empire Strikes Back and 1983's Return of the Jedi, directed by others but produced by him) would be the only one made available on DVD. If viewers didn't like the new computer-enhanced battles and insertion of computer-generated characters, tough luck. "I was able to go in and complete the films I originally intended them to be," he said in 2004.
Now, having sold a great many DVD sets of the revised films, Lucas has relented -- in part. Next Tuesday he will release the original versions of the films, including Star Wars as it first memorably appeared on screen 29 years ago. But they will be treated as unrestored bonus features and appended to the revamped versions, which fans must buy all over again, and the originals will be available only until Dec. 31.
Still, it's good to see them getting delayed respect. It won't matter that some of the special effects look creaky in retrospect; they didn't look creaky back then. Harrison Ford's Han Solo, about to be blasted by Greedo in Star Wars, will fire first -- not second, as in Lucas's pusillanimous revised version. (Lucas is capitalizing on this by selling T-shirts with the line "Han Shot First.") Solo won't be visited by a computer-generated Jabba the Hutt ("Why haven't you paid me, and why did you fry poor Greedo?") as he awaits the arrival of Luke Skywalker, Obi-wan Kenobi and the robots. There will be a less persuasive explosion when Peter Cushing blows up Princess Leia's home planet and, in the later films, we will see puppets instead of CGI musicians in Jabba's palace and the original space-filler Sebastian Shaw, not Hayden Christensen, as the older Anakin Skywalker. Welcome back.
United 93, which imagines the final moments of those aboard the fourth hijacked plane on Sept. 11, 2001 -- the one that crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers overpowered the terrorists -- comes to DVD with an affecting hour-long piece on the families of those killed. Those families, filmed before and after the movie was made, are generally satisfied with the intentions and the result, but the mourning continues. One relative, while he thinks the movie will be an admirable project, calls it "a fresh kick in the gut, no question. It will not be easy and, with all respect, I'm still not sure I'm going to watch it."
Light years away, Kinky Boots is the fact-based underdog-workers-make-good story from England about a failing shoe factory that got its second wind making elaborate patent-leather red boots for transvestites and drag queens. The film has a terrific song by the late Kirsty MacColl, In These Shoes, with more than an echo of Peggy Lee's performance of Is That All There Is? But how could a film called Kinky Boots not make use of the admittedly painful song Kinky Boots, recorded in 1964 by Avengers stars Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman?
Speaking of echoes, the premise of Pierre Morel's viscerally exciting French film District 13 ( Banlieue 13) strongly recalls John Carpenter's Escape from New York. Part of Paris has been walled off and left to ruthless gang rule; in 2013, an athletic agent is assigned to break into the lawless enclave to recover a weapon of mass destruction. What District 13 brings to the party is parkour, the extreme sport in which people run up walls, leap over obstacles and, in one memorable scene reminiscent of a Jackie Chan stunt, run down a hallway, jump up and sail through an impossibly narrow window above a door. In a subtitled bonus feature, Morel says the actors "really throw themselves, but they've been doing this for years. They've practised landing correctly, plus they went to circus schools. They land on their feet. It's not improv." And there are no computer-generated bad guys.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
It recalls the time Lillian Hellman asked her agent to demand that she be removed from Julia, the film based on her fabricated memoir Pentimento, because she hadn't realized she would be a central character in her autobiography. (The agent demurred.) Director Sydney Pollack wanted to make a documentary on architect Frank Gehry, an old friend of his, because he was astonished by Gehry's masterwork, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain ("This looks like Don Quixote got stoned and made this building"). Not realizing that jump cuts were common in a documentary, he hired a second crew to shoot him filming his interviews with Gehry so that he would have cover for his edits. As a result, he tells Alexander Payne in a 35-minute question-and-answer session included on the DVD of Sketches of Frank Gehry (2006), he found himself in half the shots. Pollack's editor and Gehry (whose current projects include Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario) persuaded him not to leave himself on the cutting-room floor.
-- W.C.
CLASSICS FOR KIDS
Long before he made such classics as Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki created the stirring action-
adventure cartoon feature Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1980). Lupin, a devil-may-care thief whose cartoon adventures were already popular in Japan (and whose ancestry may be traced to French master criminal Arsène Lupin), takes his crack team to a castle in the Duchy of Cagliostro to steal a set of counterfeiting plates, but that's just an excuse for cliffhangers, sword fights and some of the most gorgeous animation seen on screen. The new Anchor Bay DVD has a sharper picture than the 2000 DVD release, though there are curious differences, including still photos instead of the animated opening title sequence. The viewer may choose between an English soundtrack (with the occasional curse word) and the original Japanese one with English subtitles (milder curses). In a bonus feature, animation director Yasuo Ohtsuka recalls that the film took only 41/2 months to make ("we didn't go home") and says that Monkey Punch, the artist who created the original Japanese Lupin, was heavily influenced by Mad magazine's resident caricaturist, Mort Drucker.
-- W.C.