Two well-known 70s titles tonight, a classic Savant's seen several times, and a classic that he'd somehow missed all this time.

Paramount's Serpico is as great a film as it ever was, with Al Pacino's excellent performance capping a cops 'n corruption epic made superior in every way. Paramount is giving more and more attention to their releases, and the extras here are handsomely mounted.

MGM's Where's Poppa? is a grim 'comedy' in the theater of the absurd style of the late 1960s. There's big laughs in some of the antics, but Savant found the overriding tone to be one of despair and misery. Ruth Gordon, George Segal and Trish Van Devere star.

Geoffrey Kleinman tells me that Universal has cut off all screener tapes to web reviewers, a policy I thought began with E.T. last October. Is this a trend? And are the top sites really included in the shut-down? There are certainly many disposable review sites out there, and I expect every company and publicity outfit discriminates in its own chosen way, but this is the first I've heard of an actual ban by a major.
Frankly, I've always wondered if the day would come that review discs would be cut off to the web. In the early years, 1997-1999, anyone online who claimed to be a reviewer could get discs, and I know 'reviewers' who weren't anywhere in print or on the web who got free product just by demanding it in huffy Emails!
I think I've attracted pub people with the depth and breadth of the Savant reviews, and I get lots of unsolicited stuff that sometimes yields a gem like J-MEN FOREVER. I certainly still enjoy the work, and hope it can continue for the forseeable future - I think sites like DVD Talk are legitimate, and useful to both the companies and to readers. Glenn Erickson