A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Hello, there, Constant Reader.  As you know, I have been collaborating with my high school friend and (now) actor-director Juan Carlos Hernandez on some of his new short-film projects. We have, in fact, been trying to join forces creatively for a decade now, but after I co-wrote a screenplay ("After the Ball") with Juan in 2009, my mom's last illness caused me to shift priorities and I had to stop working on another project ("Gym Rats") because I had way too much on my plat e at the time. "After the Ball" never got made; Juan and his wife Adria couldn't get financing for it, so that, folks, was that. Same happened to "Gym Rats." So Juan decided to focus on his acting career (which is not as glam or fun as it seems to outsiders), as well as being there for his wife and son, Anthony. Long story short, this year Juan decided to get back to making films, this time with a digital camera. This year, we have collaborated on

© 2017 Hasbro, Inc. and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  Photo Credit: Gamestop In the fall of 2017, two months before the release of Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Hasbro began sending shipments of The Black Series: Supreme Leader Snoke (Throne Room) to Gamestop and EB Games stores in the U.S. and Canada. Intended for sale to the public on November 10 of that year as Gamestop/EB Games exclusives, the deluxe 6-inch scale figure of the First Order's mysterious overlord hit shelves in October. © 2017 Hasbro, Inc. and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  Photo Credit: Gamestop The shadowy commander of the First Order, Supreme Leader Snoke prefers to operate from a distance, looming over his underlings in the form of an immense hologram. As the First Order rallies, this master of the Dark Side emerges from the shadows to seize victory.  Introduced in 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the mysterious villain who commands the evil First Order was mainly seen as a hologram in the

On Quora, an anonymous member asks: If '11.22.63' was a movie, do you think it deserves more than 1 star? From what I understand,  11.22.63  was going to be a feature film (aka “theatrically-released movie”), but the people involved (the late Jonathan Demme had optioned it) had an incredibly hard time adapting it into a viable screenplay.  11/22/63  (the novel) is a long and exquisitely detailed book, so the film version was abandoned. Fortunately, J.J. Abrams is a huge fan of the book, and when he emailed Stephen King to say how much he’d loved it, he also mentioned that it should be made into a miniseries. © 2011 Scribner (I love that book cover!) So…J.J. Abrams, James Franco, Stephen King, and Bridgette Carpenter teamed up and produced  11.22.63  for the Hulu streaming network. Not as a movie, but as a nine-part series. © 2016 Hulu  (This guy doesn’t look like Lee Harvey Oswald as much as Gary Oldman did in  JFK,  but he did a great job.) But t

Did only John Basilone and the Iwo Jima Marines (involved in raising the flag) sell War Bonds during World War II? No. There were thousands of people who sold war bonds during the seven or so War Bond Drives that took place between 1941 and 1945. Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone and the three surviving Iwo Jima flag raisers (John Bradley might not have been one of them, according to recent Marine Corps historical researchers, but he was believed to have been at the time) were just the tip of the war bonds iceberg. Many Americans, ranging from movie stars such as Clark Gable and Carole Lombard (she died in a plane crash while participating in a War Bond Drive) to ordinary citizens in small towns such as Luverne, Minnesota.

What is your opinion about Universal Studios' decision to release a movie in 2019 about "killing deplorables" in which liberal elites hunt and kill conservatives for sport? I think Universal Pictures (a Comcast company) is doing what every entertainment-based business does: it’s trying to make a lot of money by exploiting the current cultural  zeitgeist. In the case of this particular film,  The Hunt,  producer Jason Blum (the guy behind the  Paranormal Activity  and  The Purge  franchises) is taking conservative paranoia and dislike for liberals and distilling it into a revenge fantasy film in which a right-wing would-be victim (played by  GLOW’s  Betty Gilpin) turns the tables on the liberal elites that are kidnapping and hunting (for sport) innocent men and women who are self-described “deplorables.” I strongly suspect that writer-producer Damon Lindelof and director Craig Zobel probably intend to make  The Hunt  as a horror movie that also comments o

On Quora, member Lynn Boca asks: Why does the US government feel video games are to blame for the rash of mass shootings when other countries without the shootings also have video games? My reply First of all, it’s not the entire United States government that is making the false connection between video games and mass shootings. It’s just one of the two major political parties that govern the country - and it’s the one which is closely allied with the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers. Second, I doubt that any of the Republican Party politicians who blame video game use for the shootings in El Paso and Dayton truly believe this false narrative. The pols and spokespersons who say “Video games are to blame for mass shootings” are directing their comments at their base, not at more worldly individuals who know that Japan and other countries (such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany) where video games are not only widely played but  created and published 

Above: A typical rant from Laura Ingraham. Should Fox News suspend Laura Ingraham for her constant false, petty, partisan attacks on Democratic candidates who criticize Trump's racial rhetoric? No. First of all, Fox News Channel is not a true newsgathering organization free from bias. On the contrary; with the exception of some news breaks and coverage of “breaking news,” Fox News devotes much of its prime time programming to opinions-based content. (So do CNN and MSNBC, because opinionated presenters generate higher ratings than traditional news reports. This has been true since the early 2000s, and since ad revenue is the driving force of every free-to-air or cable/satellite channel, as long as Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity, and Anderson Cooper get eyeballs and $$$ on their 8–11 PM programming, it’s not going to change any time soon.) In the case of Fox, which is Rupert Murdoch’s version of a propaganda network for the post-1994 Republican Party, Laura Ingraham is do