Editorial Product Review: :A remarkably ambitious and engrossing project, this 1978 television miniseries ran 26-and-a-half hours, cost a then-enormous $25 million, and involved 4 directors, 5 cinematographers, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 speaking parts. Based on James Michener's panoramic bestseller about the settling of the American West--as reflected in the history of a fictional town called Centennial, Colorado--the story begins in the late 18th century and ends with a typical 20th century conflict over land usage. Centennial, however, largely concentrates on various memorable frontiersmen, trappers, ...
Editorial Product Review: :A thousand years in 10 hours is an ambitious project, to say the least. But the team at CNN succeeds with its now-typical aplomb, as the team that brought us Cold War shares with us Millennium. 'We know the history of our own country,' narrator Ben Kingsley intones. But this series purports to give us 'history from a global perspective, not through the eyes of the West.' Using reenactments and impressive computer graphics--used with inspiration for everything from rebuilding the 11th-century Pueblo Bonito to ...
Editorial Product Review: :A smart and savvy (albeit highly stylized) look at the single lives of four thirtysomething Manhattan women, Sex and the City: The Complete Second Season builds on the foundation of its first season with plot arcs that are both hilarious and heartfelt, taking the show from breakout hit to true pop-culture phenomenon. Relationship epiphanies coexist happily alongside farcical plots and zingy one-liners, resulting in emotionally satisfying episodes that feature the sharp kind of character-defining dialogue that seems to have disappeared from the rest of ...
Editorial Product Review: :Now you can achieve multiple viewings of the best Sex on TV. Winner of Golden Globes for Best TV Series and Best Actress, Sex and the City is based on Candace Bushnell's provocative bestselling book. Sarah Jessica Parker stars as Carrie Bradshaw, a self-described 'sexual anthropologist,' who writes 'Sex and the City,' a newspaper column that chronicles the state of sexual affairs of Manhattanites in this 'age of un-innocence.' Her 'posse,' including nice girl Charlotte (Kristin Davis), hard-edged Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and party girl ...
Editorial Product Review: :In its second season, The Sopranos sustains the edgy intelligence and unpredictable, genre-warping narrative momentum that made this modern mob saga the most critically acclaimed series of the late 1990s. Creator-producer David Chase repeatedly defies formula to let the narrative turn as a direct consequence of the characters' behavior, letting everyone in this rogue's gallery of Mafiosi, friends, and family evolve and deepen. That gamble is most apparent in the rupture of the relationship that formed the spine of the first season, the tangled ...
Editorial Product Review: :The Sopranos, writer-producer-director David Chase's extraordinary television series, is nominally an urban gangster drama, but its true impact strikes closer to home: Like 1999's other screen touchstone, American Beauty, the HBO series chronicles a dysfunctional, suburban American family in bold relief. And for protagonist Tony Soprano, there's the added complexity posed by heading twin families, his collegial mob clan and his own, nouveau riche brood. The series' brilliant first season is built around what Tony learns when, whipsawed between those two worlds, he finds ...
Editorial Product Review: :Anglophiles and Britcom aficionados will welcome the video of this delightful 1974 series based on the books by Charlotte Bingham. Happily, the sparkling dialogue and engaging characters wear much better than the actors' horribly dated '70s wardrobes. John Alderton and his real-life wife, Pauline Collins, star as C.D. and Clara, the George Burns and Gracie Allen of Hampstead, right down to the 'Say goodnight, Clara' that closes each episode. This boxed set contains the first seven episodes of the series. Episode 1 sets the ...
Editorial Product Review: :'So,' Tony Soprano asks analyst Dr. Melfi in the wake of not-so-dearly-departed Livia's death, 'we're probably done here, right?' Sorry, Tone, not by a long shot. Unresolved mother issues are the least of the Family man's troubles in the brutal and controversial third season of The Sopranos. Ranked by TV Guide among the top five greatest series ever, The Sopranos justified its eleven-month hiatus with some of its best, and most hotly debated, episodes that continue the saga of the New Jersey mob boss ...
Editorial Product Review: :Two of the best politically themed Simpsons episodes, 'Lisa's Substitute' and 'Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,' have already been released on video. But that still leaves this formidable slate of six episodes. Topping the ticket are 'Sideshow Bob Roberts,' in which Bart's 'mortal enemy,' Sideshow Bob, becomes mayor of Springfield; 'Trash of the Titans,' in which Homer, 'the last angry man,' is elected Springfield's Sanitation Commissioner on the platform of 'Can't someone else do it?'; and 'Two Bad Neighbors,' in which 'local oaf' Homer ...
Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 offers the best price-to-performance ratio we've seen in a desktop chip. For half the cost of AMD's top-of-the-line chip, you get identical if not superior performance and better power efficiency. AMD surprised us last year with its completely dominant dual-core chips, but Intel regains the crown with Core 2 Duo.
India expects to see rough diamond supplies fall by up to a fourth after the Diamond Trading Co (DTC), the distribution arm of De Beers, cuts down on Indian clients, an industry body said on Wednesday.