A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

When I was in 10 th grade, my third period English class was assigned to read Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird , a roman a clef based on the author’s childhood years in small-town Alabama during the Great Depression. Shortly before the – dreaded – test which was to be given after we had finished reading the book, the English department screened director Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film adaptation, which stars Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna, Brock Peters, Estelle Evans, Frank Overton and William Windom, for all the sophomores assigned to read Lee’s novel that semester in my high school’s auditorium. As adapted by playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird is, like its literary source, a semiautobiographical story of a young Alabama girl’s early years in the fictitious town of Maycomb, centering on the events that take place over a three-year time-span. Standing in for Harper Lee is her alter e

Movies have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.   Some of my earliest childhood memories center on little snippets of black-and-white movies I glimpsed while my parents watched television in the Florida room of our second Miami home; they are vague because I was less than two years old and my dad was still alive, but sometimes I still see, in my mind’s eye, little fragments of old John Wayne Westerns and war movies which my father had enjoyed. It’s no exaggeration when I say that my childhood relationship with the movies was one of the key influences during my formative years.   Because I had very few father figures beyond my maternal grandfather and several uncles before I entered junior high, I tended to mimic certain traits of actors and movie characters I admired.  I wanted to be as brave as John Wayne’s many cowboys and military heroes, as idealistic as Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, as dashing-and-daring as Errol Flynn and Clark Gable, and as funny as Stev

I first saw Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Western”  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  when it was broadcast by the ABC television network as a Sunday Night Movie feature back in the day when the home video revolution was still a decade away and the Big Three TV networks devoted some of their prime time schedule to air not-quite-new-but-not-quite-old theatrical movies.   Because I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time and wasn’t educated about movies or the film industry, I was not aware that  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  was the third chapter of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” (which also included A Fistful of Dollars  and  For a Few Dollars More ) or that it was originally an Italian-made flick (shot on locations in Spain and southern Italy) titled  Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo  (literally, “The good, the ugly, the bad").  Of course, because I was so young I didn’t quite understand all the nuances – visual and thematic – of Leone’s epic story about three anti-heroic charact

It is late spring, 1940.  It's been nine months since Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland plunged Europe into general war. France and Great Britain, which had hoped to appease Hitler the year before at Munich -- and practically gave away Czechoslovakia to Germany in order to stave off war -- have been forced to fight. After a period of uneasy waiting called "the phony war" by the American press, Hitler's armies have quickly overrun Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg and thrown the Anglo-French forces back into France in less than six weeks. British forces are forced to leave their heavy equipment on the beaches and evacuate from the port city of Dunkirk. Only the English Channel, units of the Royal Navy and less than 1,000 fighters stand between Hitler's conquering legions and the British Isles. As the new Prime Minister says in a speech before the House of Commons, "What General Weygand calls the Battle of France is over, the Battle of Britain is about

As a rule, even though I am a history buff and love historical films, I am not a big fan of biographical films about politicians, especially politicians who lived way before the 20th Century. I suppose it is because (a) Hollywood biographies tend to cherry-pick through the subject’s life to reinforce certain story points the writers or directors want to make, and (b) pre-20th Century set movies tend to be costume dramas as well as history lessons. These are unavoidable realities, but I tend to feel restless when I sit down to watch any flick set before 1860. So when a friend of mine loaned me his three- DVD set of 2008’s HBO miniseries John Adams, I was quite prepared to simply set it aside for about a week and then return it, unwatched, with a polite thank you note attached. Since I really don’t know as much about the American Revolution and the early days of the Republic, I figured I ought to at least watch Part One to see why John Adams had gotten so much good buzz. Lu

At last! Where have you been?-- C-3PO to R2-D2, A New Hope Part One: A Fan's Dream Comes True at Last. On Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2004, Lucasfilm Ltd. and 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment released -- some might say unleashed -- the DVD edition of one of the most anticipated movie collections since the invention of this increasingly popular format: The Star Wars Trilogy. And despite some opposition from fans who (a) wanted the DVD set to include both the 1977-83 versions and the 1997 Special Editions and (b) are unhappy with further alterations made to the "Classic" trilogy especially for the 2004 DVD editions, The Star Wars Trilogy four-disc set has been selling briskly. (It's No. 1 in DVD sales at Amazon.com.) I've been a Star Wars fan since 1977, so not only have I seen the existing five Episodes of George Lucas' space fantasy set "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" at the cinemaplex, but I've owned every VHS release since I pu

alexdg1's Full Review: Jaws 4 - The Revenge Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie''s plot. One of the unhappy realities of a moviegoer's existence is Hollywood's penchant of exploiting a popular and critically-successful film that was intended to be a one-time affair and makes unnecessary (to the audience, anyway) sequels that are (a) rehashes of the first film, (b) not as well-made as the original, and (c) so illogical and awful that they can't be even be considered "so bad that they are good" guilty pleasures. Jaws: The Revenge (also known as Jaws 4 ) is one of the best examples of totally worthless sequels. It makes More American Graffiti look like a masterpiece worthy of a zillion Academy Awards, and it is even sillier than Jurassic Park III (which doesn't even have a Michael Crichton novel to justify its existence on film). Written by Michael de Guzman and directed by Joseph Sargent, this movie asks us to