Posts by Gino Sassani

Steven Bochco is no stranger to innovative television. Hill Street Blues is arguably the best cop show ever made. Even his failures are praised for their innovativeness and freshness. Remember Cop Rock? NYPD Blue didn’t just push the prime time envelope. It tore the envelope to pieces and blew it away with hurricane force winds. George Carlin made a career out of his “7 words you can’t say on television”. Along comes NYPD Blue and Carlin just might need a new act. Language and nudity made this the first R-Rated primetime program. The pilot arrived with a flutter of controversy. Morality groups were vocal and sponsors were scarce. Twenty percent of ABC’s affiliates refused to show the pilot at all. When you watch these DVDs it’s hard to understand what all the noise was about. Today this stuff is the norm, and once again Bochco changed TV forever.

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Jerry Bruckheimer becomes yet another A-List film producer to take a shot at the television drama. I have to admit that I never gave this show a prayer of success when I first saw it three years ago. It’s not that I thought it wasn’t good. I loved it. I thought it would be too cerebral for the normal Joe six-pack audience. Boy was I wrong. CSI has become the hottest drama in prime time, and like Law and Order before it has begun to spin off into another incarnation with CSI: Miami. The characters are engaging and it seems we’re all obsessed with some morbid fascination of murder. You’ll get a hefty fix with this box.

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How do you spoof something that is already a spoof itself? That’s easy. You mix a reality show concept with a contrived Hollywood script. You hire the worst actors you can find and you call it The Real World Movie: The Lost Season. Even if you’re a fan of the MTV reality series, you won’t find anything remotely entertaining here. If you don’t even like the TV show, then my advice is to run. Now we have bad actors pretending to be people who are pretending to be spontaneous.

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To be fair, The Ring is not the most original horror film to come along recently. It is not only based on the cult classic Japanese film Ringu, but at times mimics the script word for word. There are also enough similarities to the recent Fear Dot Com to make one take pause. It is one of the scariest and most atmospheric films to appear in quite a few years. Since the 1980’s the state of the American horror film has been in a steady decline. Yes, special effects have advanced light years since the days of Karloff and Lugosi, but the end result has more often been to gross out rather than engross. The Ring delivers solid acting, a competent plot, and wonderfully eerie cinematography.

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