Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
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.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
Chris Rock has been one of those comedians that either hits a home run or strikes completely out. I’ve seen quite a bit of his stand-up and found I loved it or hated it. He’s not afraid to play the race card. Hell, Chris plays the whole dang deck at times, and Everybody Hates Chris is no different. The comedy is based, loosely I’m sure, on the young adolescent life of Chris Rock. It’s a black comedy that will bring back memories of those 1970’s shows we all watched as kids. Like Good Times and even Sanford And Son, the show is loaded with stereotypes. All of the white characters are bumbling fools who are often played as racists themselves. Chris’s school teacher, Mrs. Morello (Mazarella), is the most obvious example. She’s constantly trying to talk “hood” with the boys and making politically incorrect observations loaded with outrageous clichés. Of course, it’s all in fun and if you’re willing to overlook the often sensitive language and plots, you’re in for some laughs along the way. I like that the show never really takes itself seriously and challenges the viewer to simply lighten up. Basically, this ain’t no Cosby Show.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
<>“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
To Date 42 men have taken that oath to become President Of The United States. While our current president is #43, Grover Cleveland’s terms did not run consecutively and so he often is counted twice. From George Washington to George W. Bush our country has seen feast and famine, good times and bad, and extraordinary leaders and some, let’s just say, leave much to be desired. This American Experience PBS collection covers 10 of the most important from the 20th Century: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on August 29th, 2008
Spinoffs are nothing new in the world of Hollywood. Take a successful film, take some supporting or bit actor from the film and put them in a situation that is like the original but not quite and boom you got a spinoff. However, these movies or series usually take time to develop. On rare occasions, they might be released after a mere six months in some cases. For Get Smart’s Bruce and Lloyd: Out of Control, it was released a mere 10 days after the parent remake found itself in theaters. Could they capitalize on a market that was eager to go see the remake or would the parent bomb and leave this kinda movie in a bargain bin tucked far far away in the back of a Big Lots?
Bruce and Lloyd (played by Masi Oka & Nate Torrence) work in the lab of a R&D department for the United States Government. They invent many items, most of which go nowhere like the Tickle Tazer or Anti-Follicular Device which instead of being used for crowd control, is just used for removing somebody from their head of hair. However, their newest experiment is an invisibility cloak which has been dubbed OCT, Optical Camouflage Technology. The problem is that in a recent test (A very humorous scene involving Agent 91 played by Terry Crews) it simply did not have enough battery life.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
Man, has television come a long way in just over 50 years. There was once a pretty strict code that applied to television programs. Men and women, even when married, couldn’t be seen to have shared the same bed. Anything stronger than a “golly gee” was strictly forbidden. You couldn’t even show a woman’s belly button. And the good guys always had to win, while the bad guys got their comeuppance in the end. Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first to push those boundaries by telling mystery stories where the bad guys often appeared to get away with their evil deeds. Even Hitchcock wasn’t brazen enough to completely skirt these rules, and at the end of such immoral plays he would always add, in his spoken postscript, some terrible twist of fate that got the bad guys in the end. Those days seem long behind us now. We have mob bosses, crooked cops, and now a serial killer, not only getting away with their crimes but acting the hero, of sorts, for the show. Vic Mackey and Tony Soprano only helped pave the way. In Showtime’s groundbreaking series, Dexter, Morgan Dexter is a serial killer who happens to kill other killers. The series is based on two novels by Jeff Lindsay. Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter gave birth to the character and world of Dexter Morgan.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
I remember the first time I saw a Herschell Gordon Lewis film. It was Blood Feast, and it was sometime back in the early 1970’s. Lewis was ahead of his time and was doing extreme slasher before even mainstream slasher films were cool. It was shortly after that bloody experience that I saw the original Wizard Of Gore. Perhaps those experiences didn’t prepare me as much as I thought they would for the remake of Wizard Of Gore. I have to honestly say that I don’t really see the connection between these two films. Certainly the main idea of the magician remains, but little else of the original material survives.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
Animal Planet has created their own new genre of television show over the last few years. Nature shows have been around forever. I remember spending time with my family as a kid watching Animal Kingdom. Since then very little about that type of program has changed. With Discovery Channel the nature show certainly became more sophisticated. Everything changed with Shark Week. Now we have an entire cable network dedicated to animals, so it stands to reason the nature show, like the animals themselves, had to evolve. That’s a lot of program time to fill. Animal Planet has taken a new step toward the next generation of nature shows.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 25th, 2008
Current indie It-girl Ellen Page stars in this pre-Juno effort as a similarly headstrong teenager but whose life is far, far worse simply being pregnant. Here she comes from a dysfunctional home, her high school would be called a snake pit if that weren’t disrespectful to snakes, and her baby brother has disappeared while she was supposed to be taking care of him. She plunges into the underbelly of Toronto in a quest to find him, and an unending picaresque nightmare ensues.
But this isn’t called The Tracey Fragments for nothing, and the above summary fails to convey the actual experience of the film. Director Bruce McDonald breaks the screen up into fragments, and Tracey’s story unfolds as a kaleidoscope of multiple frames and shattered chronology. It’s a technique that won’t work for everyone, and that can be horribly misused, but here I found it both intense and exciting. In fact, it made some of the more familiar and/or hard to take/swallow aspects of the narrative itself much more palatable.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on August 22nd, 2008
No, this is not the movie that promised to show us men turned inside out. It is, in fact, a curious mixture of genocide documentary and concert film. The performance is by rockers System of a Down. The lead singer’s grandparents were survivors of the Armenian Genocide, and so that atrocity is the primary focus of the film, which cuts between concert footage, personal interviews, grisly documents and academic talking heads. By extension, the film also takes a stand against all forms of genocide, and is an explicit invitation to the audience to get involved in the fight for justice.
The mixture of elements is unorthodox, to put it mildly, and the effect is a bit bizarre. There are many moving, heartfelt and sharply observed moments, but one is also left with the feeling of having watched well-meaning but overly earnest and slightly naive agit-prop. Then again, it’s hard to resent the important work the film is trying to do.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 21st, 2008
My mother was a big fan of The Untouchables. I think she really just had a crush on Robert Stack. Years later when Stack was hosting Unsolved Mysteries, I could swear that I heard her murmur a few
