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Reviews
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Two and a Half Deaths (2008)
jumping the shark - in style?
A zany episode - The premise was not that good: the usual parody of TV in TV. A sit-com actress and the usual band of poor mistreated screenwriters, the dumb husband, the lawyer ready to cool off drugs and alcohol abuse. Some "breaking news", the usual stuff.
The CSI Boys went to Hollywood - a tour in Burbanks - and "Brass" pointed out that the series "Jumped the shark" - Fonzie, You Know?
But, if you got the mood, you got an inside joke every other line.
"David", the coroner assistant, pushed "Grissom" to give the famous "Grissom's One Liner" that closed the first part of almost every episode in 8 seasons.
The Hollywood executive wandered in the lab and mumbled "wow, we can make a show of it" - "Grissom" with an Emmy in hand (CSI got 3 nomination, none win) up to the very end, when the murderer explained how to write a script for a crime episode.
Some jokes were a bit low-brow - "Hodges" and the Tampax, for example.
But, in all, this is the episode where CSI jumped the shark - ninth season is ahead with a new cast. So, if they had to jump, they jumped in style.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: You Kill Me (2007)
Light episode, running like a clockwork
A great "light" episode.
We started with a "boom" - but it's just a game between "Hodges" and "Wendy".
From here we had a crescendo of weird fun, where the Lab Rats, as cluedo cards, got into more and more cases - as victims, or murderers, or...
In an overlap of in-story and off-story universe: comments, the main cast snapping fingers when they found an evidence or chit-chatting with the players of the game. "David" quipped every time that "No sexual abuse" was made on the dead Lab Rat of the case - but "Hey, it's a neck wound" where the camera is going'?
Not much content, perhaps. But the episode run as a clockwork.
"Hodges" even leaned on the forth wall, pointing out that "Bobby the armorer" under interrogation by "Capt.Brass" was just a running gag.
633 Squadron (1964)
A war propaganda movie, twenty years too late
It's a quite interesting movie, from a certain point of view.
633 squadron had all the clichés: a tip of hat of our ally with an Australian, an Indian, you may also read a New Zealand title somewhere, every kind of British and of course our beloved American wing commander from the E.S., Eagle Squadron. Plus a noble and daring-do Norway partisan (a bit mediterranean looking, but who cares?), and here we are. Add the usual "comamnd decision" commander, the chairborne officers who wants to have his piece of action, the war bride, the boys singing at the pub after an air raid. Of course a quick romance between our war-weary hero and the blonde.
Everything you may find in a wartime or just after-war movie.
But we are in 1964 - the same year of Dr.Stranamore. So the gung-ho, woodly heroism sounds a bit phony.
And the "action" suffers of choppy cutting, plastic models on a string, horrible pyrotechnics and bad editing. Of course, in 1964 the FX can't do much more, but we have better examples.
Only good thing, the real mosquitoes flying, even too often with false boom-boom, guns and so on superimposed.
El Alamein - La linea del fuoco (2002)
A War movie, Italian Cinema way.
How to make a film in Italy.
A script that has anything original or "important": war is bad, that's it. But it's a "liberal" point of view, so it's good and it's enough.
The same actors seen in every Italian film adding the usual comedian out of a night show (Favino) to have a "known one", and an homage to "bigger names" of the director's circle, giving a cameo to Orlando (Moretti's best one) and Cederna (Salvatore's own).
Bad acting: in Italian, every actor murmured in some local "patois", and hardly you can understand what they say. That's a cliché of every Italian war movie, that Italian soldiers uttered strong local accents: war movie or comic film. Not else.
Even budget wasn't SO low, no attempt to research what's the right uniforms, vehicles, terms, historical details, as none of the blue-nosed liberal producers wants to talk with the "militarist" who collect or study military history.
Spice all with "I'm an artist" attitude, and you have a typical Italian movie.