Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 13th, 2009
Night Court appeared on the scene at NBC in 1984 and was to last 8 seasons. If you thought it looked and sounded a lot like Barney Miller, you won’t be surprised to learn that a number of key people, including creator Reinhold Weege, came from that classic cop comedy. Several key elements of Miller can be found in Night Court. The themes are almost identical with both beginning with an easily identifiable bass run. The most important imported element from Miller was the constant parade of the kookiest and craziest criminals this side of the Cuckoo’s Nest.From a hick farmer played by then beginner Brent Spiner to hookers with hearts, Night Court relied heavily on the eccentric character to provide most of its laughs.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 12th, 2009
Top Secret comes to DVD in a new "I Love the '80s" edition. The film continues the legacy of David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams as kings of sight gags and the ludicrously unexpected. Made in 1984, the film stars a young Val Kilmer as rocker Nick Rivers, an artist so clearly modeled after Elvis that he even sings potential lover Hillary Flammond a spoof version of "Are You Lonesome Tonight".
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 12th, 2009
"When you give up your dream, you die."
Jennifer Beals and Michael Nouri star in Flashdance, a misguided, but highly entertaining piece of nostalgia from director Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction).
A lot has happened since its 1983 release. Still, it’s hard to imagine anyone that grew up in or around the eighties has escaped the iconic image of Beals in her cutoff gray sweatshirt, long legs bared for the world to see. Harder to imagine is people exist who could have made it their whole lives without hearing at least one song from the amazing (for the times) soundtrack.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 11th, 2009
Welcome to 1972, when the sexual revolution is simultaneously in full swing, yet also showing signs of exhaustion (all that swinging can wear a body down, don’t you know). Barbi (Anna Biller) is a model housewife who is awakening to the feeling that there is a world outside her four walls. When she and her husband have a falling out, she hooks up with her more extroverted neighbour Sheila (Bridget Brno), who is also in the midst of a marriage crisis, and the two of them seek new love by taking work at an escort agency. What follows is a picaresque series of encounters, with nary a sexploitation angle ignored.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 10th, 2009
What a sordid mess!
Melrose Placelingered in the dark recesses of viewers’ hearts and souls as the guiltiest of pleasures for seven seasons. Wrapping up at the end of its seventh season with a ridiculously clichéd fake death twist for two major characters, the ingredients for it all are here in the fifth season – or the first half of it.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on February 9th, 2009
My place of birth was in Jamaica, NY in the summer of 1975. However, my parents decided to move me around a bit and where I grew up was actually a lot more south than that. Many times in my youth I visited New York to see my grandmother and wondered (often aloud) what it would be grow up in New York rather the suburbs of a southern state. My grandparents would tell me stories, my dad would tell me stories as well as people within earshot of my curiosity. Films helped in this respect too and another fine film about that experience ended up in my hands.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on February 9th, 2009
Woody Allen lands a terrific cast with his latest attempt at comedy, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but there is something very off about the way these characters are written. Annoying pretentious dialogue renders a whimsical, fairy-tale-like backdrop ineffectual, causing each moment of silence to come all too slowly.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 4th, 2009
Hedda and Neal (Lydia Lunch and Don Bajema) are a couple whose relationship needs work. They have retreated to an old plantation house for precisely that reason, but then Hedda invites over her former lover, Jackson (Henry Rollins). The inevitable triangle that occurs is intercut with flashes of other events from the house’s past.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 4th, 2009
I was first introduced into the somewhat twisted world of Dave Barry in 1986 when I moved to Florida. The Tampa paper carried his Sunday column, and all I can remember is that it had something to do with dinosaurs on the beach and that I couldn’t stop laughing. For years afterward both my wife and I made the column regular Sunday reading. As years went on other things fill one’s life, and I only occasionally read the material until he disappeared almost completely from the Central Florida scene
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 4th, 2009
Who says no one likes a guy who’s negative all the time? Becker has got to be one of the most cynical, grumpy, and negative characters to grace our sit-com screens. He’s a guy you probably love to hate, and he’s also hilarious. Ted Danson spent over a decade behind the bar at Cheers and could have easily called it a career. You know, stop while you’re ahead. Instead he climbed right back into the television saddle and reemerged as Dr. Becker.
