{"id":15385,"date":"2017-02-11T12:25:15","date_gmt":"2017-02-11T17:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=15385"},"modified":"2017-02-11T12:25:15","modified_gmt":"2017-02-11T17:25:15","slug":"the-vice-universe-band-of-the-hand-1986","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=15385","title":{"rendered":"The Vice Universe: Band of the Hand (1986)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being a human barometer isn’t easy, especially when a headache lasts as long as a storm front as it creeps over the city, and dumps a steady dose of snow. Toronto’s winter in 2016-2017 has been pretty mild, but I always know when something’s coming by, and yesterday’s cranial alert\u00a0was a record at almost 24 hours of steady throbbing.<\/p>\n

With a clear sky (and clear head), here’s the belated review of Band of the Hand<\/strong><\/a> (1986), a film made during Miami Vice<\/strong>‘s rapid ascension to hit series on NBC’ during the mid-1980s.<\/p>\n

Look at Lauren Holly’s HAND. Her character is not yet part of the BAND, but soon she will be another FINGER that makes the HAND which forms a powerful FIST that will defeat BAD HANDS!<\/p><\/div>\n

Like the series, Michael Mann executive produced the film which also signaled the feature film directorial debut of Starsky and Hutch<\/strong> co-star Paul Michael Glaser.<\/p>\n

Director Paul Michael Glaser (hands NOT visible).<\/p><\/div>\n

Mann wrote 4 episodes of the hit 1970s series, and gave Glaser further chances to direct on Vice<\/strong>, resulting in a few classic episodes and two Emmy Award nominations in 1985 and 1986 for Glaser. Band<\/strong> should’ve been an important stepping stone – as a B-movie, it’s perfectly fine – but as he recounted in an interview archived by the\u00a0Television Academy Foundation, shit happened, and it took a few years before Glaser\u00a0returned to the big screen.<\/p>\n

The film did eventually make its way to DVD, but Mill Creek’s budget line Blu-ray sports a really nice transfer that preserves the film’s colours and film grain. Only qualm is the tepid stereo mix, which is baffling for a Mann production, because his Manhunter<\/strong> (1986) was noted for being an especially ‘loud’ film during its theatrical release and boasted great bass on laserdisc; and Vice<\/strong> itself was among the first series to be shown in early stereo by NBC.<\/p>\n

The network had (I believe) made the first stereo broadcast with an episode of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show<\/strong>, which Carson highlighted in his monologue, and using Vice<\/strong> to sell stereo TV was a smart move on NBC’s behalf. The show had a substantial music budget and showcased 2-3 new songs weekly, plus tasked Jan Hammer to create scores that blended with sound effects, songs, and enhanced epic montages.<\/p>\n

At some point I’ll grab Mill Creek’s Blu-ray set of Vice<\/strong> – it’s supposed to look okay in new HD transfers – and do a retrospective of the show, which I watched to the bitter end after it lost its mind and became a parody of itself (a show’s in big trouble when a lead character, a cop, \u00a0gets amnesia and spends a chunk of the season as an enforcer), but certainly a high point for me was doing a Q&A with series composer Hammer a while back.<\/p>\n

That interview formed the skeleton of a 2-part retrospective published in Film Score Monthly<\/strong> in 2003, and I’ll post links when I’ve integrated the jpeg scans into the current database.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, here are a few online scans of the poster art used to sell\u00a0Band<\/strong>, which are stark reminders of the graphic style\u00a0that dominated the decade.<\/p>\n

If you’re asking Why so many triangles? Why patterns derived from Maggot Banana soup and Cream of Worm Chowder? sadly, I have no answers, but would you look at that fancy hand!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Cheers,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mark R. Hasan<\/strong>, Editor
\nKQEK.com<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of the Michael Mann-produced Band of the Hand (1986), new on Blu from Mill Creek.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15388,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[4933,2562,2563,4934,1790,4936],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/BandOfTheHand_featured.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-409","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15385"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15385"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15404,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15385\/revisions\/15404"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}