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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > Crime > British > Mystery > Detective > Police Procedural > Corruption > Courtroom > TV > 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

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


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