A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2002 Paramount Pictures “We Were Soldiers” (2002) Directed by Randall Wallace Written by Randall Wallace, based on the book We Were Soldiers Once...And Young, by Hal Moore and Joseph L. Galloway Starring: Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe,  Sam Elliott, Greg Kinnear, Chris Klein, Keri Russell, Barry Pepper Joe Galloway : [ narrating ] We who have seen war, will never stop seeing it. In the silence of the night, we will always hear the screams. So this is our story, for we were soldiers once, and young. “We Were Soldiers,” writer-director Randall Wallace's 2002 feature film about the three-day Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, is one of the best movies about America's "lost crusade" in Southeast Asia. . Based on Lt. Gen. Harold B. Moore and Joseph Galloway's non-fiction book We Were Soldiers Once....and Young, Wallace's film version is a realistic and respectful account of the first major battle between U.S. and North Vietnamese ...

(C) 2014 Quirk Books/Lucas Books/Lucasfilm Ltd. Scene 1. The Ice world of Hoth. Enter LUKE SKYWALKER. LUKE: If flurries be the food of quests, snow on. Belike upon this Hoth, this barren rock, My next adventure waits. 'Tis time shall tell. And yet, is it adventure that I seek? Shall danger, fear, and action fill my days? Shall all my life be spent in keen pursuit Of great adventure and her fickle fame? What if William Shakespeare had written Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in the Elizabethan era? Could George Lucas’s epic space saga have been told by the Bard of Avon on a 17th Century stage with actors, props, and a script written in iambic pentameter? To many Shakespeare fans (or, for that matter, Star Wars fans), such a mashup seems silly and (gasp) sacrilegious. Shakespeare and Lucas are, after all, separated from each other by several centuries and their distinct narrative styles. In 2013, first-time author Ian Doescher succes...

(C) 1986 Jack Ryan Enterprises & Larry Bond “Red Storm Rising” (1986) is a technothriller by Tom Clancy about a conventional war in Western Europe between the Soviet Union and the U.S.-led NATO alliance in the mid-1980s. Like its predecessor, “The Hunt for Red October,” Clancy’s sophomore work was a game-changer in the military fiction genre. It not only told a sprawling story with multiple plot threads –including a third Battle of the Atlantic, a Soviet invasion of Iceland, and a massive land campaign in Germany –  but it also avoided the apocalyptic vision of most Third World War scenarios: a nuclear exchange between East and West. “Red Storm Rising” begins – literally -with a bang as a group of Islamic jihadis from the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan commits a destructive act of sabotage against an oil production facility near Nizhnevartovsk, Russia. Though the terrorists are killed by a Soviet fast response team, they cripple the country’s ability to produce and refi...