A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Summer of ’42 (1971) Part One: An Overview of Summer of '42 Nothing from that first day I saw her, and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I've ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important, and less significant. In everyone's life, I often think, there is a  Summer of '42  (or '52, or '62, and so on....), a time in which we discover the joys and sorrows of growing up...and falling in love. There are hijinks and pranks, jokes and playful insults...and always the bonds of friendship. But sometimes, in those days of discovery and self-awareness, we feel the angst of that first attraction, the bittersweet highs and lows of falling seriously in love for the first time – sometimes with the right person, sometimes not. And of course, we feel the heartbreak of losing that cherished love...wondering what on Earth happened. Based on an actual event i...

When Universal Pictures rolled out writer-director Paul Greengrass’  United 93  in 2006, I was not sure if I would ever see it.  I certainly didn’t see it in theaters that year, and I did not rush to order it from Amazon when it was available on DVD a few months later.  Like millions of my fellow Americans, I was apprehensive about seeing a recreation of the events of September 11, 2001, and specifically about the efforts of 40 passengers and crewmembers to wrest back control of the hijacked airliner from four Al Qaeda terrorists before it hits its intended target in Washington, DC.  While I did not – and still do not – think my own reluctance came from the movie being released only five years after the events of 9-11, I didn’t want to have nightmares about United 93 the way I did back in the fall of 2001.  I was watching  Good Morning America  on that day (having tuned in a few minutes after the first plane hit the Twin Towers) and I st...

The Bottom Line  Although Smetana's life ended in tragedy, his music became the foundation of Czech musical tradition. This European album highlights his best works.   Bedrich Smetana, along with Antonin Dvorak, is a composer who helped put what's now known as the Czech Republic on the classical music map; before the world heard his comic opera  The Bartered Bride  in 1866, this small Slavic country (part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire) was considered to be a musical backwater. Like Peter Tschaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia and Richard Wagner in Germany, Smetana's music was, first and foremost, a reflection of his fierce nationalism; his use of such traditional Czech dances as the  polca, furiant,  and  dumka  in his works give his compositions a distinctive regional flavor. This earned him the reputation of being the founder of Czech musical tradition, and his most nationalistic piece, the tone cycle known as  Ma Vlast (My ...

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines In 1991, as Terminator 2: Judgment Day' s end titles faded to black and the theater's lights came back up, we were left to believe that Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), her son John (Edward Furlong) and a reprogrammed Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) had not only defeated the advanced T-1000 Terminator which had been trying to "terminate" the future leader of the human resistance against the murderous Skynet computer network, but also changed history by preventing the development of Skynet itself. After all, the formidable trio had destroyed the Cyberdine Corporation's main lab, Skynet's "father," Dr. Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), was dead, and all traces of the original Terminator – the mangled arm, the strange chip that Dyson had reverse engineered, and the T-101's CPU itself – had been melted in a vat of of hot liquid metal, along with that formidable pair of good/evil Terminators. End of movie, end of story, ri...

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) In the years after the 1968 release of Stanley Kubrick's landmark science-fiction film  2001: A Space Odyssey,  he and collaborator Arthur C. Clarke were asked many questions about how it was conceived, how the realistic special effects had been done, why did Kubrick decide to use classical music pieces in the soundtrack, and if HAL was a punny jab at IBM's corporate name. Another question that followed both the director and the writer for years was  Will you ever do a follow-up to  2001 ? Kubrick wasn't interested in doing a sequel and generally stayed away from science fiction; the only other set-in-the-future projects he ever envisioned after  2001  were  A Clockwork Orange  and penning the basic story idea for  A.I.,  and even that he turned over to his friend Steven Spielberg a few years before his death in 1999. Clarke, on the other hand, at first demurr...

In the spring of 1994, Pocket Books published the first edition of  The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference to the Future,  the third book in a trilogy of reference books co-authored by graphics artist and production consultant Michael Okuda. (The other two volumes are  The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual  and  The Star Trek Chronology: A History of the Future. ) At the time, the Star Trek franchise was in a state of flux.  Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)  was ending its seven-year run in syndication and production was under way for its first theatrical movie,  Star Trek: Generations.  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9)  was picking up steam in its second season in syndication, and Paramount was about to launch its United Paramount Network with  Star Trek: Voyager (VGR)  as its flagship TV series. This, of course, meant that the first edition of  The Star Trek Encyclopedia,  written and edite...

Remember Me Star Trek: The Next Generation - Episode 79   Written by: Lee Sheldon Directed by: Cliff Bole   Stardate: 44161.2 (Earth Calendar Year 2367)   Several months have passed since the USS  Enterprise  (NCC-1701-D) completed her repair-and-refit work at Starfleet's Earth Station McKinley, and with a few missions under her crew's belt, the starship is at Starbase 133 for a regularly-scheduled personnel rotation. Along with some of the new crew members, Starbase 133's now retired medical officer, Dr. Dalen Quaice (Bill Erwin), boards the  Enterprise   as a passenger.  A friend and mentor to  Enterprise  Chief Medical Officer Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), the recently widowed Quaice is on his way to his home on Kenda II. Not long after Dr. Crusher welcomes her friend and colleague and helps him settle in his stateroom, she decides to head over to Main Engineering, where her son, Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) is c...

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...