Season One: Danger Zone. When writer/director/actor Jordan Peele took the reigns of CBS-All Access’ new remake of Rod Serling‘s classic series, “The Twilight Zone”, few were more excited than myself. As a big fan of Peele’s movies (“Get Out” “Us”) I thought he’d bring some of the profundity and gallows’ humor of his films into…
Month: June 2020
A slice of Soviet-era sci-fi cinema: “Planeta Bur” (1962) is three movies in one…
Soviet Sci-Fi Cinema. Russia’s Soviet era (1917-1991) was a difficult time, especially for artists, who worked under heavy state censorship. Many artists during this time were stifled, fined, imprisoned or even executed for daring to challenge the Soviet status quo through their works. That said, Soviet-era science fiction cinema still managed to produce some truly…
Star Trek: Enterprise’s two-parter “Demons” and “Terra Prime” speak to right now…
Earth, Today. The third decade of the 21st century is off to a really rocky start. Political unrest in the United States at its most volatile since the late 1960s, arguably more so, in fact. Severe racial and economic strife, grotesque social injustice, a global pandemic, rampant political corruption, multiple constitutional crises and even murder…
JAWS (1975); the movie that invented the summer blockbuster turns 45…
“This is summer…” June of 1975 was a very different time. Video games were mainly for arcades. Home video wasn’t yet a thing. There was no internet. No 24 hour news cycles (there was the evening news and the morning news, as well as newspapers). Cheap entertainment options for the masses were limited to LP record…
Netflix’s “Space Force” (2020) or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Satire…
*****HIGHLY CLASSIFIED: SPOILERS INSIDE! ***** Netflix has just unveiled a new Steve Carrell-produced/starring streaming series that takes place in a reality just west of our own; it’s a universe that still has Star Wars, Twitter, Tiktok, K-Pop, the Apollo lunar landings, Donald Trump (though never mentioned by name) and other alignments with our own universe, but…
Deep Space Nine’s “Far Beyond The Stars” still matters…
Brave New World. To those who believe that Star Trek wasn’t concerned with ‘social justice’ issues until the newer CBS All Access series? I’ve got something for you… Deep Space Nine’s 6th season episode “Far Beyond the Stars” (1998) broke a lot of Star Trek’s rules. Rather than deal with racism through the metaphoric lens…