Years:  1972, 1973
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Mike Connors, Gail Fisher, Robert Reed
Guest stars:  Martin Sheen, Burgess Meredith, Abe Vigoda, William Shatner, Anne Archer, Marion Ross, Robert Reed, Jessica Walter
Theme music composer:  Lalo Schifrin
Run time:  21 hours 18 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
DVD extras:  Not much of anything
Related reviews:  Mannix Season Two, Mannix Season One, Mannix Season Three, Mannix Season Four, Mannix Season Five

     As you can see from the picture above, very little has changed in the world of Mannix for the sixth season.  The DVD cover of all six have featured basically this exact same picture…a pastel background and Mike Connors looking at me.  Then six bullets.  You know, to reinforce that this is season SIX.  For those who can’t read, but can count.

     The sixth season itself is indistinguishable from the previous five, in that Mannix takes on a series of investigations – from finding a little kid’s stamp collection (which is probably plausible for a private investigator) to going undercover in a mob organization (which probably isn’t).  No matter what case he takes, though, one thing is for certain – Mannix will be shot at.  Even when attempting to recover a stamp collection, he will have shots fired his way.

     So the only thing that will set Season Six apart from other seasons is the guest list, which is highlighted by Martin Sheen, who appears as an amnesiac war veteran being conned into a heist by some nefarious characters.  This episode came just before Sheen became a major star – a year before his star turn in Terrence Malick’s Badlands and eight years before his definitive role in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. 

     Other stars who appear in the sixth season, like Marion Ross and Jessica Walter, have appeared in previous seasons of Mannix, then there’s William Shatner who used to show up in every single TV series ever created.  And Burgess Meredith and Abe Vigoda.  So…not a stellar guest list this time around. 

     I like Mannix, and I find myself rooting for him not to be shot in most episodes.  And sure, it’s the same thing episode after episode, season after season.  But there’s something to be said for knowing just what you’re gonna get, and liking it.  Which means there’s something to be said for Mannix.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Drama
Countries:  France
Language:  French w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Isabelle Huppert, Bouli Lanners, Sabila Moussadek
Director:  Jeanne Labrune
Run time:  95 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

      Isabelle Huppert is probably the best French actress working today.  She has given electrifying, erotic and deeply personal performances in dozens of good movies over the past decade, like La Vie Promise and Merci Pour Le Chocolat.  And she is once again magnificent in 2010’s Special Treatment, on DVD now from First Run Features.

     The thing is, Isabelle Huppert is really the only GREAT thing about Special Treatment.  She plays a prostitute, one who services her clients in a variety of ways, dressing up and dressing down and sometimes, it appears, a little rough stuff.  She wants to get out of the life, and a particularly disturbing encounter with a client appears to be the last straw.  But she doesn’t seem to know how to quit. 

     The prostitute is one story, and at the same time Special Treatment tells the story of Xavier, a therapist with marital troubles who is just going through the motions with his clients. 

     We’re supposed to see parallels between Xavier’s therapy sessions and Alice’s prostitution sessions.  He charges people for ten sessions at a time, so does she.  He questions the validity of what he’s doing, so does she.  His job seems to be distancing him from those around him, including his wife.  So does hers. 

     The thing is, I get it.  Okay, they’re similar.  It feels too heavy-handed to me – after all, what prostitute has ever offered ten-session packages to her customers, and why bother doing that unless you want to make it totally clear that THEY HAVE SIMILAR PROFESSIONS!

     When Xavier and Alice finally get together, and might be able to help each other in some way, the movie picks up a bit.  But again, it’s Huppert who makes the whole thing worthwhile. Her performance is bold, strong and vulnerable all at the same time.

     The only problem I have with it is that she never takes her clothes off.  Come on, you’re playing a prostitute. If any role calls for tasteful nudity, it’s this one.  If you had done THAT, there would have been TWO reasons to watch Special Treatment.

Year:   2004
Genre:  Documentary
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Directors:  Andrew Rossi, Kate Novack
Featuring:  Billy Phelps, John McCormick, Sirio Maccione, Daniel Boulud, Keith McNally, Danny Meyer
Run time:  80 minutes
DVD distributor:  First Run Features
Special features:  Hours of more interviews with the participants

     I love cooking.  I even consider myself to be a good cook.  Others, at times, have told me that I am, indeed, a good cook.  And often I have heard the phrase “you should open a restaurant”.  My response to that is always “haha. Yeah right.”

     No business venture is as apt to go under as a restaurant.  As the restaurateurs in Eat This New York explain, it takes a lot more than the ability to cook to make a restaurant work.  You must also have great people skills (I think I do), an extraordinary vision (I think I don’t), and terrific business acumen (I know I don’t).

     And so with Eat This New York, I knew what I was getting from the very beginning.  This is a documentary about two best friends, Billy and John, who are struggling to open a restaurant.  They get into fights.  There are construction delays.  And of course the inevitable money troubles involving loan applications, personal finances and a budget that keeps ballooning.

     I’ve seen all of this before.  And there was nothing particularly compelling for me in the story of Billy and John, who moved out to New York City from St. Paul Minnesota with this dream of opening a restaurant in a city that already has tens of thousands of them. 

     What WAS compelling was the involvement of the luminaries of the New York City restaurant world.  Sirio Maccione, star of another Rossi documentary called Le Cirque: A Table In Heaven.  Danny Meyer, subject of the documentary The Restaurateur.  And many, many others.  Their insight and their memories are wonderful, and keep the story moving when I felt that just watching two guys struggle was getting a little old.

     Eat This New York is on DVD right now, and can be picked up through First Run Featuers.

Year:  2011
Genre:  Kids, Cartoon, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Bill Fagerbakke, Carolyn Lawrence, Clancy Brown
Director:  Paul Tibbitt
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Another week, another Spongebob DVD release.  On January 3^rd, that DVD is Spongebob’s Frozen Face Off, from Paramount Home Entertainment.  This time, the little yellow square guy sets off on a cross-country race against all the other characters on the show.  For some reason this takes place on sleds, in snowy wintery blizzard conditions.  Are they even trying to pretend they remember this show takes place under water any more?

     I don’t know.  It seems that not only have they forgotten that the Spongebob lives in a pineapple Under The Sea, they have also run out of ideas completely.  Every episode seems to involve Plankton trying to steal the Krabby Patty formula, again.  Even the race through the frozen mountains is an episode involving Plankton stealing the Krabby Patty formula.  This makes me a little sad.  I love Spongebob, and I don’t really want the show to end, but this does sort of feel like the death knell of the series. 

     After all, how many cartoon series have featured a huge cross-country race in their final season?  Scooby-Doo, Popeye, Yogi Bear, and hundreds of others have signaled their upcoming cancelation by pitting all their characters against each other in a no-holds barred race across dangerous terrain, featuring back-stabbing and rampant cheating and other shenanigans.  Hundreds of them.  It may, sadly, be time to say goodbye to Spongebob.

     Until then, of course, Spongebob will be releasing a new DVD twice a month or so.  The only artist more prolific than Neil Young appears to be Spongebob.  If you were a hardcore fan of both, and had to pick up every Neil Young release and re-release and compilation and concert, and you had to pick up every Spongebob DVD as well, you’d go broke.  Then again, if you were a huge fan of BOTH Neil Young and Spongebob, you would more likely be spending all your money on weed.

     I think I’ll keep track of both this year.  Which will release more things on Tuesdays, Neil Young or Spongebob.  So far Spongebob has the lead, with one DVD in one week of 2012.  1-0 Spongebob.  To be continued…

Years:  1979, 1980
Genre:  TV series, Cop, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jack Lord, Kam Fong
Creator:  Leonard Freeman
Run time:  19 hours, 51 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

        The twelfth and final season of Hawaii Five-O comes to DVD January 10^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  The show was clearly on the way out from episode one, as Danno is now gone and with the exception of Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett, the whole cast has pretty much changed.

     As always, there are some fairly interesting guest stars, like Jeff Daniels who shows up for an episode about remote controlled planes being used to rob a museum.  But since this is the very last season, of the original run of Hawaii Five-O, it’s all about one episode, the very last one, where McGarrett finally catches Wo Fat. 

     Of course, if this were today’s Hawaii Five-O, there would be six lead-up episodes during the season and a gigantic three-part finale to close out the whole deal.  Not in 1980.  The big series finale is one, stand-alone episode, where McGarrett disguises himself as an internationally renowned Nobel Prize winning scientist in order to infiltrate Wo Fat’s compound and prevent him from obtaining some kind of weapon of mass destruction.

     In the end, the final confrontation involves no explosions, no real gunfights, no car chases and no ticking time bombs.  It’s just McGarrett and Wo Fat having a good, old-fashioned fist fight.  Then instead of killing him, McGarrett makes the arrest, even without Danno around to “book him”.  In the end, the final season of Hawaii Five-O is probably the weakest of the whole series.  But it’s still a lot of fun, and hearkens back to a different age of television. 

     It occurred to me, watching Wo Fat and McGarrett in their fist fight, that no one does good fist fights any more.  Watch any of today’s shows, and the characters have to be superhuman badasses.  Which means that when, say, LL Cool J fights someone on NCIS: LA, he can’t have a real fight because he’s too badass.  He’s a SEAL, you know.  So when he has to fight, he just does some move and knocks the guy out and breaks his arm.  It’s over. 

     I blame Steven Seagal.  You’ll notice that in his movies, he never got into a fist fight, like Bruce Willis did.  He just beat people up and never got touched.  Even when he finally tracked down Bobby Lupo’s killer Ritchie, he just threw him into a series of glass objects until he got tired of it and put a corkscrew in his eye.  Now, many movies and a ton of TV shows follow that lead.  It really makes Hawaii Five-O feel even more old-school than it actually is!

Year:  2010
Genre:  Kids, Cartoon, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Tom McGrath, Jeff Glen Bennett, John DiMaggio, Danny Jacobs, James Patrick Stewart, Andy Richter, Mary Scheer, Tara Strong, Nicole Sullivan
Eye candy:  Nicole Sullivan (Marlene, if you will)
Director:  Bret Haaland
Run time:  73 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     On January 10^th, Paramount Home Entertainment releases Operation Blowhole, the latest DVD from the Penguins of Madagascar.  There’s a lot of content on the DVD, not all of it the Penguins of Madagascar series, but you’ve really got to navigate around the disc a lot to find it.

     The three central episodes centre around Dr. Blowhole, the evil dolphin nemesis of the Penguin commando team.  Dr. Blowhole, voiced by Neil Patrick Harris, is a lot of fun.  Like an evil dolphin super-villain version of Doogie Howser.  But again, as always, the penguins work best in small doses, and three back-to-back-to-back episodes of them fighting a dolphin is no small dose.  It’s a big dose.  I like Dr. Blowhole, and I like the multiple musical numbers they throw in here, but one at a time, please. 

     On the Operation Blowhole DVD, there are a lot of extra episodes, of this show and others.  That’s good, because some of those Blowhole episodes have appeared on other DVDs before.  There’s a total of 73 minutes of content on this DVD, some of which is a bit tough to find. But it provides some good variety, and the kids should really enjoy all of it.