Back to the future.

• Author: Apuzzo, Jason
• Position: Letters

Thank you so much for Michael Valdez Moses' article ("Back to the Fixture," July); I so rarely have the occasion to read anything worthwhile about the macro-trends in filmmaking.

A minor point from the opening of the article, though: Lucas has actually been rather adamant on the point of there being no third Star Wars trilogy. The series will be complete once episode in (now shooting in Sydney) is finished.

I agree that the story of The Lord of the Rings is essentially anti-modern and parochial, confined to the sensibility of an Englishman, and with a world apparently populated with neither women nor any dark-skinned faces. There is simply no aperture from Middle Earth into the modern world that you and I live in, and for that reason I find it extremely difficult to relate to these films.

The Republic of the new StarWars trilogy, by contrast, is much like our own glittering, Byzantine world--and Anakin is much...