(Note: A overwhelmingly percentage of what you’ll find inferior has been re-printed from my reconsideration of The Cadaverous Shadow - Season 1, but not all of it. You’ll just make to deliver assign to it to detect the additional stuff!)
The Series
Employing the “no-bullshit teacher at an inner city” gimmick long before the modern templates of Lean On Me and Dangerous Minds were around, 1978’s The White Shadow struck enough of a chord with viewers to warrant a full three-season run. For fans of the basketball-centric high school drama, those three seasons were simply not enough, but at least those supporters will be able to kick back and enjoy their old favorite through the magic of DVD. (Well, the first two seasons, anyway.)
Ken Howard stars as Coach Ken Reeves, a former NBA pro whose bum knee forced an early retirement. Offered the rather unglamorous job of high school coach to a bunch of inner-city misfits, Reeves rises to the task using his own patented brands of hard work, rough talk, and tough love. Of course the Carver High kids will initially reject the guy, and of course they’ll (slowly) come around and embrace their new teacher. And these kids are going to need Reeves on their side, because their first season’s exploits are absolutely riddled with temptations, traps, and troubles.
Although many of the episodes are entirely formulaic and frequently rather predictable, there’s a rough-hewn toughness to the program that indicates a bold and sincere effort beneath the surface. Executive producer Bruce Paltrow (yes, the late father of Ms. Gwyneth) was clearly interested in tackling some hot-button issues, and The White Shadow did not shy away from stories full of anger, intolerance, and racism. The messages were always kept on a “TV-safe” level, but many of them were also pretty daring. (Especially considering that the season was produced in the late 1970s.)
As you might expect from a well-intentioned series that hoped to run for a few years, the characters and the social issues were as important as the next basketball game. Drug abuse, institutionalized racism, sex education, illiteracy, and gang violence were only a few of the issues tackled here, and while The White Shadow might have simplified its tragedies for a family-friendly presentation, it never stooped to outright preaching or whiny platitudes. Plus it wasn’t all doom & gloom; Coach Reeves would counsel his charges on a variety of topics … although his advice would quite often fall on deaf ears (until the Act III revelations were made, that is).
Considered by many to be one of network TV’s finest sports-related series, The White Shadow is more than a little dated and antiquated by now, but there’s still some fun to be had here, plus the first two seasons come packed with a variety of colorful and ever-changing challenges and struggles. (Plus there’s some basketball.) Nominated for four Emmys over its three-season run (and winner of one), The White Shadow isn’t the newest or flashiest sports-centric high school drama you’ll ever see, but I found it just as much fun this afternoon as it was 20-some years ago. I’ll take three random episodes of The White Shadow over movies like Dangerous Minds and Rebound any day.
(One interesting piece of trivia: Three of the Carver High athletes would go on to become successful directors: Thomas Carter (Save the Last Dance, Coach Carter), Kevin Hooks (Passenger 57, 24, Lost), and Timothy Van Patten (The Sopranos, Deadwood).)
The 24 episodes from The White Shadow’s second season are presented in a four-disc set, and yes, that means the DVDs are dual-sided. Episodes are as follows:
Disc 1a
On the Line — The coach and team regret giving a journalism student permission to write a series about the basketball for the school paper. (09/17/79)
Albert Hodges — An embittered black youth causes trouble among the basketball team players when he insinuates that Coach Reeves is a racist. (09/24/79)
Cross-Town Hustle — Believing the coach is picking on him, Milton Reese is an easy mark when a fast-talking coach from a rival school tries to get him to transfer. (10/01/79)
Sudden Death — Reeves is devastated when a freshman he actively encouraged to join the basketball team drops dead during a practice session. (10/08/79)
Disc 1b
A Silent Cheer — The coach and one of his players share the painful realization that their playing “glory days” are truly over and it’s time to move on. (10/15/79)
No Place Like Home — After Coolidge’s apartment building burns down, Coach Reeves lets him stay at his apartment for a few days - a decision he quickly comes to regret.
Disc 2a
Globetrotters — The team’s winning streak has turned them into insufferable egotists, so Coach Reeves secretly enlists the aid of the Harlem Globetrotters. (11/05/79)
Me? — The coach isn’t looking forward to teaching a health class on sex education, but he soon realizes it’s a good thing he did. (11/12/79)
Needle — The coach tries to stop Hayward from exacting revenge on the drug pusher who sold a fatal dose of heroin to Hayward’s 15-year-old cousin. (11/26/79)
Sliding By — Coach Reeves is thrilled when a high school basketball star transfers to Carver High, until he learns that the boy is illiterate. (12/03/79)
Disc 2b
Delores, Of Course — Jackson is so happy that his former girlfriend is back that he asks her to marry him, totally unaware that she is now employed in the world’s oldest profession. (12/08/79)
A Christmas Present — As the team prepares for their big holiday party and Sybil happily reconciles with her husband, Coach Reeves finds himself facing Christmas Eve alone. (12/25/79)
Disc 3a
Feeling No Pain — When the coach tries to legally help one of his players get some prescription painkillers, his good intentions backfire. (01/01/80)
Artist — Thorpe is torn between his love for art and his father’s belief that a basketball scholarship is his son’s only ticket out of the ghetto. (01/08/80)
Salami’s Affair — In order to improve his grades and not be dropped from the team, Salami agrees to be tutored in history - an arrangement that quickly leads to other things. (01/15/80)
Links — Reeves is invited to bring some of the basketball team to a local country club, but when they show up, they’re told “blacks are not allowed.” (01/22/80)
Disc 3b
The Stripper — If Reeves is shocked when his girlfriend takes him to a strip joint, he’s floored when she suddenly appears onstage as the club’s most popular stripper. (01/29/80)
Gonna Fly Now — The coach enlists the help of a female police narcotics officer after it becomes clear that someone around school is selling “Angel Dust” to the students. (02/05/80)
Disc 4a
Out at Home — Coach Reeves is dismayed after he’s promoted to Athletic Director, a position that the school’s baseball coach desperately wanted. (02/19/80)
The Russians Are Coming — Coach Reeves gets involved in a bit of international intrigue after a player from the Soviet Union basketball team asks for help in defecting to the United States. (02/26/80)
The Hitter — Coach Reeves tries to help Go-Go after the young man repeatedly shows up at school with bruises that indicate he’s being beaten at home. (03/04/80)
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The Death of Me Yet — Coach Reeves and the team’s elation at qualifying to compete in the big city championship game is overshadowed by a tragedy. (03/11/80)
Disc 4b
Coolidge Goes Hollywood — Coolidge quickly shuns his coach and friends after the director of a TV series about black students offers him a weekly part on the show. (03/18/80)
A Few Good Men — As another school year comes to and end, Coach Reeves and team members make summer plans and the seniors consider life after high school. (04/01/80)
“This Scorsese “Mean
Streets” type of film has been done too many times and often much
better than it was done here.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
This Scorsese “Mean Streets” type of film has been
done too many times and often much better than it was done here. It was
mildly entertaining, setting a wise guy mood in a wealthy suburban area
instead of using the usual locale of the gritty urban streets. It was sort
of funny hearing the sage-like philosophy coming out of such empty heads
as the old mobsters (especially Ford Sorvino-Mira’s grandfather) to the
young potential mobsters, who already looked just as stupid as their mentors.
There was also a very funny bit, featuring fast-talking heavyweights in
matching designer jog suits named Vic and Eddie (Frank Medrano and Louis
Lombardi). But the film had such a pat look I just couldn’t help feeling
that it was phony, an annual staging of a movie about wannabe Mafia youths
that almost every new indie director thinks he has to make.
The Prodigy movie bluray
Three inseparable childhood friends, the sons of the privileged,
Andy (Steve Parlavecchio), Trevor (Patrick McGaw), and Billy (Joseph Lindsey),
have grown up in the Long Island suburbs of Five Towns. They enjoyed doing
petty crimes as youngsters for the respect they got and because they were
bored. After finishing high school, in the late 1980s, Billy asks Andy
to make a drug delivery for him. Andy says yes, then changes his mind and
gets Trevor to do it for him. Trevor thinks Andy is too scared to do it
and decides to help his friend out, but gets arrested in a police sting.
After serving two years of hard time and feeling disillusioned, he fails
to return to his home town. But he is anxious to see his one-time girlfriend
Laura (Mira Sorvino), whom he has not seen or written to while in prison.
It is never made clear if Billy set his friends up; the implication is
that he did in order to get rid of the competition.
Trevor comes back home after his release by motorcycle and with a
different attitude. He plans to see Laura and then leave for California
with his motorcycle friend. Trevor’s friends have also changed since he
was sent away. Billy has become a hotshot hood. Andy, who is now 23-years-old
and works under Billy, stagnates and is disgusted that Billy treats him
as his flunky. He wants to make one big score on his own even though he
comes from wealthy parents and could always get money from them — but
he’s all about proving himself, wanting very much to be recognized as a
big-time criminal operator. He sees his opportunity through a drug deal
where he needs $25,000 to get in on that deal and decides to rob a nightclub
with the gang he put together, even though he knows the club is run by
a big-time Jewish mobster. He talks the weak-minded Trevor into going along
with the heist.
The old-time Jewish gangster club owner, Jack Trattner (David Stepkin),
asks his vicious enforcer, Michael (Artura), to get the ones who took his
money and diamonds. The 26-year-old first-time director Rob Weiss puts
all his cards on the action table, moving it along at a fast clip. The
story highlights how different the three friends turned out to be as young
adults and how Billy so easily betrays his friends. The weakness of this
plot is that the friendship among the three never seemed to be anything
but a superficial one to begin with, yet we are supposed to believe it
is packed with a great deal of emotion at present.
Trevor is the only one of the three whom we can be sympathetic to,
even though he doesn’t have much smarts. But he is looking for a different
way of life and is searching to find out what really makes him happy, having
learned that it is not money. Andy is a loser and needs to mature. Billy
is just a weasel. It is difficult to find one thing about him that is likable.
I also found it hard to believe that he became a big-time criminal, he
just seemed to be too punky.
The problem with this creepy friendship tale, is that everything
about the film is shallow including the friendships — so when they breakup,
who cares! The main joke seems to be that the kids learn to respect their
gangster grandfathers and not their parents, who have become wealthy the
old-fashioned way through their talent.
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Who says you have to look to old Italian-made nervousness films to achieve your quota of blood, torture, and bloodshed? You can decide it all right here on your own doorstep from people like writer, director, and reviser Eric Stanze and his 1999, super-low-budget, run-to-video position flick, “Ice From the Bric-e-brac.”
Right away you’re wondering why I’m spending any time at all on this disc, and it’s because I think it’s important to see what minor, new filmmakers are up to in their spare time. Naturally, “Ice From the Sun” was meant for a greatly spelled out, reduced public and was not till hell freezes over intended to be reviewed by a mainstream critic destined for the ordinary viewer. But I have the feeling that the more grief a conservative chap like myself heaps upon the pellicle, the more it inclination function for Mr. Stanze’s purposes and the heartier get off on his target audience. I would not want to disappoint him or his followers.
The sci-fi fear plan begins with an unclad manservant writhing in torture in what looks like a concrete basement, intercut with a woman being garroted in a car park. Somehow, there’s a connection between the woman’s due escape and the man’s tormented actions as he appears to grow into the strangler’s rope disappear. Then we note the would-be garroter get his head blown off. And that’s due to save starters! The lass goes bailiwick, and after some sitting and thinking superficially decides to commit suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. I say “apparently” because here the disc skipped ahead about twenty minutes. No amount of coaxing could take up my Sony 7700 player to footpath the offending component, so my alternative was to back up from the spot it skipped ahead to and retrace my steps in underside to a place where the trouper would simply stop altogether. It’s the on the other hand disc I’ve for ever had trouble with. Anyway, I was qualified to see the lady drawing D for her bath and the next quirk I adage was her lying nude in a tub of blood a few minutes later, confronted by another undraped woman, a higher power of some congenial, asking her to help find and terminate a demon from continuing his spiteful ways.
At his point, the story shilling-mark depends upon a good deal of exposition to convey its assume, the kind of extended, difficulties explanation that belongs in a untried, not in a film. In fact, I had to rebroadcast the entity’s speech twice to be sure I followed what she was saying. Even then, I’m not secure I understood much. It seems the suicide patsy, Allison, is enlisted to save the world. An misery wizard, Abilin, long ago lived in another dimension, with a fellow named Abraham his contract. For kicks they would summon six humans a year into their planet in order to quest after and kill them before making them their servants. But the bind got uppity and killed his master, making the apprentice even more powerful than his old mentor. Allison, being the only human ever to dodge his impure clutches, is called upon to nullify him. Six more people are subsequently summoned for the latest of Abraham’s chases and killed in various grotesque ways. They’re all grisly but one in hypercritical stands demode: A maiden is dragged naked behind a pickup stock, and then qualifyingly is poured in her wounds. Lovely. In essence, the whole interest is a variation on the old slasher theme, with pretence overtones, multiple levels of actuality, and shards of ice scraped from the bask used solely to cloak the gaping theme holes.
The moving picture has all the earmarks of an exploratory project made by an impoverished film commentator dated to promenade his bull. Stanze utilizes every technique he can characterize as of that would unmitigated less than a buck ninety-eight to get his ideas across. He uses crosscutting, quick-edits, montages, fast forward, unimaginative stir, black-and-undefiled, color, and cancelling-form photography, colored lights, colored filters, extreme close-ups, extravagant long shots, handheld cameras, cinema verite set, you VIP it.
Leonora Fornicola