Posts by Gino Sassani

CBS releases the 18th season of NCIS on DVD, and just the sound of that gives one reason to pause. There are few shows or franchises that get to live in that rarified air. In the modern age of television, only the Dick Wolf Law & Order series has accomplished this kind of sheer mass of episodes. The NCIS landscape is certainly in for some big changes. The New Orleans show ended with its 7th season last year, and we'll be talking about that show in the days to come. This 18th season of the mothership includes the 400th episode of just that series. The franchise will close in on its 900th episode next season with the addition of NCIS: Hawaii. CBS still has production facilities in the Island State, and those will soon be put to good use extending the family that actually started with JAG, and if you include that 10-year run, the franchise is over 1000 episodes. Shows don't last that long without doing something right.

The 400th episode of NCIS is a bit of a special one. The show goes back in time to the days when Gibbs (Harmon) and Ducky (McCallum) first met. A current case takes them back to that meeting, and we get to learn some of the quirks of that relationship and where it came from. In fact, if there is a theme for season 18, it's Gibbs and his relationships. A lot of the season's stories really bring some of those relationships to new levels, and for some, full circle. Gibbs is absolutely the big story this season. Imagine a character that has been on a show for 400 episodes and he can still evolve and expand. That's exactly what you're going to get here.

"Let's just cut the crap and get on with it, shall we?"

You shouldn't need a primer on the NCIS franchise by now. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last decade or longer, you're up to speed on these guys. If not, you still could have some fun and enjoy the CBS DVD release of NCIS: L.A., but NCIS has been around for nearly 20 years, and this particular version has been around for 12 seasons now. That's a lot of characterizations under the bridge and a ton of character evolution and stories that can't help but give you maximum mileage out of the release. If you aren't up to speed, you can check out over 30 seasons of various NCIS reviews by just banging it here: NCIS Reviews. That should keep you busy long enough to get you to the point that we're here talking about Season 13. So hopefully you are up to speed, and we can get on with it. Shall we? 

It was 1975, and cop shows were all the rage. The only way a crime show might be able to distance itself from the crowd was to introduce the audience to a group of cops that were not quite so known and show off special-unit kinds of skills and equipment. The solution in 1975 was the L.A. SWAT team. Most folks didn't know what SWAT was. It stands for Special Weapons And Tactics. They are the guys who have the cool armored trucks and go where the serious action can be found. Hostage situations and severe firepower that overwhelms the typical cops on the beat are no match for these elite forces. So Steve Forrest and Robert Urich took our televisions by storm. The amazing thing is that the series was a mid-season replacement in its first year and only really lasted one complete season. It was 37 episodes and out. But the theme by Barry De Vorzon became a top-40 hit on the radio, and while the ratings never really caught fire, something about the whole experience remained in the pop culture all of this time. An A-list film in 2003 that starred Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farrell, Jeremy Renner, Michelle Rodriguez, and LL Cool J did well enough at the box office to spawn a few direct-to-video sequels in name only. And it all went away once again.

Jump to 2017, and it appears little has changed. Cop and crime shows are all the rage, and the only way to stand out is to introduce the audience to a new kind of unit or team. That's how we got the NCIS, Criminal Minds and CSI franchises, to be sure. So why not pull out a few old tricks. That appears to be television gold these days with remakes of Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver, Magnum P.I., Charmed, and The Equalizer all having significant runs in the primetime schedule. Why not bring out SWAT? That's exactly what happened, and here we are four years later with the fourth season hitting the video shelves on DVD.

What a great time it was to be a teen in the late 1970’s. No, I’m not referring to disco music. It was a great time to go to the movies. It was the culmination of the perfect date, and Hollywood was riding the beginning of a trend that remains alive and healthy today. I’m talking, of course, about the slasher film. You could argue that Hitchcock started the ball rolling in 1961 with Psycho, but it would be decades before that film would find its true audience and plethora of imitators. Although The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween came before Friday The 13^th, can it be argued that any horror film franchise is as widely known? The truth is that even the man behind the film, Sean Cunningham, never really knew what it was that he had. It was never his intent to follow the film with a barrage of sequels. He also scoffed at the idea that Jason could become the centerpiece for future films. By now Jason has become such an iconic character that there is an entire generation out there that doesn’t know that Jason wasn’t the culprit in the first film. Jason’s stature has reached the heights of the classic monsters of the Universal days. While some of us hesitate to put his name and hockey mask up there with the likes of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, and The Mummy, the recognition and sheer dollars generated make it difficult not to. By the beginning of the 1980’s names like Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers would be scaring audiences around the world, rendering the classics somewhat silly in the eyes of a more visceral generation of teens.

Paramount has put together an impressive collection for fans of the franchise. Because of rights issues it includes only the first eight films, but they loaded on all of the vintage extras and some from the recent SHOUT mega set. This is a good budget way to get these films on Blu-ray if you don't need quite all the bells and whistles from that set. Here are the films you'll get:

"Once the world was full of wonders, but it belongs to the humans now. We, creatures, have all but disappeared. Daemons ... vampires ... witches ... hiding in plain sight. Ill at ease even with each other. But, as my father used to say, in every ending, there is a new beginning. It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with A Discovery Of Witches."

And that's how it all starts. The ambitious series from Sky is based upon The All Souls Trilogy novels by Deborah Harkness. In the first season of eight episodes, we are introduced to Diana Bishop, played by Teresa Palmer. She a witch who is living in a world where there are three species of creatures: witches, vampires, and daemons (Demons). Diana 's parents were killed when she was young because of their witchcraft, at least that's what she's been brought up to believe by her Aunt Sarah (Kingston) and her lover "Auntie" Em (Pettiford). No, we're not in Kansas anymore. Notice no one is singing Carry On Wayward Son. This isn't Supernatural, after all. Never mind all of that. Diane isn't a very good witch, because her powers appear to be stunted. She doesn't understand why until she becomes a visiting professor at Oxford and requests a book from their antiquities library. The book is called Ashmore 782, otherwise known as The Book Of Life. No one has been able to find it for centuries. But when Diane summons the book, she gets it. What she didn't know was that she was setting in motion a series of events that will cut across each of the creature lines.

"I saw this movie."

When the film Stargate was released in 1994, I had very high hopes for the movie. The concept was rather brilliant, and I anticipated a kind of Star Trek without the ship. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin hit it out of the park with Independence Day two years later, but I was sadly very disappointed in Stargate. I loved the wonderful mythology that combined ancient history and aliens. The concept had so much promise but was bogged down in awkward pacing and some of the worst storytelling I've seen in a big-budget science fiction film. So when the television series debuted on Showtime in 1997, I didn't even bother to check it out. I didn't pay any attention. If I had, I might have given it a try because of the involvement of Richard Dean Anderson, because I loved him in MacGyver, but I intentionally avoided watching the show. Nearly two years later, we had just moved into a new house and I was assembling a metal shelf unit. It was tedious work, so I put on the television for background while I tightened about a thousand small nuts and bolts. The cable box just so happened to be tuned to Showtime, and they were running a string of Stargate SG-1 episodes. I have to admit I was captivated by what I saw. The promise I was so angry had been squandered in the film was very much alive in this television series. The characters/actors were all compelling. Missing out on the show from the beginning was one of the biggest entertainment mistakes I ever made. It's become one of my favorite shows of all time, right up there with Star Trek: The Original Series, Hill Street Blues, The Rockford Files, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is science fiction television at its absolute best. A rare case where the television series blows the film from which it was adapted away. That hadn't happened so dramatically since M*A*S*H.