A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2013 Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment On Quora, Jason Handleman asks:  Do you look forward to cinematic reboots and remakes or do you prefer original, untested offerings? My reply: It really depends on the film and/or genre, as well as other considerations, such as  who  is making the reboot/remake, the cast, as well as the  why. For instance, I would not care for remakes of such films as  Casablanca, North by Northwest, Jaws,  the original  Star Wars  Trilogy,  Raiders of the Lost Ark,  or  Stand By Me.  Those are films that are representative of the times in which they were made, and no matter how hard one tries, they can’t be replicated and be expected to catch lightning in a bottle twice. I am open to remakes and/or reboots of comic book movies; DC and Marvel Comics reboot their established titles every so often, so if the source material can be revamped by their respective publishers, then their movie a...

Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 drama  Cast Away  is one of those films that aspires for cinematic greatness, nearly achieves it, yet leaves the viewer with no small amount of disappointment at the very end.   Essentially a 20thCentury take on Daniel Defoe’s classic tale  Robinson Crusoe, Cast Away  stars two-time Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks as a FedEx systems analyst who is stranded on an island after his plane crashes in the Pacific Ocean.  Chuck Noland:  We live and we die by time. And we must not commit the sin of losing our track on time.   It  is late 1995.  Chuck Noland is one of FedEx’s most driven analysts; he is a man who is obsessed with efficiency and time management, which is logical considering that he works for a company which lives by its "Absolutely, Positively Anytime" slogan.  Based in the company’s headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee, Chuck is tasked with ferreting problems with the transit of packages ...

The Cold War, that bizarre state of war-in-peace between the U.S.-led West and the Soviet-led East which began in 1945 and ended in 1991, was, until the post-9/11 War on Terror, the most dominant geopolitical conflict in my lifetime. For the first 28 years of my life, I knew that somewhere in the Soviet Union, an intercontinental missile lay in a concrete-and-steel silo with a nuclear warhead targeted on my home town of Miami, and that a single miscalculation by either an American President or a Soviet General Secretary could lead to the annihilation of the entire human race. Having grown up with the nightmarish fear of mushroom-shaped clouds rising over blasted cities and with an almost atavistic dislike of Soviet-style Communism, I developed a strange fascination for movies and books that dealt with the Cold War, particularly those that extrapolated from reality and explored the ultimate nightmare scenario of either a conventional or nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union/W...

To: Mace Neufeld, Harvey Bernhard, Robert J. Anderson and Brian Taggert From: Perplexed Film Viewer Re:  Omen IV: The Awakening Gentlemen, As someone who has been watching and reviewing movies for a very long time, I am well aware of the film industry's true nature, i.e., that film studios and television networks' main focus is to make money for their corporate owners' stockholders - any real entertainment value of the projects that get "green-lit" is purely incidental. Because most businesspeople tend to be very conservative and risk-adverse, it's therefore not surprising that studios and producers are attracted to sequels, prequels and franchises, even when a film - such as  The Omen ­  is intended to be a stand-alone viewing experience and isn't - like the first two  Superman  movies - part of an organic multi-episode series. Franchises, when they succeed, often result in big payoffs for everyone involved in their creation; George Lucas, Stev...

Although the average film-goer may not be aware of this, some of Hollywood’s best films are often inspired by movies made in other countries, such as those directed by Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, whose  Rashomon, The Hidden Fortress  and  Yojimbo  inspired American films such as  The Outrage, Star Wars  and  Last Man Standing.  (Kurosawa’s  Yojimbo,  in particular, was also the somewhat controversial template for Sergio Leone’s  A Fistful of Dollars , but  Last Man Standing  is an officially sanctioned remake.)  Perhaps one of the most popular Americanized remakes of a Kurosawa “Easterner” is 1960’s  The Magnificent Seven,  a Western written by William Roberts and officially acknowledged (in the main title sequence) as being inspired by Toho Films’  Seven Samurai  (1954)   .  That  Seven Samurai  could be adapted fairly easily from a film set in a medieval Japanese setting ...