And the Oscar Goes to…: The Great Ziegfeld

The video version of this review can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAVGSLnEuGI

One of the hard things about doing a long series about films that are hailed as some of the greatest of all time is, believe it or not, having so many good films. It can quickly get quite dull saying how good film after film is. For varieties sake, it can be nice just to criticize a bad movie from time to time. It being a few months since I reviewed Cavalcade (1933) (one of the two Best Picture winners I really disliked up to this point), part of me was actually hoping for an awful movie again to spice things up, and well, I did ask for it.

Writing Now

To the best of my recollection, I wrote my first fiction story when I was in the second grade. It was a short story sequel to the My Father’s Dragon trilogy, which the whole class had to read. I wrote mine (titled “The Rainbow Dragons” or something like that, if you were curious) and didn’t think much of it after that. Later, in the fifth grade, around Halloween time, each member of class was given a basket with a Halloween cassette tape (kids, ask your parents) and an assortment of various Halloween related props. We were meant to use the various items as inspiration and write a Halloween short story. To make a long story short (too late), I really enjoyed the process of writing that story (I even still have a copy of it somewhere) and have been writing ever since. Well, sort of.

Travels Through the Time Vortex: An Unearthly Child

One of my pet peeves, something that frustrates me to no end, is when people don’t give “classic” Doctor Who (1963-1989, 1996) the proper chance. While not everyone does this, I’ve heard of cases where people will only watch one story or, even worse, one episode of one story and then deem the classic era isn’t for them. In my opinion, you can’t do that. Classic Who is filled with so many radically different interpretations of the Doctor – each with his own quite distinct era, feel, and pace – that you can’t judge 26 years of television by just a single serial. This point of view was formed when I began collecting Classic Doctor Who DVDs in an effort to further familiarize myself with the show’s pre-2005 era. After getting recommendations from fans and thinking about what stories I would want to see the most, I made up a list of three or so stories for each Doctor and have been sporadically watching them over the last couple years. Every now and then I will give you my thoughts on the stories I chose. Anyway, best to start at the beginning.