******STOP THOSE SPOILERS!****** “Stop! That! Train!” is a railway-based, drag queen led-redux of the Abrams/Zucker Bros comedy, “Airplane!” (1980); one of my personal favorite comedy movies of all time. The movie was created by writing partners Christina Friel and Connor Wright (“The Bitch Who Stole Christmas”) and directed by Adam Shankman, a veteran music video…
Month: June 2026
Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” (2026) revisits more than it reveals…
******UNIDENTIFIED FLYING SPOILERS!****** I’ve been a fan of director Steven Spielberg since my family and I waited hours parked outside a drive-in theater waiting for the filled parking lot to clear so we could squeeze in and see “JAWS” back in 1975. Two years later, seeing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (CE3K) at the…
Retro-Musings: “Conquest of Space” (1955) is sabotaged (literally) by its unlikable characters…
******MARS-SIZED SPOILERS!****** I grew up admiring the gorgeous, inspirational space art by Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986), who remains one of my favorite artists. I love his imaginative paintings of future space exploration, with astronauts setting foot on the moon, Mars, and even the Saturnian moon of Titan. Growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, those…
Marcia Lucas (1945-2026); an editing virtuoso of 1970s cinema…
A long time ago, in an editing bay not too far away… Born in Modesto, California in 1945 to an Air Force officer father, Marcia Griffin moved all over California, until her parents divorced and she went to North Hollywood, where she and her mother stayed with her grandmother. It was in Hollywood where Marcia…
Apple TV’s “Star City”; unpacking the Soviet sidequel to “For All Mankind”…
******ROCKET-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Debuting in November of 2019, “For All Mankind” was created by veteran TV writer/executive producer Ronald D. Moore, best known for the critically-acclaimed reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” (2003-2009), along with coproducers/writers Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert. The series was hung on a deceptively simple premise; what if the Soviets had beaten the Americans…
For All Mankind’s season 5 finale, “This Land is Our Land,” regains some much-needed optimism…
******TITAN-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” nearly lost me with its surprisingly reactionary 4th season, which saw the demotion and humiliation of its stronger women characters, such as Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), who is brutally imprisoned, while astronaut Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) was shot, and exiled from Mars after a revolt at the end…