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Dispatches from Trump's America: He was warned about Flynn, but Trump persisted

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Here we are, several days after President Donald J. Trump's infuriatingly underwhelming "first 100 days," with a Chief Executive who hasn't matured into his job and his popularity still at world record lows. Unlike President Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous first 100-day period in 1933, Mr. Trump's first months in the White House will be remembered for his crass behavior toward Mexico and other countries, his insistence on building a $21 billion dollar wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, his constant use of Twitter to spout bits of Orwellian nonsense, the mean-spirited assault on President Obama's legacy, his bumbling attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and, of course, Russiagate. As hard as it is for Mr. Trump's devoted followers to accept, the 45th President of the United States has been an abject failure since his Inauguration nearly five months ago. His popularity, which was at record lows even before he took the Oath of Offic

Book Review: 'Star Wars: The Visual Encyclopedia'

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(C) 2017 Dorling Kindersley/Penguin Random House and Lucasfilm Ltd. May 25, 2017 marks the 40th Anniversary of the theatrical premiere of Star Wars, a space-fantasy film written and directed by a young filmmaker named George Lucas. It was financed and released by 20th Century Fox, a studio led by a board of directors that was skeptical of the movie set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" that theater owners who wanted to screen The Other Side of Midnight (Fox's expected hit movie for 1977) could only do so if they booked Star Wars during the summer. (Only 40 theaters in the entire U.S. had agreed to show Star Wars when Fox tried to market the film before May 1977, so the studio decided to play hardball and made the theater owners an offer they couldn't refuse.) The 33-year-old Lucas's "space movie" would only be a modest hit, and Fox would be lucky to get back its $11 million investment.  The "suits" were wrong. Star Wars was not

Movie Review: 'Red Dawn' (1984 Original Version)

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Red Dawn  Release Date: August 10, 1984 Screenplay by: John Milius and Kevin Reynolds, based on a story by Kevin Reynolds Directed by: John Milius Starring: Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, C. Thomas Howell, Ron O'Neal, Ben Johnson, Harry Dean Stanton, William Smith, Powers Boothe, Jennifer Grey Director John Milius' 1984 Red Dawn is one of my favorite "what-if" action movies. Set in the late 1980s, Red Dawn depicts an invasion of the United States in a truly dystopian post-Reagan world. "Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years. Labor and food riots in Poland. Soviet troops invade. Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength goals of 500,000. El Salvador and Honduras fall. Greens party gains control of West German Parliament. Demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil. Mexico plunged into revolution. NATO dissolves. United States stands alone." - Prologue title cards, Red Dawn Originally conceived by Kevin

Movie Review: 'The Seven-Per-Cent Solution'

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The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is not a Sherlock Holmes movie. It's a movie about Sherlock Holmes. That's different. - Nicholas Meyer, When Sherlock Met Sigmund Before the mid-1970s, most moviegoers' memories of Sherlock Holmes centered on the 14 films that featured Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as his friend and biographer Dr. John Watson. Starting with 20th Century Fox's The Hound of  the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - both made and released in 1939 - and continuing with 12 more films produced by Universal Pictures, Rathbone and Bruce created a stereotypical version of Holmes and Watson: the former being the pipe-smoking, violin-playing great detective, slim and taciturn beneath his deerstalker hat, while the latter was the rotund, jovial, and easily amazed sidekick.  Below is a sample from one of those old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies: Sherlock Holmes : There are still some gaps to be filled, but all in all, things are

Book Review: 'Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier'

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(C) 1999 Berkley Books The late Tom Clancy is best remembered as the creator of the Jack Ryan series of novels that began with 1984's The Hunt for Red October and continues, to this day, via the works of his last co-authors, Grant Blackwood and Mark Greaney. Clancy, even in life, became a "name brand" which is used to market military-themed computer and video games ( Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy's EndWar, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell ) and book series ( Tom Clancy's OpCenter ) which consist of novels that were not written by Clancy himself.   Before his death at the age of 66 in October of 2013, Clancy was also a respected commentator on military affairs, Second Amendment rights, and politics. He was not shy about his conservative views; the Jack Ryan series often depicts liberal politicians (such as the hapless and unethical Edward Kealty, a thinly-disguised doppelganger for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts) as morally weak, idealistic-

And now, a few words from our blogger.....

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Hi, all. It's a hot mid-spring day here in the ol' Sunshine State; it is hot (91 degrees), muggy, and it looks as though we may get some scattered storms this evening. I'm as well as I can be; I am getting over a cold that has been bugging me since last week, but other than that, I'm in good shape. There are days when I miss my mom so much that I can't think straight, but by and large my life is slowly but surely getting back on an even keel. (C) 2011 Yale University Press I was going to write a book review of Robert Gerwarth's Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich today, but I feel sleepy and can't focus well enough on the task to do a good job, so I'll put it aside for a while. It's an interesting biography of the only Nazi leader targeted for assassination by the Allies during the war, so it deserves a well-written critique.  But. I. Don't. Feel. Up. To. It. At. The. Moment. Right now I'm having a hard time staying awake

Movie Review: 'Time After Time'

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In 1979, five years after the publication of his Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel The Seven Percent Solution and two before he directed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Nicholas Meyer made his directorial debut with Time After Time.  Meyer got involved with this time travel thriller after his friend Karl Alexander, the author of the eponymous novel which inspired both the film and the recently canceled ABC TV series, showed him part of the manuscript and asked for a critique.  Nicholas Meyer was then best known as a novelist and budding screenwriter, and his Seven Percent Solution was widely admired by readers and critics alike. Intrigued by Alexander's concept - famous novelist H.G. Wells pursues Jack the Ripper in 1970s San Francisco, Meyer bought the film rights; after Steve Hayes and Alexander wrote a screen story, Meyer then wrote a screenplay and eventually sold it to Warner Bros. with one condition: that he would be the film's director.   H.G. Wells: My name is H.