Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 14th, 2011
"Within the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit are rapid response teams known as RED CELLS. These nontraditional teams operate outside the bureaucracy of and report solely to the Director of the FBI. "
It started as a back-door pilot last year on an April episode of Criminal Minds called The Flight. We are introduced to the Red Cell Team. The team is headed by one Sam Cooper, played by Forest Whitaker. Sam's talent is that he can really get inside of a killer's head. He has a kind of empathy for the killer and can easily put himself in the killer's shoes. Of course, it takes a mental toll, and he suffers for the skill. Don't confuse empathy for feeling sorry for the killer. Michael Kelly plays his right-hand man John Sims, or as he's affectionately called, Prophet. He's an ex-con who has received a full pardon for his crimes. He dedicated himself to using his insightful abilities to predict behavior for the good guys. Next up is Gina LaSalle, played by Beau Garrett. She's the heart of the team and the brains. Matt Ryan plays Mick Rawson who is an ex-military sharpshooter and one of the coolest behind a long-range rifle. The weak link of the group was not actually in the back-door pilot. Irritating as hell Janeane Garofalo might have single-handedly brought the promising show to its knees and off the schedule after a mere 13 episodes. She plays Beth Griffith, who is just as bleeding-heart and outspoken as the actress who plays her. She's been fired from unit to unit only to settle on this squad. It's obvious that someone on the crew is a huge fan of this idiot and decided she'd make a wonderful addition to the team. They figured we'd love watching her abrasive personality and thin acting skills on a weekly basis. Yeah, how's that working out for ya?
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."
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. The location would be completely scrapped. The show would get new digs in a covert building that appears to be a condemned water plant on the outside. I'm not quite sure why a public agency needed a secret hideout, but there it is. The show retained its high-tech look. They have a Minority Report-style computer system which remained the centerpiece of their operations room.
The show differed in several ways from its sister show. While LA was still a military show, that angle is downplayed here. The atmosphere for the team is more civilian-looking all the way around. There are seldom folks walking around in uniforms. The operations utilize more of the standard surveillance and undercover work. In the back-door pilot, the leader of the group was an agent who had history with Gibbs. Her name was Macy, and she was played by CSI alum Louise Lombard, who was gone when the series premiered in its own right. Later we are told she was killed. There's a lot more street work to be found here. That means car chases and lots of shootouts. The cases often deal with terrorists, so these guys break a lot of the rules. They don't let any silly Constitution stand in their way.
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.
Special Agent Gibbs (Harmon) heads up this group of criminal investigators. Harmon has always been good, but I dare you to find a character he’s played better. He just eats up the part. You won’t have any trouble believing that Gibbs is the seasoned veteran investigator leading this team. Special Agent DiNozzo (Weatherly) is a former Baltimore homicide detective who often lets his determination run his investigation into trouble. He’ll bend a rule or throw a punch, whatever it takes to bring down the bad guy. The newest member of the team is Israeli Mossad Agent Ziva David, played by Cote de Pablo, a newcomer to television. She has the unenviable task of replacing popular actress Sasha Alexander, who exited the show after two seasons. She is, perhaps, one of the most complicated characters I’ve yet to encounter in ensemble television. She’s difficult to read and shows a performance level beyond the scope of a beginner. Rounding out the cast are two very nice characters. Pauley Perrette plays the goth chick/forensic specialist Abby Sciuto. She reminds me a ton of the Penelope Garcia character from Criminal Minds. She’s flirty, far too informal for Gibbs, but is a lot smarter and tougher than she appears. Making himself more visible in this series is David McCallum as pathologist Ducky Millard. Ducky is the Quincy of the group as he checks out the bodies. His dry wit makes him my favorite character on the show.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by M. W. Phillips on August 10th, 2011
“The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands. It's a good non-specific symptom; I'm a big believer in it. A lot of people will tell you that a good phony fever is a dead lock, but, uh... you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor's office. That's worse than school. You fake a stomach cramp, and when you're bent over, moaning and wailing, you lick your palms. It's a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school.”
John Hughes was enjoying a creative peak in the 80s. He owned the teen coming-of-age genre with movies like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and Uncle Buck. Hughes wrote Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in less than a week to avoid a writers’ strike. The film was shot for a budget of $6 million as a love letter to Chicago. It is arguably his finest movie.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on July 25th, 2011
Rango (Johnny Depp) is a chameleon with an enormous imagination. In his terrarium, he has developed a social network with inanimate objects that would be the envy of Castaway’s Tom Hanks. He essentially lives inside his head, but then reality (perhaps – the film maintains a certain ambiguity here) suddenly intervenes and he finds himself cast from his safe, hermetic world. Marooned in the desert, he arrives in the town of Dirt, where his inclination for the dramatic has him claiming to be a sharp-shooting, quick-drawing hero. When he accidentally proves his claim by killing, through sheer stupid luck, a hawk that has been terrorizing the town, he is enlisted by the townspeople to defend them from the tyrants who keep them oppressed and thirsty.
Another day, another self-referential computer-animated film, this one taking on westerns rather than fairy tales. And sure, there are more references than you can shake a stick at, to westerns or otherwise (check out the lightning-fast nod to Depp’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas during the highway scene). But this isn’t just a pastiche. The love of classic westerns is palpable, and the film is unapologetic in its adoption of the genre’s convention, but it does take care to fully realize its characters. Visually, the film is extraordinary, displaying a rich palette of colours and moods, an imagination as exuberant as its protagonist’s (a dream sequence becomes exactly what Salvador Dali would have imagined had he been a thirsty chameleon), and the detail work of the animation is bleeding edge. Not everything in the narrative is exactly a surprise, but some pleasures are pleasures precisely because they are familiar, and there are plenty of charming eccentricities to make us forgive the occasional lapses into the been-there-done-that. Certainly one of the better animated films of the year.
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. This was a down-to-earth gritty detective show. Mike Connors played the tough-as-nails detective. He was perfect for the part and blended into the role seamlessly for 8 years.
The show was created by the team of Link and Levinson, who later gave us the detective in the rumpled raincoat, Columbo. It was groundbreaking in so many areas. While it might not be remembered today as one of the top detective shows, there can be no argument about the impact Mannix had on the genre. A decade later one of my favorite television detectives, Jim Rockford, would borrow rather heavily from Mannix. Like Rockford, Mannix was getting beat up a lot. They both had the same sense of style, wearing rather ugly sport jackets. Neither was afraid to bend the rules, or the law, when necessary. Again like Rockford, Mannix often falls for the wrong girl at the wrong time. Mannix was good with a gun and equally adept with his fists. The show received a ton of controversy from the start for the amount of violence it employed. Tame by today’s standards, Mannix was quite aggressive for its time. The joke was that the show’s producers mandated a fight or car chase every 15 minutes whether it was needed or not. I’m sure that wasn’t true, but nonetheless the show opened the floodgates for the detective shows that followed. In this first season, Mannix worked for the enigmatic detective agency, Intertect. They supplied him with the latest in modern technology and with his cases. His main company contact was Lou Wickersham, played by Joseph Campanella. Now Mannix is on his own and begins to resemble more and more these detectives that would eventually follow in his tire tracks.
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.
Both my age and lack of interest from the time I was between the ages of 1 to 5, when this show originally aired, betray any memories I may have of this program. Approaching it these days, I can clearly see how it was derivative of Dallas, its CBS rival (Dynasty having aired on ABC). If these wealthy folk are not in each other’s faces, they’re in each other’s beds.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on July 6th, 2011
There is hardly any differentiation between the Jackass series and its films, aside from a few more celebrity cameos and bigger budget stunts as the years have gone by. A testament to this is the “.5” editions of each film, which are literally cobbled together using rejected sketches and stunts from the original release. Unlike when such films as X-Men or Spiderman put out a DVD called 1.5 or some such, this is not simply an expanded version of the original release, but a whole new film. Saying that the Jackass series has X amount of seasons on TV or X amount of movies is relatively useless because that would suggested there is a more defined time line in their history, and we'd have to exclude the copy-cats and offshoots such as Viva La Bam and Wildboyz in the canon. These boys have been filming for over a decade and whenever they get 3 hours worth of usable footage, they put out two movies (one to theatres, one straight-to video), that's the basic gist of it.
There is honestly not that can be criticized because, at this point, audiences know exactly what they're in for when it comes to Jackass. Mind you, those that are fans will notice that the stunts have become tamer. In some backwards way, some of the older stunts had either a way of being entertaining for being clever or cute in perfectly harmless ways, or even slightly educational when it came to becoming human guinea pigs for tazers, rubber bullets or other devices that are being used to harm humans on purpose. The stars of Jackass have become just that: “stars.” They have invested many injuries and humiliations to get to where they are today, and are not as willing to take chances these days. There was an interesting bit about paranoia and just how miserable being on a Jackass set can be because pranks can happen at any point. Perhaps some of the stars' hesitation comes from being exhausted of being victimized whenever they turn their backs or attempt to nap.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 1st, 2011
And now we enter the final year of The Medium. The final season has several bright spots. On Bring Your Daughter To Work Day, Paulie Walnuts, Tony Sirico, plays a mob guy ghost that keeps haunting Allison. It's a rather nice episode, and Sirico gets to provide some wonderful moments that remind us of his days with The Sopranos. Scanlon gets to be a ghost, for a short time. Allison has a vision of the future. John Glover even gets to play a devilish character that reminds us of his short-lived days on Brimstone. The final episode is a fitting send-off for the series.
Medium was based on a real person with alleged psychic powers who apparently has helped out various law enforcement agencies in some actual cases. If you’ve seen the series, you might find that hard to believe, and the episodes are obviously fictional adventures and not based on the real Allison Dubois’s experiences. At first glance it might be easy to lump Medium in with Ghost Whisperer or The Dead Zone. Actually, there are almost no similarities to any of those shows. Allison does not gain any understanding through touching, and while she does see ghosts at times, that aspect of the show has been made to play in only a small percentage of the episodes. Allison accesses her powers through dreams. These nightmares are usually vague and often provide additional clues with each recurring dream. The formula for the show is that she must interpret these images and signs in time to do whatever it is she needs to do. Now that her secret is out, she’s not able to continue her work at the DA’s office. Joe’s career is also in jeopardy, so the show is going through some changes here. The strike likely did some damage, so we may never know exactly what was in store.
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