A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Last Thursday's cruise missile strikes on a Syrian airfield - in which two U.S. warships launched 59 Tomahawk land attack missiles (TLAM) allegedly in retaliation for a deadly chemical attack that killed "dozens of civilians" may have been aimed at Syrian dictator Bashir Assad's military forces. But the real target was the credulity of the American public and the mainstream media as the unpopular President tries to deflect attention from investigations into Russia's alleged interference with the 2016 election - and his campaign's possible collusion with Moscow. According to CNN.com, the April 6 missile strike against " the airbase that was home to the warplanes that carried out the chemical attacks" was ordered by the President to, as Mr. Trump said, " to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons." Per the official version of why Mr. Trump ordered the TLAM strikes last week, the President was shocked by media f

(C) 2016 Del Rey Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. Jacket design by Scott Biel On November 15, 2016, Del Rey Books, an imprint of Random House, published Star Wars: Catalyst - A Rogue One Novel. Written by James Luceno ( Star Wars: Cloak of Deception and Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader ), this 352-page book is the exciting prequel to director Gareth Edwards' Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Lucasfilm's first film of its stand-alone Star Wars Anthology series.  Released a month before the theatrical debut of Edwards' film and Alexander Freed's novelization (also published by Del Rey), Star Wars: Catalyst - A Rogue One Novel tells how Galen Erso, a brilliant research scientist, is recruited by his friend, Lt. Cmdr. Orson Krennic, to work on Celestial Power, a top secret project for the Galactic Republic.  It is a time of turmoil in the galaxy. As the Clone Wars flare up across thousands of planetary systems, Erso, a polymath with a special interest in the mysterious and po

There are plenty of books about modern warfare based on “first-hand” sources, oral histories, field notes, and official records written pretty much in the same style as Cornelius Ryan’s  The Longest Day. For instance, Ryan wrote what you might call a sequel to  The Longest Day,  1966’s  The Last Battle.  That book delves into the “race” to capture Berlin in the spring of 1945. There were plans to make a film adaptation of  The Last Battle,  but they were canceled before production began. Ryan also wrote another sequel to  The Last Battle  titled  A Bridge Too Far.  The third book in an unofficial “World War II Trilogy,” it tells the story of Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ failed attempt to obtain a bridgehead over the Rhine in September 1944. Like  The Longest Day,  it was made into one of those “all-star cast” spectacular war films. I think it’s better than  TLD,  but it wasn’t a big hit in the States when it was in theaters in 1977. For more recent conflicts, I r

I think the main reason for so many remakes and “reboots” is simple: economics. The movie industry - or “Hollywood” - is not an altruistic community of artists who seek to entertain and/or enlighten us  just for the sake of it.  It’s a business, and its primary goal is to make a profit by producing a product that is intended to entertain or enlighten us, the consumers. The artists themselves may have some artistic impulse to create, of course, but “Hollywood” really means  the studios,  which are run by business people. Superman: The Movie  is a classic….did it need a reboot? Now, studio executives are extremely risk-adverse when it comes to making movies. Financing a film project is almost like gambling; the suits at 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Universal, and Sony don’t have a money-printing machine in their basements, so they prefer to play it safe and go with tried-and-true concepts instead of taking a leap of faith and financing an original script based on an ori

(C) 1983, 2004 WGBH Boston The Series On Tuesday, October 4, 1983, PBS stations across the U.S. aired Roots of a War (1945-1953) , the first of 13 parts of Vietnam: A Television History. Co-produced by WGBH, Boston's PBS station, with Britain's Central Independent Television/UK and France's Antenne-2 in association with  LRE Productions, this documentary miniseries was an in-depth look at America's "lost crusade" in Vietnam, starting with France's failed attempt to reassert its colonial authority after World War II and ending with America's withdrawal from Southeast Asia and the North Vietnamese capture of Saigon, South Vietnam's capital. The series - as the New York Times' reviewer wrote in 1983 - was "a landmark of television journalism" because it attempted to " tell us what things were, not what we might have liked them to be."  The conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal called it "an extraordinary film

(C) 2017 Lucasfilm Ltd. and Buena Vista Home Entertainment On Tuesday, April 4, Buena Vista Home Entertainment (BVHE) - Walt Disney Motion Pictures Studio's home media division - released the Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy three-disc set of director Gareth Edwards' blockbuster hit  Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. This home media debut of the first in a series of Star Wars Anthology stand-alone films comes less than four months after its theatrical premiere and almost one year after the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Blu-ray and DVD.  Although BVHE offers various "exclusive" editions for specific sellers (such as the "SteelBook" edition for Target), most Star Wars fans will probably buy the set that I bought from the Disney Store - the three-disc edition with two Blu-ray discs (BDs), one DVD, and the code for a digital download (which expires after April 4, 2022).  In many respects, BVHE'sBD/DVD/HD Digital Copy Rogue One  combo package resemb