A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Return of the Jedi CD set cover art. (C) 1997 HighBridge Audio and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) In late 1983, after the box office success of director Richard Marquand's Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and the equally positive reception to National Public Radio's Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, writer Brian Daley, director John Madden, and the creative team that had brought two thirds of the Star Wars Trilogy to the airwaves started thinking about adapting Jedi for NPR.  After all, both of the previous Star Wars radio adaptations had done well in the ratings and had given the nearly-extinct genre of radio dramas a huge jump start. And with Star Wars at the height of its popularity, it would not be very long until Madden, Daley, and the rest of the crew led by producer Mel Sahr began work on Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - The Radio Drama. Unfortunately, it would be a long time till the Star Wars Radio Drama trilogy could be completed.  As

Photo Credit: collector-actionfigures.com  Although the Star Wars saga is perhaps associated with dazzling set-piece action sequences replete with lightsaber duels and dogfights in space, the series is replete with small moments that are in themselves fateful or revelatory. In filmmaking, no scene is -- or should be, anyway -- extraneous or tossed in just because it looks "cool." Every tiny bit of dialogue, every single shot has to move the story forward, even something that seems irrelevant.  In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, everything is set up to propel Anakin Skywalker from his life as a slave to the start of his training as a Jedi Knight, a seemingly straight path that will, of course, zig and zag to Anakin's ultimate destiny…his deviation from the true path of the JedI, his forbidden romance with Padme Amidala, and his turning to the dark side of the Force.  Hasbro's Mos Espa Encounter scene pack beautifully recreates the face-off between y

Pros:  Everything. Cons:  None. Ramsey: Colonel Von Luger, it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they cannot escape, then it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability.  After more than a decade of trying to get a studio to film a movie based on Paul Brickhill's book  The Great Escape,  John Sturges finally got backing from the Mirisch Company to recreate the true-life story of Allied officers escaping from a German POW camp in 1944. While the screenplay by W. Burnett and James ( Shogun ) Clavell fictionalizes the characters and compresses events to fit a feature film's running time, the details of the escape attempt are true-to-life. Even better, the film was actually shot in Germany (even the thickest wooded areas in California don't come close to resembling the Black Forest area). No

Pros: Good - if a bit overlong - script. Fine cast and great performances. Cons: Leisurely pace might be a turn-off to some viewers. One of the few good things about television and the home video business is that, on occasion, a box-office "flop" that is simply a good movie that didn't find a receptive audience in theatrical release can still make a comeback thanks to repeated airings on cable networks such as TNT and through sales and rentals of videocassettes (remember those?), DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. Such is the case of Frank Darabont's first major feature film, 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, which he adapted from a Stephen King novella ( Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption ) which had been published in a mid-1980s anthology, Different Seasons . Though it was given good reviews in its initial release back in 1994, The Shawshank Redemption tanked at the box office...badly. Viewers, perhaps puzzled by its strange title or by it

First of all, I don’t think that any rational person who has a good conscience and loves this country is intentionally trying to tarnish the image of the U.S. Sure, there are some Americans out there who thrive on creating chaos and want to make the U.S. look like a caricature of a Third World country. Some of them might be extreme leftists or anarchists, while others might be Nazis, white supremacists, and other unsavory individuals who espouse hateful world views. Overall, however, it simply isn’t true that either conservatives or liberals are intentionally tarnishing the U.S. brand, either domestically or internationally. That having been said, the folks that are unintentionally tarnishing the U.S. brand are the folks that helped elect Donald J. Trump to be the 45th President of the United States. Most of these individuals happen to identify as conservatives. Some of them don’t like Trump much but saw in him a means to an end, i.e., to ensure that a Supreme Court vacancy