A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

"I love the ending. You have to see it to enjoy it." Meg Learner, PersonaPaper , Image from Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss © 2020 Popcorn Sky Productions Well, it took a little while ﹘ 17 days, to be exact ﹘ but Ronnie and the Pursuit of the Elusive Bliss has gotten a couple of long-form published reviews. The first one was Denise Longrie's user review on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com ). Here is an excerpt: It's fun to watch the family members interact with each other. There's no malice. The different characters become angry and annoyed at each other. In less capable hands, their portrayals could have been cardboard clowns. However, even when they're at their most ridiculous, these characters remain human beings with depth. "These people love each other. Despite their differences, they still care for one another."  Denise Longrie, Internet Movie Database user review .  Image from  Ronnie and the Pursuit of th...

Photo Credit: Pixabay Well, hello there! It's been a while since I've written a non-review post. There are several reasons for this, the biggest being that I no longer write as much about my personal life as I used to. Not that there isn't anything new or interesting going on; au contraire, my friends. My life has changed radically in the eight years since I started A Certain Point of View, and maybe someday I'll revisit those changes here or in another venue. Right now, though, I'll just focus on creating the kind of content you've been seeing here for the past few years - namely, reviews and reflections about movies, books, music, TV shows, and the occasional computer game, as well as a soupcon of political commentary should the mood strike me. I was going to write a review of The Capital of Baseball (1950-1960), the seventh episode of Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns, but my heart is not in it. It would entail rewatching the episode, which I ordin...

Hi, all. It's a hot mid-spring day here in the ol' Sunshine State; it is hot (91 degrees), muggy, and it looks as though we may get some scattered storms this evening. I'm as well as I can be; I am getting over a cold that has been bugging me since last week, but other than that, I'm in good shape. There are days when I miss my mom so much that I can't think straight, but by and large my life is slowly but surely getting back on an even keel. (C) 2011 Yale University Press I was going to write a book review of Robert Gerwarth's Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich today, but I feel sleepy and can't focus well enough on the task to do a good job, so I'll put it aside for a while. It's an interesting biography of the only Nazi leader targeted for assassination by the Allies during the war, so it deserves a well-written critique.  But. I. Don't. Feel. Up. To. It. At. The. Moment. Right now I'm having a hard time staying awake...

(C) 2015 Paramount Home Entertainment When Australian director Peter Weir (“Gallipoli”) began filming “Witness” in 1984, Harrison Ford was a major action-adventure star known for his roles as Han Solo in the “Star Wars” trilogy and Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” At the time, though, few moviegoers considered Ford as an actor capable of playing a romantic lead on the silver screen. (Ford starred in Peter Hyams’ 1979 World War II melodrama “Hanover Street,” but it failed to earn popular and critical acclaim.) Happily for Ford and movie audiences everywhere, Weir’s film about John Book, a Philadelphia police captain who falls in love with a beautiful Amish widow (Kelly McGillis) while hiding out in the Pennsylvania countryside from a posse of corrupt cops changed that perception forever. “Witness” proved that Ford could play complex and down to Earth characters beyond the iconic heroes he is still best known for. Writt...

Hi, there, Constant Readers. It's Monday, November 24, 2014, and right now the temperature in Miami is 86 degrees Fahrenheit under mostly clear skies. The humidity levels are tolerable, but the heat index outside is 96 degrees. Much too summery for my taste; if it wasn't for all the pre-Black Friday ads online and elsewhere, I'd have forgotten that Thanksgiving is this coming Thursday. I apologize for not being a Constant Writer, folks. I haven't been tending to my blog as much I should, but the complications of being a caregiver to a sick parent, trying to find online revenue streams to replace Epinions and Yahoo Voices (a.k.a. Associated Content), the stresses of managing my household finances, and a host of other issues have made a hash of my plans for "A Certain Point of View."  It's hard for me to find a good balance between my personal and working lives, especially when both inevitably overlap. I've been fairly busy over at Examiner, where I...

Although I’ve written literally over a thousand reviews about many different products, it’s a fair bet to say that my favorite subject to write about is movies, both theatrical and made-for-TV ones. It all started when I was struggling to find out which beat or section of my high school student newspaper I wanted to be assigned in.  Because I’d been “drafted” into my first journalism class by my ninth-grade teacher before I even set foot inside South Miami High, I literally felt like a fish out of water in Mr. Gary Bridge’s Newspaper Reporting and Editing class. Fortunately, we students were issued a huge hardcover textbook that covered all the essential points of a journalism course.  Topics ranged from what a pica and a font are to the thorny issues of what constitutes libel, and somewhere in between there were chapters devoted to each section (News, Features, Sports, Op/Ed) in an average student newspaper. I browsed through these chapters rather half-heartedly, no...

Man of Steel,  director Zack Snyder’s ambitious 2013 reboot of Warner Bros. Superman film franchise, is an earnest but sometimes dour and plodding retelling of the DC Comics superhero’s origin story. Starring British actor Henry Cavill ( Stardust ) in the dual role of Kal-El/Clark Kent and co-starring Amy Adams, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Russell Crowe, and Michael Shannon,  Man of Steel  reinvents Superman’s backstory from the ground up. In essence, it tells Superman’s Moses/Jesus-inspired saga of how Kryptonian scientist Jor-El (Crowe) sends his newborn son to Earth to save him from his home planet’s destruction. Because the screenplay by David S. Goyer (based on a story by producer Christopher Nolan) pretends that the Christopher Reeve/Brandon Routh Superman films don’t exist,  Man of Steel  begins on Krypton. As in the comics and the Richard Donner  Superman: The Movie,  the planet is doomed. However, in Goyer’s reboot, Krypton’s red sun...

 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...

Spring, 1945. After the failure of his Ardennes Counteroffensive - the famous "Battle of the Bulge" - three months earlier, Adolf Hitler huddles in his bunker beneath Berlin, trying desperately to stave off certain defeat as his "Thousand Year Reich" falls back on all fronts. In the East, the Red Army has overrun most of Poland and East Prussia. Russian armies, several million soldiers strong, are now less than 100 miles away from the Nazi capital.  Only the floodwaters of the Oder and Neisse Rivers, as well as the tattered remnants of the once mighty German forces which invaded Russia in 1941, block their advance. In the West, the American, British, Canadian and French forces have liberated most of France, all of Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Holland.   And though the surprise German attack in December caught Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Anglo-American subordinates by surprise, its failure has eliminated one of the Allies' worst strategic scenarios f...

Dear readers, Even though I am not feeling all that well as of late (I seem to have picked up a nasty chest cold or something), I will be working on a few reviews this week for Epinions' $10-for-10 December promotion. I'm not sure in what order I'll do them,  and given the circumstances I don't know if I'll even be able to get them all done by December 31, but these are the products I plan to write about: Prometheus, the Alien semi-prequel directed by Ridley Scott The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan's final film of his Batman trilogy Seven of the Harry Potter movies (I've already reviewed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ) Charles B. MacDonald's Company Commander Regarding Henry , a film by director Mike Nichols.   I bought it for my mom's Christmas present so I haven't watched it yet, so if I do review it, it will probably be one of the last reviews I'll write this year. If I can "suggest a product" (SA...

Cover Designed by Alex Diaz-Granados. (C) 2012 Alex Diaz-Granados  Pros:  Well written and extensive on movies covered... Cons:  though the book as a whole lacks a unifying focus. A love of movies since childhood and a passion for writing combined long ago to drive the author into creating an account at Amazon and later Epinions so that he could write movie reviews. While those reviews have expanded into other content areas, movies remain the primary driving force for Alex Diaz-Granados. The result is this self-published book featuring just some of his eight years of movie review work at Epinions.com. After an introduction that discusses the passion the author has had all his life for movies¸ it is on to the reviews. The book is broken down into four chapter sections covering movies he liked and movies that he didn’t. The reviews are extensively detailed both in terms of plot and storylines as well as analysis of the films regarding these same details...