A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2007 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment In November 2007, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released a four-disc set titled Die Hard Collection. Issued simultaneously with the DVD and Blu-ray (BD)  premiere of that year’s   Live Free or Die Hard ,  Fox’s first BD box set consists of the first four movies of the Die Hard franchise that launched actor Bruce Willis into action hero super-stardom. (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has released subsequent compilation sets, including the five-film 25th Anniversary collection with 2013’s A Good Day to Die Hard. ) What’s In the Box? The 2007 Die Hard Collection collects four BDs, one for each of the Die Hard films, in a slightly thicker-than-average multi-disc plastic jewel case. The discs themselves are first-generation Blu-rays with a storage capacity of 500 gigabytes and 1080p high definition video resolution. The set also offers lossless audio and smart menu technology that allows viewers to access me...

The Departed,  Martin Scorsese's 2006 Academy Award-winning remake of Hong Kong's  Infernal Affairs , marks the New York City native's return to the gritty crime drama genre in which he made his mark back in the 1970s. Instead of turning his cinematic eye on the mean streets of the Big Apple, Scorsese ( Taxi Driver, Goodfellas ) explores the dark underside of Boston, Massachussets in a tale about corruption, the rivalry between the Irish and Italian mobs, and internal strife within Boston's law enforcement officers. Written by  William Monahan ( Body of Lies, Kingdom of Heaven ) and based on the original  Infernal Affairs  script by Alan Mak and Felix Chong,  The Departed  features Jack Nicholson as an aging but wily mobster named Frank Costello. Costello (loosely based on the notorious Whitey Bulger) is a menacing yet seductive gangster who early in the film recruits 12-year-old Colin Sullivan (Conor Donovan) into his circle of criminals. (Costello i...

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 ...

When Universal Pictures rolled out writer-director Paul Greengrass’  United 93  in 2006, I was not sure if I would ever see it.  I certainly didn’t see it in theaters that year, and I did not rush to order it from Amazon when it was available on DVD a few months later.  Like millions of my fellow Americans, I was apprehensive about seeing a recreation of the events of September 11, 2001, and specifically about the efforts of 40 passengers and crewmembers to wrest back control of the hijacked airliner from four Al Qaeda terrorists before it hits its intended target in Washington, DC.  While I did not – and still do not – think my own reluctance came from the movie being released only five years after the events of 9-11, I didn’t want to have nightmares about United 93 the way I did back in the fall of 2001.  I was watching  Good Morning America  on that day (having tuned in a few minutes after the first plane hit the Twin Towers) and I st...