A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Before the November 2009 release of  Star Wars - The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One  Blu-ray and DVD sets, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm released two four-episode "volumes" of episodes of the Cartoon Network's animated anthology series set between  Attack of the Clones  and  Revenge of the Sith. The first volume,  A Galaxy Divided,  is a no-frills presentation of the series' first four episodes ( Ambush, Rising Malevolence, Shadow of Malevolence  and  Destroy Malevolence ); the first of these is a Yoda versus Asajj Ventress battle of wits, while the others make up a complete story arc in which Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin's Padawan Ahsoka Tano are on a seek-and-destroy mission against a Separatist superbattleship commanded by General Grievous. Because  Star Wars: The Clone Wars  (like Lucasfilm's  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles ) doesn't have a well-defined chronology, Volume Two : Clone  Commandos takes th

 I'm not a Civil War movie fan. I'm rather a more, shall we say, generalist war movie one. Still, I have watched several feature films about the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history because, like the late Shelby Foote, I believe that we must understand that mid-19th Century tragedy in order to comprehend the modern character of the American people. As a general history buff, I prefer Ken Burns' 1990 documentary miniseries  The Civil War  as a source of such a deep comprehension.   Sure, the writers (Burns, his brother Ric and Geoffrey C. Ward) allowed a few factual errors to creep in, but overall the most-watched PBS program in history has depth and a powerful narrative that many "for entertainment" films about the Civil War sorely lack. Of the three Hollywood-made Civil War epics that I've seen over the past 21 years (including Edward Zwick's  Glory ), writer-director Ronald F. Maxwell's  Gods and Generals  is the only one which disappointed me

Nos·tal·gia : Pronunciation: nä-'stal-j&, n&- also no -, nO-; n&-'stäl- Function: noun Etymology: New Latin, from Greek nostos return home New Latin -algia; akin to Greek neisthai to return, Old English genesan to survive, Sanskrit nasate he approaches 1 : the state of being homesick : HOMESICKNESS 2 : a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia - nos·tal·gic /-jik/ adjective or noun - nos·tal·gi·cal·ly /-ji-k(&-)le/ adverb Nostalgia. For most of us, the past sometimes seems more attractive than our present or somehow less frightening than the undiscovered country of the future. It's an illusion, really, but memory has a way of dulling all but the sharpest pains, the saddest memories, and the rest of all our yesterdays becomes a series of sepia-colored memories in which we take refuge from our 21st Century red state-blue state, conservative vs. l

Spring, 1945. After the failure of his Ardennes Counteroffensive - the famous "Battle of the Bulge" - three months earlier, Adolf Hitler huddles in his bunker beneath Berlin, trying desperately to stave off certain defeat as his "Thousand Year Reich" falls back on all fronts. In the East, the Red Army has overrun most of Poland and East Prussia. Russian armies, several million soldiers strong, are now less than 100 miles away from the Nazi capital.  Only the floodwaters of the Oder and Neisse Rivers, as well as the tattered remnants of the once mighty German forces which invaded Russia in 1941, block their advance. In the West, the American, British, Canadian and French forces have liberated most of France, all of Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Holland.   And though the surprise German attack in December caught Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Anglo-American subordinates by surprise, its failure has eliminated one of the Allies' worst strategic scenarios f

It's Sunday,. December 16, 2012.  It's nice outside - sunny, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and not humid - and I really want to go for a walk or simply go to the "little pool" on 97th Place and read a book out in the fresh air.  Problem is, I can't do any of that because on weekends my mom's Nursing South Corporation aide is only here to perform what is called "personal hygiene duties" and can't stay longer than one hour. In fact, she's not even here yet and it's almost 1:30 PM.  So because my mom is confined to bed and practically helpless, I am here in what used to be our dining room trying to write anything...a review, Facebook posts, emails or a blog entry.  I need to exercise my mind somehow, since I can't watch TV or listen to music during Mom's waking hours in case she calls for me from her room. I love my mom dearly and I try to carry out my duties as a caregiver with as best an outlook as I can muster, but some days, like toda

Although I like to read different types of books about the Second World War, I don’t usually read memoirs written by the participants because (a) most of them are written by generals or politicians, (b) they can be tedious to read and/or (c) the authors have axes to grind or are trying to twist history in order to enhance their reputation at the expense of the truth.  (In other words, they can often be self-serving and even misleading.)  There are other reasons why memoirs don’t attract my attention as a reader in the same fashion as books like Cornelius Ryan’s  A Bridge Too Far  or Stephen E. Ambrose’s  Band of Brothers  do; as historian Ronald H. Spector ( Eagle Against the Sun )  puts it, “Memoirs of wars and politics usually become less interesting with the passage of time.”  Readers who were born a generation after V-E or V-J Day find such works as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe  (1948) or Winston Churchill’s six-volume opus  The Second World War  (1948-1953) outdate

In the summer of 1987, Universal Studios released  Dragnet,  the third feature film based on the long-running radio and TV police procedural series created in 1949 by actor-director-producer Jack Webb.  The show, which ran on-and-off from ’49 to 2003 on various media platforms on two networks and in syndication, is famous for its musical theme (“Dum - - - de - DUM - DUM"), its cinema verite approach to storytelling, and Webb’s deadpan delivery of his dialogue.  Five years after Jack Webb’s death (which came just as a new version of  Dragnet  was in pre-production), writer-director Tom Mankiewicz teamed up with actors Dan Ackroyd and Tom Hanks to create a comedy which was part parody and part loving tribute to Webb’s very straight-faced drama.  Here, Ackroyd, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mankiewicz and Alan Zweibel, stars as Joe Friday, nephew and namesake to Webb’s famous Los Angeles Police Department plainclothes sergeant.  The younger Friday is a bit taller and stockie