.com This live-action short film mines comic gold from sly conjecture: three days before graduation in 1967, USC film student George Lucas (Martin Hynes) is still struggling with his unfinished script for an "agricultural space tragedy," fending off interruptions from a bong-toting stoner roommate and a pretentious, black-clad neighbor and rival whose pompous threats of industry domination are interrupted by noisy applications of his asthma inhaler. Just when Lucas seems at wit's end, his chance encounter with Marion (Lisa Jakub), an admiring student radical with a distinctive coiffure employing twin buns, provides the filmmaker with the key: "Write what you know." Thus, director and cowriter Joe Nussbaum deftly and affectionately parodies Shakespeare in Love while skewering the ubiquitous Star Wars mythos in only eight minutes. This droll confection gets all the details right, from its late-'60s countercultural backdrop to a score that nimbly weaves bursts of John Williams-like symphonic bombast with tremulous, neo-Elizabethan chamber motifs. Crisply shot and edited, the film even employs the lateral wipes and keyhole dissolves Lucas resurrected from '30s serials for his epochal space opera. For Star Wars buffs and film fans in general, George Lucas in Love proves a delight. --Sam Sutherland
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