A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Blogger's Note: This review was written originally for Amazon sometime in November of 2003, then updated (twice) for Epinions. It is not about the four-movie box set which was released in late 2008 after Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, nor is it about the soon-to-be-released Indiana Jones Blu-ray box set. Since the advent of the Digital Video Disc format in the late 1990s, there were two long-awaited movie trilogies: the Classic Star Wars films and the Adventures of Indiana Jones. The former was first released in September of 2004, but the daring fedora-wearing archaeologist had almost a year's headstart when Lucasfilm and Paramount Home Video released a 4-disk set in November 2003. The Adventures of Indiana Jones  box set consists of the first three films of the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg collaborative creation, 1981's  Raiders of the Lost Ark , 1984's  Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , and 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Cru

One of the great truths in life is that all art, as writer-director Nicholas Meyer ( Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ) is fond of saying, reflects the times in which is it created. A good example of this is 1970's  Kelly's Heroes,  a wry, dark, and sometimes downright daffy caper-comedy set in World War II. Starring Clint Eastwood as an oft-busted ex-lieutenant-but-now Private Kelly,  Kelly's Heroes  is not so much a giddy Blake Edwards-inspired World War II comedy a la  What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?  but more of a Vietnam War-era revision of all those war movies wherein the G.I.s are always portrayed as imperfect but well-meaning "angels in battle dress and helmets" who are fighting to liberate Western Europe from Nazi tyranny. Kelly's Heroes,  directed by Brian G. Hutton, whol made only a handful of fair-to-middling features and a score or so TV episodes of various series before switching careers to plumbing, is essentially a Sergio Leone spaghetti West

On June 22, 1961 – by coincidence, the 20th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union – writer-producer Carl Foreman’s  The Guns of Navarone  premiered in the United States. Not only was it the first of several adaptations of novels by Scottish writer Alistair MacLean to become big-budget action-adventure movies, but it also marked the return of Foreman, who had been blacklisted during the Red Scare of the 1950s as one of the Hollywood Ten, to the limelight of the movie industry after years of working anonymously for more than a decade.  Starring Gregory Peck as Capt. Keith Mallory, David Niven as Corporal Miller, Anthony Quinn as Andrea Stavros, and Anthony Quayle as Maj. Roy Franklin,  The Guns of Navarone  tells the exciting – if at times a bit implausible – tale of a small Allied commando team tasked with one hell of a mission: Infiltrate the German-occupied island of Navarone in the Aegean Sea, avoid detection, and blow up a pair of large radar-controlled c

Francis Ford Coppola’s original 1979 version of Apocalypse Now is a dark, sardonic, surrealistic yet mesmerizing reworking of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Starring Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Fredric Forrest, Larry Fishbourne, and Dennis Hopper, Apocalypse Now trades Conrad’s African setting for the then-still largely unexplored (by Hollywood, anyway) jungles of Vietnam. The film’s premise is deceptively simple. A hard-bitten, combat-weary Capt. Benjamin Willard (Sheen) is given a difficult (and highly classified) assignment: he is to travel up a long Vietnamese river on a Navy PBR (river patrol boat) to find the jungle outpost of Col. Walter Kurtz (Brando), a highly decorated and intelligent Special Forces officer who has gone "rogue" and utilizing what one senior officer describes as "unsound methods" to fight the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Willard is to locate Kurtz and "terminate (him) with extreme prejudice.&quo

World War II, for good or ill, has been the backdrop for hundreds – if not thousands – of movies produced by all the nations which participated in it even as it was being waged. Of course, though “combat” films along the lines of A Walk in the Sun, Battleground, The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan often come to mind when the term World War II movie is mentioned, the genre actually straddles quite a few other film styles that aren’t restricted to movies about battles, campaigns or the hardware of the war.  Many love stories, dramas, comedies and even science fiction films have been set or partially set during World War II. Naturally, the sheer scope of World War II – fought on three continents and involving millions of combatants – and its more or less unambiguous “good versus evil” nature resulted in the near-mythologizing of certain events by Hollywood and writers of fiction. One of the most popular subgenres of World War II films is the “sabotage and commando r

Because World War II was the defining conflict of the 20th Century - its aftermath continues to shape our lives almost 70 years later - and because it was a globe-spanning conflict, it is not surprising that many filmmakers continue to chronicle those awfully bloody six years that ended over 50 million lives - most of them civilian lives. Some, of course, are big Hollywood recreations of actual battles ( The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far ) or fact-based miniseries along the lines of Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Others are fictional stories that range from the somber eulogy of Saving Private Ryan to the more action-oriented baubles a la The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare, both of which exemplify the Commando Raid Adventure sub-genre. Nevertheless, from the dawn of the Television Age back in the 1940s and ‘50s, the millions of feet of combat and propaganda footage shot by both the Axis and Allies have been mined for a plethora of documentaries made for television, st

On November 4, 2008, roughly seven years after Lucasfilm Limited and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the two-disc DVD set of  Star Wars – Episode I: The Phantom Menace  and slightly four years after the unveiling of the somewhat controversial  Star Wars Trilogy  box set, the two companies went ahead and issued the first box set of  Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy  in tandem with a redesigned  Star Wars Trilogy  box set comprised of the 2006 Limited Edition DVDs which contain – due to high demand from fans – both the enhanced Special Edition and original theatrical release versions of  A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back  and  Return of the Jedi . For some reason, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment waited a bit over three years to produce a box set of the Prequels –  Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Episode II: Attack of the Clones  and  Episode III: Revenge of the Sith  – which had previously been released in separate 2-DVD sets. (A careful search of eith

When most of us talk about the genre labeled "science fiction"  or "sci-fi," we often associate it with such movies or franchises as  Independence Day, Star Trek  and/or  Star Wars , with perhaps a nod to Stanley Kubrick's  2001: A Space Odyssey  and Steven Spielberg's  Close Encounters of the Third Kind  thrown in almost as a distracted coda. Star Wars,  of course, isn't  true  science fiction; George Lucas's multimedia franchise is better described as "space-fantasy" or "space opera" and is instead a high tech update of the old  Flash Gordon  and  Buck Rogers  serials of the 1930s and early 1940s.   Gene Roddenberry's  Star Trek  (and its various spin-offs) is closer to true science fiction but it's still more of an action-adventure tale gussied up with plausible but still fantastical advanced technology (warp drive, subspace communications and transporters) which is designed to get around the limits of physics a