A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 1998 Hasbro, Inc. and Lucasfilm Ltd.  You have to hand it to Jabba the Hutt. He might be the slimiest, most vile gangster in the galaxy, and he does surround himself with scum and villainy, but man, he does have some redeeming qualities.  Er, two redeeming qualities: he likes good music, and he likes dancing girls. He has been known to hire such renowned groups as Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes -- the jazz-like band that was present at Chalmun's Cantina in A New Hope -- and Max Rebo's Band, currently playing at Jabba's fortress-like palace on Tatooine.  Although the core of the group is the trio of Max Rebo, Sy Snootles, and Droopy McCool, the Band has been known to hire additional musicians, including Joh Yowza, a Yuzzum from Endor; Barquin D'an, a Bith musician (and relative of Figrin's), and three shapely backup singer-dancers, Greeata, Lyn Me, and Rystall.  Hasbro's Jabba's Dancing Girls is one of the 10 three-figure Power of th

If you (or someone you know) attended the typical American public school at any grade level, you doubtlessly remember that unless you were lucky to get a creative and enthusiastic instructor who had great motivational skills, most of the core curriculum classes were, well, boring. In most cases, one of the most boring courses students have to suffer is American History, which is often broken up into two units during a school year (U.S. History to 1877 and U.S. History From 1877 to the Present). Now, history as a subject in and of itself shouldn’t be boring; it has a huge scale and a great deal of human drama, what with the rise and fall of civilizations and empires, the emergence of great (and not so great) leaders, technological, scientific and philosophical advances, the foundation of great cities and – inevitably – conflicts of all sorts and sizes. However, with teachers often teaching history according to the Great Men school of thought and cramming hundreds of dr

This review is from:  Greetings From Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer (Paperback) One of the principles I live by is "never really take back-cover blurbs seriously," so when I read the "Warning: This Book May Have You Laughing Out Loud in Public" blurb in Mari SanGiovanni's debut novel "Greetings From Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer," I (a) rolled my eyes in the universal "yeah, right" expression and (b) took it as a challenge to read it and not laugh, be touched, or even be turned on just a little bit. Aside from a few books by Dave Barry and Douglas Adams' five book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, I don't, as a rule, read too many comedic novels. Either I never have time to do so, or when I do, I don't find them very funny. Good thing, then, that I came upon a copy of Mari's wonderfully zany novel about an attractive, witty, bright, talented, if somewhat eccentric lesbian writer, Marie Santora, whose zany Italian-A

Blogger's Note: This review was written originally for Amazon sometime in November of 2003, then updated (twice) for Epinions. It is not about the four-movie box set which was released in late 2008 after Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, nor is it about the soon-to-be-released Indiana Jones Blu-ray box set. Since the advent of the Digital Video Disc format in the late 1990s, there were two long-awaited movie trilogies: the Classic Star Wars films and the Adventures of Indiana Jones. The former was first released in September of 2004, but the daring fedora-wearing archaeologist had almost a year's headstart when Lucasfilm and Paramount Home Video released a 4-disk set in November 2003. The Adventures of Indiana Jones  box set consists of the first three films of the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg collaborative creation, 1981's  Raiders of the Lost Ark , 1984's  Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , and 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Cru

The Bottom Line: If you still own a VCR or can transfer this VHS tape's content to digital media, From Star Wars to Jedi may be worth getting. Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot. On Wednesday, May 25, 1977, 20th Century Fox - somewhat skeptically - released  Star Wars,  writer-director  George Lucas's third feature film, hoping that enough movie-going science-fiction "geeks" would go see it on Memorial Day Weekend for the studio to recoup its $9 million investment. Considering that science fiction movies rarely earned enough box office "take" for studios to earn much more than the seed money that they reluctantly doled out to even visionary directors like Stanley Kubrick, neither the board of directors at Fox nor Lucas himself had any hopes that  Star Wars  would set the movie world on fire.  Indeed, the studio "suits" - and some of the film's British crew - figured that Lucas's spac

One of the great truths in life is that all art, as writer-director Nicholas Meyer ( Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ) is fond of saying, reflects the times in which is it created. A good example of this is 1970's  Kelly's Heroes,  a wry, dark, and sometimes downright daffy caper-comedy set in World War II. Starring Clint Eastwood as an oft-busted ex-lieutenant-but-now Private Kelly,  Kelly's Heroes  is not so much a giddy Blake Edwards-inspired World War II comedy a la  What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?  but more of a Vietnam War-era revision of all those war movies wherein the G.I.s are always portrayed as imperfect but well-meaning "angels in battle dress and helmets" who are fighting to liberate Western Europe from Nazi tyranny. Kelly's Heroes,  directed by Brian G. Hutton, whol made only a handful of fair-to-middling features and a score or so TV episodes of various series before switching careers to plumbing, is essentially a Sergio Leone spaghetti West

In almost every TV series which airs in any country at any given time - at least as far as I have seen, anyway - even the best of shows seem to have their off-par episodes and, sadly, even off-par seasons. Take, for instance, the recently-canceled  24.   It started out strong in the fall season of 2001 and was - for the most part - a pretty good series until its fifth season.  Then, when it introduced James Cronwell as Jack Bauer's shady father and had him teaming up with villainous Chinese agents against his own son, the show ‘jumped the shark" and caused its most loyal fans to start wondering whether it had run out of creative steam. And even during its great seasons,  24  had its fair share of eye-rolling moments.  Who can forget Teri Bauer's bout with amnesia in the first season, or the nearly-deadly close encounter between Kim Bauer and a mountain lion in the second? (Not to mention all the moles who managed to infiltrate the happily fictitious Counter Terrori