I’m trying to decide whether or not to spend $1500-plus so I can attend 2010 South by Southwest (3.12 to 3.20) and in so doing catch the following (which I haven’t yet seen): Bernard Rose‘s Mr. Nice, Michel Gondry‘s The Thorn in the Heart, Alexandre O. Philippe‘s The People vs. George Lucas, Shane Meadows‘ Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, Steven Soderbergh‘s And Everything Is Going Fine, Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas‘ American: The Bill Hicks Story, Mike Woolf‘s Man on A Mission, Jacob Hatley‘s Ain’t In It For My Health: A Film About Levon Helm, Mark Landsman‘s Thunder Soul and Daniel Stamm‘s Cotton, as well as the alrready-announced Kick-Ass, Cold Weather, Elektra Luxx, Hubble 3D and The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights.

It may be worth it just to see The People vs. George Lucas. Just after The Phantom Menace opened — more than ten years ago! — I told David Poland in a phone coversation that Lucas was “the devil.” Poland chortled, scoffed. “George Lucas is not the devil, Jeffrey,” he said. He most certainly is, I replied, in the sense that Albert Brooks called William Hurt “the devil” in Broadcast News. Lucas is an embodiment of evil in that he destroyed his own Arthurian mythology and sacrificed the church of millions of Star Wars believers on the altar of commercialism and Jake Lloyd and Jar-Jar Binks action-figures.

Now I have won — the world has caught up to my view. George Lucas is the devil, there’s a SXSW doc about this very point, and Rabbi Dave lacked the foresight to understand the fundamental truth of it.