A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Miramax Films Director John Dahl’s “The Great Raid” is a World War II film that is in turns an old-fashioned war movie and a realistic depiction of a military action that actually took place. Written by Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, “The Great Raid” depicts a successful U.S.-Filipino raid in early 1945 on a Japanese prisoner of war (POW) camp to free 500 American survivors of 1942’s infamous Bataan Death March. Based on the books  The Great Raid on Cabanatuan  by William Breuer and  Ghost Soldiers  by Hampton Sides, “The Great Raid” stars Benjamin Bratt, Connie Nielsen, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Marton Csokas, Motoki Kobayashi, Gotaro Tsunashima, Sam Worthington, and Dale Dye. “The Great Raid” starts on a gruesome note by depicting the massacre of American POWs by Japanese forces on the island of Palawan in late 1944. The Japanese were not signatories of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, and their military code,...

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) When I was growing up in the 1970s and early ‘80s, the Miami-area television station which is now CBS4 (WFOR) was located on another place on the VHF dial: Channel Six. Back then, its call letters were WCIX and it was an independent station unattached to any of the Big Three national networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). Before the advent of the Fox TV network and 1989’s “Big Switch,” WCIX used to air a mixed bag of local programming, blocs of syndicated reruns of older TV series (“I Dream of Jeannie,” “Bewitched,” and “Star Trek”), and movies from various decades and of variable quality. Until the VCR Revolution of the mid-1980s, the only way in which most Americans who did not belong to the One Percent could watch movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood was to catch them on indie stations.  WCIX aired them on weekday nights as the 8 PM Movie and on weekends at 1, 3, and 5 in the afternoon. One of the really good movies I saw back the...