A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

From the Earth to the Moon finally gets the Blu-ray treatment. © 2019 Imagine Entertainment and HBO Home Entertainment  Yesterday marked the 50th Anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the third manned flight to the Moon and the first to land on Earth's closest celestial neighbor and only natural satellite. There were the usual commemorative segments on the morning and evening newscasts, and social media was littered with tributes to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.  Fittingly, Imagine Entertainment and HBO Home Entertainment chose July 16, 2019 as the "drop date" for the long-awaited Blu-ray disc (BD) set of From the Earth to the Moon, a 12-part docudrama about mankind's greatest adventure: Project Apollo.  Produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer, From the Earth to the Moon premiered on HBO in the spring of 1998, seven months before the 30th Anniversary of Apollo 8's historic "first...

On Quora, member Michael Justin asks: Will  Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker  flop like  Solo: A Star Wars Story? My response: Considering that most of the audience for the Skywalker Saga films is larger than the core of naysaying “Never Disney  Star Wars ” fan-group, I would say…”No.” Solo: A Star Wars Story  failed to perform well at the box office, not because of the success of a boycott led by  The Last Jedi- basher clique or because it was a lousy  Star Wars  film, but rather by its behind-the-scenes drama, a lackadaisical marketing campaign, spectacularly  bad  scheduling, and perhaps even a mild case of franchise weariness. Of all those factors, the most serious was Lucasfilm’s hiring and subsequent firing of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller as directors of a  Star Wars  films. Reportedly, the creators of  The LEGO Movie  wanted to give  Solo  an  Ocean’s 11  comedy-cape...

On June 27, 1995, three days before the theatrical release of director Ron Howard's Apollo 13, MCA Records dropped Apollo 13: Music from the Motion Picture , a 78-minute-long soundtrack album that presents eight songs from the Apollo era (including James Brown's "Night Train" and Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" ), one 1990s cover of a pop standard ( Blue Moon by the South Florida retro-country band The Mavericks) seven tracks of dialogue recorded for the record by members of the cast, and seven tracks of composer James Horner's original Academy Award-nominated orchestral score for the film. Prior to the release of Apollo 13: Music from the Motion Picture , Horner - who wrote the score to the Academy Award-nominated film based on Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger's Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 - had prepared a 59-minute-long "assembly" album for commercial release. This version of the soundtrack presented 12 t...

The Signature Edition reissue 5-DVD box set. © 1998, 2005 Home Box Office and Imagine Entertainment. President John F. Kennedy: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this time period will be more impressive to Mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space. And none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. On April 5, 1998, HBO broadcast "Can We Do This?" — the first episode of From the Earth to the Moon, a 12-part miniseries about Project Apollo, the U.S. manned space program tasked to fulfill President John F. Kennedy's challenge of placing "a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth" before 1970. Based mostly on Andrew Chaikin's 1994 book A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts , From the Earth to the Moon follows the professional and person...

Before James Horner died at the age of 61 on June 22, 2015 in a single-fatality plane crash in California's Los Padres National Forest, he had composed over 100 film scores, including the Academy Award-winning music for director James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which included that year's Oscar-winning Best Original Song, "My Heart Will Go On." Throughout his 27-year-long career as a composer and orchestrator, Horner earned eight more Best Original Score Oscar nominations, won two Golden Globes, three Satellite Awards from the International Press Agency, and three Saturn Awards from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. Among the eight Oscar-nominated scores in Horner's filmography is the one for director Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13, a dramatization about the April 1970 lunar mission which nearly ended in tragedy as a result of a catastrophic explosion of an oxygen tank aboard the spacecraft's Command/Service Module (CSM). ...

© 2018 Abrams and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  On May 25, 2018, New York City-based publisher Abrams Books released Phil Szostak's The Art of Solo: A Star Wars, the latest entry in the long-running  The Art of Star Wars series that began with Carol Titleman's classic 1979 work, The Art of Star Wars.  Featuring production paintings, costume designs, sketches and concept paintings for props, spaceships, and the many characters that were imagined for the 10th live-action Star Wars movie, The Art of Solo: A Star Wars Story is a treasure trove of graphic artwork created by some of Lucasfilm's most talented artists. Concept art for the Vandor train heist by artist Thom Tenery. © 2018 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Published on the same day that Solo: A Star Wars Story premiered, Szostak's fourth The Art of... book is divided thusly: Foreword by Neil Lamont Foreword by James Clyne Introduction by Phil Szostak Who's Who Harry and the Boy Han Solo Qi'ra ...

(C) 2018 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  On Tuesday, September 25, 2018, The Walt Disney Company’s home media division, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, released Solo: A Star Wars Story in four formats – DVD, Blu-ray, UHD 4K Blu-ray, and digital download. The home media release of Solo – the 10 th live-action entry in the Star Wars franchise and fourth produced in the post-George Lucas era – comes six months after the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi on home media; it is widely seen as Disney’s attempt to recoup the financial losses from Solo’ s underperformance at the box office earlier this year. Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in Solo: A Star Wars Story , an all-new adventure with the most beloved scoundrel in the galaxy. Through a series of daring escapades deep within a dark and dangerous criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his mighty future copilot Chewbacca and encounters the notorious gambler Lando Calri...

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) Written by: Lawrence Kasdan and Jon Kasdan. Based on characters created by George Lucas Directed by: Ron Howard Starring: Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton, Paul Bettany, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Joonas Suotamo On May 25, 2018 – 41 years after the premiere of George Lucas’s original Star Wars film, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures released Solo: A Star Wars Story, the second standalone movie in Lucasfilm Ltd.’s series of Anthology films set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Written by Lawrence Kasdan ( The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark ) and his son Jon, Solo: A Star Wars Story was originally directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the filmmaking duo behind The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, but they were replaced four-and-a-half months into principal photography and replaced by Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard. It is based on characters and situati...