Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 9th, 2011
“Ride into this world all alone. God takes your soul. You’re on your own.
The crow flies straight, a perfect line on the devil’s back until you die.
Gotta look this life in the eye”.
When these guys send a message, they don’t use Western Union.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 8th, 2011
“A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another. If these minds love one another, the home will be as beautiful as a flower garden. But if these minds get out of harmony with one other, it is like a storm that plays havoc with the garden.”
To the point, Criminal Minds is very compelling television. Ever since The Silence Of The Lambs and perhaps long before, we have been fascinated by serial killers and the profilers who try to get inside their heads.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 8th, 2011
“Every story has a beginning, but ours doesn’t start the way you might think. Sure, it begins on a street that looks like most and with a family that was, for the most part, normal…ordinary.”
Superheroes are big business these days. I’m not just talking the blockbuster tentpole films, either. Television has enjoyed a bit of a resurgence thanks to shows like Heroes. All we’ve been waiting for was someone to come up with a fresh take on the whole thing.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on September 3rd, 2011
A Mini-series is probably the hardest thing to review for me. Movies are fairly easy, even the ones that exceed two hours. Television series since they are episodic in nature, one can watch a few, come back and watch a few more. Video Games despite taking triple the effort of an average movie are easy because they are interactive. But most mini-series are usually 3-4 hours long and really can not be broken up. Well for today’s review, multiply that duration by two and we have the Thomas Hardy Collection.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 2nd, 2011
“You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension — a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.”
We finally come to the last year of the original show’s run. The hour-long episode experiment didn’t last, and the show returned to its traditional half-hour format.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 1st, 2011
In many ways Cougar Town appears to be Friends 20 or more years later. It’s not just the fact that the former Friends star Courtney Cox heads the call sheet on the new situation comedy. There are a ton of other elements that appear to tie the shows together. Like the old NBC show, the core of this show is a tight group of friends. They have a lot of the same kinds of adventures and conversations as the old gang used to have. The big difference here is that the adventures and the talk come from an older, if not more mature,
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 1st, 2011
“It’s a question we all ask ourselves. Do I trust the people who live next door? Will that couple across the street be there when I need them? Can I count on the woman who lives down the block? Yes, good neighbors are people we can rely on. But if we discover our neighbor can’t be trusted, then it may be time to move.”
What you can count on from the neighbors of Wisteria Lane is another season of secrets, betrayals, and fashionable housewives.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2011
“You cannot run from a vampire.”
We’ve all seen the young girls out there swooning over the Twilight films and books as if the whole vampire idea had just been invented. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the television networks and cable channels would be taking notice. No, it’s not the swooning teenagers, it’s the green being transferred from their pockets to their coffers. But vampires on television are not new either. Dracula itself was a series. In the 1960’s and 70’s there was Dark Shadows and the vampire Barnabas Collins.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2011
Dexter Morgan (Hall) is a forensic lab rat for the Miami-Dade Police. He really knows blood splatter. He should, because he moonlights as a killer. It seems that poor old Dex just can’t help himself. His parents were criminals, and he witnessed his mother’s brutal slashing by a chainsaw gang when he was just a young boy. He was adopted by Harry Morgan (Remar), a police officer. Harry saw the killer instinct in Dexter and taught him how to channel the urges for the sake of good.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 25th, 2011
The series was previewed in a two-part episode of NCIS entitled Legend. A dead Marine in Washington led to a terrorist cell in LA, where Gibbs and McGee join the LA branch to bring down the bad guys. Here we meet the new characters and get a chance to get comfortable with them. However, by the time the show aired its first episode, there were some pretty major changes for the show already. It’s not uncommon, and the Legend episode was really a back-door pilot.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 25th, 2011
“Unlike the rest of us, sex, lies, and scandal never take a vacation. Instead they take the Long Island Expressway and head East to the Hamptons. Some would say summer is their busiest season. Think Park Avenue, but with tennis whites and Bain de Soleil. The players change, but the game remains the same.”
With internet blogging becoming such a common trend, we just knew that someone somehow would work it into a clever little plot. It started as a series of adolescent books that appealed mostly to the teen girls.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 24th, 2011
NCIS is a spin-off, of sorts, from the popular military lawyer show JAG. You could say that NCIS is the Order to JAG’s Law. The NCIS is a real government agency that deals with criminal activity inside or involving the US Navy or Marine Corps. The series has an incredibly global feel and honestly looks damn good for television. Production values are high, and the location stuff is out of this world, or at least all over it.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 24th, 2011
“I never thought we’d get back to this table. I can’t tell you how good it felt to have dinner together again. We hadn’t done that since the accident. To be honest, sometimes it felt like we’d never get over it. But somehow we did.”
But will we ever get over the Walker family? This was to be the final season of the series, and the network wasn’t exactly kind in its last days. The budget was slashed so that most of the characters appear in limited episodes. You won’t find near so many of the Walker family gatherings as you did in previous years.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 10th, 2011
“This is me now. A man haunted by the sacrifices he’s had to make. A man who ran and never looked back. I left my country to begin a new life, one where I could finally blend with those I was living amongst, become just another face in the crowd.”
Well… anyone who has seen even one episode of HBO’s half-hour comedy Eastbound & Down knows that isn’t going to happen. Former major league pitcher Kenny Powers could no more easily blend into a crowd than Charlie Manson at a law enforcement convention.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 3rd, 2011
An ancient facility beneath Antarctica becomes the launching platform to the lost city of Atlantis. Atlantis is buried beneath an ocean in another galaxy and can only be reached with an additional symbol on the Stargate. Because of power limitations this trip, at least for the time being, is a one-way adventure. A crew of scientists and military officers from many countries assemble to explore the Pegasus Galaxy from the Atlantis gate.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 27th, 2011
I’ve seen some dysfunctional families on television over the years. Haven’t we all? It’s fun to laugh at someone else’s flaws. Along comes Showtime, and it’s rather hard to classify the series The United States Of Tara. This one takes dysfunction to a whole new level. Tara (Collette) suffers from multiple-personality disorder. Laughing yet? She has managed to control the problem by using medications and attending frequent therapy sessions. But the medication is sapping her creative ability.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on July 25th, 2011
“Look, you got what you wanted, I’m officially out of control.”
Based loosely on (Executive Producer) Mark Walberg’s meteoric rise to fame, Entourage has always been a male bonding fantasy; it plays like a boys-will-be-boys version of Sex in the City. Following Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his posse’s misadventures through the decadent lifestyles of the hyper-rich and fabulously famous carried with it a certain insider’s credibility and made for fun, if not slightly debauched TV voyeurism.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on July 23rd, 2011
I have never been a huge fan of Tyler Perry’s creations. Particularly, House of Payne is something I really don’t care for. Mostly this is due to the fact that the original story that made the household dynamic of mixed family members what it is throughout the series came from a story about a woman who was a crack addict and arsoned her own house. After seeing this story, and the completely insensitive way it handled drug addiction struck me as so foul that I have yet to find forgiveness.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 21st, 2011
The fourth season of The Virginian was a milestone year for the groundbreaking western. Four of the show’s regular characters would be appearing in their final episodes. Lee J. Cobb was never completely happy doing the show, and while he always acted professionally, his castmates all knew he wanted to leave. Cobb finally left halfway through this season even though he would remain on the opening credits for the entire year. This would also be the first and last year for Diane Roter as Jennifer Sommers, the Judge’s niece.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 17th, 2011
Dog the Bounty Hunter: This Family Means Business is a six episode DVD special release. The series chronicles the Chapman family as they chase down fugitives in scenic Hawaii. The show has been on A&E for seven years now and has become a flagship series for the network. The show introduces a fugitive, investigates the fugitive, and catches the fugitive. The show has a strict formula that it adheres to and rarely differs from. This particular special release arrives to celebrate the show crossing the two hundred episode threshold.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on July 16th, 2011
Somewhere between Spike TV and the Discovery Channel lies the History Channel’s take on nature programs. Underwater Universe is the collision of sensationalist and informative television. 5 episodes profiling the deadliest attributes of the Oceans, all told with melodramatic statements, fast editing but still plenty of experts offering scientific analyses to the “hows” and “whys” of what each episode is featuring.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on July 12th, 2011
My childhood was full of cartoons from all walks of life. There are classics such as the Jetsons and Daffy Duck (notice I did not say Bugs Bunny) and then more recent products of my time period like Transformers and X-Men. But I always had an eye out for those cartoons that were anything but conventional. I recently got the chance to review Thundercats and I hoped that my childhood memories would hold up. Thundercats, HOOOO!
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 11th, 2011
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 started in 1967. The computer that Mannix used took up an entire room and was queried using cardboard punch cards. This wasn’t science fiction. We’re not talking some newly discovered Irwin Allen series. Mannix didn’t go after aliens or robots.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on July 11th, 2011
Oh, how the rich can get into mischief. This DVD set is smack dab in the middle of Dynasty’s successful nine season run. The mudslinging, both literal and figurative, was at its height in this fifth season, and no $200 haircut or $1000 outfit was left unruffled by the various scandals and plots set into the web of these wealthy Denver residents. In fact, this season was the one and only time this series won a Golden Globe for best TV drama.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on July 4th, 2011
The story begins with the immediate validation of superstition. Anesi Gebara is the head of an illegal lottery and so numbers are crucially linked to his life, both in his work and in the aforementioned superstitions that haunt his life.
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