Case Histories (2011/Acorn DVD Set)/Cop Land (1997/Miramax/Lionsgate Blu-ray)/CSI: Miami:
The Ninth Season/CSI: NY: The
Seventh Season (2010 - 2011)/Perry
Mason – Season Six, Volume One (1962/CBS DVDs)
Picture: C+ (Cop Land:
B-) Sound: C+/B-/C+/B-/C+ Extras: C/C/C+/C/D Episodes: C+/C/C+/C/C+
Our
latest look at police stories then and now show how strained they can get, even
when they are popular, good and try to work.
The
underrated Jason Isaacs stars in Case
Histories (2011), from Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels in six
episodes for what might be a longer series.
He is a former cop turned private investigator, so you would think that
would get us away from the usual police procedural show, but we instead get a
somewhat formulaic detective show that is predictable and safer plot-wise than
I would have liked, holding Isaacs (et al) back. Still, he can act and the casting is good, so
you might still enjoy it on that level, but I expected more over the six
episodes here and was disappointed. The
only extra is a 15-minutes featurette.
James
Mangold’s Cop Land
(1997) was an attempt to do a police corruption drama in New
York with Sylvester Stallone forgoing his tired big budget antics
to play a somewhat overweight cop caught in the middle of rotten madness as he
becomes the moral center of some bad happenings in New York City. Having Robert De Niro on board was supposed
to make this an event and the makers also got Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert
Patrick, Michael Rapaport, one-time actor Peter Berg, Janeane Garofalo and
Annabella Sciorra to round out a decent cast.
However, the script is inconsistent and this turned out to not be so
memorable, so it is a curio of a project that could have been great and fell
short.
Extras
include Deleted Scenes, Storyboard Comparison, Making Of featurette and feature length audio commentary by
Mangold, Stallone, Patrick and Producer Cathy Konrad.
The CSI franchise continues on in multiple
shows and this time, we have CSI: Miami: The Ninth Season/CSI: NY: The Seventh Season, both from
the 2010 – 2011 season. At this point,
both shows are really stretching things and out pushing it like such cop
shows (the original Hawaii 5-0, Law & Order, MidSomer Murders) so I guess the reason to drag things out is to keep
the audience they have in a world with hundreds of channels, but that does not
always make for good TV and it really (especially after all this time) becomes
a for-fans-only affair.
Still, Miami (22
episodes over 6 DVDs) and NY (the
same) take care of those fans by each adding a good number of extras. Miami includes
audio commentaries on two episodes, Deleted Scenes and three featurettes
including The Whole Nine Years, A Miami
Milestone: The 200th Episode and To Be Continued… The Season Finale, while NY adds Deleted Scenes, a Gag Reel, Under The Microscope blogs and four featurettes including Seventh Deadly Season, New In
Town: Jo Danville, An Extended Visit:
John Larroquette Come To CSI: NY
and Wild Ride: On The Set with Peter
Fonda. We’ll they certainly care,
especially when so many TV box sets come with zero extras, so we’ll give them
that.
Finally
we have Perry Mason – Season Six, Volume
One (1962) with Raymond Burr back again with the regular cast and more familiar
guest star faces this time around include Adam West, Woodrow Parfrey, Joseph
Sirola, Jeanette Nolan, Mabel Albertson, Leonard Stone, Sue England, Ellen
Burstyn, David Hedison, Jeff Morrow, Eddie Firestone, Harvey Korman, Anna Lee,
R.G. Armstrong, Parley Baer, Keye Luke, Edgar Buchanan, Strother Martin, Jim
Davis, Margaret O’Brien, Lurene Tuttle and Leonard Nimoy.
That all
makes it fun enough, but the show was finally starting to show some wear,
though it remained a huge hit for CBS and Burr a big star, but even though the
books are numerous and idea of the courtroom drama and courtroom mystery
strong, even this show fell into formula.
This time however, I watched hearing the announcement that Robert Downey
Jr. would play the detective/lawyer in a revival making him the first big name
to play Mason since Burr. Designed to do
for him what Sherlock Holmes has done, we guess they’ll dump most of the
character to make it a comical Downey commercial hit which will make watching
these more of a pleasure if you actually like mysteries. There are no extras.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on Histories
and the CSI sets are all a little
softer than expected with some detail issues and motion blur, allowing the
black and white 1.33 X 1 transfers on Mason
to look as good with its more stable and solid 35mm shooting. Ironically, all qualify for Blu-ray release
which is what Cop Land has in its
1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer and it looks the best
here of the five as expected but not by much.
This is definitely an older HD master and even with some nice shots of New York City, limited
too often.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on Cop Land is also down a generation, is dialogue-based often and is towards
the front speakers, but that is enough for it to have the best audio here, tied
with CSI: NY offering an aggressive
Dolby Digital 5.1 mix even more aggressive and with more of a soundfield than
the surprisingly weak Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on CSI: Miami. The Dolby
Digital 2.0 Stereo on Histories is
solid if not very active and Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on Mason reliable and surprisingly good for its age.
- Nicholas Sheffo
