A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

DVD Cover Art (C) 2012 Cable News Network, Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. CNN Presents: Cold War (C) 1998 Turner Original Productions, Inc.   In 1998, seven years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, CNN and Britain's BBC Two network aired Cold War, a 24-part miniseries co-produced by Turner Original Productions and Jeremy Isaacs, a British producer who is best known for his 1970s series about World War II, The World at War.   The idea of the series originated with Jeremy Isaacs Productions and was financed by CNN founder Ted Turner. Isaacs then put together a team of writers and producers to make 24 46-minute-long episodes that are presented in the same style and format of The World at War. Many of Isaacs' collaborators, including co-producer Pat Mitchell, writers Neal Ascherson and Jerome Kuehl, and composer Carl Davis, had worked on the earlier series. Thus, Cold War can be considered to be a sequel to The World at War.  As you might expect,

Pros:  Great cast; good (if not perfect) directing; gripping story Cons:  Score is sometimes intrusive; pacing can be slow at times And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by from this day until the ending of the world but we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,  for he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition, and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whilst any speaks, that fought with us upon St. Crispin's day! Like millions of people in the United States (and, I suspect, the English-speaking world), my exposure to the works of William Shakespeare came about when I was taking the mandatory-for-graduation Language Arts course during my senior year. Not counting  West Side Story  (a thinly-veiled modern version of  Romeo and Juliet ) and several  Star Trek  episodes with titles derived f

Dunkirk (2017) Written and directed by: Christopher Nolan Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy Dunkirk is one of the great untold stories in modern cinema. Having made a trip on a small boat across the Channel about 25 years ago, the roughness of the water, the sheer physical challenge of making that crossing - but without anybody dropping bombs, without traveling into a war zone - cemented in my mind an extraordinarily high level of admiration for the people who in 1940 just got into those little boats and came over to help the soldiers. - Christopher Nolan , in a Time interview, explaining why he chose to make a movie about the Dunkirk evacuation.    Christopher Nolan's latest film, Dunkirk, is a World War II-set drama that looks a lot like an epic but feels like a thriller. It has many of the elements of a post- Saving Private