Editorial Product Review: :As with Star Wars, the George Lucas-produced Indiana Jones trilogy was not just a plaything for kids but an act of nostalgic affection toward a lost phenomenon: the cliffhanging movie serials of the past. Episodic in structure and with fate hanging in the balance about every 10 minutes, the Jones features tapped into Lucas's extremely profitable Star Wars formula of modernizing the look and feel of an old, but popular, story model. Steven Spielberg directed all three films, which are ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Dashing Errol Flynn is the definitive Robin Hood in the most gloriously swashbuckling version of the legendary story. Warner Brothers reunited Michael Curtiz, their top-action director, with the winning team of Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (Maid Marian) and perennial villain Basil Rathbone as the aristocratic Sir Guy of Gisbourne, and pulled out all stops for the production. It became their costliest film to date, a grandly handsome, glowing Technicolor adventure set to a stirring, Oscar-winning score by ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:This is the film that cemented Schwarzenegger's spot in the action-brawn firmament, and it was well deserved. He's chilling as the futuristic cyborg who kills without fear, without love, without mercy. James Cameron's story and direction are pared to the bone and all the more creepy. But don't overlook the contributions of Linda Hamilton, who more than holds her own as the Terminator's would-be victim, Sarah Connor--thus creating, along with Sigourney Weaver in Alien, a new generation of ...
Editorial Product Review: :Trapped by his image in 1976, Clint Eastwood resurrected his Dirty Harry character for a third go-round (out of a total of five) in this potboiler story in which the San Francisco detective takes on a group of revolutionary kids. Tyne Daly costars as a female cop who partners with the reluctant Harry Callahan, and she does very well by a role created merely to underscore and articulate the hero's various virtues. It's a dull package all around, but inside ...
Editorial Product Review: :Five--count 'em, five--chances to wallow in the shoot-first, ask-questions-later ethos of San Francisco cop Harry Callahan, who became a signature character for actor Clint Eastwood. The first one, Dirty Harry, is the best, a Don Siegel film in which Harry flouts rules about police brutality to capture a serial killer. In Magnum Force he tracks rogue cops and utters his 'Do you feel lucky, punk?' speech. In The Enforcer he gets a female partner (future Cagney and Lacy star Tyne ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's 1981 resurrection of the Saturday-matinee adventure genre was deservedly popular, and kicked off a successful trilogy. Set in 1936, this first feature introduces Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, an archaeologist and adventurer whose quests for rare antiquities frequently find him running from one menace or another. Raiders finds Dr. Jones in the middle of a Nazi plot to use the mysterious powers of the Ark of the Covenant to win the war. Karen ...
Editorial Product Review: :This first sequel to Dirty Harry was written by a couple of strong voices, writer-directors Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and John Milius (Farewell to the King). But that doesn't mean the film is particularly good. After Don Siegel's ferociously dark style in the first movie, Ted Post's blocky, television-ish direction in Magnum Force is a huge letdown. The story doesn't win any prizes, either. Eastwood's San Francisco detective Harry Callahan (apparently having retrieved his badge after throwing it away ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Whether or not you can sympathize with its fascistic/vigilante approach to law enforcement, Dirty Harry (directed by star Clint Eastwood's longtime friend and directorial mentor, Don Siegel) is one hell of a cop thriller. The movie makes evocative use of its San Francisco locations as cop Harry Callahan (Eastwood) tracks the elusive 'Scorpio killer' who has been terrorizing the city by the Bay. As the psychopath's trail grows hotter, Harry becomes increasingly impatient and intolerant of the frustrating ...
Editorial Product Review: :After the drudgery of Sudden Impact, the fourth and worst sequel to Dirty Harry, no one could have expected the fifth to have any signs of life. But The Dead Pool is fairly inspired, even playful--check out a 'chase' scene between Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan character and a remote-controlled toy car wielding a bomb--and it ended the long-running series on an unexpectedly positive note. This time, Callahan investigates a series of murders that appears to be on a 'death list,' ...
This raw work-flow application isn't the Holy Grail many hoped it would be, but Apple Aperture 1.5 could make life easier for photographers who need to cull, retouch, and output large numbers of photographs quickly and efficiently.
This raw work-flow application isn't the Holy Grail many hoped it would be, but Apple Aperture 1.5 could make life easier for photographers who need to cull, retouch, and output large numbers of photographs quickly and efficiently.