“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…
Tag: #StevenSpielberg
War and Remembrance: “The War of the Worlds”…
War Correspondent. It was over 120 years ago that Herbert George Wells first published the seminal alien invasion story, “The War of the Worlds.” Like so many of Wells’ works (“The Time Machine,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Shape of Things To Come”) WOTW became a template for many such alien invasion stories to come, such…
“JAWS: The Art of Fear in Filmmaking” exhibit at Catalina Island…
To paraphrase the tagline from JAWS 2: Just when you thought it was safe to go into the museum… I’d like to preface by saying JAWS is one of my top five favorite movies of all time. If I were marooned on a desert island with a portable DVD player that ran on coconut juice? I…
Revisiting “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in cinema…
Whip it good. This week, my wife and I took in a screening of the 1981 Steven Spielberg/George Lucas classic “Raiders of the Lost Ark” at our local cinema. I hadn’t seen “Raiders” theatrically since the summer of 1981, when I was all of 14. This time, nearly four decades later, I was a…
“Jurassic Park” (1993) loses none of its bite 25 years later…
When I think of game-changing special effects movies, a handful of my favorite titles come to mind; movies such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) “Star Wars” (1977), and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (also 1977). Others include James Cameron’s “The Abyss” (1989), and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991), as they are landmarks in the advancement of computer-generated imagery…
“Ready Player One” boots up…
Need to open this quick little review of “Ready Player One” with two things: * First, I am quite possibly the world’s worst video gamer. I have the hand/eye coordination of a drunken toddler and I know next to nothing about video games, online gaming, virtual reality, etc. Driving in often-thick California traffic is…
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind”; still ‘watching the skies’ 40 years later…
In addition to being the 40th anniversary of Star Wars, this year also marks the big 4-0 for another movie that greatly influenced me as a kid (and well into adulthood); Steven Spielberg’s ‘other’ big movie of the 1970s, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Looking back on it, I still very much remember the…