Disc Type

"Rule 91: When you decide to walk away, don't look back."

CBS releases the 19th 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, a new NCIS: Hawaii has now had its first year, and we'll be talking about that show in the days to come. The franchise will crossed its 900th episode this season with the addition of NCIS: Hawaii.

“In the 1940’s, a new genre – film noir – emerged from the world of hard-boiled pulp magazines, paperback thrillers, and sensational crime movies. These films, tough and unsentimental, depicted a black and white universe at once brutal, erotic, and morally ambiguous.”

Film Noir officially started in the 40’s, but the movement was well underway by the early 30’s. You can trace its roots to the Great Depression and the arrival of the dime pulp magazines. These were highly stylized, mostly mystery stories that provided cheap escapism for the masses who were not having a good time of it. Writers like Raymond Chandler crafted the mold that was easily transferred to the silver screen. These were low-budget films that were intended to be second billing with the more mainstream releases. They were shot quickly. Many have a very flat look, created intentionally.

"Most things happen unexpectedly, even the apocalypse!"

I can't deny that Italians, we love to cook and eat. It's a stereotype that I embrace with pride. So it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that food finds its way intruding in other aspects of life. In the 50's and 60's we called the Italian western films of directors like Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns. Later we would talk about the Italian horror films from masters like Mario Bava and Dario Argento Spaghetti Nightmares. Well, why should we leave out the same period's Italian science fiction films? So even if it's not terribly original, I'm going to coin the term Ziti Sci-Fi. One of the true masters of Ziti Sci-Fi has to be director Antonio Margheriti. Don't be too surprised if you don't know the name. His films were always low-budget affairs, and he usually directed under the more American-sounding name of Anthony Dawson or Anthony M. Dawson. He understood that the American audience was the Holy Grail of box office success

"For those of you who haven't met me, you might call me the undernourished Alfred Hitchcock. The great British craftsman and I do share something in common: an interest in the oddball, a predilection toward the bizarre. And this place is nothing if not bizarre, by virtue of the paintings you see hanging around me."

When I mention the name Rod Serling, I'll bet that The Twilight Zone is the first thing that pops into your head. And why not? It would be very hard, indeed, to argue against the impact that The Twilight Zone has had on television. To say that the series was a milestone in that medium would be an understatement of the worst kind. When Rod Serling brought his landmark series to CBS in October of 1959, television was still very new. No one was quite sure what the future held for that magical box. For five years Rod Serling would enter our living rooms with the most bizarre tales we'd ever seen.

With streaming working the way it does now, every studio in the world is churning out hours and hours of television to please a growing number of viewers on multiple platforms. There's more material produced in one year today than was produced in any decade leading up to the day Netflix opened the door on a new trend. It's changed the way we watch television, and that extends to the networks that still operate over the airwaves. We no longer sit and watch an hour or two of television in what was once called prime time. Now we binge. The latest statistics tell us that the average person watches a minimum of four hours at a time, usually the same show. That means not only more content but a greater range of content types. A-list actors and filmmakers are joining the trend, and they're now able to cater to pretty much every taste or genre. Along comes AMC+ and the first effort to bring the Spaghetti Western to "television".