A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 1983 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Pros:  Good script; stunning effects and dazzling space battles; a classic John Williams score Cons:  A bit talky...to some, the Ewoks and to others, the Special Edition version is sacrilege.... On Wednesday, May 25, 1983, exactly six years after the premiere of George Lucas's  Star Wars  (now known as  Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope ), millions of fans queued up in front of thousands of movie theater box offices to be among those lucky viewers to watch  Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi  on its first day of release. Three years had passed since the theatrical run of  The Empire Strikes Back,  which had surprised critics and fans alike with its  Episode V  subtitle, the introduction of Jedi Master Yoda, the romance between Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), the claim made by Darth Vader (David Prowse, voice of James Earl Jones) that  he  was Luke Skywalker's (Mark Hamill) dad and - frustrati

Pros:  None except that it ends Cons:  Dry, minimalist prose; uninvolving plot Although I have been a voracious reader since I was a wee lad, there  are  certain genres in popular fiction that I avoid. For instance, it doesn't matter how desperate for reading material I might be, but you'll never catch me reading a Harlequin Romance novel; it might be entertaining and a light read, but I know I'll end up rolling my eyes and say to myself,  If only real-life love were so simple! Another genre I avoid is the wide-ranging mystery-thriller category, which includes anything smacking of police procedurals and/or dogged detective work. Perhaps it's because I tried reading a few Agatha Christie novels in high school and simply couldn't get into them, or maybe it's because novels by such authors as Patricia Cromwell and Sue Grafton make me feel, um, stupid. The closest I ever come to suspense or mystery is when I read a Tom Clancy novel, but that author, l

(C) 2007 Scholastic, Inc. Harry Potter: The Complete Series Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7)   Although I’ve owned two of J.K. Rowling’s bestselling fantasy novels about the adventures of a boy wizard named Harry Potter ( Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone  and  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ),  I never really tried to read the entire seven-book cycle after I finished reading the first book.  In both cases, I had been given the Potter books as gifts, and though I finished  The Sorcerer’s Stone  and gamely gave  Order of the Phoenix  “the old college try” and got halfway through it, for some reason or another, I did not buy the other five books of the series.  Now, you might think that I had not enjoyed  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone  or dismissed Rowling’s works as “mere” kids’ books, but you’d be far off the mark.  I like fantasy books quite a bit and I  did  like the first book a great deal; Rowling may have intended her books to be read by children but much

Return of the Jedi CD set cover art. (C) 1997 HighBridge Audio and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) In late 1983, after the box office success of director Richard Marquand's Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and the equally positive reception to National Public Radio's Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, writer Brian Daley, director John Madden, and the creative team that had brought two thirds of the Star Wars Trilogy to the airwaves started thinking about adapting Jedi for NPR.  After all, both of the previous Star Wars radio adaptations had done well in the ratings and had given the nearly-extinct genre of radio dramas a huge jump start. And with Star Wars at the height of its popularity, it would not be very long until Madden, Daley, and the rest of the crew led by producer Mel Sahr began work on Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - The Radio Drama. Unfortunately, it would be a long time till the Star Wars Radio Drama trilogy could be completed.  As

Photo Credit: collector-actionfigures.com  Although the Star Wars saga is perhaps associated with dazzling set-piece action sequences replete with lightsaber duels and dogfights in space, the series is replete with small moments that are in themselves fateful or revelatory. In filmmaking, no scene is -- or should be, anyway -- extraneous or tossed in just because it looks "cool." Every tiny bit of dialogue, every single shot has to move the story forward, even something that seems irrelevant.  In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, everything is set up to propel Anakin Skywalker from his life as a slave to the start of his training as a Jedi Knight, a seemingly straight path that will, of course, zig and zag to Anakin's ultimate destiny…his deviation from the true path of the JedI, his forbidden romance with Padme Amidala, and his turning to the dark side of the Force.  Hasbro's Mos Espa Encounter scene pack beautifully recreates the face-off between y

Pros:  Everything. Cons:  None. Ramsey: Colonel Von Luger, it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they cannot escape, then it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability.  After more than a decade of trying to get a studio to film a movie based on Paul Brickhill's book  The Great Escape,  John Sturges finally got backing from the Mirisch Company to recreate the true-life story of Allied officers escaping from a German POW camp in 1944. While the screenplay by W. Burnett and James ( Shogun ) Clavell fictionalizes the characters and compresses events to fit a feature film's running time, the details of the escape attempt are true-to-life. Even better, the film was actually shot in Germany (even the thickest wooded areas in California don't come close to resembling the Black Forest area). No