Disc Reviews

“I fought for the sport of it, never to kick someone’s ass. It started in the ring and ended in the ring. Fighting should be a last resort, not a first.”

Before this quote, I must I was mildly concerned about the message this film was sending to the public. I wholeheartedly agree with the statement; however, before the words were uttered, I was mildly confused by the behavior of some of the characters in Fight to the Finish. Fortunately, the confusion did not last long, as I was quickly brought up to speed about the characters’ actions.

Here is an instance where there was so much promise going into this film, but because of its lack of restraint, it blew an opportunity to be a good film.  The Midnight Man offers up a fun premise, a good cast, and high production values, but what plagues this film is a script that is filled with so much bad dialog you’ll wish you were watching a silent film.  Quick lesson in screenwriting: don’t try to be Shane Black or Quentin Tarantino; they are a class of their own, and to try to copy them only shines a light on how bad your dialog really is.  I’m being hard on this film, because had this film shown some restraint and kept the dialog simple, this could have been a really cool film.

Grady (Will Kemp) is the guy people use when things are about to get messy and you need to have your problem eliminated quickly.  He’s the perfect hitman because of a special gift that he has the ability to not feel pain; the sense of touch means absolutely nothing to him.  Because of his superhuman threshold against the sense of feeling, it has given him bravado that borderline makes him a reckless individual, but still he gets results.

Back in October I wrote about The Facts of Life: Season 7 in which I dealt with the general history and overall dynamics of the show. I suggest you go back and check that out so I don’t cover the same ground twice. The big addition that year was George Clooney. Not many series have as long and healthy a run as The Facts of Life, but as they age changes are forced on them. One of those changes that occurred in the opening episodes of Season 8 is Charlotte Rae’s (Mrs. Edna Garrett) decision to leave the show. The transition is handled gracefully with Edna’s marriage to a doctor who is leaving to help those in the third world by serving in the Peace Corps. This brings her sister, Beverly Ann Stickle (Cloris Leachman) to try and take up the mantle of house mother to the girls. I’m sure everyone knows the girls, named Blair, Jo, Tootie, and Mindy. The main purpose of releasing these programs from the 1980’s on DVD is to relive earlier times in our own lives as much as to see the programs themselves. Maybe mothers want to share life lessons with their daughters from a much simpler and, at this point, almost alien time. The show was part broad comedy and part melodrama, focusing on the teenage girls and their coming of age. The comedy on the show was, frankly, full of hamminess and cheesiness. With so much ham and cheese, you weren’t hungry after one episode, so imagine bingeing on a season of shows. The life lessons learned were basic but well-intentioned and good-natured. On one level, things have changed enormously since the 1980’s, but core values and human decency are still important. It’s hard to find that kind of innocence today in television programming, but it was almost required in those days.

Most of the episodes tend to run together with a predictable sameness with some rising to the top and some sinking to the bottom. One particularly difficult one to watch was an episode with Fabian and Bobby Rydel playing themselves, but then flashing back into the sixties when they were popular. I mentioned ham and cheese, but I forgot to mention corn. This was a lowlight of corniness with the girls playing 60’s teenagers and Leachman as a jaded beatnik. One of the highlights was an episode when the young orphan who was always hanging out with them, Andy Moffett (Mackensie Astin), was going to a heavy metal concert by a group called The Walking Dead. They were ahead of their time on that one.

The premise itself is relatively simple and requires no real past knowledge to get on board. Unit 15 is the elite unit of an unnamed Canadian metropolitan police force. The unit is led by Staff Sergeant Oliver Shaw (Gordon). Each episode begins with his roll call. Apparently in Canada it's called parade. He does the usual job of giving out riding partners and assignments and providing the general "hot" information for the shift turn-out. The show focuses on a group of rookie cops assigned here. This is where it gets tricky. They are still pretty much referred to as rookies, but it's the fifth season, and it's clear they've been there more than a year by now. The episodes follow their day tour. This is pretty much "Grey's Anatomy with guns".

It's an awkward show, to say the least. The police aspects of the show are actually above average. There's obviously some good creative writing on this team, and each of the police stories was pretty interesting. The show manages to look fresh and the criminal stuff not quite so hashed out. If Rookie Blue wanted to be a straight police drama, it could be a very good one. Only I suspect it's not what they really want to be. The only trouble with these good cop stories is they tend to get abbreviated so that we can get to the musical chairs of the romantic entanglements. That's the audience Rookie Blue is really gunning for, and that's where they lose me to a certain degree. Let's just say there's more kissing than cuffing going on here.

If there is a television series in the history of the industry as American or timeless as The Andy Griffith Show, I haven't seen it. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone with strong negative feelings about the series. It was one of those organic and comfortable productions that reached deep into the core of rural America. Even if we lived in a bustling city, there were aspects of the show that still rang true. It was populated with the kind of familiar faces that it wasn't hard for anyone in the audience to smile in remembrance of a character they've known in real life. And even after 50 years, the series still speaks to that certain aspect of the friendly small Southern town. A lot of the credit for that peaceful easy feeling must be credited to the titular star Andy Griffith himself.

It all started as an episode of The Danny Thomas Show called Danny Meets Andy Griffith in February of 1960. In October of that same year, the first episode of the show ran. That was the first time television audiences took a trip down to Mayberry. There they met Andy Taylor (Griffith), a widower with a young son named Opie, played by future Happy Days star and superstar director Ron (it was Ronnie then) Howard. The relationship could be summed up in the popular series opening that found the father and son heading to their favorite fishing hole with poles slung on their shoulders. All the while, the soon-to-be-famous whistled theme put us in just the right mood. Andy was helped out at the house by Aunt Bea (Bavier), who always had something "mighty fine" cooking or baking in the oven.