Drumline (2002) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

March 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Nick Cannon, Zoë Saldaña, Orlando Jones, GQ
screenplay by Tina Gordon Chism and Shawn Schepps
directed by Charles Stone III

by Bill Chambers Appealing newcomer Nick Cannon stars in Drumline as Devon, a Harlem high-school graduate making the transition from a big fish in a small pond to a guppy in the ocean that is Atlanta A&T. Devon begins his gruelling training for A&T’s mostly-black drumline on the wrong foot, wearing dark colours when white was demanded, failing to get his roommate to the first tryout on time, and claiming an instrument reserved for upper-tier members of the drumline–and refusing to give it back until he’s shown some respect by veritable drill sergeant Sean (Leonard Roberts). The one bold move that works in Devon’s favour at the start is hitting on Laila (Zoë Saldaña), captain of the cheerleading squad; she and Devon’s superiors, including the drumline’s manager, Dr. Lee (Orlando Jones), aim to turn the boy into a man through demonstrations of tough love peppered with encouragement.

Bushwhacked (1995) – DVD

March 19, 2003Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Family, Mystery

*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Daniel Stern, Jon Polito, Brad Sullivan, Ann Dowd
screenplay by John Jordan & Danny Byers and Tom Swerdlow & Michael Goldberg
directed by Greg Beeman

by Walter Chaw The Yang to the distaff Yin of Troop Beverly Hills, Bushwhacked, Greg Beeman’s endlessly irritating slapstick take on High Sierra, finds the bird-faced actor Daniel Stern doing his best to milk the hysterical simpleton shtick of his hapless Home Alone villain. Nicknaming Stern’s character “Spider” for no real reason but to, eight years after its release and just now finding its way to DVD, connect it in a disturbing way to David Cronenberg’s thirteenth film by way of arrested Freudian developmental phases and fixations on body function, Bushwhacked, as it happens, is also about as funny as Spider–not a particularly shining endorsement of something that’s ostensibly a comedy.

Roger Dodger (2002) – DVD

March 17, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Campbell Scott, Jesse Eisenberg, Mina Badie, Jennifer Beals
written and directed by Dylan Kidd

by Bill Chambers There’s a clever moment in Roger Dodger destined to slip past viewers that underscores the precision with which the film was conceptualized. Roger (Campbell Scott), the lady-killer whose nickname (which he shares with the stooge in Sidney Lumet’s Q&A) lends the picture its title, walks up to one of the glass walls of a meeting room inside his workplace to communicate with two colleagues on the other side–one of whom sticks the word “incubator” to his own forehead just as the scene cuts. Coming on the heels of a prologue in which Roger has demonstrated his persuasive albeit highly misogynistic grasp of sexual politics to his dazzled peers, this tableau is the movie in a nutshell: With a man of such confidence around, all others are hatchlings hanging on his tutelage. The film is subsequently about Roger passing a certain torch to his visiting 16-year-old nephew, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), and Nick fighting his moral instinct to extinguish it, as when he practices Roger’s art of seduction on a couple of bar-hopping older women played by the pitch-perfect duo of Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) [VISTA Series] – DVD

March 17, 2003Posted inAdventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Esoterica, Family, Mystery, Spielberg

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Charles Fleischer
screenplay by Peter S. Seaman & Jeffrey Price, based on the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit by Gary K. Wolf
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers Who Framed Roger Rabbit opens with an animated short (“Somethin’s Cookin'”) starring Roger Rabbit (voice of Charles Fleischer) and Baby Herman (Lou Hirsch) in which Roger, sitting for the lady of the house, is thwarted in his attempts to keep his young charge from climbing the refrigerator. You’d hardly know it, but we’re seeing these characters for the first time–and the ineffable period authenticity of “Somethin’s Cookin’,” a cartoon commissioned specifically for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, betrays the scrupulous eye of director Robert Zemeckis almost immediately. Animated by the legendary Richard Williams, “Somethin’s Cookin'” is fashioned in Tex Avery’s mix of elegance and elasticity; later, when Bugs Bunny makes an appearance in the movie proper, he still has the slopey head of yore. (Warner actually insisted on the modern versions of Looney Tunes appearing in the film, so Zemeckis had dummy footage mocked up to get their approval that he had no intention of using in the finished product.) The prologue ends prematurely when Roger sees bluebirds instead of stars–in the picture, cartoons are shot on soundstages: Roger Rabbit exists for real, as do Mickey Mouse, Bugs, et. al, and they hail from a Hollywood subdivision called Toontown. They are invincible, but they are also actors who bring their personal lives to work, so sometimes they just can’t generate stars on command.

Agent Cody Banks (2003)

March 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Espionage, Family, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Frankie Muniz, Hilary Duff, Angie Harmon, Keith David
screenplay by Zack Stentz & Ashley Miller and Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski
directed by Harald Zwart

Agentcodybanksby Walter Chaw A pint-sized version of a James Bond film, Harald Zwart’s Agent Cody Banks locates that series’ fascination with modes of conveyance and breasts and places it cannily in the realm of early adolescence. It belongs there, after all, but burying Frankie Muniz’s face in Angie Harmon’s breasts (a second attempt is recognized and discouraged) is filmed statutory rape, even if he’s not complaining. Its screenplay by committee (four writers, with a fifth credited with story) is flat and uninvolving (and feckless), with the sole highlight coming in a background PA announcement asking the owner of a silver Aston Martin to move it from the handicapped parking zone. Otherwise, the picture is just a collection of teensploitation formulas (“the bet” chief among them) married to a few weak gadgets and the same sort of world-saving wish-fulfillment fantasy that Bond has long since made stultifying and passé.

Secretary (2002) – DVD

March 14, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring James Spader, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Davies, Patrick Bauchau
screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, based on the short story by Mary Gaitskill
directed by Steven Shainberg

by Walter Chaw Pleasantville for the sadomasochism set, Steven Shainberg’s Secretary is a gentle sexual-awakening fable set in a peculiar fairytale hyper-reality reminiscent of the saturated inward-gazing milieu of David Cronenberg’s Spider. Featuring a courageous, social-convention-shattering performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the picture is The Graduate by way of humiliation and water sports–the hallmark pool scenes feature Gyllenhaal’s Benjamin Braddock character Lee Holloway festooned with water-wings, her position just on the surface the mordant reflexivity of Sunset Blvd.‘s doomed Joe Gillis rather than of Braddock’s bottom-of-the-drink disconnection. Between Secretary and the Jake Gyllenhaal starrer Moonlight Mile, the Gyllenhaal siblings seem intent on tackling their generation’s particular alienations by way of Mike Nichols’s counterculture classic, but where Jake takes a conventional route in Moonlight Mile, Maggie’s exploration of plastics-vs.-individualized happiness embraces the essential shadows of our nasty sexual ids in a Solondz-lite waltz with seething suburbia.

Le6ion of the Dead (2001) – DVD

March 11, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Horror, Vampire, Zombie

Legion of the Dead
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Michael Carr, Russell Friedenberg, Kimberly Liebe, Matthias Hues
written and directed by Olaf Ittenbach

by Walter Chaw Sort of like how I imagine Samuel Beckett would read while huffing accelerant, Olaf Ittenbach’s Le6ion of the Dead rips off a couple of Tarantino screenplays en route to winning the title of the most arbitrary and impossible-to-follow film that isn’t composed primarily of stock footage. Though the director has tried to have his name removed from the picture, citing unapproved edits made in the struggle for an “R” rating, unless the studio wrote the screenplay, pointed the camera, and hired the actors…sufficed to say that there’s enough blame here to go around.

Inspector Gadget 2 (2003) – DVD

March 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Disney, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring French Stewart, Elaine Hendrix, Caitlin Wachs
sceenplay by Ron Anderson and William Robertson & Alex Zamm
directed by Alex Zamm

by Bill Chambers Edited with the Cuisinart clarity of a car commercial, designed with a balloon-animal colour palette similar to that of last year’s psychedelic Thomas in Love, Inspector Gadget 2 (henceforth IG2–incidentally, the on-screen logo reads Inspector 2 Gadget) has style in theory, like Avril Lavigne, but is monotonous and exasperating–also like Avril Lavigne. I haven’t seen the original film, but I did watch the cartoon every morning before school as a kid (we used to sing our own version of the theme song in the playground: “Doo doo doo doo do, Inspector Goo-head“–ah, those halcyon days), so I recognize certain touchstones the sequel, um, touches: faceless supervillain with the pussycat emblem Dr. Claw (who, robbed of his synthetic speech in addition to his lap kitty, looks and acts like Truman Capote in IG2); Inspector Gadget’s niece, Penny (Caitlin Wachs), and her dog Brain (in IG2, a beagle without the flexibility of his animated counterpart), both fledgling detectives; and the always-fuming Chief Quimby (Mark Mitchell), who does not pop out of mailboxes and such things here to deliver messages to Gadget that self-destruct. More disappointingly, he does not have a moustache.

Tears of the Sun (2003) + Bringing Down the House (2003)

March 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, War

TEARS OF THE SUN
*/****
starring Bruce Willis, Monica Bellucci, Cole Hauser, Fionnula Flanagan
screenplay by Alex Lasker & Patrick Cirillo
directed by Antoine Fuqua

BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE
*/****
starring Steve Martin, Queen Latifah, Eugene Levy, Joan Plowright
screenplay by Jason Filardi
directed by Adam Shankman

Bringdownthetearsofthesunby Walter Chaw Antoine Fuqua’s curiously timed Tears of the Sun is an unpleasant bit of jingoistic bullroar that seeks to redress the Clinton administration’s refusal to intervene in the Rwandan genocide by offering up a small band of American special forces soldiers as saviour bwana bravely risking all for a white woman and, incidentally, restoring the son of a slain tribal leader to power. A lot like Schindler’s List, for all the devastating scope of human tragedy involved in its story, the film is about the survivors and the white heroes, not the victims.

Poolhall Junkies (2003)

March 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Chazz Palminteri, Rick Schroder, Rod Steiger, Michael Rosenbaum
screenplay by Gregory ‘Mars’ Martin and Chris Corso
directed by Gregory ‘Mars’ Martin

by Walter Chaw Obviously the spawn of a post-Rounders discussion (“Hey, that was great, but wouldn’t it be better with pool instead of poker?”), Gregory ‘Mars’ Martin’s Poolhall Junkies also counts among its plunder victims The Hustler, The Color of Money, On the Waterfront, and–pick any David Mamet. With the late Rod Steiger as a crusty pool hall owner, Christopher Walken in his typical role as actor in an actor-less stew, and a law school student girlfriend (Alison Eastwood, similar to, but somehow more expressionless than, Bridget Fonda) in a plush pad who has a lot of morals except when it comes to nepotism and winning a job in a pool game, Poolhall Junkies is B-list, B-movie garbage that plows through its clockwork machinations with a kind of juvenile bluster that keens like a hammer to the brainpan.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) + Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) – DVDs|[Special Collector’s Edition] – DVDs

March 5, 2003Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Trek

STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK
***/****
DVD – Image A Sound A
SCE DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei
screenplay by Harve Bennett
directed by Leonard Nimoy

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME
**/****
DVD – Image B- Sound B Extras C
SCE DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan
screenplay by Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer
directed by Leonard Nimoy

by Vincent Suarez I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the middle installments of the six Star Trek films featuring Captain James T. Kirk and his crew; I would have been content had the series ended with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, which is not only a great Trek movie but also an extremely fine piece of filmmaking in itself. (The seventh film in the series, Star Trek: Generations, passed the phasers to Captain Picard of “The Next Generation”, and included only brief appearances by a select few under Kirk’s command.) For me, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock seemed to betray the spirit, morality, and philosophy of its predecessor, while Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home represented the low point in cinematic “Trek,” reducing the series to formulaic farce.

Six Feet Under: The Complete First Season (2001) – DVD

March 2, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image A Sound A Extras B+
"Pilot," "The Will," "The Foot," "Familia," "An Open Book," "The Room," "Brotherhood," "Crossroads," "Life's Too Short," "The New Person," "The Trip," "A Private Life," "Knock, Knock"

by Bill Chambers Like you, I was enthralled by American Beauty, but its resonance proved short-lived. The spell was broken for me when my friend innocently observed after a screening that men only masturbate in the shower in movies–the whole film mentally unravelled from there, that hanging thread, as I became cognizant of, and progressively bothered by, its oversimplifications. Is it just my imagination, or would Mr. Furley spin in his syndicated grave over the misinterpretation that informs the picture's climax? Though the culturally young are entitled to find American Beauty profound, since it's of that particular kind of Hollywood caginess that takes a trained eye (and is especially cheeky coming from an enfant terrible of the British stage), more people need(ed) to recognize that it's Blame It On Rio with proscenium arches.

The First $20 Million (2002) – DVD

February 26, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, ZERO STARS

The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound B-
starring Adam Garcia, Rosario Dawson, Jake Busey, Enrico Colantoni
screenplay by Jon Favreau and Gary Tieche, based on the novel by Po Bronson
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Food-obsessed Japanese girl band Cibo Matto plays quietly behind a weird commercial of pastel San Diego Chickens sky-diving within the first five minutes of The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, offering a benighted hope that the film won’t suck that is so ephemeral that its inevitable death is less cruel than perverse. Playing like a version of Real Genius that’s somehow worse, the idea of a hard-partying geek fraternity involved in changing the world one byte at a time is so disinteresting and bankrupt that its resounding failure isn’t nearly as surprising as the twin revelations that the otherwise bright-seeming Jon Favreau co-wrote the screenplay (and appears in a cameo with crap in his mouth), and that this dog pile of a script (based on a novel by Po Bronson) actually found suitors.

Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000) – DVD

February 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Gangster, Germany, Ireland, UK

*/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kevin Spacey, Linda Fiorentino, Peter Mullan, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Gerard Stembridge
directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan

by Walter Chaw Completed about a year after John Boorman’s infinitely superior The General, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Ordinary Decent Criminal is a sporadic “fictionalizing” of the life of Irish crime boss Martin Cahill that dresses up Cahill’s exploits with slick visuals while attempting the unsavoury task of doing exactly what The General was accused of doing: making urban terrorism and torture whimsical caper fare. Recasting Cahill as a Keyser Soze with a sense of oily humour and renaming him Michael Lynch (Kevin Spacey), Ordinary Decent Criminal is extraordinarily lightweight blather free entirely of the sense of scale and place of Boorman’s film. The General is fantastic, Ordinary Decent Criminal: just fatuous.

Frank McClusky, C.I. (2002) – DVD

February 24, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Dave Sheridan, Randy Quaid, Enrico Colantoni, Dolly Parton
screenplay by Mark Perez
directed by Arlene Sanford

by Walter Chaw There’s a freshness to the staleness of Frank McKlusky, C.I. that charms initially before it grates for its dedicated cuteness and innocuous incorrectness. With an amazing supporting cast of the lower echelon of B-list comedy performers (Dolly Parton, Randy Quaid, Orson Bean (reprising his Being John Malkovich character), Andy Richter, Kevin Pollack, Adam Corolla, and Chris Farley’s also-fat brother), the picture is clearly a rip-off of Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura films, complete with a mugging Dave Sheridan (so good in Bubble Boy, now channelling Carrey), a pooch sidekick, and a blonde love interest in the emetic Cameron Diaz (of Carrey’s The Mask) mold played, strangely enough, by Cameron Richardson.

The Money Pit (1986) [Widescreen] – DVD

February 22, 2003Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Spielberg

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Tom Hanks, Shelley Long, Alexander Godunov, Maureen Stapleton
screenplay by David Giler
directed by Richard Benjamin

by Bill Chambers Many comedies are padded by slapstick–here’s slapstick padded by jokes, every single one of which bears the tang of a warm-up act. There is dialogue that advances a scene and there is dialogue that fills a page count, and David Giler’s screenplay for The Money Pit toils almost exclusively in the latter. On the one hand, that’s exactly the right approach, as it relegates stars Tom Hanks and Shelley Long to the status of Chachi and Joanie whilst elevating the titular house to starring role. But “the money pit” can only fall down and go boom so many times, thus making The Money Pit a stop-and-go feature that would kill as a short. I’ve often toyed with doing my own edit of the film.

Sports Night: The Complete Series Plus Pilot Episode (1992-1993) – DVD

February 22, 2003Posted in1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Sports, Television

Image B Sound B
SEASON 1 – “Pilot,” “The Apology,” “The Hungry and the Hunted,” “Intellectual Property,” “Mary Pat Shelby,” “*The Head Coach, Dinner and the Morning Mail,” “Dear Louise,” “Thespis,” “The Quality of Mercury at 29K,” “Shoe Money Tonight,” “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee,” “Smoky,” “Small Town,” “Rebecca,” “Dana and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Sally,” “How Are Things in Gloca Morra?,” “The Sword of Orion,” “Eli’s Coming,” “Ordnance Tactics,” “Ten Wickets,” “Napoleon’s Battle Plan,” “What Kind of Day Has it Been”
SEASON 2 – “Special Powers,” “When Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Cliff Gardner,” “Louise Revisited,” “Kafelnikov,” “Shane,” “Kyle Whitaker’s Got Two Sacks,” “The Reunion,” “A Girl Named Pixley,” “The Giants Win the Pennant, the Giants Win the Pennant,” “The Cut Man Cometh,” “The Sweet Smell of Air,” “Dana Get Your Gun,” “And the Crowd Goes Wild,” “Celebrities,” “The Local Weather,” “Draft Day: Part I – It Can’t Rain at Indian Wells,” “Draft Day: Part II – The Fall of Ryan O’Brian,” “April is the Cruelest Month,” “Bells And A Siren,” “La Forza Del Destino,” “Quo Vadimus”

by Walter Chaw Taken as a whole, and a box set from Buena Vista allows one to do just that, Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night” takes on the character of an extended experiment that starts tentatively and ends as one of the genuinely valuable moments of television in the year before HBO and flagship show “The Sopranos” became the benchmark for quality boob-tubery in the post-post-modern age. Detailing the behind-the-scenes drama of producing an “ESPN SportsCenter”-esque news program, it draws inevitable comparison to James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News (and accordingly, during the first season, episode five, Felicity Huffman gets to knock over a production assistant à la Holly Hunter’s character in that film), but distinguishes itself with an understanding that in many ways, sports is an effective locus for the hot-button issues of modern society: misogyny, race, addiction, violence.

Old School (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Ellen Pompeo
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Following in the tepid footsteps of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder‘s attempt to update Animal House for the new millennium, Todd Phillips’s Old School is better than it should be for a surprisingly funny Will Ferrell and another one of those laconic performances by a Wilson brother (Luke, this time) that just begs for a better vehicle. Less than John Landis’s landmark ode to anarchy, however, Old School most resembles Hart Bochner’s PCU–a film to which it pays unsubtle homage in the “ironic” casting of Jeremy Piven as that hale genre archetype: the button-down dean. (And PCU ultimately finds itself the superior campus clone comedy… For whatever that’s worth.) As diaries of arrested development go, Old School at least has the wit to tell a story of thirtysomethings seeking to recapture the halcyon days of binge-drinking and the joys of sexual objectification, making it something of a middle class/mid-life crisis tragedy and fitfully engaging in a distracted way as a result.

Brown Sugar (2002) – DVD

February 15, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Mos Def, Nicole Ari Parker
screenplay by Michael Elliot and Rick Famuyiwa
directed by Rick Famuyiwa

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a lot of talk of integrity in Brown Sugar, and a lot more of the defiant nature of good hip-hop; if the film embodied either of those traits in its words or pictures it would be a perfect ten. Alas, for all of Brown Sugar's hue and cry over the mainstreaming of the music, the film is tediously commonplace in its attitudes; director/co-writer Rick Famuyiwa treats hip-hop mania like the sedate cream-coloured furniture his protagonists seem to enjoy–just another tony item to be collected. He simply isn't smart or passionate enough to evoke an obsessive love for anything, be it musical or human, and both his romance plot and his professing of musical devotion are borrowings from other movies and conversations overheard. While it's too low-key and oblivious to be offensive (and the furniture does have its qualities), it makes no impression at all beyond the miracle one fluky, inspired performance that belongs in a better movie.

All in the Family: The Complete Second Season (1971-1972) – DVD

February 15, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Christopher Heard, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Television

Image B- Sound C-
"The Saga of Cousin Oscar," "Gloria Poses in the Nude," "Archie in the Lock-Up," "Edith Writes a Song," "Flashback: Mike Meets Archie," "The Election Story," "Edith's Accident," "The Blockbuster," "Mike's Problem," "The Insurance is Canceled," "The Man in the Street," "Cousin Maude's Visit," "Christmas Day at the Bunkers'," "The Elevator Story," "Edith's Problem," "Archie and the F.B.I," "Mike's Mysterious Son," "Archie Sees a Mugging," "Archie and Edith Alone," "Edith Gets a Mink," "Sammy's Visit," "Edith the Judge," "Archie is Jealous," "Maude"

by Christopher Heard It has to be stated at the outset that I am one of the world's most ardent "All in the Family" fans–I believe this television series to be the greatest ever. Producer Norman Lear bought the rights to Johnny Speight's British kitchen-sink comedy "Till Death Do Us Part" and relocated it to Queens, New York, and in so doing he unwittingly rewrote the books on the power of the medium. A show that weekly served up major sociological storylines, dressing them in darkly comedic depictions of the ugliness of racism and intolerance, in "All in the Family", you were laughing at Archie Bunker, not with him. And in the end, the moral right always won out over Archie's ignorance.