Most readers below a certain age or from other countries might never have heard of Bob Burns III, who was, on the surface, a nice guy living with his wife in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank who put on a cool neighborhood Halloween show every year. That short description is not wrong, but it’s…
“The Shark Is Broken” (2022) brings the drama behind “JAWS” to the stage…
******GREAT WHITE SPOILERS!****** “The Shark Is Broken” (2022) is an enjoyable play chronicling the collision of egos between actors Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider during the troubled extended production of “JAWS”(1975); the Steven Spielberg blockbuster-crowdpleaser which inaugurated the summer blockbuster movie phenomenon. The play, which premiered in the UK and Ireland before coming…
Why “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979) is the greatest love story of the Star Trek movies…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** After seeing “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (TMP) theatrically in the late 1970s at age 13, the last thing I would’ve labeled it was a love story. There are no cute-meets of characters spilling coffee on each other in turbolifts. We don’t even see Captain Kirk romance a single green-haired alien woman. In…
Gil Gerard, star of “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” passes away at age 82…
After a weekend filled with violence, including two ugly mass shootings and the brutal slayings of Rob Reiner and his wife in their home, I was deliberately throwing myself into an unrelated column I’d been working on for a few days prior, when my sister texted me with news that actor Gil Gerard, star of…
Actor/filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, found dead in their home…
This past weekend felt exceptionally violent. First, a horrific mass shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island. Then another, even worse mass shooting during a Hanukah celebration at Bondi Beach, in Australia. Closer to home, my wife and I were returning from an evening holiday stroll at downtown Disney in Anaheim Saturday night, when we…
Retro-Musings: The “Daimajin” trilogy (1966)…
******KAIJU-SIZED SPOILERS!****** As a kid, I was (and am) a huge fan of Japanese kaiju-eiga (giant monster) movies, such as the “Godzilla” films, Rodan, Mothra, “War of the Gargantuas,” and many others. It was during a random ‘4:30 Afternoon Movie’ that I caught an English-dubbed Japanese kaiju movie called “Majin, the Monster of Terror,” and…
Revisiting “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ten years later…
******STAR DESTROYER-SIZED SPOILERS!****** I make no secret of the fact that I, my wife, and other Gen Xers we know found writer/director George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999-2005) disappointing. While they offered some interesting ideas, they lacked the heart, passion and grit of the original trilogy; replacing them with clunky scripting, soulless performances, and…
Netflix’s “A House of Dynamite” (2025) weakens before impact…
******SILOS OF SPOILERS!****** Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) first came onto my radar with a rural Romeo & Juliet vampire film. No, not the “Twilight” movies; the good one, “Near Dark,” from 1987. Since then, her reputation has grown tremendously, with action films such as “Point Break” (1991), before her Best Director Oscar…
Star Trek TOS: “The Corbomite Maneuver” (1966) put the series on course…
******FESARIUS-SIZED SPOILERS!****** As a kid watching Star Trek out of broadcast order in reruns during the 1970s and 1980s, I could always tell earlier episodes by their ‘growing pains’; uniforms without black collars, different paint/layout scheme for the ship’s interiors, Spock’s makeup tweaks, various terminology differences (“United Earth Space Probe Agency,” “Vulcanian” ), etc. First…
Retro-Musings: “The Thief of Bagdad” (1940) works its magic, 85 years later …
******DJINN-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Even the most ardent movie lovers like myself have ‘blind spots’; major classics and blockbuster movies we’re familiar with through cultural osmosis, yet we’ve never actually seen. Despite my mad love of cinema, I’ve had an embarrassing number of overlooked classics in my lifetime. For example, I’d never seen “It’s a Wonderful Life”…
Guillermo Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” (2025) is stitched together from both faithful and divergent pieces…
******207 YEAR-OLD SPOILERS!****** After impressing critics and audiences with his first independent feature film “Cronos” (1993), future Oscar winning writer-director Guillermo Del Toro quickly rose through the ranks, making his Hollywood debut with “Mimic” (1997) before going on to more mainstream projects such as “Hellboy” (2004). He would return to less commercial films, such as…
The first two episodes of AppleTV’s “Pluribus” give rise to a world of shiny, happy, eerie people…
*****SMILEY-FACED SPOILERS!***** The trailer for AppleTV’s new sci-fi series “Pluribus” (Latin for many) had me hooked for several reasons; creator/producer/director Vince Gilligan (“The X-Files,” “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul”), lead actress Rhea Seehorn (“Better Call Saul”) and a not-unfamiliar sci-fi idea of a shared human consciousness. The plans to create a unique RNA molecule has…