A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2014 Quirk Books/Lucas Books/Lucasfilm Ltd. Scene 1. The Ice world of Hoth. Enter LUKE SKYWALKER. LUKE: If flurries be the food of quests, snow on. Belike upon this Hoth, this barren rock, My next adventure waits. 'Tis time shall tell. And yet, is it adventure that I seek? Shall danger, fear, and action fill my days? Shall all my life be spent in keen pursuit Of great adventure and her fickle fame? What if William Shakespeare had written Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in the Elizabethan era? Could George Lucas’s epic space saga have been told by the Bard of Avon on a 17th Century stage with actors, props, and a script written in iambic pentameter? To many Shakespeare fans (or, for that matter, Star Wars fans), such a mashup seems silly and (gasp) sacrilegious. Shakespeare and Lucas are, after all, separated from each other by several centuries and their distinct narrative styles. In 2013, first-time author Ian Doescher succes

(C) 1986 Jack Ryan Enterprises & Larry Bond “Red Storm Rising” (1986) is a technothriller by Tom Clancy about a conventional war in Western Europe between the Soviet Union and the U.S.-led NATO alliance in the mid-1980s. Like its predecessor, “The Hunt for Red October,” Clancy’s sophomore work was a game-changer in the military fiction genre. It not only told a sprawling story with multiple plot threads –including a third Battle of the Atlantic, a Soviet invasion of Iceland, and a massive land campaign in Germany –  but it also avoided the apocalyptic vision of most Third World War scenarios: a nuclear exchange between East and West. “Red Storm Rising” begins – literally -with a bang as a group of Islamic jihadis from the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan commits a destructive act of sabotage against an oil production facility near Nizhnevartovsk, Russia. Though the terrorists are killed by a Soviet fast response team, they cripple the country’s ability to produce and refine o

(C) 1984 U.S. Naval Institute Press In 1984, the Naval Institute Press published “The Hunt for Red October,” Tom Clancy’s Cold War-era novel about a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, Jack Ryan, who leads a group of Anglo-American naval officers on a classified mission in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Their task: to assist 26 disenchanted Soviet Navy officers commanded by Captain First Rank Marko Ramius in a mass defection to the West – and take possession of the Red Navy’s newest ballistic missile submarine. Clancy, who at the time owned a successful insurance agency in Maryland, was one of the first writers to have a work of fiction published by the Naval Institute Press. The Annapolis-based publishing arm of the U.S. Naval Institute is best known for non-fiction books and reference guides about the military – with a special focus on naval warfare, technology, and history. In 1984, when Clancy submitted his manuscript for “The Hunt for Red October” to the Pr

(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant of