George Lucas: I haven't seen Force Awakens trailer

The teaser video for JJ Abrams’ forthcoming Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, is set to be the most-viewed trailer of all time, but George Lucas hasn’t seen it
from the upcoming film, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," expected in theaters on Dec. 18, 2015
Lightsabers ain’t what they used to be … JJ Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Photograph: AP/LucasFilm/Disney

It is on course to be the most-viewed trailer of all time, with an estimated 52m views in its first four days online. But the man who created the long-running Star Wars space saga, George Lucas, has not yet taken the time to view the teaser for new entry The Force Awakens, reports pagesix.com.
Lucas told the site he would wait until JJ Abrams’ film hits cinemas. The film-maker, who sold all Star Wars rights to Disney in a $4.05bn deal in October 2012, said he was “not really” curious about the new movie.
“I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t seen it yet,” pagesix.com quoted Lucas saying. Asked why, he replied: “Because it’s not in the movie theatre. I like going to the movies and watching the whole thing there. I plan to see it when it’s released.”
The internet has not been kind to Lucas since the release of the trailer on 28 November. Wags immediately reimagined the teaser with incongruous CGI aliens, in a reference to the remastered Special Edition versions of the original Star Wars trilogy.
One Funny or Die video even speculated over the film-maker’s miserable reaction to Abrams’ take on his creation. In the spoof commentary, Lucas and the “force ghost” of Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker lament the addition of a new, three-pronged lightsaber and complain about the absence of Jar Jar Binks’ race, the Gungans, in the teaser.

Big Eyes review – Tim Burton’s art fraud film is a slow-burn study of abuse

But is it kitsch? … Amy Adams as Margaret Keane in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes.

The irony of Big Eyes, Tim Burton’s film about the authorial stamp on a work of art, is that it is nearly bereft of what makes Burton’s work so recognisable. The deeper implications of this are a matter for Burton and his shrink, but for us in the audience it’s a welcome recharge from a man whose last picture, Frankenweenie, was merely a longer version of one of his earlier projects.
Big Eyes reteams Burton with screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who collaborated on the (dare I use the M-word?) masterpiece Ed Wood. Both films are about a misunderstood artist, but the similarities end there. The new film tells the strange but true story of Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), a divorcee who arrives with her young daughter in San Francisco in the late 1950s. She’s a bit of a mystery – women simply didn’t just up and leave their husbands back then – but she takes great pride in her paintings. Her work, at first mostly portraits of her daughter, takes the cute but sad form of waif-like children with dark, enormous eyes.

Margaret finds a stable provider in Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), a real-estate man and “Sunday painter” of dull street scenes. What he lacks in artistic spark he more than makes up for in loquaciousness and hucksterism. He can’t get his or Margaret’s work exhibited in art galleries, so he works out a deal to get the paintings shown in the Hungry I jazz club. When Walter argues with the club owner (Jon Polito), he is fortunate enough to do so while the press is watching. Amid the confusion, the paintings start selling and the next thing you know, Walter is taking credit for Margaret’s work.
They don’t just sell a few portraits of “big-eyed waifs”; the paintings become a national sensation. Despite the work being derided by serious art critics as kitsch, Walter, with the aid of a columnist pal (Danny Huston), gets it seen and admired by movie stars. He goes on television. The masses who can’t afford a painting are soon buying cheaply produced posters. Even Andy Warhol approves. Meanwhile, trapped in a darkened studio in their new googie-style mansion, Margaret slaves away creating more “Keanes”.
The slow burn of Big Eyes is watching Margaret find the courage to confront her husband, resulting in a fascinating, and funny, trial. Though it is set 50 years ago, Big Eyes is eerily a film of the moment. As we hear more testimonials from the victims of Bill Cosby – himself a figure of Americana bordering on kitsch – there are many who still refuse to take a woman’s allegations at face value. CNN talking head Don Lemon’s ludicrous line of questioning to Joan Tarshis lays bare the misunderstanding some people still have about abuses of power. Margaret has her confidence and agency destroyed slowly and methodically. Walter can stumble into his scheme, knowing that he’ll be able to rely on the “woman’s place” argument when he needs reinforcement from a patriarchal system. (A visit to a Roman Catholic confessional in which the priest tells Margaret to just do as she’s told is among the more infuriating moments in the film.)

The setting and the politics of the era are what keeps Big Eyes intriguing, but much like the waif paintings themselves, the script isn’t exactly subtle. There are many scenes in which we don’t so much get an insight into a character’s thought processes through some deft observation, we get it because the characters stand in a corridor and shout their inner conflicts at one another. Shading from supporting players, even entertaining ones such as the hipster gallerist (Jason Schwartzman) or the snobby New York Times art critic (Terence Stamp), are really there to bark a point of view, and are not gracefully threaded into the drama.
Tim Burton’s usual visual language peeks through sparingly. There’s that fabulous house and then there are the paintings themselves, which harmonise nicely with Burton’s established, playfully macabre iconography. Part of the film’s problem, though, is that it’s hard to know if we should be celebrating or laughing at Margaret’s work. Certainly we care for Margaret and the way Walter has her trapped, but her character comes across as a cypher representing a great number of issues without being a real individual. This movie wants to be an oil painting, but ends up being more of a mass-produced, though good-quality print.

• Big Eyes is released in the US on Christmas Day, in the UK on Boxing Day and 19 February in Australia