A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Beginning with a searing indictment of slavery, this first episode dramatically evokes the causes of the war, from the Cotton Kingdom of the South to the northern abolitionists who opposed it. Here are the burning questions of Union and states' rights, John Brown at Harpers Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the firing on Fort Sumter, and the jubilant rush to arms on both sides. Along the way the series' major figures are introduced: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and a host of lesser-known but equally vivid characters. The episode comes to a climax with the disastrous Union defeat at Manassas, Virginia, where both sides learn it is to be a very long war. From the episode guide at PBS.org It's hard to believe that almost 30 years have passed since Ken Burns' The Civil War premiered on September 23, 1990, when the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired The Cause: 1861 , the first of nine episodes about Amer

Pros:  Great cast; good (if not perfect) directing; gripping story Cons:  Score is sometimes intrusive; pacing can be slow at times And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by from this day until the ending of the world but we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,  for he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition, and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whilst any speaks, that fought with us upon St. Crispin's day! Like millions of people in the United States (and, I suspect, the English-speaking world), my exposure to the works of William Shakespeare came about when I was taking the mandatory-for-graduation Language Arts course during my senior year. Not counting  West Side Story  (a thinly-veiled modern version of  Romeo and Juliet ) and several  Star Trek  episodes with titles derived f

Cover design by Rex Boronelli. (C) 2010 Last Laugh, Inc. and Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited. Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress. - The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which became the law of the land in January of 1920 "THE STREETS OF San Francisco

Cover art by Mathieu Laffray. (C) 2009 Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On December 16, 2009,  Dark Horse Comics published Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, a 420-page hardcover collection of the comics adaptations of the 1991-1993 three-book cycle of novels by Timothy Zahn. Written by Mike Baron and featuring the art of three different artistic teams, The Thrawn Trilogy collects issues 1-6 of Heir to the Empire, issues 1-6 of Dark Force Rising, and issues 1-6 of The Last Command in one volume for the first time. In 1991, after a five-year "dry spell" in which no new Star Wars fiction saw print, Bantam Spectra published Timothy Zahn's novel Heir to the Empire, which raised interest in that galaxy far, far away to a level that had not been seen since the release of the "last" of the films, Return of the Jedi . Later that same year, Dark Horse Comics obtained the Star Wars comic-book license, and a merging of interests seemed inevitable.

Pros:  2010's  cast, including Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren. Good script. Great visuals. Cons:  Real life rendered its Cold War political undertones obsolete. In the years after the 1968 release of Stanley Kubrick's landmark science-fiction film  2001: A Space Odyssey,  he and collaborator Arthur C. Clarke were asked many questions about how it was conceived, how the realistic special effects had been done, why did Kubrick decide to use classical music pieces in the soundtrack, and if HAL was a punny jab at IBM's corporate name. Another question that followed both the director and the writer for years was  Will you ever do a follow-up to  2001 ? Kubrick, of course, wasn't interested in doing a sequel and generally stayed away from science fiction; the only other set-in-the-future projects he ever envisioned after  2001  were  A Clockwork Orange  and penning the basic story idea for  A.I.,  and even that he turned over to his friend Steven Spielberg a few

(C) 1997 Del Rey Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Pros:  The novels capture the essence of Han and Chewbacca in their pre-Rebellion days Cons:  No Darth Vader, no Empire, no Princess Leia or Luke One of the first things I noticed the first time I listened to National Public Radio's  Star Wars: The Radio Drama  was how Brian Daley had fleshed out the role of Han Solo; starting with the episode titled  The Millennium Falcon Deal , the Corellian with a starship for hire not only was faithful to the character played on-screen by Harrison Ford, but he was more intense and conflicted, especially in his dealings with the galactic underworld. Indeed, Han seemed to be Daley's favorite character to write for, since the writer often gave him some of the best lines in the 13-part adaptation of  Star Wars  (a.k.a. Episode IV:  A New Hope ). That Han and his Wookiee co-pilot/first mate got such a cornucopia of good material in the three Daley-scripted Radio Dramas shouldn't

The Post (2017) Written by: Liz Hannah and Josh Singer Directed by: Steven Spielberg Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Poulson, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys   Robert McNamara: If you publish, you'll get the very worst of him, the Colsons and the Ehrlichmans and he'll crush you. Kay Graham: I know, he's just awful, but I... Robert McNamara: [Interrupting and getting extremely angry] He's a... Nixon's a son of a bitch! He hates you, he hates Ben, he's wanted to ruin the paper for years and you will not get a second chance, Kay. The Richard Nixon I know will muster the full power of the presidency and if there's a way to destroy your paper, by God, he'll find it. Director Steven Spielberg’s The Post is a timely political how-they-done-it about how The Washington Post (following the lead of its much larger and more prominent rival, The New York Times ) helped unco