A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Heartbreak Ridge,  the 13th film directed by Clint Eastwood, is a strange war movie that takes  very  familiar stock characters and situations and attempts to give them some contemporary (at least in 1980s terms) twists to a story about the training of a Marine platoon and its eventual baptism by fire in battle.  Eastwood, who also produced  Heartbreak Ridge,  plays Gunnery Sergeant (GySgt) Tom “Gunny” Highway, a 30-plus year veteran and holder of the Medal of Honor who is facing retirement after seeing combat in Korea, the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic and – of course – Vietnam.  Because he has been in the Corps since he enlisted as a young adolescent, Highway is not too thrilled at the prospect of mustering out and feels he still has some role to play in the service.  Naturally, since the Marine Corps is one of the smallest branches of the military and “Gunny” is well-connected within the network of noncommissioned officers, he...

Considering the success of director Robert Aldrich’s 1967 war-action film  The Dirty Dozen , it’s not surprising that MGM/United Artists – the studio which owned the film rights to E.M. Nathanson’s 1965 novel – decided to produce a sequel which would depict the further missions of Maj. Reisman (Lee Marvin), Sgt. Bowren (Richard Jaeckel) and their wily superior officer, Maj. Gen. Worden (Ernest Borgnine).  As anyone who is remotely familiar with how the film industry works, studios are usually owned and operated by very conservative (in the fiscal sense of the word) men and women who tend to focus on how to make movies economically while making huge profits from them. This point of view also means that studio heads and producers tend to prefer “safe bets” rather than take huge cinematic gambles which may hurt the profit line and even sink their studios.  Because sequels and franchises tend to be “safer bets” than truly innovative movies, Hollywood tends to take a property ...

In December of 1945,  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Loews released director John Ford's They Were Expendable, a film about a U.S. Navy motor torpedo boats fighting against the Japanese during the dark days of late 1941 and early 1942. Starring Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, and Donna Reed, They Were Expendable is an adaptation of William L. White's 1942 best-selling book of the same title.  Written by Frank "Spig" Wead, a former naval aviator, the screenplay dramatizes White's "non-fiction" account of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron  Three and some of its officers and men, covering the dark days of the Japanese invasion of the Philippine Islands (December 1941-May 1942). Though its factual veracity is, shall we say, doubtful, is one of the best war movies made during World War II, (or the period shortly after) partly because - except for the score - They Were Expendable tries hard to capture the emotional truth of the PT men's struggles to survive under th...

For the entire review, please see: Relics: Scotty treks again in Star Trek: The Next Generation's Episode 130 In late 1986, when Paramount Pictures announced that its television division was producing a syndicated follow-up to  Star Trek ,  creator Gene Roddenberry decreed that  there would be very few links between  Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST-TNG)  and  The Original Series (TOS)  in order for the new show to stand on its own.  Published articles in contemporary science fiction-related magazines such as  Starlog  reported that Roddenberry had deliberately set  ST-TNG  100 years after the first season of  Star Trek  so that there would be very few possibilities for crossover appearances of the original series cast.  There would also be no references as to the fate of major characters such as Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest of the familiar crew, presumably because the actors who played them would still...

(C) 2006 Penguin Books In 1976, only a few months after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a young ex-British Army officer named Antony Beevor began working on a book titled  The Spanish Civil War , the very conflict which had ended with Franco's Nationalist faction as the victors after nearly three years of vicious fighting with the vanquished "reds" of the Spanish Republic. Beevor's book was published in 1982, but because it was written before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many important aspects of the Soviets' "internationalist" support of the Spanish Republic were not covered in depth, making  The Spanish Civil War 's first edition worthy of the term "a work in progress" even if the author didn't realize it at the time. By the turn of the 21st Century, however, the Russians began granting access to the vast archives to scholars, researchers and authors from the once-feared West, and Beevor is one of ...

Who says classical music can't be fun, or that it's just old, slow, and uninvolving stuff fit for rich people with stodgy tastes?  Considering that there are so few classical music commercial radio stations left, I suppose that's the popular notion of the genre. I mean, the section devoted to classical music in stores such as FYE and CD Warehouse is tiny when compared to the pop-rock, hip-hop, even country-western departments. And when has an American Idol contestant even bothered to offer a single aria from "Carmen" or "Madame Butterfly," hmmm? (The answer, of course, is "never.")  Having been bitten by the classical music bug at the age of 14 after hearing several orchestral film scores, I am not one of those persons who prefers loud rhythmic confections over strongly melodic compositions. I also like to listen to artists who are able to shift musical gears as time goes by and refuse to be pigeonholed into one category such as "pop-roc...

(C) 2007 Lucasfilm Ltd. and Paramount Home Video In the early 1990s, after the success of  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , producer George Lucas came up with an ambitious project: a 70-episode live-action TV series chronicling the adventures of a young Henry (Indiana) Jones, Jr. as a pre-teen boy and a restless adolescent, taking the future archaeologist on a globetrotting journey of self-discovery and preparing him for his raid on the Lost Ark and other "rare antiquities" in the three Steven Spielberg-directed movies.  Lucas assembled a creative team that included top-notch writers (Frank Darabont, who would later write  The Shawshank Redemption  and  The Green Mile , wrote five episodes), directors (Mike Newell, Nicolas Roeg, Simon Wincer), and a crew that would later be better known for its work on the  Star Wars  prequels - designer Gavin Bocquet, cinematographer David Tattersall, editor Ben Burtt, and producer Rick McCallum, plus a s...