******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** As an old Trekkie from waaay back (as old as the franchise itself), I’ve read about pitches for a Starfleet Academy movie as far back as the late 1980s, when the late Star Trek movie producer Harve Bennett had a movie about Kirk and Spock’s academy days together. That pitch was rejected, though…
Enjoying a small slice of the 37th Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival…
Unless you count big ticket media conventions like San Diego Comic Con or special screenings in and around Los Angeles, I’ve never actually attended an international film festival before. That is, until last Thursday. My wife and I, celebrating both her birthday and the birthday of our friend Alison (who introduced us over 27 years…
Apple TV’s “Pluribus” explores the loss of self in its fascinating first season…
******SMILEY-FACED SPOILERS!😊****** Apple TV’s sci-fi series “Pluribus” sprang from the mind of writer/creator/producer (and occasional director) Vince Gilligan (“The X-Files,” “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul”), and while his new series also takes place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, it’s not part of the “Breaking Bad” universe. If anything, Gilligan’s new series recalls his work on “The…
Bob Burns (1935-2025): The sci-fi kid, prop-maker, archivist and showman who (thankfully) never fully grew up…
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…