This page has my comments and special work related to various movies.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999, 20th Centory Fox)
My Thoughts About Star Wars Episodes II and III
The Matrix (1999, Warner Brothers)
Radio Days (1987, Orion Pictures)
Good Will Hunting (1997)

Trivia concerning the movie "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" (Which, by the way, is in the top 20 on my chart ranked by all-time attendance)

• There is a scene in a junkyard involving Qui-Gon telling Watto what he needs and then trying to negotiate payment. There are one or two shots (depending on which print you are seeing) that show a prop which is essentially identical to the pods in the spaceship Discovery in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". In one shot, the pod is near the middle of the screen and takes up about 1/4 the width of the frame and 1/2 the height, or 10% of the total frame area. In the other shot, the pod is in the upper-left of the frame, takes up only about 2% of the screen area, and is partly obscured by other junkyard junk. By mid-August 1999, the shot with the larger, more prominent Discovery pod was either cut or (more likely) altered in prints in distribution in the United States. I don't think it was cut because the change in dialogue would be noticable to many people, and the screenplay still agrees with what's said in the film.

• Actor Warwick Davis, who played the Ewok "Wicket" in Return of the Jedi and starred (without a mask) in the lead role of the 1988 film "Willow" can be seen alongwide Watto cheering for Sebulba during the podrace. He also plays Wald (Anakin's alien friend who looks like Greedo) and appears in a Tatooine crowd shot where he is tougher to spot.

• In the credits there are many categories that have lots of names listed in a big block with five columns. In each of these categories but one, the number of names is exactly a multiple of five. Either they deliberately hired each category in multiples of five, or (more likely) they added fake names to make the columns line up (without which, certain names would stand out just by being in an uneven column).

• In the credits the Tunisia filming locations are listed twice. One of the Tunisia locations is called "TATAOUINE". This connection has actually been around since the original Star Wars (episode IV) but I haven't gotten an authoritative answer as to whether Lucas named the planet after the location in Tunisia or whether the location in Tunisia is just a temporary settlement (camp town) that existed during filming.

• No use of hyperspace warp effect (as seen from inside cockpit of Millenium Falcon in episode IV). I think this is a deliberate effort by Lucas to make the effect unique to episodes IV, V and VI. The result of this would be that, once all 6 movies are complete, a person watching the movies in order would see that effect first in episode IV and this will make episode IV a little more interesting, effects-wise, than it would be otherwise.

• Minor flaw: The sunset scene on Coruscant shows a really, really big sun. But the shadows in the daytime scenes on Coruscant are too sharp for a sun that big.

• Right near the end of the movie someone says something about a future "balance". I have interpreted two possible types of "balance" that exist at some point during episodes IV, V and VI:

- the number of (living) good Jedi warriors equals the number of "evil" warriors (two of each). In episode I there seem to be far greater number of good warriors.

- Luke + Leia = male & female, perhaps the good side of the Force needs a female warrior to have balance.

• The first time you see Darth Sidious is in a projected image that looks much like the images of Emperor Palpatine that we see in episodes V and VI. Naturally I assumed they were the same person. Lucas leaves the issue open and doesn't give a credit for Sidious. If Lucas wanted us to think they were two different people, he didn't try very hard.

• While travelling into the core, our heroes encounter some animals. This is part of Obi Wan's training — he is being taught how to manipulate the thoughts of the creatures and thereby save himself from danger. This lends an additional interpretation to Qui-Don's line "You overdid it" — he is telling Obi-Wan that he overdid it by attracting two larger predators rather than just one.

• Anakin/Darth Vader doesn't "vanish" when he dies the way Obi-Wan and Yoda do. I always took this to be because Obi-Wan and Yoda were more "pure" in some way. In episode I we see Qui-Don die and not vanish. To me this means he is not pure, and his judgment is inflenced by the dark side even though he thinks he's fighting for good. And it is mostly because of this judgment that Anakin ends up being trained.

• We could debate quite a while as to whether the Force is some kind of conscious entity or is controlled by some conscious entity, and I don't want to get into that debate. But, if we assume that there is a conscious entity, then it seems to me that it is deliberately causing Darth Vader to come into being because he is a necessary evil (as it were) in creating this future "balance". The conscious entity "creates" Anakin knowing he will fall, that the dark side will be in power for a while and that the children of the corrupted warrior will ultimately defeat the dark side. Perhaps it also knows that the Republic is doomed and that creating and defeating an evil empire is the best way to get to a new Republic.

• The Jedi Council seems to be almost as ineffective as the Senate. The two who sit on either side of Yoda seem to be the most respected aside from Yoda himself, and one of them immediately brushes off the idea that the Sith have returned. They're not good enough Jedi to detect the Sith, or perhaps they simply forgot that "Hard to see the dark side is" — either way, they're pretty incompetent.

track 8, 1:36 (about 6 seconds) Luke's theme

track 11, 2:30 (about 20 seconds) Luke's theme from episode IV

track 14, 3:45 (for about 20 seconds) vocal theme heard in episode

VI during the scenes showing the confrontation between Luke, the Emperor and Vader.

track 16, 1:17 Imperial theme from episode V

These are my predictions for Star Wars Episodes II and III. Most are pretty obvious. I haven't tried to get the order right because it doesn't matter:

Palpatine uses his control of the Senate and the Trade Federation to expand his influence throughout the galaxy. He beseiges and takes control of many planets, but is often hindered or thwarted by the Jedi.

Anakin Skywalker is a powerful Jedi Apprentice and returns to Tatooine as Palpatine tries to take over that planet. Amidala, having been so greatly helped by Anakin 10 years earlier, now comes to help free his planet. Tatooine achieves a mixed victory, deposing the Hutts (and as a result freeing the slaves), but being forced to submit to control by Palpatine/Trade Federation in their place. In the process they fall in love.

Having had little success with droids, Palpatine decides to turn to human soldiers, since their minds are more easily controlled. Clones are even more easily controlled since their minds are alike — control one and you control them all (this also turns out to give the Jedi an advantage in defeating the clones). Palpatine employs the clones to control and conquer systems.

Palpatine is annoyed by the Jedi and continues trying to wipe them out, using a new Sith apprentice or perhaps several apprentices one after another.

Palpatine intercepts the young Jedi-in-training Anakin Skywalker and tricks him into thinking his cause is good. Anakin is torn between what Palpatine wants him to do and what the other Jedi want him to do.

Palpatine, having acquired control over a sufficient fraction of the galaxy, declares himself Emperor. The new Empire will be more powerful and all-inclusive than the Republic could be (including outlying systems such as Tatooine).

In a climactic scene, Obi-Wan and Anakin are fighting Sidious and a Sith apprentice. Sidious tells Anakin to slay the apprentice in anger (which will bring Anakin to the dark side). Anakin slays the Sith apprentice but simultaneously falls into the lava and is nearly killed, losing almost all of his body in the process. Obi-Wan somehow gets knocked out (perhaps he falls somewhere) so he cannot intervene. Sidious snatches up Anakin, now scarred for life, and whisks him away.

The Jedi discover that Amidala is pregnant and arrange for her hiding on Alderran.

The Emperor provides the scarred Anakin with a bionic body and makes him his new apprentice, Darth Vader. The Jedi soon realize that this used to be Anakin Skywalker. Vader gets many (including a few Jedi) to serve the dark side. Many Jedi confront Vader and his minions and are killed. Most of them were deceived, led into traps, or otherwise at an unfair or dishonorable disadvantage when fighting Vader.

Obi-Wan and Yoda find themselves among the last of the Jedi and decide to cease their activity with the Force and go into hiding. Obi-Wan gets Amidala's son (leaving the daughter) and takes him to Tatooine.

The Emperor has been unsuccessful with the clones and must abandon them, and turns to ordinary human conscripts to use as soldiers.

The Sith warriors run out of good guys to kill. Being evil, they compete with one another for the spot at the Emperor's side. Vader kills off the last of them. With two evil and two good (in hiding), the Force is at a balance.

It is also revealed that the ultimate (forseen) "balance" in the Force is actually the balance that will be brought about by Anakin's offspring, who (by being of opposite sex) will bring an important gender-balance to the good side of the Force. If Lucas went ahead with the third trilogy he would use this idea as Leia develops her abilities and becomes as important an influence as Luke.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace. 8-year-old Anakin is discovered by

Qui-Don. Anakin meets Queen Amidala. Palpatine manipulates the Senate and the Queen to be elected as the Senate's leader. Darth Maul is defeated by Obi Wan and Qui-Don, who dies. Anakin becomes Obi Wan's apprentice.

Episode II: . 10 years later. A tone similar to episode V. Romance and marriage of Anakin and Amidala; the Clone Wars take place; Anakin and Amidala fight the Siths; Senator Palpatine manipulates his way closer to complete control of the crumbling old Republic.

Episode III: . 2-3 years later. Emperor Palpatine and his new order rise to dominance. Anakin falls to the dark side. Obi-Wan and Yoda struggle to hide Amidala and her unborn children from the ruthless Palpatine. Darth Vader and his minions hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights.

Episode IV: A New Hope. 17 years later. Amidala's children find each other with the help of Obi-Wan and two droids. Leia's home planet Alderaan is destroyed. Obi-Wan dies, then helps Luke help the rebellion in a temporary defeat of the Empire.

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. 3 years later. Luke begins his Jedi training under Yoda, while Leia and the Rebellion are continually on the run. Darth Vader seeks out Luke, who leaves Yoda before his training is complete to challenge Vader. Vader tells Luke he is his father.

Episode VI: The Return Of the Jedi. 1 year later. Luke uses Jedi powers to rescue Han Solo, then returns to Yoda and learns of his family history. Yoda dies. Luke, Leia and Han lead the Rebellion in defeating the Empire again. Luke confronts Vader and the Emperor; just before the Emperor kills Luke, Vader turns back to good and destroys the Emperor.

My rating: 8 out of 10

I admire this movie for introducing millions to an idea that I have explored extensively for over 20 years: That everyone's mind might be hooked up to some type of virtual reality system and therefore, maybe, nothing is "real". Since I was so familiar with this premise, nothing that happened in the movie took me by surprise and I found myself wishing its many essential plot devices were consistently plausible.

For the sake of entertainment and a dramatic, unpredictable storyline, the Wachowskis decided to give the bad guys a consistent physical manifestation, limited to defeating good guys only by chasing them down and shooting or fighting them. Similarly, while our heroes can enter the Matrix anywhere they want on a whim, leaving is excessively elaborate. And despite the fact that they can hack the Matrix to manifest a physical presence, they apparently can't hack anything else like magic spells or superhuman powers.

This is all set up to create an instability and balance of power that allows for plenty of suspense, drama and what my friends call "excessive gratuitous violence" in the lengthy combat scenes that showcase the film's groundbreaking (for 1999) special effects.

So, if you're seriously interested in the premise of the movie (and we all should be, as it probably plays a very real and central role in Humanity's future) and the lessons it has to teach, just remember that "The Matrix" is first and foremost designed as entertainment. Its lessons consist of a few basic ideas which you will need to explore on your own elsewhere.

Why, after all this, do I still rate it 8/10? Because The Matrix is d*n good entertainment, for anyone who enjoys gratuitous violence and dark science fiction, and it has gotten an important message out to many people.

If you liked the ideas presented in The Matrix you should probably see the earlier films from which the ideas seem to have been copied: Dark City, eXistenZ, Total Recall, The Terminator, Johnny Mnemonic, Blade Runner and Neuromancer.

Its many inconsistencies

• The Matrix's support hardware was designed to link bodies in the real world to virtual presences inside the Matrix. Each body has a "cable" attaching it to a computer, and the computer sends and receives the necessary signals through this cable to make the person interact with the world inside the Matrix. The good guys in the movie "hack into" the Matrix and manifest themselves inside the Matrix. To accomplish that, their "hack" has to make the Matrix computer put them into the Matrix and maintain a connection without the presence of a cable or a body. They essentially have a "wireless" or "virtual" connection to the Matrix, rather than a physical connection like everyone else. This is something the Machines didn't design the system to do and therefore obviously represents a very sophisticated hack, introducing an entire human body into the Matrix. If such a hack is possible it should be easy to perform other types of hacks in the Matrix, like magic spells or superhuman powers. Using such hacks it would be easy to defeat the Agents. Of course, the Agents should find it even easier to do such things. All we see them do is seal Neo's mouth in the "What good is a phone call..." scene, and various special jumping, dodging and fighting skills that the good guys can also do. Neo learns how to control everything by the end of the movie, but he has to use his mind. In a real Matrix it would be far easier to do these things by directly manipulating the software the same way they did to hack into the Matrix in the first place.

• The "What good is a phone call if you can't speak" scene involves a mechanical "creature" that the Agents place into Neo's body. In a later scene Neo is picked up by the good guys and the creature is removed. All of this is happening before Neo leaves the Matrix, so the mechanical creature exists only inside the Matrix. It is apparent that the Agents want to manipulate Neo somehow; the creature is there either to terrify him or perhaps to hook into his brain. This, in turn, is to get Neo to comply. Why did the Agents need to use a mechanical creature? If the machines created the Matrix they can effect whatever results they want by directly manipulating the objects inside the Matrix — just throw Neo in a cage with no doors! They shouldn't have to rely on such indirect methods. This is similar to the question: why do the Agents need to use bullets to kill people? Why not just make a hole appear in the person's chest?

• Human intelligence is limited, but the AI Machines' intelligence should keep growing indefinitely. Certainly by the time the movie takes place the AI Machines have become far more intelligent than humans. Therefore, the Machines should easily be able to outwit the humans in any situation, and figure out solutions to any challenges or problems created by the humans. For example, if the humans hack the Matrix, the Machines should find it very easy to locate and disable the hack, or to implement a better counter-hack.

• Morpheus tells Neo that his physical appearance in the Matrix is a manifestation of his self-image. This makes sense for people like Morpheus who have seen themselves in a mirror in the real world. But Neo was born inside the Matrix. He had never been out, and never had a chance to see what he looks like in the real world, and nevertheless (surprise!) he discovers that his appearance in the real world is the same as it had been in the Matrix. For this to be true, Neo would have had to have some kind of ESP (sensing the shape of his body without actual visual or tactile input), or the Machines would have had to look at his body at least once and program the proper physical appearance into the Matrix. And what if (while living in the Matrix) Neo decided to gain or lose weight, or develop muscles, or sustained an injury that changed his appearance — would the Machines alter his real physical body to agree with that? What a waste of effort. In a real Matrix, Neo would wake up and discover that he looks different. In all likelihood he would be of a different race or nationality, and perhaps of a different sex. In fact, he could even wake up and discover that, in the real world, everybody has green skin and a couple extra arms. There's no particular reason the people inside the Matrix have to be of the same species as their physical bodies.

• A similar issue with physical appearance relates to sex and children. Since every body is connected to a person inside the Matrix, and those people sometimes conceive children, the machines have to monitor the Matrix and make sure that each real physical fetus is assigned to a pair of humans who have just had sex in the Matrix. That part's easy! The hard part is making sure the baby's body (in the real world) looks like its parents. In order to maintain the similarity of peoples' appearance between the Matrix and the real world, the machines would actually have to engineer the baby's appearance — perhaps by combining the DNA of the two parents' real-world bodies to conceive the fetus; then looking at the fetus to see what its face looks like before the baby is born in the Matrix. That's a lot of extra effort. The machines would be far better off just cloning humans and having their physical bodies all be the same.

• Since the mind is still resident in the brain, time goes at the same speed in the Matrix as in the real world — and yet, consciousness is resident in the Matrix, not in the brain, (as evidenced by the fact that a person will instantly die if physically unplugged). The fact that the two time scales are identical in speed isn't an inconsistency as such, but it is an unlikely coincidence.

The 1987 Woody Allen movie Radio Days features over 40 popular radio songs from the 1930's and 1940's — far too many to put on the soundtrack album. After I got the album I was a little disappointed at the songs that weren't included, and I decided to identify all the songs in the movie.

Fortunately, the songs are listed in the credits. However, they are not quite listed in the order that they appear in the movie, and there are some omissions. This list sorts it out, fills in the missing pieces and gives visual cues to help you identify the particular song you're interested in. This should save you from having to go through the whole movie with a list and a CD player, like I did!

Notes:

1. The "movie time" given for each song tells when in the movie you start to hear each song. This is measured from when the words "A Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Production" first appear on screen. The first song actually starts a little earlier during the Orion Pictures logo. I chose not to use that as the starting point for my stopwatch because studios often change the visual presentation of their logos, and I needed a clear visual cue to set the time.

2. Song titles in italics indicate a song that is being heard a second or third time. In the case of September Song, the repetitions are actually different performances.

3. Performer's name is given whenever possible, otherwise composer's name. The Sailor's Hornpipe, Auld Lang Syne and the alternate versions of September Song are not listed in the credits.

4. A brief description of something that happens on screen while the song is heard. "VO" means "voice-over" and refers to Woody Allen's narration. In a few cases a clear reference to a real-life event can be identified. The real-life events are spread out over more than 10 years and happened in a different order than they are presented in the movie. This is of course just part of the overall style of the movie, which is a romanticized retelling of the experience of living in that time. Without the real-life event references, the story would easily cover the last 4-5 months of any year in the early 1940's.

5. Invasion by martians: A clear reference to the Mercury Theatre presentation of Orson Welles' dramatization of "The War of the Worlds" on October 30, 1938. This show did in fact cause mass hysteria, particularly in the New York and New Jersey area.

6. High Holidays: The best fit to the rest of the movie's plot would set this scene on a Rosh Hashanah (Tishray 1-2) before Pearl Harbor. Likely dates include September 14-16, 1939 and October 3-5, 1940.

7. Bombing of Pearl Harbor: Japan pulled the United States into a direct involvement in the war with their surprise attack on December 7, 1941.

8. Girl who fell down a well: Kathy Fiscus (age 3), southern California, April 8, 1949. Millions listened on their radios (there were as yet only a few hundred TV sets in the entire Los Angeles area) to the 24-hour live broadcast and its tragic resolution.

9. New Year's Eve: The narrator says the new year is 1944, so the date is December 31, 1943.

10. Personal trivia: The only scene in any movie featuring a person I know is the shot in Radio Days in which the camera follows an extra carrying a Thermos^TM of coffee; the extra is a friend from my college fraternity.

11. September Song is from the musical "Knickerbocker Holiday", and popular versions were recorded by Roger Williams and by Bing Crosby. Most people associate the song with actor Walter Huston.

This movie stands out for many reasons, such as accuracy of details (locations, the math problems, etc.) and the tight agreement and little compromise between the writing and acting. But what interests me most is the marvelous and elaborate way in which the main character Will's sexual orientation is left ambiguous. You probably think I'm crazy; all my gay friends missed it too. Every point is adequately explained by either the "straight" or "hidden" interpretation. I'll just list the relevant points and let you decide for yourself:

1: sobesednyk: (from Russian) the person with whom whom one is speaking (literally, "co-conversationalist")

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