A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

It's quiet in my writing nook here in what used to be our dining room. I'm waiting for my lunch (two Nathan's hot dogs and Pepperidge Farm buns) to be ready. I'm not usually a lunch person, but I've been up since 6:57 a.m. and I ate breakfast about an hour later, so I'm a bit hungry now. I'm also waiting for a phone call from the substitute home health aide; our regular HHA had to take care of some personal business and asked Nursing South for the day off.  The sub called at 9 this morning and said she'd be here around 1 or so this afternoon; it's now 1:44 p.m. and she has not called yet. Most annoying, I think, but substitute HHAs often say they'll be here at X hour and end up getting here at Y. Either they get delayed by their duties in other patients' houses or get lost on the way here...but it's always something with the people from Nursing South. Mom slept well last night. In fact, she slept 14 hours, with only one interrupti...

The following column was first published in the Opinions page of  Catalyst  on March 6, 1986, the day after my 23rd birthday:   It's cold outside and darkness is setting in as I fidget on a hard concrete bench at the bus stop. I have done everything that I had to do today -- wrote my column, studied for tomorrow's test, called a few contacts for stories and all the other jobs on my list. Now I'm free.  Out there, somewhere, a bus is making its way through heavy traffic, depositing people here, picking up people there. Its course is not a straight line from point A to point B; it zig-zags all over the place. It will take 20 or 30 minutes to reach campus. If the traffic is heavy, perhaps longer.  I look around. There are 15, maybe 20, people sitting, standing, pacing back and forth. On a bench to my left, a pair of basketball players concentrates on their textbooks.  A wizened old woman, obviously neither student nor faculty -- her clothes seem almost as old ...

Hi, there, Constant Readers. It's Monday, November 24, 2014, and right now the temperature in Miami is 86 degrees Fahrenheit under mostly clear skies. The humidity levels are tolerable, but the heat index outside is 96 degrees. Much too summery for my taste; if it wasn't for all the pre-Black Friday ads online and elsewhere, I'd have forgotten that Thanksgiving is this coming Thursday. I apologize for not being a Constant Writer, folks. I haven't been tending to my blog as much I should, but the complications of being a caregiver to a sick parent, trying to find online revenue streams to replace Epinions and Yahoo Voices (a.k.a. Associated Content), the stresses of managing my household finances, and a host of other issues have made a hash of my plans for "A Certain Point of View."  It's hard for me to find a good balance between my personal and working lives, especially when both inevitably overlap. I've been fairly busy over at Examiner, where I...

When director J.J. Abrams and his collaborators Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, and Roberto Orci decided to set 2009's  Star Trek  in an alternate timeline apart from  The Original Series  and its spinoffs, they did it to achieve creative freedom. Abrams and his creative team knew that simply inserting a young cast into the established Trek universe would not work.  Star Trek's  lore is nearly a half-century old, and the franchise's loyal fans wouldn't have accepted a reboot that attempted to inject the new cast into the 1966-69 William Shatner-Leonard Nimoy-DeForest Kelley troika's adventures. The effect, I think, would have been too jarring. Star Trek 's time travel-created alternate timeline thus gave Abrams & Co. the necessary flexibility to reinvigorate Gene Roddenberry's old series. As Abrams pointed out in an interview:  "The idea, now that we are in an independent timeline, allows us to use any of the ingredients from the past -...

Although I’ve written literally over a thousand reviews about many different products, it’s a fair bet to say that my favorite subject to write about is movies, both theatrical and made-for-TV ones. It all started when I was struggling to find out which beat or section of my high school student newspaper I wanted to be assigned in.  Because I’d been “drafted” into my first journalism class by my ninth-grade teacher before I even set foot inside South Miami High, I literally felt like a fish out of water in Mr. Gary Bridge’s Newspaper Reporting and Editing class. Fortunately, we students were issued a huge hardcover textbook that covered all the essential points of a journalism course.  Topics ranged from what a pica and a font are to the thorny issues of what constitutes libel, and somewhere in between there were chapters devoted to each section (News, Features, Sports, Op/Ed) in an average student newspaper. I browsed through these chapters rather half-heartedly, no...

World War II.  It was the largest and bloodiest conflict in human history, with battles raging on the air, land, and sea from the steppes of the Soviet Union to the steaming jungles of Guadalcanal. Every major world power was a combatant, and after six years of fighting, over 50 million human beings were dead, millions more were wounded or left homeless, and the seeds of the Cold War were planted as the balance of power now shifted to the United States and the Communist-ruled Russia and its unwilling allies in Eastern Europe.  Naturally, even during the war, World War II became a popular subject for filmmakers in all the warring countries. not only as entertainment but also as part of the war effort; both the Axis and Allied camps infused their wartime films with propaganda, sometimes grossly heavy-handed (such as the Nazis'  The Eternal Jew , which stirred up anti-Semitism in Germany and the countries it occupied), sometimes subtly ( Casablanca,  which on th...

The Bonding Stardate 43198.7 (Earth Calendar Date 2366) Episode Production Number: 153 Episode Number (Aired): 52 Original Airdate: October 23, 1989 Written by: Ronald D. Moore Directed by: Winrich Kolbe The Episode:  On Stardate 43198.7, the  Galaxy- class  USS Enterprise  (registry number NCC-1701-D) is in standard orbit over an uncharted and seemingly uninhabited Class-M planet. An away team led by Security chief Lt. (j.g) Worf (Michael Dorn) is exploring the surface. After the away team makes its initial survey, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) learns that the planet was once inhabited by a culture known as the Koinonians. The Koinonian culture had apparently wiped itself out in a war, leaving only archaeological relics behind. Before the away team beams back up to the  Enterprise,  Lt. Marla Aster (Susan Powell), an archaeologist, is killed when one of the leftover bombs from the Koinonian war explodes. " Away team is aboard, captain. One dead ...