The View From The Mountain

I was watching a video on YouTube about the "wacky" animated fantasy films of the 80s, and it made me realize that this year marks the fortieth anniversary of Fire And Ice . Unlike the other fantasy films (both animated and live-action) that were released in the 1980s, Fire And Ice was notable because it was a collaboration between animated film director Ralph Bakshi ( Fritz the Cat , Wizards ) and noted fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta. Fire And Ice takes its inspiration more from the Conan the Barbarian stories (which Frazetta became first known for, having drawn the covers for them) rather than the Lord of the Rings . Bakshi was no stranger to J.R.R. Tolken’s works, having produced his own animated version of LOTR a few years prior. Bakshi re-used his favorite form of animation, called rotoscoping, where actors are filmed onstage, and their actions on film are then hand-drawn, frame by frame, by an animator onto cells. This provides a far more reali...

I was a huge fan of Jenna Coleman when she played Clara Osborn, the companion to the eleventh and twelfth Doctor Who (played by Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, respectively). Doctor Who, a sort of mad magician who literally travels through space and time, can be an intimidating character, but Coleman more than held her own, plying an engaging performance that was self-assured without being too arrogant. Her time on the program, stretched across the better episodes of two of the Doctors, was extremely memorable for me. So when I heard that Coleman was starring in Wilderness, a mini-series for the Amazon Prime streaming service, I was more than happy to give it a shot. Of course, I waited until all of the episodes were up. I hate the trend with some streamers reverting to the old ’one episode per week’ tactic; I’d rather binge-watch the whole thing over a day or two, which was easy to do with Wilderness, seeing how it only had six episodes, overall. But the fi...

I was a toddler when the Adam West Batman series first aired in the late 1960s, and I just ate it all up. My father originally built this model kit of the Batbike that was seen on the show. They re-released this model kit back in 2003, and after recently finding the unbuilt kit in my stash, I decided to build this myself. The pictures you see here are of my build of the 2003 re-release of the Batbike. I don't know what happened to the original that my father built; it was lost to time. I just finished building this Batbike just a couple of days ago. The kit was a complete replica of the original 1960s kit, and it was pretty easy to build. I always loved the sidecar with Robin on this design. Just like...

Director Guy Ritchie is making a lot of movies, lately. Ritchie will make a big-league film--like Aladdin , for Disney--and then go off and make a mid-budget movie immediately afterward. And this is a good thing. Because the more Guy Ritchie films, the merrier. His latest, Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre , stars Jason Statham as Orson Fortune, a cool, suave, James Bond-type agent who does special missions for the British government. Cary Elwes plays Nathan, his long suffering handler, who constantly has to explain Fortune’s maverick antics to Knighton, their tedious boss at MI6 (well-played by long-time Ritchie collaborator Eddie Marsan). Fortune is called upon once more when an experimental weapon known only as “the Handle” has been stolen from a secret lab. Tracking the theft to international arms dealer Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant, who seems to be having a lot of fun here), Fortune must stop Simmonds before he can sell the Handle to a buyer. Fortune is...

Since exploding onto the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2016’s Doctor Strange , the eponymous hero--also known as the Sorcerer Supreme--has been a trusted ally in the fight against evil in several of the MCU films. But the 2016 movie was not the very first time that the mystical adventures of Doctor Strange was caught on film. Forty five years ago this year, a TV movie starring Peter Hooten as the heroic sorcerer was released. In the 1978 TV movie, Hooten’s Stephen Strange was a psychiatrist on staff at a hospital in NYC, when he comes across an interesting case. A young woman (Eddie Benton) shows up in bad shape. Suffering from amnesia, she’s very disoriented and unsure of who or where she is. Yet the viewer has already seen what has happened to this woman, who turns out to be a college student named Clea Lake. Clea had been used as a pawn in a battle between sorcerers Lindmer (John Mills) and Morgan le Fay (Jessica Walter). The evil Morgan le Fay had used...

I had this 1/1000th scale model kit (from Polar Lights) of the Klingon D-7 battleship from Star Trek on my hands. So I decided to build a space dock for it. I knew I wanted some kind of gantry covering the ship on top, so I used these plastic girders from Evergreen and assembled them into the basic shape of the D-7. I scratch-built the buildings you see on the gantry from styrene sheet. Then I covered them with greeblies--these are bits and pieces of model kits that I placed on the surface of the buildings to give them some texture. I also made sure to give the D-7 plenty of battle damage, so as to give it a good reason to come in for repairs. And so, after a really rambunctious time on the Romulan DMZ, the Klingon Battlecruiser K'Prang pulls in for repairs and some blood wine. Then it...

Back in January of this year, Netflix premiered Woman of the Dead , a crime thriller from Austria with slight supernatural overtones. I figured I’d give it a shot, since I was in the mood for a good Lifetime-type crime story. Do you know what I mean when I refer to these Lifetime TV movies? They’re goofy crime “thrillers” regarding soccer moms who become amateur sleuths that wind up being so silly that they’re more unintentionally funny than anything else. But within the first fifteen minutes of its first episode, Woman of the Dead proves itself to be more of a Hitchcockian thriller: a darker, high-brow, and sophisticated thriller that’s genuinely exciting. Anna Maria Mühe stars as Brunhilde Blum (everybody calls her Blum), an undertaker in a small Austrian mountain town where it seemingly snows all year round. Her beloved husband works as a cop with the local police force--until the moment when he gets savagely run down on his motorcycle by a black Range Rover that abr...