The guy is a bit more uptight than he needs to be, but I can understand where he is coming from. Obviously he feels that film should be used to express great drama and teach people about life. Ebert really expresses my exact feelings on the greatness of film as an art form by saying that essentially every film is a special effect, it is not real it is a dream. In real life all sorts of horrible stuff can happen to us, and all sorts of great thing can happen to us, but some things can only happen through the magic of film. It is fun to imagine far off worlds that are very different from our own, and honestly, I think a lot more can be learned about life from fantasy stories like Homer's Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and other works of fantasy than can be learned from more serious true to life stories. Fantasy can be a hyperbolic and magnified way of expressing and teaching very true things about life. But then again, I grew up with this crap making me certianly dumber than I need to be.

Watching this video reminded me of an essay written by C.S. Lewis about adults with childish tastes. Lewis was a very strong believer in fantasy stories and fairy tales. If he would have been born a few years later, or lived long enough to see it, I have a feeling Lewis would have been a huge advocate of Star Wars, even if he had only ever read the novel and never seen the film. I really like that, because her is a learned Oxford professor, in a world where science fiction is considered children's fare, and the guy considers the worls of Juels Vern and H.G. Wells to be on the same level of story telling as Charles Dickens and other "more serious writers".