A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2021 Harry N. Abrams/Abrams Books & 20th Century Studios   Hi there, Dear Reader. It’s Friday, February 4, 2022, and here in Lithia, Florida, it is a nice winter afternoon, Florida style. After a few days of near-freezing temperatures, we’re now in a warming trend. Outside, the temperature is 85˚F (29˚C) under partly sunny skies. With humidity at 57% and the wind blowing from the south-southwest, the heat index is 86˚F. Winter it may be, meteorologically and astronomically speaking, but it certainly feels like summer here. Well, as I sit here I’m keeping an eye on my Amazon account and the progress of my latest order. Yesterday I bought a copy of Laurent Bouzerau’s West Side Story: The Making of the Steven Spielberg Film. Published last November by Harry N. Abrams, a New York-based publishing company that specializes in books about art and entertainment, this is a 256-page, fully-illustrated behind the scenes account of how (and why) Steven Spielberg directed a secon...

© 2014 Universal Pictures Home Entertainment   Greetings, Dear Reader. It’s early afternoon here in New Hometown, Florida, on Wednesday, June 23, 2021. Currently, the temperature is 86 ˚ F (30 ˚ C) under rainy conditions. With humidity at 63% and the wind blowing from the northwest at 6 MPH (12 KM/H), the feels-like factor is 91 ˚ F (33 ˚ C). Today we can expect scattered showers throughout the day and into the evening. The high will be 89 ˚ F (32 ˚ C); the low will be 72 ˚ F (22 ˚ C). My two Indy Blu-ray sets. 4K UHD set on the left, my original 2012 Blu-ray set on the right. Photo by the author. Well, after a delay of nearly two weeks, I finally received my Indiana Jones: 4-Movie Collection with the first four Indiana Jones films in 4K UHD Blu-rays late Monday evening. I pre-ordered it on March 16, and the original delivery window was for June 10 or 11, a few days after the five-disc set’s street release. But Paramount Home Media Distribution, ViacomCBS’ division in charge of ...

On Quora, Cory Dun asks: How realistic is the miniseries Band of Brothers as far as the airborne divisions are concerned? Was Easy Company a real parachute infantry company? I replied: Cover of the 2001 "miniseries tie-in" edition. © 2001 Home Box Office and Simon & Schuster Band of Brothers  is a 10-part adaptation of Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1992 non-fiction book  Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Nest,  which itself was a companion book to his 1988 book  Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944.  Based primarily on interviews with surviving E (or Easy) Company veterans, correspondence, unit histories, diaries, and other resources,  Band of Brothers  was a look at a light infantry unit (albeit an elite one) that fought in many of the major campaigns in Northwest Europe from D-Day all the way to V-E Day (May 8, 1945) and through the summer of 1945. Because it is a dramatization of a non-fiction b...

"Steven and I began, as we always did. by screening his finished cut of the film. And, at the end, the lights came up, and it was time for us to begin talking about the role of music in the film. But I was so overwhelmed by what I'd just seen, I really couldn't speak. So I excused myself and walked around the building for a few minutes to gather myself, and then came back to resume the meeting. And I said to him quite seriously, 'Steven, you really need a better composer than I am for this film.' And he said, very sweetly, 'I know. But they're all dead.'" - John Williams On December 3, 2018, almost a quarter century after MCA Records released the original 14-track soundtrack from director Steven Spielberg's Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List, Burbank-based La-La Land Records began to ship a limited edition 2-CD reissue titled Schindler's List: 25th Anniversary Soundtrack. Produced, edited, and remastered by Michael "M...

Animation courtesy of Intrada Records. Art by Roger Kastel  © 1975, 2015 Universal Pictures "Dick Zanuck and David Brown, thank you both for giving me the opportunity to work with this extraordinary man, Steven Spielberg. The great Universal orchestra, my friend Herb Spencer, thank you, and all the members of this Academy for giving me this honor. I'm a grateful man, thank you very much." - John Williams' Oscar acceptance speech, 48th Academy Awards, March 29, 1976 "In doing the score for Jaws , John Williams has really outdone himself. The soundtrack is a stunning symphonic achievement and a great leap ahead in the revitalization of film music as a foreground component for the total motion picture experience...." - Steven Spielberg, director of Jaws , in the original 1975 LP liner notes In 2015, Oakland (California)-based Intrada Records released a deluxe 2-CD edition of composer-conductor John Williams' Academy Award-winning score for...

Jurassic World (2015) Written by: Colin Trevorrow, Derek Connolly, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver Story by: Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa  Based on Characters Created by  Michael Crichton Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D'Onofrio,  Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson, Omar Sy, BD Wong, Irrfan Khan On June 12, 2015 (two weeks after its world premiere at Paris' Le Grande Rex theater), Universal Pictures' Jurassic World hit U.S. theaters in wide release. Directed by Colin Trevorrow under the aegis of executive producer Steven Spielberg, Jurassic World revived the long-dormant franchise after a protracted development that lasted over a decade. Set 22 years after the events in Spielberg's 1993 adaptation of the late Michael Crichton's science fiction novel Jurassic Park, the movie is the first installment of a planned Jurassic World trilogy. Two decades after the disaster at John Hammond's Jurassic Park theme park, a new park created by Simon Mars...

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) Directed by: J.A. Bayona Written by: Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, James Cromwell, Ted Levine, Isabella Sermon, Geraldine Chaplin, Jeff Goldblum On June 22, 2018, Universal Pictures' Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hit theaters in its U.S. wide release. Written by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow ( Jurassic World ) and directed by Spanish director J.A. Bayona, this is the second chapter in the Jurassic World trilogy and the fifth film of the Jurassic Park franchise.   How many times do you have to see the evidence? How many times must the point be made? We're causing our own extinction. Too many red lines have been crossed. And our home has, in fundamental ways, been polluted by avarice and political megalomania. Genetic power has now been unleashed and of course, that's going to be catastrophic. This change was inevitable from...

Cover art for the 1990 first edition by Chip Kidd. (C) 1990 Alfred A. Knopf Nowadays, the title  Jurassic Park  conjures up images from a series of films which began with Steven Spielberg's Apatosaurus-sized blockbuster and became an ongoing franchise. As of this writing, Universal Pictures has released  five  films in the series, including  The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, Jurassic World,  and this year’s  Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom  This, of course, is to be expected and is not exactly a new concept in Hollywood; Jaws, which was Spielberg's first real blockbuster (and is in fact the grandfather of the modern "monster hit movie") also started out as a decent horror film about a predator with sharp teeth that, um, snacked on people...and should have, like its 1993 cinematic heir, should have been left as a stand-alone film. What some people tend to forget is that both these franchise-starting Spielberg f...