Major fire at Universal Studios
This news will leave a hole in the gut of movie and TV fans.
A giant fire broke out at Universal Studios in Los Angeles early this morning, destroying the courthouse square from the Back to the Future movies and damaging the famous clock tower. The King Kong attraction was destroyed, along with over 40,000 videos that were housed in a vault, including footage from I Love Lucy and Miami Vice. Not sure why videos aren’t stored in a fireproof vault, maybe underground or some other safe area, but luckily there are copies of the videos in another office.
There have also been a few sets that have been destroyed, including fake New York City and New England street sets that have been used in various TV shows, commercials, and movies. No word on how the fire started but officials say that it has now been contained. One firefighter and two other have been hurt (the latter in an explosion at the vault after the fire was out), but the MTV Movie Awards will go on as scheduled tonight.
Criminal Minds: Lo-Fi (season finale)
(S03E19) Talk about ending a season in an explosive way!
In the past three years, this week’s episode was probably the second episode of Criminal Minds that I watched in its entirety. It’s not a bad show but I just can’t watch everything that airs on TV. However, since I stop watching any American Idol season after Hollywood Week, so I wasn’t going to watch the finale, and because my usual Wednesdays at 9 PM shows were done for the season, I tuned in to CBS and watched the BAU at work.
The team was sent to NYC to determine if random shootings of victims who had nothing in common were the work of one or more shooters. I, who is not a regular viewer of the show, enjoyed the case of the week because it had a good number of twists and turns (finding out there were more than one shooter, one of them waiting for the detectives to arrive and shooting one of them, etc.).
But the case of the week was thrown out the window in the episode’s last 30 seconds or so. We saw each character enter a different car and then BOOM!, one of them blew up. It may not be an original ending, since a lot of series had bombs go off in their season finales, but it is a major game changer nonetheless.
Per the hits we got here at TV on our Criminal Minds category minutes after the episode ended, and after reading some of the comments at official CM forums, it seems that the ending surprised a lot of fans. Comments on the forums range from “They can’t do that to the team!!!” to “I hope they kill off Joe Mantegna’s character because he’s no Gideon!” Fans are not happy campers right now and most of them, according to what I’ve read on the web, hope that the explosion occurred in a car where none of the team was.
Hours before the season finale aired, TV Guide posted an article about it in which executive producer Ed Bernero reveals that “one of our team is going to be severely injured and viewers will have to wait all summer to find out who it was.” Look at his choice of words: severely injured. Could it be that no one will die but that someone will spend weeks, if not months, in the hospital?
Dead or severely injured, depending on who was hit, the show could have totally different dynamics when it returns for a fourth season this fall. What did you think of the finale? Who do you think was hit by the explosion? Do you think the explosion is linked to the case of the week?
Anthony Edwards might return to ER (?!)
It’s not something that is definitely going to happen, but ER producers are trying to get as many former cast members to make appearances on the show next season, which looks like a go now and will probably be the NBC show’s final season.
So…how exactly do you make a dead (really dead, not soap opera/body never found dead) character like Mark Greene come back to life? Executive producer David Zabel says that they’ve kicked around the idea of airing a so-called “lost episode” from 1996 featuring Edwards and Noah Wyle, who has agreed to come back to the show for several episodes next season. I guess the other choices are flashbacks, Greene’s twin brother, or appearing as a ghost.
And those aren’t the only two the show is trying to get to come back for longtime fans: they also want to get George Clooney and Juliana Marguiles to make an appearance so we can find out how Doug and Carol are doing. Marguiles I can imagine coming back for a guest spot on the show (she’s currently on FOX’s Canterbury’s Law), but Clooney? That’s a long shot, since he’s gone on to bigger things. Then again, if there’s any A-list star who I think would go back to the show that launched their career, it would be Clooney.
Personally, I’d love to see all of these people come back. Seeing Clooney and Marguiles again would be fun, as long as they don’t do the ER type thing and have them about to divorce or Doug cheating on her or have one of them die in a explosion or something. And I think they should actually go the soap opera route with Edwards. I never liked the fact that they killed him off. They could have just had him leave the hospital to work on his marriage or whatever. But the woman who played his wife didn’t leave the show so they probably couldn’t do that (though they could have just not shown Edwards even though his wife still worked at the hospital). Even though we saw him die on camera, maybe Benton discovered some secret rejuvenation drug that brought him back to life and they had to keep Greene in hiding because some bad guys were after him.
Yeah, I know, it’s crazy. But I’m willing to suspend my disbelief to get a favorite character back this time.
The Equalizer: Season One - DVD review
Did you know they’re making a big screen version of The Equalizer? It’s true, and it seems like a really bad idea to me.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the show (as you’ll see in my review after the jump) it’s just that this type of lone, ex-spy hero bit has been done to death in the past 20 years, and there’s nothing really special about it anymore. And like all big screen versions of a TV show, it’s not only going to miss the boat by just being BIGGER than the show (big name stars, celebrity villains, explosions, explosion, explosions), it’s going to miss the point of what makes an audience love the original TV show in the first place. It’s not the plot or how they did the show, it’s that the show came at a certain time (in our lives and TV-wise), in a certain way, and it starred a certain person. Just look at the Charlie’s Angels movies or that horrid Beverly Hillbillies movie. It’s not that either of the original shows had original plots or any incredible innovation, it’s that they were of a time, the way we experienced them.
So I cringe when I hear there’s going to be a big screen Equalizer. Thank God we have the DVDs of the original.
This is actually one of those shows I thought would never come to DVD. It lasted a few seasons, but I thought it would be one of those “in the middle” shows: not short-lived enough to guarantee that there would be no DVD and not long-running enough to guarantee a definite release. But so many shows are being released now; I just hope this one sells enough that it makes Universal take notice and release the other three seasons.
Packaging: Nothing incredibly innovative, but that’s not an insult. Sometimes a DVD set is either overly intricate or overly flimsy. This is neither. There’s a plastic case that slips inside of an outside box, which has a picture of Edward Woodward and the skyline of New York City on the front. No booklet inside, but a lot of sets don’t have booklets.
Audio/Video: Both are quite good. It’s really nice to have Stewart Copeland’s music loud and in stereo. Surfing around the web, I’ve noticed that some people are saying that much of the original music that was used in the show is missing here, because they couldn’t get rights to the songs. Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen the show, so I’m not sure how many songs from that time period were used and in what episodes they might be missing from. If anyone has any concrete info on what songs are missing and from what episodes, please leave a comment below.
Extra Features: There’s only one commentary, and sadly, Woodward isn’t on it. It does have creator/producer Michael Sloane, and once you get past his constant explanations of what line was crucial to the entire plot of the series, it’s filled with some neat trivia. For example, CBS had no desire to cast Woodward in the role of Robert McCall (they wanted Robert Culp or maybe Ben Gazzara), but once they saw the test footage they jumped on board. There’s also an explanation of how some characters (such as McCall’s old agency buddy, played by Jerry Stiller!) didn’t return for the rest of the series.
It’s funny to see who guest starred on The Equalizer in its first season: Tony Shalhoub, Bradley Whitford, J.T. Walsh, David Alan Grier, Luis Guzman, Lori Petty, Esai Morales, William Zabka, Ed O’Neill, Christine Baranski, Charles S. Dutton, Kim Delaney, Patricia Richardson, even Adam Ant.
There is a good episode from the second season included in the set, “Beyond Control,” so that’s a nice bonus.
This set is a Godsend if you’re a fan of the show. Isn’t it great to be in a world where we can actually have The Equalizer on our shelves to watch over and over again, instead of having to wait for some local station or cable station to “buy” the series and start showing repeats?