The View From The Mountain

I got this moon buggy toy from the movie Diamonds Are Forever back when I was a little spud around when the movie first came out. But I recall being annoyed upon seeing, instead of an astronaut, it had a guy in a suit driving it. Not realizing this was supposed to be 007 (I had never even heard of James Bond at that point in my young life), I removed the silly guy in the suit and always pretended that the moon buggy was driven by a proper astronaut. The arms are folded in front of it because they can no longer hold a pose. But the radar dish still spins when you roll it along.

The Amazon streaming service had a surprise for me the other night: Brainstorm , the 1983 science fiction film that wound up becoming actress Natalie Wood’s last movie, due to her untimely death. I saw this when it was first released in theaters, not really paying much heed to the behind the scenes saga. At that time, I was so hungry for new science fiction--ANY science fiction--that I happily ran to the theater whenever a promising SF feature came out. Watching Brainstorm , with its themes of life and death, wound up made me very sad back then--so much so that I never re-watched the film again (until recently). I wasn't prepared for how much it reminded too much of the then-recent death of my mother, who was a huge fan of Natalie Wood. Now, re-watching the film for the first time some 42 years later, I enjoyed it as being a strange piece of nostalgia from my late teens. While Brainstorm is flawed, the concept of scientists working on a m...

Despite coming out thirty six years after the first film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , once again directed by Tim Burton, wound up being vastly entertaining, adding lots of pleasant surprises, like the use of stop-motion animation. The sequel takes place within the same real-life time frame, with Lydia Deetz, played with wry humor by Winona Ryder, now the host of a ghost hunting show. She’s also the mother of Astrid, a teenager played by Jenna Ortega. They live with Delia Deetz (the always great Catherine O'Hara), Lydia’s step-mother and Astrid’s step-grandmother. After the death of Charles--Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father--during a bird-watching accident involving sharks, the Deetz ladies must go back up to the creepy house in Winter River, Connecticut for his funeral. This is the same place where Lydia first encountered Beetlejuice all those years ago, and she is understandably reluctant to even mention his name, lest she accidentally calls forth Beet...

I saw the original Alien film in the theaters when it first came out back in 1979, and I was instantly a fan of the film, as well as its director, Ridley Scott. I followed this film series as one movie after the other was released over the years, and found myself really enjoying them, even if some of the films weren’t that great. The last film in this series was 2017’s Alien Covenant , a Scott-directed sequel to a prequel (!!!) which did so badly that I figured the Alien film franchise was finally over and done with. But, forty five years after the release of the first Alien , we finally get another in the series: Alien Romulus . I was genuinely (and pleasantly) surprised to see this, with 20th Century Fox, the studio that made and distributed the Alien films, having been gobbled up by Disney. The behind the scenes story was that Alien Romulus was only going to be released on Hulu, but that Disney executives saw something in the rough cut that made them chang...