A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Pros:  Nice rendition of the TIE Bomber, packaging, comes with figure Cons:  Hard to find, has small parts that can choke toddlers TIE Bomber:   Using the standard TIE fighter as a starting point, Imperial engineers designed a dedicated craft to deliver explosive payloads through bombardment. Showing its TIE roots, the TIE bomber's fuselage is bracketed by a pair of solar gather panels. For its increased power requirements, the bomber boasts elongated panels with greater surface areas than the standard starfighter.  –  Star Wars  Databank entry at www.starwars.com Since 1978, when Kenner Toys (now Hasbro) released the first vehicles that were designed for the then-revolutionary 3.75-inch scaled “action figures” based on the characters from George Lucas’  Star Wars  saga, children and adult collectors have seen various toys based on the basic TIE (Twin Ion Engine) fighter and follow-on variants, including three versions of the basic TIE, two variants of Darth Vader’s

(C) 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corporation It's been over 40 years since George Lucas ( THX 1138, American Graffiti ) first shared Star Wars with millions of awestruck moviegoers in the late spring of 1977. Both the director and the studio executives at 20th Century Fox thought they'd have a modestly successful sci-fi fantasy film with "just okay" box office receipts. Instead, bucking their logic and lowered expectations, Star Wars became not only the biggest hit of its time, but it also launched both a multi-movie series and a huge merchandising/multimedia "empire" that made millions for the shy, unassuming USC film school graduate from Modesto, California. Star Wars (later renamed Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope ) begins with one of the most stunning opening scenes in movie history: After the 20th Century Fox Fanfare and a moment of silence for the "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" card, the Star Wars logo appears with t

“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