Archive for the ‘1976’ Category
Streets of San Francisco Season 4, Volumes 1 & 2. On DVD August 28th. (******6/10)
Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
Years: 1975 1976
Genre: TV series, Drama
Country: United States
Languages: English
Starring: Karl Malden, Michael Douglas
DVD distributor: Paramount Home Entertainment
I’ve always liked Streets of San Francisco – not so much because it was a great show (it wasn’t), but because I love Karl Malden and it’s pretty cool to see a super-young Michael Douglas before he became really famous. On August 28th, Paramount Home Entertainment releases Season Four, in two DVD volumes.
Right away, it wasn’t just about Malden and Douglas. It was about other guest stars before they were famous. In the very first episode, a young Mark Hamill shows up as the drug addict son of a renegade cop. This was a year before Star Wars, which of course shot Hamill to fame as Luke Skywalker. So, now I’ve seen him in five things. Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. And now Streets of San Francisco. I wonder what that guy’s doing now.
There are a few other stars who appear in season four, (note John Ritter‘s appearance above) but most notably Paul Sorvino as a renegade cop looking to avenge his partner’s death. There were a lot of renegade cops on Streets of San Francisco.
But of course Karl Malden and Michael Douglas were there to uphold the law, stop the renegade cops and serve as advocates for procedure, police integrity and due process. And the biggest problem with the show was that they did just that in every single episode.
Hawaii Five-O Ninth Season. On DVD August 3rd. (*******7/10)
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
Years: 1976, 1977
Genre: TV series, Cop, Drama
Country: United States
Language: English
Starring: Jack Lord, James MacArthur, Kam Fong, Al Harrington
Guest stars: Khigh Dheigh, Rich Little, Mel Ferrer, John Ritter
Creator: Leonard Freeman
Run time: 19 hours, 51 minutes
DVD distributor: Paramount Home Entertainment
What’s left to say about Hawaii Five-O? Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord) is awesome, in a vain, proto-Caruso sort of way. Wo Fat (Khigh Dheigh) is a magnificent bad guy, all erudite and smarmy and genius. And Hawaii is full of babes in bikinis and evil drug dealers and such. In the ninth season, out August 3rd from Paramount Home Entertainment, the pattern continues. The team take on bad guys at nuclear facilities, they take on Wo Fat as he steals plutonium, and they save the day at the last second over and over. The season opens with one of those silly “amnesia” stories where Wo Fat has messed with McGarrett’s brain and he no longer knows who he is. But it’s just the right kind of silliness for Hawaii Fivce-O, which I love more and more with each passing season.
I recently saw an ad on television for the NEW Hawaii Five-O series, which is somehow coming back to television. For some reason. It stars some guy named Alex O’Laughlin as McGarrett (his previous big credit was in Whiteout). It also stars the adequate at best Scott Caan as Danny Williams and the sexy but unproven Taryn Manning as Mary Ann McGarrett. I see no listing for a Wo Fat. Mistake #1. Of what I’m sure will be a long, painful series of mistakes. The first mistake though, really, is remaking this show at all. Hawaii Five-O was perfect in the 60s and 70s. It was just the right kind of cheese, which is best watched now, years later. The grainy, silly 70s type of show that is best viewed in retrospect.
I have no doubt that the new Five-O has the best intentions. But McGarrett can’t be duplicated – we already have a pale imitation on television today. Obviously David Caruso. And Wo Fat as a supervillain just wouldn’t work today. What would he be – a fat internet hacker working out of his mom’s basement while she brings him Tang and sandwiches? I suspect that this new TV series will be Hawaii Five-O in name only, and leave the original series alone. I am guessing it will be all about car chases and sexy babes and tough-guy talk and romantic complications. As long as it doesn’t try to replicate the original, I’m happy. There is only one Hawaii Five-O.
Hawaii Five-O Season Eight. On DVD March 16th. (******6/10)
Monday, March 15th, 2010
Years: 1975, 1976
Genre: TV series, Cop, Drama
Country: United States
Language: English
Starring: Jack Lord, James MacArthur, Kam Fong, Al Harrington
Guest stars: Susan Dey, George Takei, Pat Hingle, Helen Hayes, Charles Durning, Ed Asner, Lew Ayres
Creator: Leonard Freeman
Run time: 20 hours 9 minutes
DVD distributor: Paramount Home Entertainment
I still enjoy Hawaii Five-O. After watching eight seasons worth (season 8 comes out March 16th from Paramount Home Entertainment), the show has grown on me more and more. Except for one thing. Wo Fat. This is a show that really does NOT need a supervillain. The Wo Fat episodes are totally useless. And stupid. Steve McGarrett is cool, and he makes badass statements that are cheesily fun in their overly dramatic nature. And he makes these bizarre leaps in logic that only a Superinvestigator could make. Which is also cheesily fun.
But when Wo Fat enters the picture, giving McGarrett a Supervillain foil, McGarrett stops being a cool-ass police detective, and becomes a Superhero. For example, the first episode of Season Eight sees Wo Fat building an entire hospital as a front. Then he accepts a bunch of patients in that hospital so no one clues in to his real motive – stealing military secrets. You see, he has kidnapped a woman whose husband is a high-ranking military official…
He has also created an elaborate ruse where everyone believes the woman has been injured in a car crash and is in a coma in this fake hospital. Which functions as a real hospital. But in fact, he is just keeping her sedated, so the husband will go see her in that hospital, and when he gets there Wo Fat and his cronies can brainwash him on a regular basis and get him to turn over military secrets to them. Seriously. That’s Wo Fat’s plot. I’m not sure he’s a supervillain, so much as a complete idiot with way too much money to waste.
But of course, the only one who can decipher this elaborate plot is Steve McGarrett. Because only he speaks Bad Guy Rich Moron Spy. And immediately, he says “this can be only one guy – Wo Fat!” And of course it is. But Wo Fat isn’t even in the episode. He shows up for a total of like twelve seconds, so he can chortle and tent his fingers and stroke his moustache and do other Supervillain things. But really he’s just there to say “yes, it’s me. Wo Fat. I’m evil.” And then he’s gone.
The rest of the show is great – McGarrett is cheesy, there are babes and Hawaiian scenery, and it’s a lot of fun. But by the eighth season, Wo Fat has run his course. I’m certain he will be there until the end though, because he and McGarrett need to have their One Final Confrontation. Which I assume will take place on a rooftop in the rain and involve a couple of laser-shooting battling robots and a number of burly, brainwashed mind-controlled henchmen.
Star Trek Original Motion Picture Collection. On Blu-Ray May 12th. (*********9/10)
Monday, May 18th, 2009
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There are extensive special features, including commentaries and interviews and behind the scenes stuff and nerd stuff on every single disc. However, it’s the movies that everyone cares about, so I will review them one at a time. Here goes:
Star Trek The Motion Picture (****4/10):
“It’s life, Captain. But not life as we know it.”
It’s hard to believe that Star Trek lasted so long given the silliness of the original series and the poor quality of this first movie. This is, really, a bad movie. It’s all special effects, which are great in Blu-Ray, but totally pointless. The movie goes on way too long, trying to cram one special effect on top of another for the entire two-hour-plus running time. The movie opens with some special effects, then other special effects, then Spock talking to his Vulcan elders. They are about to present him with a medallion, which symbolizes his attainment of Total Logic. I thought right away – if he has truly attained Total Logic, banishing all emotion from his psyche, would he really need a medallion to symbolize that? That isn’t terribly logical, is it?
From there the movie gets sillier and sillier. Kirk is an admiral now, and he is sour at his desk job. This will continue over the course of several movies. A mysterious cloud is approaching the Earth, and the crew of the Enterprise go inside to discover an entity that has achieved self-awareness and seeks its creator. And there are more special effects. Which seems to take all the charm out of the movie, and all the interesting features of the characters, and turns it all flat. Considering this is a Star Trek movie and it’s in outer space and it involves Kirk and the Enterprise and so forth, Star Trek The Motion Picture is sadly devoid, utterly, of wonder and charm.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (*********9/10):
“Who am I hiding from?”
“From yourself!”
Thank God the series continued, for this terrifically campy and silly film! And make no mistake, this movie is CAMPY. And SILLY. It is a battle of two titanic overactors – who will suffer an aneurysm from overacting first? Kirk or Khan? Shatner or Ricardo Montalban? Khan rages, shakes his fist, and quotes Moby Dick at Shatner. Shatner emotes, sighs, screams and quotes A Tale Of Two Cities at Khan. Shatner makes a dramatic entrance, bathed in blue light as his silhouette emerges in a doorway. Montalban, not to be upstaged, emerges from a sandstorm and takes off the hood of his robe in a truly dramatic moment of revelation – It’s KHAN!
It certainly helps to have seen the Khan episode of the original series, but it isn’t necessary. That would explain fully why Khan is so obsessed with killing Kirk. However, reading Moby Dick could prepare you for this as well. Khan is basically Captain Ahab, so obsessed with his White Whale, Kirk, that he is willing to die in order to take down his nemesis. Kirk and Spock are meanwhile living out A Tale Of Two Cities, quotes from the book and everything – “it is a far, far better thing that I do…”
We learn that some scientists have managed to create life from nothing, in a project called Genesis. We also learn that Kirk has a son. Which appears to be forgotten rather quickly, but I’m sure it means something in a later movie. What makes Wrath of Khan work the best of all the Star Trek pictures is that Ricardo Montalban is the only appropriate foil for William Shatner. Only a massive overactor can truly be a nemesis to another massive overactor. Given all the silliness, however, Wrath of Khan has a surprisingly moving conclusion as Khan brings destruction upon himself, Kirk embraces his son, Spock makes the ultimate sacrifice, and they all quote Moby Dick and A Tale of Two Cities.
Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (********8/10):
“I have been, and always shall be, your friend.”
This movie, amazingly, is almost as good as Wrath Of Khan, although it is far less cheesy than its predecessor. Gone is Ricardo Montalban, despite his attempt to stab at Kirk from Hell’s Heart, and so forth. Instead, we get Christopher Lloyd in the role of nemesis, Bad Guy and all around irritant to the crew of the Enterprise. He is a Klingon warlord who is after that Genesis thing that was introduced in Khan. He too is a massive overactor, but his overacting is just one marble short of being Doc from Back To the Future, and that is just distracting. And too silly for an otherwise serious movie.
The central story, however, is not that of Kirk Versus the Klingon. It is, of course, the Search For Spock. Spock can’t die, you see, and he has somehow begun to regenerate on the planet to which his body was fired at the end of the second film. When the Enterprise crew beam down to that planet to rescue him (and go through the weird Vulcan ritual where his mind is put back into his body and so forth), the planet is growing at a crazy rate, and Spock with it. This has the terrifically convenient effect of making sure that at the end of the movie, Spock can once again be played by Leonard Nimoy! (Who also directed.)
There are some solid scenes, and some solid camp as well. Shatner, in mourning, basically puts on this cheesy and bizarre puppy-dog face. He may as well be pouting and whining and licking his hands. The Klingon Bird Of Prey spaceship looks amazing in HD. Christopher Lloyd’s rat-dog-gremlin pet thing looks idiotic in HD. There is a solid scene breaking Bones out of the brig as the crew goes renegade to bring Spock home. And of course, the ship always takes off just as the planet explodes, and Kirk is beamed up just as the fire gets to him, and everything happens Just In The Nick Of Time.
In Search For Spock, Kirk’s son dies. Which is, apparently, why he was introduced in the second film. It gives Shatner a chance to do some pretty funny emotional over-acting, but it appears to be forgotten rather quickly. I mean, it was his son. Not SPOCK! And now everything is cool and they can take Spock back to Vulcan to get his mind right. The costumes there are cool. They look good in HD. The next movie involves whales.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (******6/10):
“A joke is a story with a humourous climax.”
Explaining the plot of The Voyage Home could backfire. This could easily be interpreted as a joke. They need to go back in time to get humpback whales and bring them to the future so they can communicate with this probe which is somehow shutting down all electronic devices within a several thousand mile radius. So they go to Sea World in 1989…seriously. This is the plot of the movie. Remember when Jaws went to Sea World in the third one? Remember how cheesy and stupid that was?
Amazingly though, The Voyage Home is not, really, that stupid. It’s certainly silly. After all, it’s the 80s, and there HAS to be a punk kid making too much noise on the bus who gets his comeuppance, and there has to be sleazy accountant types, and there has to be a hot blonde woman with big hair who cares deeply about animals…basically, Kirk and Spock and Bones and the rest of them appear to have been beamed back right into the middle of Crocodile Dundee. Then there is a Culture Clash! And hilarity ensues! Leonard Nimoy directed this one too, and he deserves credit for not letting it become…well…Crocodile Dundee. Well, not totally.
The fun parts of this movie involve Spock, mostly, who is still not back to his old self. He is now a total straight-arrow Vulcan, using only logic and unable to carry on a regular conversation with anyone. Bones wants to fight with him and argue with him like old times, but every time he tries, he hits a brick wall. There are some moments of real humour there. Shatner is as understated as he can possibly be, most of the time, mostly because Spock is the star of the film this time around. And, of course, they are all going to save the world. With whales.
“Captain! There be whales here!”
They get the whales, save the right two, of COURSE they manage to get to them just before a whaling vessel – whaling vessels being everwhere in the ocean – and we learn some good, helpful environmental lessons along the way. There is a real ambitious desire to make an environmental point in this movie, and I appreciate that. But the whales ARE pretty silly. And then, just to hammer home the point that this is THE 80s, the final credits roll to a synth tune, over still photos from the movie we’ve just seen, like the end of some dreadful 80s TV show. It’s like Star Trek by way of Magnum P.I.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (****4/10):
“All I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.”
It appears that by the time Star Trek V came around, Gene Roddenberry and his entourage had completely run out of ideas. I mean, even the title – the Final Frontier? Where have I heard that before? Leonard Nimoy left the director’s chair for this one, and left William Shatner in charge. What we get is a staggeringly strange mishmash of stupidity and idiocy, and not necessarily in that order. We DO get to see Spock put that Vulcan neck knock-out thing on a horse. Which is something neat. A horse.
The movie opens, as did Mission: Impossible II (both dreadful movies) with William Shatner free-climbing a rock face in Yosemite National Park. This shows how Extreme he is. You see, he is camping with Spock and Bones. This goes on for a while. The camping. And the brotherly love and the joshing and the cameraderie and the campfire and so forth. When they are finally called back to emergency duty, they are strangely awkward with each other, like they had a gay threesome in the woods and must never speak of it again.
They are called back into action because Spock’s half-brother, a cult leaderish type guy, has escaped from somewhere and taken over the Enterprise. So Kirk and Spock and Bones run around the ship, trying to evade the rest of their crewmates who are under the spell of the cult leader, until they finally cross a barrier that no one has crossed in history. (Judging by their reaction to crossing this barrier, they are timidly going where no man has gone before.) On the other side, they meet God, or some approximation of him who appears to be inspired by the Wizard of Oz, and Spock fires a laser gun from a Klingon ship, and everyone goes home happy.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (*******7/10):
“The Federation is no more than a homo-sapiens only club.”
Kim Catrall joins the cast of Star Trek for a brief one-movie stint as a sharp-eyebrowed, pointy-eared character who looks like Spock. This leads me to believe that she may be a Vulcan. Spock is a Vulcan. She looks like Spock. She is a Vulcan. That is logic, and Spock would be proud, I think. By this point, the rest of the crew is pretty old. Shatner and Nimoy are long in the tooth, James Doohan is large in the paunch, and Bones and Chekov and Sulu are pretty tired. Good thing Catrall and Christian Slater are there to infuse the series with a little bit of youthful exuberance. Not that they are any good.
You know who is good though? Christopher Plummer. He is the best Star Trek villain since Khan, and like Mr. Montalban, his character has a tendancy to quote from great literature – in this case, Shakespeare. Plummer plays General Chang, a Klingon general who plans to get rid of Kirk once and for all. The setting is a series of Klingon-Federation peace talks, and Kirk represents the bigotry of the human beings against the Klingon race. This is not just the one-sided view of Klingons. Kirk is genuinely prejudiced against Klingons, because they killed his son. (I know, I know, he barely seemed upset about it at the time, but his is a slow-burning anger.)
Some Klingons are killed while in the care of the crew of the Enterprise, and of course Kirk is blamed. Of course, he also didn’t do it. But he gets arrested anyway, and sent to an underground labour camp in the Dilithium mines for Klingon prisoners. While there, he has sex with some space-hottie who then shape-shifts into – an exact replica of Kirk! In some kind of bizarre plot to murder Kirk while he’s “trying to escape”. This is the second-most remarkable Shatner-vs-Shatner scene since the finale of White Comanche back in 1967.
In the end, the success of Star Trek VI rests mostly on the shoulders of Plummer, Nimoy and Catrall, who do most of the interesting things in the film. Bones, Chekhov, Uhura and Scotty are all pretty obnoxious here. As Shatner has toned down his overacting, the rest of the cast appears to be determined to compensate. They are virtually insufferable. But the movie works anyway, with it’s racial overtones, sci-fi atmosphere, courtroom drama, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome scene and prison escape. This movie has everything! And most of it works. And so concludes the Star Trek Original Motion Picture Collection, on Blu-Ray now.
“Second star to the left. And straight on ’til morning.”