A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The Hurt Locker (2009) There is, apparently, a simple rule-of-thumb (at least for those folks who keep track of these things) that war movies, no matter how well-made they may be, simply do not attract huge audiences to theaters in times of war. Certainly, people who are old enough to remember World War II and its immediate aftermath can make a good case that this is not always the case and that many of them, whether they were adults or kids at the time, watched movies such as  Air Force, Back to Bataan, Guadalcanal Diary, Sahara, The Flying Tigers  and  A Walk in the Sun , not to mention the various newsreels and government-produced propaganda films. That having been said, movies about America's post-World War II conflicts made while the bullets were flying and the soldiers, sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and Air Force personnel were in harm's way often flopped or were less-than-critically acclaimed.  (John Wayne's  The Green Berets  may be liked by fans of the Duk

Summer of ’42 (1971) Part One: An Overview of Summer of '42 Nothing from that first day I saw her, and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I've ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important, and less significant. In everyone's life, I often think, there is a  Summer of '42  (or '52, or '62, and so on....), a time in which we discover the joys and sorrows of growing up...and falling in love. There are hijinks and pranks, jokes and playful insults...and always the bonds of friendship. But sometimes, in those days of discovery and self-awareness, we feel the angst of that first attraction, the bittersweet highs and lows of falling seriously in love for the first time – sometimes with the right person, sometimes not. And of course, we feel the heartbreak of losing that cherished love...wondering what on Earth happened. Based on an actual event i

When Universal Pictures rolled out writer-director Paul Greengrass’  United 93  in 2006, I was not sure if I would ever see it.  I certainly didn’t see it in theaters that year, and I did not rush to order it from Amazon when it was available on DVD a few months later.  Like millions of my fellow Americans, I was apprehensive about seeing a recreation of the events of September 11, 2001, and specifically about the efforts of 40 passengers and crewmembers to wrest back control of the hijacked airliner from four Al Qaeda terrorists before it hits its intended target in Washington, DC.  While I did not – and still do not – think my own reluctance came from the movie being released only five years after the events of 9-11, I didn’t want to have nightmares about United 93 the way I did back in the fall of 2001.  I was watching  Good Morning America  on that day (having tuned in a few minutes after the first plane hit the Twin Towers) and I still feel a pit in my stomach when I rem

The Bottom Line  Although Smetana's life ended in tragedy, his music became the foundation of Czech musical tradition. This European album highlights his best works.   Bedrich Smetana, along with Antonin Dvorak, is a composer who helped put what's now known as the Czech Republic on the classical music map; before the world heard his comic opera  The Bartered Bride  in 1866, this small Slavic country (part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire) was considered to be a musical backwater. Like Peter Tschaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia and Richard Wagner in Germany, Smetana's music was, first and foremost, a reflection of his fierce nationalism; his use of such traditional Czech dances as the  polca, furiant,  and  dumka  in his works give his compositions a distinctive regional flavor. This earned him the reputation of being the founder of Czech musical tradition, and his most nationalistic piece, the tone cycle known as  Ma Vlast (My Fatherland ) is one of the best

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines In 1991, as Terminator 2: Judgment Day' s end titles faded to black and the theater's lights came back up, we were left to believe that Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), her son John (Edward Furlong) and a reprogrammed Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) had not only defeated the advanced T-1000 Terminator which had been trying to "terminate" the future leader of the human resistance against the murderous Skynet computer network, but also changed history by preventing the development of Skynet itself. After all, the formidable trio had destroyed the Cyberdine Corporation's main lab, Skynet's "father," Dr. Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), was dead, and all traces of the original Terminator – the mangled arm, the strange chip that Dyson had reverse engineered, and the T-101's CPU itself – had been melted in a vat of of hot liquid metal, along with that formidable pair of good/evil Terminators. End of movie, end of story, ri

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) In the years after the 1968 release of Stanley Kubrick's landmark science-fiction film  2001: A Space Odyssey,  he and collaborator Arthur C. Clarke were asked many questions about how it was conceived, how the realistic special effects had been done, why did Kubrick decide to use classical music pieces in the soundtrack, and if HAL was a punny jab at IBM's corporate name. Another question that followed both the director and the writer for years was  Will you ever do a follow-up to  2001 ? Kubrick wasn't interested in doing a sequel and generally stayed away from science fiction; the only other set-in-the-future projects he ever envisioned after  2001  were  A Clockwork Orange  and penning the basic story idea for  A.I.,  and even that he turned over to his friend Steven Spielberg a few years before his death in 1999. Clarke, on the other hand, at first demurred from doing a literary sequel, but in 1982 his novel  2010: Odyssey Tw

In the spring of 1994, Pocket Books published the first edition of  The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference to the Future,  the third book in a trilogy of reference books co-authored by graphics artist and production consultant Michael Okuda. (The other two volumes are  The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual  and  The Star Trek Chronology: A History of the Future. ) At the time, the Star Trek franchise was in a state of flux.  Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)  was ending its seven-year run in syndication and production was under way for its first theatrical movie,  Star Trek: Generations.  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9)  was picking up steam in its second season in syndication, and Paramount was about to launch its United Paramount Network with  Star Trek: Voyager (VGR)  as its flagship TV series. This, of course, meant that the first edition of  The Star Trek Encyclopedia,  written and edited by Mike and Denise Okuda with Debbie Mirek, was at best an introduc