A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)   If you have ever watched a film series based on a multivolume literary tale – like, say,  The Lord of the Rings  or Twilight –  you’ve probably noticed that the first movie is the “expository” installment in which we are introduced to the characters, settings and situations of the story.  Usually, these first movies are sometimes a bit long and leisurely paced so that we can get our bearings in their universe, especially if they take place in a fantasy Utopia with magical themes and otherworldly creatures.  Second films in  continuing sagas , on the other hand, tend to flow better and with a firmer grasp on the story and characters because the introduction of characters and the setup of the overarching tale have all been dispensed with.  The pacing of the story is usually brisker – even if the running time is not particularly short – and the writers, director, and actors can get on to the meat of th...

One of the more interesting aspects of the four-film  Alien  saga is the way in which the audience was given a seemingly satisfying conclusion at the end of each chapter in the Ellen Ripley-versus-the-xenomorph saga, then, after a decent interval of five or six years, a new installment was released by 20th Century Fox that dispelled whatever feeling of closure Ripley (and the audience) felt after each “fade to black.”  At the end of James Cameron’s  Aliens  (1986), it seemed impossible that there could be another installment of the Alien  franchise. After all, Sigourney Weaver’s signature heroine had nuked the Company/Weyland-Yutani’s “Shake-n-Bake” colony on LV-426 and duked it out mano-a-mano with the Alien Queen aboard the  Sulaco  before going into her cryogenic sleep tube just like her fellow survivors Hicks (Michael Biehn) and Newt (Carrie Henn). Ripley’s tale, it seemed, was happily over.  Until, of course, producers David Giler...

In 1984, Paul McCartney starred in what amounts, basically, to an overlong and unremarkable music video titled Give My Regards to Broad Street , which centered upon the theft of the master tapes to Paul's newest album and the musician's resulting efforts to retrieve them. And just like  The Magical Mystery Tour  film a decade-plus or so earlier,  Give My Regards to Broad Street  failed to follow in the celluloid footsteps of  Help! ,  A Hard Day's Night,  or even  Yellow Submarine.   Of course, sometimes even failed films come with a soundtrack album, and  Give My Regards to Broad Street lends itself well to having its spinoff record -- and of course, because it  was  a Paul McCartney project, the powers that be did release an album that is a mix of songs from Paul's Beatles career to his solo/Wings years.  Although I didn't care much for the film (which I've almost totally forgotten), I do like this album, considering ...

Before the November 2009 release of  Star Wars - The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One  Blu-ray and DVD sets, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm released two four-episode "volumes" of episodes of the Cartoon Network's animated anthology series set between  Attack of the Clones  and  Revenge of the Sith. The first volume,  A Galaxy Divided,  is a no-frills presentation of the series' first four episodes ( Ambush, Rising Malevolence, Shadow of Malevolence  and  Destroy Malevolence ); the first of these is a Yoda versus Asajj Ventress battle of wits, while the others make up a complete story arc in which Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin's Padawan Ahsoka Tano are on a seek-and-destroy mission against a Separatist superbattleship commanded by General Grievous. Because  Star Wars: The Clone Wars  (like Lucasfilm's  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles ) doesn't have a well-defined chronology, Volume Tw...

 I'm not a Civil War movie fan. I'm rather a more, shall we say, generalist war movie one. Still, I have watched several feature films about the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history because, like the late Shelby Foote, I believe that we must understand that mid-19th Century tragedy in order to comprehend the modern character of the American people. As a general history buff, I prefer Ken Burns' 1990 documentary miniseries  The Civil War  as a source of such a deep comprehension.   Sure, the writers (Burns, his brother Ric and Geoffrey C. Ward) allowed a few factual errors to creep in, but overall the most-watched PBS program in history has depth and a powerful narrative that many "for entertainment" films about the Civil War sorely lack. Of the three Hollywood-made Civil War epics that I've seen over the past 21 years (including Edward Zwick's  Glory ), writer-director Ronald F. Maxwell's  Gods and Generals  is the only one which disap...

Nos·tal·gia : Pronunciation: nä-'stal-j&, n&- also no -, nO-; n&-'stäl- Function: noun Etymology: New Latin, from Greek nostos return home New Latin -algia; akin to Greek neisthai to return, Old English genesan to survive, Sanskrit nasate he approaches 1 : the state of being homesick : HOMESICKNESS 2 : a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia - nos·tal·gic /-jik/ adjective or noun - nos·tal·gi·cal·ly /-ji-k(&-)le/ adverb Nostalgia. For most of us, the past sometimes seems more attractive than our present or somehow less frightening than the undiscovered country of the future. It's an illusion, really, but memory has a way of dulling all but the sharpest pains, the saddest memories, and the rest of all our yesterdays becomes a series of sepia-colored memories in which we take refuge from our 21st Century red state-blue state, conservative vs. l...