Review by C.J. Bunce
The best documentaries tend to be about a subject you had no interest in before watching it. I count Michael Apted’s 7-Up documentary series as the best of all time, with the rest of the best to include the World War II story Ghost Plane of the Desert: Lady Be Good, Nova’s biography of Andrew Wiles searching for Fermat’s Last Theorem The Proof, Penn & Teller’s Tim’s Vermeer, Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer, the Bruce Lee biography Be Water, Thor Heyerdahl’s Oscar-winning Kon-Tiki, Stephen Fry’s fandom journey Wagner and Me, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, PBS’s The Farthest: Voyager in Space, the FBI scandal story 1971, Kurt Russell family’s The Battered Basterds of Baseball, and one from everyone’s top 10 list, Harlan County USA.
But how about a documentary about a subject you know you like? Lawrence Kasdan’s Light & Magic fits the bill, a docu-series about the making of Star Wars… and more. It probably won’t get an Oscar nod next year, but sure it has the most nostalgia per minute. You may think you have seen it all, then Kasdan, Ron Howard, and their friends show up and find this incredible footage and get most of the original creators of Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and Industrial Light & Magic to walk fans through how it all happened. The six-part docu-series is now streaming on Disney+. Like ILM’s myriad contributions to movies, the result feels like magic.
