A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Ever since a 28-year-old neighborhood watch captain (and law enforcement wannabe) named George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, 2012 during a brief but fatal confrontation in a Sanford gated community, the state of Florida's seven-year-old Stand Your Ground law has found itself in the cross-hairs of much-needed scrutiny by its supporters and critics alike. Passed in 2005 by a Republican-controlled state legislature and signed into law by then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Florida Statute 776.013 expanded the traditional "Castle Doctrine" law which, among other things, allows a law-abiding citizen to use lethal force - if necessary - to defend his or her home by extending the rights to self-defense to any location where the person who claims self-defense has a "legal right to be." To quote from the Stand Your Ground statute:   (1)  A person is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to him

When I bought my first true "attach to a television set" DVD player (as opposed to a DVD-ROM drive on my PC) in the fall of 2000, I purchased it not only because my DVD collection was growing and I needed to play the 10 or so movies I had at the time on some other venue than my computer, but also with the expectation that George Lucas and 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment would release the original  Star Wars Trilogy  on this wonderful new format.  After all, the 1977-1983 trio ( Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi ) had been released on all the other home video formats, including Betamax and VHS videotape and the "father of the DVD," the laserdisc. Indeed, the  Star Wars Trilogy  has the distinction of being the most reissued film set in video history, starting with each film's first initial VHS release in the mid-1980s, then various box set re-releases since, ranging from CBS-Fox's circa 1988 "plain vanilla"

If you, like me, watch news broadcasts, read newsmagazines and/or newspapers or surf the Web for up-to-date reporting and different viewpoints on the issues of the day, you probably have noticed that everyone has an opinion on those issues, especially "hot button" stories such as the Trayvon  Martin tragedy which took place in February of 2012. Trayvon Martin, as you may well be aware (unless you have been stranded on a desert island with no links to the outside world), was a 17-year-old Miami-Dade County resident who, while on a 10-day suspension from his high school, was spending some "away from all the bad influences" time with his father in Sanford (a small town near Orlando), where the elder Martin's girlfriend owns a house in a gated community. Though the details are still murky and under investigation by several law enforcement agencies, Trayvon Martin left that house during a basketball game and walked several blocks to a nearby convenience store to

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 "