A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

“There’s a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn’t a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.” — Barbara Kingsolver If 1993's Schindler's List was director Steven Spielberg's soul-searching and ultimately redemptive examination of why we fought the war, then 1998's Saving Private Ryan is the emotional bookend that depicts the sacrifices made by citizen-soldiers who put their lives on hold -- and often lost them -- to save the world from becoming a charnel-house ruled by Adolf Hitler and his Axis partners. It is  a powerful and graphic film that has, in retrospect, reawakened our nation's interest in World War II and made us realize, however belatedly, how m

(C) 1977 Arista Records Pros:  Interesting mix of atonal post-modern styles and more traditional Romantic melodic material Cons:  The cut-paste presentation of cues. When I first heard the opening bar of the  Main Title and Mountain Visions  from  Close Encounters of the Third Kind  in the late summer of 1978, I didn't know what to make of it. I hadn't seen Steven Spielberg's classic film about mankind's first peaceful contact with another spacefaring civilization (having spent much of my movie allowance on multiple screenings of  Star Wars ), so for me the music was mysterious, strangely atonal, and even ominous. It had none of the 19th Century Romantic era stylings of Williams' music for  Star Wars ; there wasn't a grand overture or march-like opening and there were very few repeated themes or leitmotivs. Indeed, some of the very early tracks on the  Close Encounters,  when heard without the context of Spielberg's movie, sound as though th

(C) 1983 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Pros:  Good script; stunning effects and dazzling space battles; a classic John Williams score Cons:  A bit talky...to some, the Ewoks and to others, the Special Edition version is sacrilege.... On Wednesday, May 25, 1983, exactly six years after the premiere of George Lucas's  Star Wars  (now known as  Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope ), millions of fans queued up in front of thousands of movie theater box offices to be among those lucky viewers to watch  Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi  on its first day of release. Three years had passed since the theatrical run of  The Empire Strikes Back,  which had surprised critics and fans alike with its  Episode V  subtitle, the introduction of Jedi Master Yoda, the romance between Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), the claim made by Darth Vader (David Prowse, voice of James Earl Jones) that  he  was Luke Skywalker's (Mark Hamill) dad and - frustrati

Pros:  None except that it ends Cons:  Dry, minimalist prose; uninvolving plot Although I have been a voracious reader since I was a wee lad, there  are  certain genres in popular fiction that I avoid. For instance, it doesn't matter how desperate for reading material I might be, but you'll never catch me reading a Harlequin Romance novel; it might be entertaining and a light read, but I know I'll end up rolling my eyes and say to myself,  If only real-life love were so simple! Another genre I avoid is the wide-ranging mystery-thriller category, which includes anything smacking of police procedurals and/or dogged detective work. Perhaps it's because I tried reading a few Agatha Christie novels in high school and simply couldn't get into them, or maybe it's because novels by such authors as Patricia Cromwell and Sue Grafton make me feel, um, stupid. The closest I ever come to suspense or mystery is when I read a Tom Clancy novel, but that author, l

(C) 2007 Scholastic, Inc. Harry Potter: The Complete Series Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7)   Although I’ve owned two of J.K. Rowling’s bestselling fantasy novels about the adventures of a boy wizard named Harry Potter ( Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone  and  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ),  I never really tried to read the entire seven-book cycle after I finished reading the first book.  In both cases, I had been given the Potter books as gifts, and though I finished  The Sorcerer’s Stone  and gamely gave  Order of the Phoenix  “the old college try” and got halfway through it, for some reason or another, I did not buy the other five books of the series.  Now, you might think that I had not enjoyed  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone  or dismissed Rowling’s works as “mere” kids’ books, but you’d be far off the mark.  I like fantasy books quite a bit and I  did  like the first book a great deal; Rowling may have intended her books to be read by children but much