Magic City – The Complete First Season (2012/Starz/Anchor Bay Blu-ray set)/The Samaritan (2012/IFC/MPI Blu-ray)
Picture:
B- Sound: B- Extras: C/C- Main Programs: C+
Crime
stories are not as easy to pull off as you might think and some trying to
categorize any one of them that is darker than a TV police procedural only
complicates matters. Here are two
ambitious releases that at least try to get it right.
First we
have a new cable TV series Magic City –
The Complete First Season (2012) which wants to be in the same league as Las Vegas,
The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire without necessarily
imitating them. Set in Miami 1959, it focuses on a hotel run by a
smart, streetwise manager (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who knows things are about to
get shaken up. After a disturbing dream,
he awakes to slowly find his problems mounting.
Frank Sinatra is going to play his place for New Years Eve, but he has a
strike on his hands, he’s got women to juggle as well, financial issues to
consider, a mob boss who wants to squeeze more out of everything and even
ignores warning signs of changes to come (watching the Batista Cuban Government
under siege, he scoffs at the possibility of an overthrow) so things are not
going well.
The show
has a good look (production design, clothes, locales, cars) but not enough is
made of the locations. It does have a
period feel to it enough, though it could get moiré out of them. It has a fine supporting cast including Olga
Kurylenko, Steven
Strait, Kelly Lynch,
Leland Orser and Danny Huston among them, but the scripts are not as effective
and expansive as they could be. I wanted
to feel more of the crime story, the period and have more of a build-up for
various things happening, which hits me every time an event happens that reminds
me of a gangster or crime film or TV episode that already covered that
territory.
Still,
the show also has potential to grow after this debut season with everything set
up, though later episodes put the storylines in a corner that are at least
partly formulaic. Still, I don’t
understand why this is not getting more press, though it does not feel like we
are getting the whole inside story of hardcore criminal tales from Miami then
(which would also be about now, give or take new De Palma Scarface-type of real life activity) so the show has a ways to go
to be a pier of those other shows.
Still, it has the potential and I look forward to seeing where they go
the next season. Carl Franklin directed
the pilot and the behind the camera talent is just as good.
Extras
include six featurettes: Starz Studios:
Magic City, The Cars Of Magic City,
The Style Of Magic City, Building An Empire, The Golden Age Of Music and Miami
Beach: The Real Magic City.
David
Weaver’s The Samaritan (2012) stars
Samuel L. Jackson as a convict who has finally been released from prison and
upon that is returning to old haunts and old contacts to find out what has been
going on, where there are resources he could use and what he will do next. The son (Luke Kirby) of a man he killed also
wants to talk to him, not knowing how his father died, a young man who is
involved with a deadly high-class gangster (Tom Wilkinson) of his own. In all this, world will collide and that is
not all that will collide.
This too
has some really good actors and performances, plus the screenplay by Elan
Mastai and Weaver is not bad, but it also has more clichés than it needed, too
many obvious, convenient connections and only the combined performances of the
cast make this one more watchable than it should be. I will not reveal anything that might be more
of a surprise, though expect some blood and gore. I can see why all involved signed up for this
one, though. Debra Kara Unger also
stars. A Theatrical Trailer is the only
extra.
The 1080p
1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Magic and 2.35 X 1 on Samaritan
are well shot and have good style choices to them respectively, but they are
both still a bit visually styled-down as productions and are HD shoots. Considering that, the choice for a little
less depth and detail does not hurt either narratively and the resulting
playback could not be better with that intent in mind.
The sound
is the same story too, with Magic
having lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mixes on all eight hour-long episodes and Samaritan offering a decent DTS-HD MA
(Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix. Both
are well recorded, are often dialogue-based and have good mixing, but the
soundfields in both cases can be more towards the front speakers than I would
have liked and a slight sense of inconsistency is also present, though the
playback is warm and smooth enough in all cases.
- Nicholas Sheffo