‘Lifepod,’ a 1993 science fictional update of Hitchcock’s ‘Lifeboat,’ offers scant rewards for viewers

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 3, 2015

Journey with me, dear readers, back to a time before the Internet, when the media landscape was very different…

Two decades ago, every American city of any size had a daily newspaper. Many newspapers would print daily television listings. Typically, one of the sections in Sunday’s newspaper — usually the largest edition of the week — comprised a guide to the coming week’s television programming.

In June 1993, someone in the press devoted a bit of attention to Lifepod. This was a TV movie directed by actor Ron Silver that reworked the 1944 Alfred Hitchcock movie Lifeboat with a science-fiction spin: The characters, instead of surviving an ocean-going vessel sunk by a Nazi submarine, are refugees from a spaceliner that may or may not have been destroyed by an act of sabotage.

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Guess who’s coming to invade? Revisiting ‘Independence Day’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 3, 2015

Aliens are coming! Aliens are coming! And they’re going to blow up the White House, the Empire State Building and some skyscraper in Los Angeles!

That’s the elevator pitch for Independence Day, the blockbuster action-adventure movie directed by Roland Emmerich and co-written by Emmerich and Dean Devlin. ID4, as it was dubbed in marketing materials, was the top-grossing film of 1996 and to this day has the 12th-biggest Independence Day weekend opening of all time.

I remember watching Independence Day when it first came out and thinking that it was good, corny entertainment. (Confession: I’m almost positive that I owned, and eagerly read, the novelization of this movie.)

It was not without reservations that I sat down to re-watch Independence Day one night last week. After all, I’d recently read a rather indifferent assessment of the movie at Moria, Richard Scheib’s invaluable website for fans of science fiction, horror and fantasy films.