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“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...

I finally got around to watching Tomorrowland (2015) with George Clooney. This movie is famous for being a huge bomb for Disney, and I was curious as to why, seeing as it starred a very good actor and was written and directed by the very talented Brad Bird (who also...

Watching two recent action movie additions to the Netflix lineup, “Den of Thieves” with Gerard Butler, and “Triple 9” with seemingly half the B-list male actors in Hollywood, really drove home a point that I’ve been thinking about lately: modern Hollywood has become...