News/Articles

It was in the 1980s that the American movie culture exploded in size.  Theaters went from one screen to two to twenty, and the number of films being released every year dramatically increased to keep those screens filled.  Those multi-plexes—some of them located in...

After once again struggling, and failing, to make it through more than two episodes of Blindspot, I am reminded that it often takes quite a bit of work to “write smart”, and smart writing is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to network TV.  Blindspot is...

The below article was originally posted to my Handguns Magazine Website blog Carry On in 2012, and to this day it is one of the most favorite articles I've ever done.  Many of those blog posts seem to have disappeared from the internet, as has the blog itself, but let...

It’s long been said there are no new ideas.  No new plots, no new characters, no new forms of evil or sexual peccadilloes—somebody, at some point in history, has been there and done that. I was reminded of this recently while watching The Rhythm Section (2020) on...

“Don’t remake great movies; remake movies that should have been great, but weren’t.” The above quote, from a well-known director whose name I can’t recall, I saw in an issue of the now-defunct Premiere magazine twenty years ago.  It has stuck with me because of how...

Hollywood hasn’t had any problem making money off of Tom Clancy books, let’s be clear.  Where they’ve failed is making movies (and now TV shows) that are as good as the source material. The problem isn’t that there aren’t talented writers in Hollywood.  Probably half...

The title of this little piece borrows a bit from Arthur C. Clarke’s famous line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” which he wrote in 1962. People might think in this era of smartphones and other technology which, to someone in...

Have you ever been armed and within twenty yards of the President and the Vice-President of the United States?  Unintentionally? Check that off the bucket list, I guess. In 1996 Bill Clinton was running for reelection, and he and his Vice President Al Gore were...

It seems Hollywood these days can’t make a movie set more than a couple hours into the future without the earth dying due to human abuse.  Global warming, pollution, whatever, it is hard to find a futuristic movie whose premise isn’t based, in whole or part, on...