Mister Jacob's Citadel

      Halloween (1978) was a horror film directed and scored by John Carpenter and co-written with Debra Hill who also produced the film. It was the first movie of the Halloween franchise and kicked off the slasher film craze of the 1980s. Halloween cost only $300,000 to make and made $70 million dollars at the box office which is an 11,000% return on investment (the film has probably made even more money due to TV rights fees and DVD sales) making Halloween one of the most successful independent films of that era. The film involves an escaped mental patient named Michael Myers going back to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois to stalk and murder a group of teenage girls on Halloween night, the fifteenth anniversary of the murder of his older sister. However, his psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is hot on his trail and is willing to do anything to stop him.      From a pure filmmaking perspective, Halloween is phenomenal. John C...

      Jaws (1975) was directed by Steven Spielberg and is based on the novel of the same by Peter Benchley. Upon its release in the summer of 1975, Jaws became the highest grossing film ever made up to that point, making it the first blockbuster movie. The movie had such a cultural impact that beach attendance dropped because people were so scared of going into the water.       The movie’s plot is fairly straight forward. A killer shark begins attacking people in a New England resort town which causes the town’s police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), a young marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and Quint (Robert Shaw) an eccentric and obsessed shark hunter to team up and try to kill it.       I actually have not seen Jaws from start to finish. I have seen the whole movie in bits and pieces before this point. Jaws is one of those movies that you come across on TV and no matter what point the movie i...

     DC: The New Frontier was a six-issue mini-series written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke. The series was published by DC Comics in 2004. The New Frontier takes place in an alternate timeline from 1945, 1948 and from 1952 to 1960. It involves characters from DC’s Golden Age like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman meeting characters from DC’s Silver Age like The Flash, Green Lantern, and Martian Manhunter. The New Frontier captures what a strange time the 1950s and early 1960s were. It was a time of optimism and seemingly endless economic prosperity. This optimism manifested itself in the Space Race , where Americans realized that the sky was no longer the limit. However, this era was plagued by racism , communist paranoia , and the fear of nuclear war . All of these real historical issues are told through the lens of DC’s heroes.      What I love about The New Frontier is how it was paced. It’s written like Pulp Fiction (1994), where the characte...