A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

When I was in 10 th grade, my third period English class was assigned to read Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird , a roman a clef based on the author’s childhood years in small-town Alabama during the Great Depression. Shortly before the – dreaded – test which was to be given after we had finished reading the book, the English department screened director Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film adaptation, which stars Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna, Brock Peters, Estelle Evans, Frank Overton and William Windom, for all the sophomores assigned to read Lee’s novel that semester in my high school’s auditorium. As adapted by playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird is, like its literary source, a semiautobiographical story of a young Alabama girl’s early years in the fictitious town of Maycomb, centering on the events that take place over a three-year time-span. Standing in for Harper Lee is her alter e

Movies have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.   Some of my earliest childhood memories center on little snippets of black-and-white movies I glimpsed while my parents watched television in the Florida room of our second Miami home; they are vague because I was less than two years old and my dad was still alive, but sometimes I still see, in my mind’s eye, little fragments of old John Wayne Westerns and war movies which my father had enjoyed. It’s no exaggeration when I say that my childhood relationship with the movies was one of the key influences during my formative years.   Because I had very few father figures beyond my maternal grandfather and several uncles before I entered junior high, I tended to mimic certain traits of actors and movie characters I admired.  I wanted to be as brave as John Wayne’s many cowboys and military heroes, as idealistic as Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, as dashing-and-daring as Errol Flynn and Clark Gable, and as funny as Stev

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet: Jack and Rose Redux? After the phenomenal success of James Cameron’s 1997 Academy Award-winning film Titanic , millions of its fans speculated if its two stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, would ever work together again, especially in a movie where they would be a couple again. What many Leo-Kate fans wanted to see on the silver screen was essentially a Titanic -like love story without the Titanic, which, like its real-life counterpart, had sunk after a collision with an iceberg several hundred miles off the Newfoundland coast. A direct sequel was out of the question; DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson was dead, and since Titanic lies in the historical fiction/romance genre and not science fiction, he could only have co-starred in such an unlikely project either in flashback sequences or as a figure in Kate Winslet’s character’s dreams. Finally, after a decade’s worth of reading Hollywood’s proverbial tea leaves for any signs of

Hunger Games, the eagerly-anticipated film adaptation of Suzanne Collins' 2008 best-selling novel, has set global box-office records, taking in $155 million in its first weekend as a theatrical release, according to figures published on the web site Collider.com. Directed and co-scripted (with Collins and Billy Ray) by Gary Ross, who co-wrote 1988's Big and had previously helmed Pleasantville  and Seabiscuit , The Hunger Games is the first installment in a trilogy of dystopian science fiction stories set in a North America where, after several disastrous events, the existing democratic nation states of the United States, Canada and Mexico have ceased to exist and have been replaced by the totalitarian country known as Panem. As in the best-selling Young Adults novel published by Scholastic - the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series - The Hunger Games presents us with a vision of an America gone seriously wrong.   Panem is ruled by the tyrannical "

When I was 25 years old and still working toward an AA degree in Journalism/Mass Communications at what's now Miami-Dade College, I was accepted into the College Consortium for International Studies' Semester in Spain program. For 12 weeks in the Fall Term of the 1988-89 academic year, I lived and studied in Seville, Spain's third largest city, along with 41 other students from around the U.S. Not knowing what, exactly, I was getting myself into, I also volunteered to send dispatches from Seville to Catalyst , my home campus' student newspaper as its first foreign correspondent. Having had several years' worth of experience as a reporter and section editor, I thought that it would be a somewhat tricky but still manageable assignment, but in the days before the Internet and e-mail were available to the average person, it ended up being harder and more frustrating than I'd bargained for. Nevertheless, I did manage to, as we reporter types like to say, get

After nearly nine years of being an online reviewer at both Amazon and Epinions (and, for a time, anyway, at the now-terrible Viewpoints), I have decided to compile some of my reviews and publish them in book form.  (We can't survive on IS income alone, right?)  I can't take the time or money to hire an agent or go through the process of sending out manuscripts to the big publishers in hope of getting published, so I decided to "self-publish" through Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace (both Amazon companies). The book, Save Me the Aisle Seat , is now available as an ebook for the Kindle, and within a week it should be available in print at Amazon and maybe a few other places. I'd like to thank my friend Leigh Egan for her valuable assistance in completing this challenging project. I hate to have to shill my book like a medicine salesman selling snake oil, but if anyone here has a Kindle (of any model), please, please consider buying it!  It's price

When I started taking journalism courses at a local college in the mid-1980s, I was under the impression that I was well-prepared to be a college-level writer for the campus’ student newspaper.  I had studied the basics of news writing, reporting, editing, and page makeup for two years in high school, and I had been a section editor during my sophomore and senior years.  I even earned A’s consistently in my journalism courses. So imagine my surprise, two years after I had graduated from high school, when I stepped into my JOU 1100 classroom for the first time and felt as though I had actually studied just enough to get by in class but had much more to learn. It’s possible that I felt that way because I had added Prof. Townsend’s class two days into the Fall term (my Pell Grant had just been approved and I needed to become a full-time student, so I added Basic Reporting and Introduction to Radio and Television to my schedule) and was nervous.  Perhaps I was keenly aware that do