Chuck: The Complete Fourth Season

Chuck: The Complete Fourth Season Review

In the Chuck Season 4 DVD, "Chuck" continues its highly entertaining blend of drama, comedy, and romance. Nice guy computer nerd and newly minted CIA agent Chuck Bartkowski (Zachary Levi) is finally teamed, both personally and professionally, with the lovely and deadly CIA agent Sara Walker (Yvonne Strahovski). At the beginning of the Chuck Season 4 DVD, Chuck and best buddy Morgan (Joshua Gomez) search for Chuck's long missing mother Mary Bartkowski (extended cameo by Linda Hamilton), thought to be a rogue agent working for the villainous international arms dealer Alexei Volkov (a superbly over-the-top Timothy Dalton). In a multi-episode sequence, Chuck, Morgan, Sara and the famously gruff NSA agent John Casey (Adam Baldwin) track and eventually confront Mary Bartkowski and Volkov. Mary's loyalties are something of a mystery, especially after she deprives Chuck of the use of the Intersect embedded in his brain, which provides him with his spy skills. Season Four was originally scheduled for 13 episodes, before being extended to a full season. Lucky fans get two season finales. In the first, Team Bartkowski tries to protect Chuck's sister Ellie from the Volkov gang, as she prepares to give birth to her first child with husband Captain Awesome, and as Chuck seeks a quiet moment to propose to the evasive Sara. In the second, Chuck and Sara must escape the revenge of the Volkov family long enough to bring off their own wedding. The steam could easily have gone out of the series after Chuck and Sara finally got together, but the creative team of Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak keeps finding ways to keep it funny and interesting. Any number of boomer TV series and movie dramas get hilariously ripped off this season, while a parallel storyline has Casey and Morgan as mismatched house mates and agent partners, with Morgan trying to keep secret his relationship with Casey's daughter Alex. "Chuck: The Complete Fourth Season" is very highly recommended to fa

This is Eureka Springs: Little Switzerland of the Ozarks

This is Eureka Springs: Little Switzerland of the Ozarks Review

A video tour of Eureka Springs, Arkansas area.

Sanctuary: The Complete Third Season

Sanctuary: The Complete Third Season Review

Dr. Helen Magnus (Amanda Tapping) is a beautiful and enigmatic scientist who seeks out all manner of monstrous creatures. Aided by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Will Zimmerman (Robin Dunne), tech expert Henry Foss (Ryan Robbins), professional con artist Kate Freelander (Agam Darshi), and the mysterious and unpredictable John Druitt (Christopher Heyerdahl), the Sanctuary team tracks down, studies and protects the strange and often terrifying creatures that secretly populate our world.

Eureka Seven - Box 2 (3DVD)

Eureka Seven - Box 2 (3DVD) Review

Il bocciolo splendente racconta la storia... che lega gli uomini e la terra. Il ragazzo e la ragazza decidono di intraprendere il viaggio in cerca del futuro. "Ascolta Nirvash da quando sei piombato in casa mia, noi siamo sempre stati in viaggio, non è vero? Abbiamo incontrato molte persone e ce ne siamo separati. Per me i ricordi sono estremamente importanti. Però durante questo viaggio ho sempre avuto Eureka al mio fianco. Io ti scongiuro, Nirvash! Non voglio che finisca tutto in questo modo! Io ho bisogno ho bisogno di Eureka al mio fianco!"

Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler

Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler Review

Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler Feature

• DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER-RESTORED AUTH ED (DVD MOVIE)

It's hard to imagine that the razor-sharp Kino DVD of Fritz Lang's first magnum opus fails to capture any of the visual electricity and heady atmosphere experienced by Berlin filmgoers in 1922. The film's historical importance to the crime-film genre and its thematic relevance to the director's later work have never been in dispute, but with only murky, choppy editions to go by, the movie has largely been paid lip service for its legacy rather than appreciated for itself. Now, thanks to this definitive restoration by the Murnau Institute, we can properly see it and experience it.

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is actually two films in one--or, more precisely, one film in two feature-length parts totaling four-and-a-half hours and conceived to be watched on consecutive evenings. Its title character is a criminal mastermind with the power and the will to orchestrate complex capers, counterfeit national currencies, manipulate the stock market, and hypnotically bend anyone to play a role in his diabolical designs. The hand of Mabuse seems to reach everywhere--for the excellent reason that the Doctor himself, a master of disguise, turns out to be just about anywhere at just the moment his intervention will wreak havoc and wreck lives. (He's played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who would repeat the part ten years later in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and also, in spirit if not in name, in Lang's dazzling 1928 film Spies; he was also the inventor Rotwang in Metropolis--as well as, offscreen, the former husband of Lang's screenwriter wife Thea von Harbou!)

The film's title in German is Doktor Mabuse der Spieler, and our supervillain is really less a gambler (all his games of chance are rigged) than a player: playing multiple roles, but even more importantly, playing with others' lives, playing with the very fabric of modern reality. The subtitles of the two parts are "A Picture of the Time" and "People of the Time"; the film is an artifact of the Weimar era when, as one character remarks, "We are bored and tired ... we need sensations of a very special kind to remain alive." Lang and his art directors, Otto Hunte and Karl Stahl-Urach, create a hallucinatory mise-en-scène in which the decor is at once stark and decadent, a playground for all manner of perverse spectacle and gamesmanship, a maze of corridors and doorways and streets where the modern and the gothic interlayer. This world ripe for Mabusian manipulation prefigured Hitler by a decade--and in one of his last declarations, the Doctor anticipates more contemporary visionaries of chaos: "I feel as a state within a state, with which I have always been at war." Fritz Lang continues to be a chillingly prophetic filmmaker. --Richard T. Jameson DR. MABUSE THE GAMBLER - DVD Movie

Eureka Seven - Box 3 (3DVD)

Eureka Seven - Box 3 (3DVD) Review

Il bocciolo splendente racconta la storia... che lega gli uomini e la terra. Il ragazzo e la ragazza decidono di intraprendere il viaggio in cerca del futuro. "Ascolta Nirvash da quando sei piombato in casa mia, noi siamo sempre stati in viaggio, non è vero? Abbiamo incontrato molte persone e ce ne siamo separati. Per me i ricordi sono estremamente importanti. Però durante questo viaggio ho sempre avuto Eureka al mio fianco. Io ti scongiuro, Nirvash! Non voglio che finisca tutto in questo modo! Io ho bisogno ho bisogno di Eureka al mio fianco!"

Bones: The Complete Fifth Season

Bones: The Complete Fifth Season Review

Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) are back for more mystery, murder, and mayhem in the fifth season of Bones. Relying on Brennan’s unparalleled scientific abilities and Booth’s street-wise instincts, the sexy, crime-solving duo and their team face everything from modern-day witches to murdered rock-n-rollers as they scramble for evidence to stop a gruesome serial killer. This spectacular new season brings a wedding, the show’s landmark 100th episode, and decisions Bones and Booth must make that could change their lives forever.