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Post by Mattsby on Feb 16, 2019 5:12:46 GMT
All 44 eps of this show - aired on NBC, produced by Michael Mann - has just been added to Amazon Prime! It stars Dennis Farina, in his first major role I think, and lotta great interesting names pop up in guest spots: Vincent Gallo, Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, Elias Koteas, Julia Roberts, Pam Grier, etc. Mann called this "one hell of a 22-hour movie" and named Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz as an inspiration. Anybody - cough Viced pacinoyes - see this? Thoughts??
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 16, 2019 8:38:35 GMT
I mostly like it - I'd shout out stephen here who I think knows this era in TV stuff but have never seen him discuss it(?) I've seen it a lot and fairly recently when I do my TV recaps - it's episodic, almost too stylish (lots and lots of hats!) and sometimes confusingly plotted but in fits and starts it works. You mostly watch and say "I like it but ........" I've never really got Anthony Denison and if I can't get hooked on the bad guy it's a drawback. I would likely switch Stephen Lang into that and someone lesser into the good guy role he actually played but he maybe was too young and fresh faced - but Lang was a major actor right around the corner on film/TV and stage and would have done something more left-field I bet. Everything is drawn too neatly and if it was messier/darker and less surface it would be better - to me it is like an update on The Untouchables and that film but I never hear that mentioned too much. Guests are fantastic....
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Post by Viced on Feb 16, 2019 14:53:39 GMT
Watched the first episode on Hulu a few years back... was solid but don't remember much.
Quality was iffy though and I read that a lot of the original music had been replaced, so I didn't continue. Gimme a blu-ray with the original music and I'm all over that shit.
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Post by moonman157 on Feb 16, 2019 16:27:19 GMT
damn, thanks for the heads up
I really need to get on it and the Miami Vice tv show. I've only seen the asskicking first episodes of both shows.
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Post by stephen on Feb 16, 2019 16:28:05 GMT
I've seen some of it way back in the day but damned if I could tell you anything about it now. Probably would be nice to give it another go.
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Post by Viced on Mar 27, 2019 2:30:52 GMT
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Post by Leo_The_Last on Apr 2, 2019 19:37:02 GMT
Just throwing in my two cents: I liked it overall, watched about half of the series or a little bit more. It certainly was ahead of its time in its overall conception, but I wouldn't call it great or anything like it, and disregarding the point Mann makes of it about being one long movie, it felt rather episodic to me. You can see where Mann is coming from and what they've tried to achieve with it, but from today's perspective (and I would say even from a late 80's television perspective, I'm not an expert on that though), it didn't feel that revolutionary to me.
Fine guest stars, and Farina is always interesting to watch, but I agree about Anthony Denison. I mainly knew him from Major Crimes, and I like him there, so it seemed like a big stretch to me to buy him as this dangerous gangster type of guy, especially as he's pretty much a co-lead to Farina, and unlike him he's pretty boring to watch here. (Chuck Adamson, who co-created the show, was the role model for Pacino's Hanna in Heat.)
I have to say that my experience with it was plagued by the dirt poor quality of the DVD's. Horrible, horrible quality, felt like watching it on a 70's TV in a poor Saigon motel. Horrible.
I'm a big Farina fan and it was exactly at the time of his untimely death when I was in the middle of it. So I stopped and I haven't continued it yet. Maybe on Amazon some time in the future now that it's available.
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