If it’s Wednesday, that must mean another batch of SpongeBob cartoons. The lead-off here is the is title episode, a 22-minute piece that recounts the adventures of SpongeBuck SquarePants, our hero’s 19th-Century ancestor. The rest of the episodes are an eclectic bunch, and the thematic consistency is less than that of some other collections (there is a vague adventure link that runs through several of the stories). At any rate, the silliness is just as engaging and bizarre as ever, and there are plenty of quick absurdist sight gags to keep you chuckling.
When The Ruins opens, it doesn’t look quite so promising. We’ve got two American couples sharing a vacation in Mexico. They’re reaching the end of their stay and are getting a tad bored with the sun and surf. Enter the foreign stranger who happens to have access to a secret archeological dig and invites the foursome along. Immediately I begin to suspect I’ve seen it all before. I figure the guy’s going to lead them to some isolated torture garden where sadistic maniacs will have their way with the tourists.
They say that it isn’t over until the Fat Lady sings. Did you ever wonder what “it” was or who the heck this Fat Lady is they keep talking about? I can’t help you there, but I do know who the Fat Man is. It’s William Conrad, who came back to television in 1987 as J.L. McCabe, better known as “the Fatman”. McCabe was one of those tough as nails district attorneys. He was actually an ex-cop, so had great criminal instincts. McCabe wasn’t above bending the law to put away the bad guy, and he wasn’t considered a very friendly type of fellow. He majored in stubbornness and plain speaking.
William Conrad was no stranger to audiences when Cannon joined the Quinn Martin stable of television dramas. In fact, most folks knew his voice before they got to know his trademark girth. Conrad was the original Matt Dillon when Gunsmoke was a radio drama. When the drama entered the visual medium of television, even Conrad admitted later that the audience, who thought of him as tall and handsome, would have been disappointed. His voice lent authority to any role he played, and on radio his size was never an issue.
I don’t know what it is about Owen Wilson, but whatever film he’s in he seems to be playing himself. The soft-spoken, rather glib personality has taken him places over the years, but you have to ask yourself if he’s ever going to actually take any risks. Drillbit Taylor is no more a stretch for the actor than any of these other roles. What that means for us, the viewers, is that we’re sure to get a solid and quite believable performance. We know that we’ll end up warming to Wilson’s character in spite of the various flaws we are apt to discover along the way. If Wilson does anything well, it’s redemption.
Inspectors 81 are back on the tough streets of San Francisco for a second season of gritty police work. Remember, these are the same streets Dirty Harry worked during the same decade. There are some memorable moments in this next half season release of “Streets”. Stone goes undercover as a Catholic priest to trap a serial killer who preys on priests in For The Love Of God. It’s a tough assignment in Before I Die. The pair must stop a terminally ill cop who decides to take justice in his own hands before he goes out.
There was a new Cowboy in Dallas, and he wasn’t throwing touchdown passes. But Walker was almost gone before he could really get started. After just four episodes the show’s production company suffered financial collapse, and the show was rescued at the last minute by CBS Productions, who would continue to run the show for its nearly decade-long run. For nine years Norris brought us the ultimate Texas Ranger in a formula cops and robbers show. The show often became a parody of itself, but maintained a solid viewer ship throughout. Hell, Norris even sings the theme song.
I’m not sure if it’s the Harry Potter franchise or whether it goes back even further to the Peter Jackson Lord Of The Rings films. Somewhere along the way the studios began to cater to the children’s fantasy genre, and the rewards have often been huge. Just about every literary secret fantasy world either has now been explored or is about to be converted to film soon. Even the Tom Swift books of my childhood are about to join in the box office party. While many of these fantasy stories are older classics, some, like Harry Potter, are far more recent.
<>Imagine waking up one morning to find a newspaper on your front porch. Here in Tampa, the fact that the paper is actually on your front porch is miracle enough. Imagine further that this ordinary looking paper isn’t today’s paper at all, but rather tomorrow’s edition. If you could trust that what you held was the genuine article, so to speak, just think of the possibilities. For most of us our thoughts turn to the myriad ways in which we could enrich ourselves: sports scores, lottery numbers, even stock tips.
Because I was fairly certain I would be asked to review this second season of Jericho, I did not watch any of the episodes as they aired. With the writer’s strike many shows were going through problems, and I guess I wanted to see how it all shook loose. So, I watched very little of anything from the networks for fear of being stranded in the middle of a compelling story. Now, before the Jericho fans out there devise any plans to have me roasted along with their next batch of nuts, let me assure you I am not a monitored watcher and participated in no survey. They tend to shy away from us critic types.
I’m not sure how many people are familiar with the process of moviemaking, but when a film is not up to studio expectation and takes a long time to finally arrive to theaters after filming has wrapped, the result is sometimes due to financial issues with the studio. But most of the time it’s due to the fact that the studio has seen the final product, and it’s so abhorrent and without any value, redeeming, comic or otherwise, that it will be released as quietly and without recognition as possible. Now I don’t know if there were any financial issues surrounding Strange Wilderness, but I will say this: the film was shooting as far back as December 2005 and was released in February 2008, and at this point on rottentomatoes.com, there is not one positive review from the three dozen that are on the site. I’ll leave it to you to decide what the reasons why are.
“The man is Richard Kimble and, not surprisingly, the man is tired. Tired of looking over his shoulder, the ready lie of the buses and freight trains. Richard Kimble is tired of running…”
The elusive “one armed man” is one of the best known television icons of all time. The plight of Dr. Richard Kimball has been the subject of numerous imitations and even a feature film staring Harrison Ford as Kimball and Tommy Lee Jones as his pursuer.
Felix and Oscar return for a fourth year of laughs in The Odd Couple. Not much has changed in the world of Oscar and Felix, but isn’t that what you were hoping to hear? What I found interesting in this somewhat weaker season is that even when the actors were beginning to realize that the show was slipping, the pair never missed a beat in their own chemistry. Often it seems they lacked interest in the material when their characters were apart
Working in Hawaii on one of televisions hottest shows in the 1970’s was too good a job for most of the cast and crew of Hawaii Five-0. This meant that there was very little cast turnover for the series in general, and none going into the fourth year. Jack Lord saw his star rise considerably, and while he began to see some serious pay hikes, even he wasn’t about to kill the golden goose. With this kind of consistency, fans were never disappointed
Paramount has been late to the Blu party but more than makes up for it with the recent addition of There Will Be Blood on Blu-ray. The film is such a visually visceral experience that I can now no longer stand to see the recent standard DVD version of the film. Now, it’s important that I clarify that this is not to say that the transfer is anywhere near the best I’ve seen. In fact, I’m a bit disappointed. I’m commenting mostly on how much HD in general complements this film. This is now the second time I’ve watched this film in a relatively short span of time.
It sounds like nothing new. Hard boiled detective uses computers and other forms of technology to solve cases. It isn’t anything new, except the detective in question is Joe Mannix and the series aired in 1967. The computer that Mannix used took up an entire room and was queried using cardboard punchcards. This wasn’t science fiction. We’re not talking some newly discovered Irwin Allen series. Mannix didn’t go after aliens or robots. This was a down to earth gritty detective show.
It might be hard for me to admit, but there are certain instances where having a high definition transfer of even a modern film is not necessarily a better thing. The recent Blu-ray release of Cloverfield is one such instance. There is no question that the transfer is about as sharp and clean as anything I’ve seen on Blu to date. The problem is that it only helps to accent the stylistic flaws inherent in this kind of film. The most noticeable improvement is in the first third of the film. Of course, that part of Cloverfield is about as entertaining as watching paint dry.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you. That old axiom has never been more true than for David Vincent in the Martin Quinn series The Invaders. Quinn was best known for his police procedural shows like The FBI. At the time of the The Invaders Quinn was going into the final season of one of his most popular shows, The Fugitive. While most people over the years have compared The Invaders to that Quinn production, they were really not as similar as all that.
This is the first half of the third season of Rawhide. Long before Clint Eastwood was making our day as Dirty Harry or even roaming the badlands without a name for Sergio Leone, he was working the cattle drive on Rawhide. Rawhide was created to take advantage of the huge Western film and television wave that Hollywood had been riding for nearly a decade. With huge ratings for Gunsmoke and Bonanza among others, Rawhide was a bit of an unlikely success.
The set comprises the second half of the second season of Gunsmoke. The show was still in black and white and in the half hour format. Some of the best episodes of the set included Bloody Hands. For once a western dealt with conscience. When Dillon begins to have haunting dreams and pangs of guilt over killing three bad guys, he tries to back down from a fight. Has Dillon gone yellow? Arness does a better than average job on this rather thought provoking episode.
When last I reviewed a season of JAG, a couple of the show’s fans had a few problems which I will attempt to address here. The first was about knocking a show I wasn’t extremely fluent in. Unfortunately, when I’m called upon to review a season of any series there is no time, or money for that matter, to go back and watch several years of the show to get acquainted. Secondly, I believe that a series season needs to be able to stand on its own
We’re in the US Marines, boys and who could have guessed that it would be so much fun? I often wondered how the real life members of The Corp think about Gomer Pyle. It would have made a great extra. I remember one of the F Troop sets offered a look at members of the real unit. With only another season to go I hope Paramount looks over the idea.
Just in time for the release of one of the most eagerly awaited films in years comes a new box set of the Indiana Jones Adventures. The problem is that these transfers are not upgrades so, aside from squeezing out a few extra bucks, what’s the point? I’m sure that The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull will add hundreds of millions to the Paramount coffers, so this just looks like greed to me.
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SpongeBob SquarePants — Pest of the West 
The Ruins (Unrated Edition) 
Jake and the Fatman: Season One, Vol. 1 
The Spiderwick Chronicles (Blu-ray) ![The Spiderwick Chronicles [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](http://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/the-spiderwick-chronicles-blu-ray-large.jpg)
Early Edition - The First Season 
Strange Wilderness 
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