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 "The Shield" debuted on the FX cable channel
early in 2002 and ended its seven-season run in 2008 with one of the greatest
series finales ever broadcast. In between it blurred the line between good cop
and bad cop with Michael Chiklis' Vic Mackey, a maverick officer at once corrupt
and dedicated. Creator Shawn Ryan and his crew keep surprising us with the turns
the stories take yet never compromise the integrity of the show or the
characters. The volatile series revels in the contradictions and compromises of
the characters, but it understands exactly where everyone draws their moral
lines. They just happen to draw them in different places.
This
collection features all 88 episodes of the seven seasons on 28 discs in a hefty
scrapbook album-style case with slipsleeve pages. I'm personally not a fan of
the design (it's hard to actually get a grip on the discs in the paperboard
pages without getting your fingerprints all over the program side), and, like so
many of these sets, it won't fit on a standard DVD rack, but it's a handsome
package nonetheless. It also features the supplements from earlier season
releases: lively commentary tracks, featurettes, deleted scenes, interviews and
the rest. Exclusive to this edition is a bonus with two new featurettes:
"Rampart," an original half-hour documentary on the Los Angeles Rampart division
police scandal that inspired the show, and a seven-minute memorial for "The
Barn." If you've got the earlier releases, it's not worth trading them in, but
it's the most efficient way to get the complete collection from scratch.
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Zorro: The Complete First Season (Walt Disney Treasures)
Zorro: The Complete Second Season (Walt Disney Treasures) |
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Guy Williams, a B-movie actor with matinee-idol looks, leapt
into the saddle of this late-'50s half-hour adventure series (Disney's first
foray into a traditional weekly series) with all the flair of a born action
hero. He's charmingly thick as Don Diego, the cavalier who poses as a fop, and
perfectly dashing as the swashbuckling Robin Hood of Old California, and the mix
of broad comedy and frontier action is still fun after all these years. Leonard
Maltin introduces and hosts each set. Thirty-nine half-hour episodes in living
black and white per season (plus two bonus "Zorro" episodes from the anthology
series "Walt Disney Presents" and other archival goodies) on six discs
efficiently collected in a standard case with hinged trays, all in a collectible
tin.
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| Star Wars: The Clone Wars - The Complete Season One |
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George Lucas continues the "Star Wars" saga with this animated
series set between the movies "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith."
It's surely the best looking animated show on TV, and the wide-screen frame
gives it even more majesty. But there's something disturbing about a kids' show
where every moral lesson is learned in the heat of battle. Twenty-two episodes
(in seven extended "director's cut" versions) on four discs in a booklet case, a
64-page scrapbook with sketches, artwork and character designs from the series,
and there's a behind-the-scenes featurette for each episode.
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| The Eleventh Hour: The Complete Series |
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Rufus Sewell is Dr. Jacob Hood, a scientific genius turned
one-man CDC, in the American remake of the British miniseries about the
government's man on the spot whenever there's a crisis that smacks of scientific
tinkering or experiments gone wrong. Think "Fringe" meets "House," with less
personality but more personability. Marley Shelton is his FBI protector, part
straight woman and part action hero sidekick. The series lasted a single season
of 18 episodes, and debuts on the Warner Archive label, the DVD-R burn-on-demand
line, on six discs in a wide case with hinged trays.
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| The Botany of Desire |
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Michael Pollan hosts this public television documentary based on
his nonfiction book about the way nature caters to human desires to survive, and
the way human behavior affects the equation. "As much as it's a story about
plants," he explains, "it's a story about human desire," and he takes four case
studies to make his point. The observations are enlightening. Arrives on DVD and
Blu-ray a week after its debut on public television, and features 15 minutes of
deleted scenes and half an hour of bonus interviews with Pollan among the
supplements.
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Sean Axmaker is a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a
DVD columnist for MSN Entertainment, and a contributing writer to GreenCine.com,
Turner Classic Movies Online, Parallax View and Asian Cult Cinema, among other
publications. You can find links to all of this and more on his shamelessly self-promoting blog.
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Cheerleader MoviesWith Megan Fox in
'Jennifer's Body,' we look at our favorite cheerleader films | |
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