A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The most important programming public television offers, even with the existence of The History Channel, is a diverse range of historical documentaries that are never aired on the other broadcast networks. In the age of American Idol and The Fear Factor, it's not very easy to find well-written non-fiction television fare such as PBS' 1990 epic, The Civil War. With its then-innovative mix of photos and paintings,a wonderful script by Ken and Ric Burns, voiceovers by famous actors like Morgan Freeman, Sam Waterston and George Plimpton, a haunting musical score (which featured Fiddle Fever's now-famous "Ashokan Farewell") and a very effective narration by writer/historian David McCullough (author of The Path Between the Seas).  Not only did PBS release the series on home video, but Knopf published a "companion volume" or book tie-in.  The Civil War, written by Ken Burns, Ric Burns and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, is the companion volume to the outstand

Started working on my second book today even though the first one's paperback edition has only been "available" at Amazon for a week or so and has sold only a handful of copies. Either I am being (a) an eternal optimist, (b) a writer who learned a lesson on getting started early and doing things carefully, or (c) a Quixotic dreamer who has lost his grip on reality. By "started working on my second book" I mean copying a couple of  pre-existing review from my Word document files and porting them over to WriteWay Professional Edition. I will now revise the hell out of them until I am happy with the material, then move on to adding two more reviews and editing them. .  That way I don't have to do so much last-minute editing or struggling with formatting and pagination issues that will cause me the kind of headaches I suffered during the production of Save Me the Aisle Seat  in both print and e-book formats. © 2012 Alex Diaz-Granados.  All Rights Rese

Skin of Evil   Star Trek: The Next Generation - Episode 22   Written by Joseph Stefano and Hannah Louise Shearer, based on the story by Joseph Stefano   Directed by Joseph L. Scanlan   Stardate 41601.3 (Earth Calendar Year 2364)   On stardate 41601.3, the  Galaxy- class Starship  Enterprise 's  Shuttlecraft 13 is returning Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) from a conference when it suddenly goes off course and crashes on the unexplored world known to Federation cartographers as Vagra II.  The pilot, Lt. Ben Prieto (Raymond Forchion) manages to send out a distress signal to the  Enterprise ,  and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) orders a change of course to retrieve his two marooned crewmembers on Vagra II. But when the  Enterprise   attempts to follow Starfleet standard operating procedure and beam Troi and Prieto up via the transporter, the results are inexplicably futile.  A bizarre entity is generating a powerful energy shield which surrounds Shuttlecraft

Ever since a 28-year-old neighborhood watch captain (and law enforcement wannabe) named George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, 2012 during a brief but fatal confrontation in a Sanford gated community, the state of Florida's seven-year-old Stand Your Ground law has found itself in the cross-hairs of much-needed scrutiny by its supporters and critics alike. Passed in 2005 by a Republican-controlled state legislature and signed into law by then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Florida Statute 776.013 expanded the traditional "Castle Doctrine" law which, among other things, allows a law-abiding citizen to use lethal force - if necessary - to defend his or her home by extending the rights to self-defense to any location where the person who claims self-defense has a "legal right to be." To quote from the Stand Your Ground statute:   (1)  A person is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to him

When I bought my first true "attach to a television set" DVD player (as opposed to a DVD-ROM drive on my PC) in the fall of 2000, I purchased it not only because my DVD collection was growing and I needed to play the 10 or so movies I had at the time on some other venue than my computer, but also with the expectation that George Lucas and 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment would release the original  Star Wars Trilogy  on this wonderful new format.  After all, the 1977-1983 trio ( Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi ) had been released on all the other home video formats, including Betamax and VHS videotape and the "father of the DVD," the laserdisc. Indeed, the  Star Wars Trilogy  has the distinction of being the most reissued film set in video history, starting with each film's first initial VHS release in the mid-1980s, then various box set re-releases since, ranging from CBS-Fox's circa 1988 "plain vanilla"

If you, like me, watch news broadcasts, read newsmagazines and/or newspapers or surf the Web for up-to-date reporting and different viewpoints on the issues of the day, you probably have noticed that everyone has an opinion on those issues, especially "hot button" stories such as the Trayvon  Martin tragedy which took place in February of 2012. Trayvon Martin, as you may well be aware (unless you have been stranded on a desert island with no links to the outside world), was a 17-year-old Miami-Dade County resident who, while on a 10-day suspension from his high school, was spending some "away from all the bad influences" time with his father in Sanford (a small town near Orlando), where the elder Martin's girlfriend owns a house in a gated community. Though the details are still murky and under investigation by several law enforcement agencies, Trayvon Martin left that house during a basketball game and walked several blocks to a nearby convenience store to

When I was in 10 th grade, my third period English class was assigned to read Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird , a roman a clef based on the author’s childhood years in small-town Alabama during the Great Depression. Shortly before the – dreaded – test which was to be given after we had finished reading the book, the English department screened director Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film adaptation, which stars Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna, Brock Peters, Estelle Evans, Frank Overton and William Windom, for all the sophomores assigned to read Lee’s novel that semester in my high school’s auditorium. As adapted by playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird is, like its literary source, a semiautobiographical story of a young Alabama girl’s early years in the fictitious town of Maycomb, centering on the events that take place over a three-year time-span. Standing in for Harper Lee is her alter e