SPEND YOUR MONEY!

NEW RELEASES

*Blu-Ray prices are in BOLD BLUE
 
Alice in Wonderland                                       $16.99   $22.99  $26.99
The Wolfman                                                  $17.99   $24.99 
Burn Notice: Season 3                                    $34.99  
Life                                                                $39.99   $39.99   

$9.99 BLU-RAY sale

Blazing Saddles                                          $9.99
A Few Good Men                                     $9.99
Major League                                           $9.99
Righteous Kill                                            $9.99   

$4.75 DVD sale

Fargo
Grandma’s Boy
13 Going on 30
Kit Kitteridge: An American Girl

TV on DVD sale

21 Jump Street: Seasons 1 & 2                       $12.99
Everybody Loves Raymond: Seasons 5 & 6   $16.99
MASH: Seasons 3 & 4                                   $19.99
JAG: Seasons 3 & 4                                       $19.99

———————————————–

NEW RELEASES

*Blu-Ray prices are in BOLD BLUE

Alice in Wonderland                                       $16.99   $19.99  $26.99
The Wolfman                                                  $17.99  $22.99   $26.99 
Burn Notice: Season 3                                    $32.99  
Life                                                                $39.99   $44.99   
Rescue Me: Season 5: Vol 1 and 2                 $34.99

$4.99 DVD sale

Righteous Kill
Fracture
Uncle Buck
Heat
Watchmen

BLU-RAY sale

Seven Pounds                                                $9.99 
First Blood                                                     $9.99 
Tombstone                                                     $12.99 
Armageddon                                                   $12.99 
No Country for Old Men                                $12.99 
Law Abiding Citizen                                       $14.99 
Drag Me to Hell                                             $14.99 
Star Trek: First Contact                                  $14.99 
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End        $15.99 
Surrogates                                                      $15.99 

Video Game Sales Update

Target

Nintendo DSi system $169.99+FREE clean and protect kit ($9.99 value)
Club Penguin Herbert’s Revenge: $25
Petz Nursery: $19.99
Splinter Cell Conviction (360): $39.99
Split/Second (360, PS3): $49.99
Alice in Wonderland: $24.99 (DS) $29.99 (Wii)

Best Buy

Split/Second (360, PS3): $39.99
Mass Effect 2 (360): $39.99
Xbox 8GB Flash drive $39.99
Sims 3 Ambitions: (exp. pack) $39.99
Sims 3: $29.99
Sims 3 World Adventures: $19.99
NBA2K10 (360, PS3): $29.99
Get a $20 GC when you pre-order COD: Black ops and purchase a Xbox Live 4000 points card.

Toys R Us

All DS games B1G1 at 50% off
Free accessory (up tp $29.99) with the purchase of any gaming system.
COD:MW2 (360): $29.99
Just Dance (Wii): $27.99
10′ Minute Solution (Wii): $14.99
POP:The Forgotten Sands (Wii): $39.99

BUY FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: Blowtorch Ent.
MSRP: $19.93
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 89 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:

• Deleted Scenes
• Outtakes

The Pitch

Charlie Thurber is a second generation English professor trying to get tenure. When the college sends in a possible replacement (should he not get tenure) in the form of Elaine Grasso, Charlie begins to fall for her. Seriously. That’s it.

The Humans

Director/Writer: Mike Million
Starring: Luke Wilson, Gretchen Mol, David Koechner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Andrew Daly, Kate Walsh

The Nutshell

Charlie (Wilson) is an incredible English professor and his students absolutely love him (one young lady might love him a little too much), but his writing has never been published. Now approaching his deadline for tenure, he has to get published and prove his worth or else tenure is out of the question. It doesn’t help that Charlie’s father, a retired English professor, is pressuring him. Charlie’s best friend, Anthropology professor Jay Hadley (Koechner), is keeping Charlie on his toes with an insane hunt for Big Foot and a proclivity for pharmaceuticals. The dean, in doubt of Charlie’s potential, hires a new English professor named Elaine (Mol), and against Charlie’s better judgment, he begins to fall for her. Throw in Charlie’s profane sister (Walsh) and a telethon worker (DeWitt), and you’ve got Tenure. For better or for worse.

WHY ISN’T THIS FUNNY?!

The Lowdown

Yes, the plot is as unnecessarily convoluted as described above. The cast is filled with hilarious talent, but it’s all squandered. Did writer/director Mike Million aspire to create a banal failure of a dramedy, or did he sincerely hope to craft a witty and wry comedy? If his sights were aimed low, he succeeded tremendously. Tenure is not funny. At all. I did not laugh once during the entire 89 minute run time. I will credit Tenure with this: for being 89 minutes of unfunny, mundane plot, it thankfully felt short. Luke Wilson has long been considered box office poison, and his career of late has consisted of AT&T ads (which were pulled when market research showed people were responding negatively to Wilson) and DTV drivel like Tenure. Personally, I love Luke Wilson and I don’t understand the blatant indifference and outright disdain for him as an actor. I even love chubby AT&T peddling Luke Wilson. Give the guy a break. If you were benched in your prime, you’d have a double chin too.

Luke Wilson teaches the kids the importance of 3G coverage.

But it’s not just Wilson who is put to waste here. Koechner, whose memorable roles in films like Anchorman and The Office have proven his weight in comic gold, is given a meaningless subplot involving a hunt for Big Foot. The idea of Koechner forming a Big Foot Club and measuring giant footprints in the woods must look hilarious on paper, but in the film it is humorless and flat. Gretchen Mol shows up and does what she’s good at: being adorable. Andrew Daly is the only actor who almost gets a laugh during a dinner scene where she shows himself to be a real ass. And Rosemarie DeWitt, who I love in United States of Tara every week, is perhaps given the most thankless and useless role of all as a telethon worker hired by Charlie to be his date for possibly the most absurd and illogical reason ever.

Tenure strives to take basic plot elements from romantic comedies and put them to some use, but instead becomes a meandering, joyless experience. The talent is wasted, the potentially funny plot elements are robbed of their comic value, and by the end you’ll feel like someone has been going over you with a garden rake for the last hour: not overly horrific, but annoyingly painful enough that you’ll wish you found something better to do with your time.

Tenure takes perfectly good ingredients and turns out a half-baked, tasteless product.

The Package

There are two deleted scenes that probably wouldn’t have made a difference if they had stayed in the final film, and some outtakes, which probably would have been the funniest part of the DVD, had I not been so wiped out by the 89 minutes prior.

BUY IT AT
AMAZON: CLICK

HERE
STUDIO: Lionsgate
MSRP: $21.49
RATED: Not rated
RUNNING
TIME: 94 minutes
SPECIAL

FEATURES:
– Seleted scenes
– Making-of featurette
– Storyboard gallery
– Commentary by director Ron Harris and actresses Shauna MacDonald, Krysten Cumming and Anna Skellern

The
Pitch

The C.H.U.D.s get another helping of surface folk.

The Humans

Shauna MacDonald, Michael J. Reynolds, Jessika Williams, Douglas Hodge, Joshua Dallas, Anna Skellern, Gavan O’Herlihy, Natalie Mendoza.

The
Nutshell

Two days after the disappearance of the six female spelunkers from the first film, including Sarah (MacDonald), in an unexplored cave in the Appalachian Mountains, a search and rescue effort is underway.  When Sarah
emerges as the lone survivor and with no memory of the horrors from which she escaped, she leads another team down into the cave to try to find her friends.  The things that killed her friends are of course waiting there for them.

“Please…need lift…out of this movie…”. 

The Lowdown

First of all, the obvious question: is Descent 2 as good as the original?  No.  Is it worth seeing?  Marginally, yes.  Even though it’s basically a retread of Marshall’s innovative original that lacks any of the nuance, claustrophobia or chemistry of the first film.  Sarah’s amnesia from shock is the way-too-big of a MacGuffin that makes this outing possible.  Despite her ordeal, one might think that cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers (of a different variety here), might be the kind of things that stick with someone for a little while.  But since she can’t remember, we get basically a carbon copy of the first film, with a new cast of characters, most about whom we really don’t care. 

“What did you find?”
“Some weird bullshit about a witch named Blair.”
“Why am I getting carsick looking at it?”

Once the rescuers are underground, the exact same situation develops: they’re cut off from the surface by a cave in and then have to try to survive the creatures that prowl the darkness.  The kills mostly echo the first film, for both human and creature.  A major downer though is that there are too many cheap jump scares thrown in.  Furthermore, they’re set up like a row of dominoes; so there isn’t even that much jump to them.  First-time director, Jon Harris, who edited the first film, runs Marshall’s playbook mostly to predictability.  But the film is competently shot and although Harris adds absolutely nothing original, he doesn’t screw the pooch.  So there’s that at least.  There are two big surprises, including a twist ending.  This would be worth a rent at best if you liked the first film.  Just don’t expect much in the way of innovation.

Weirdest bondage threesome ever…

The
Package

Harris keeps the atmosphere from the first film, so there’s a lot of darkness that’s lit pretty well and the camerawork is good, so the film looks fine.  Sound is also suitably good, although it gets a little low at times.  There are about 10 minutes of deleted scenes, a couple of which, would have added even the littlest bit of flavor to some of the characters, and one badly boilerplate dream sequence scare.  There is a pretty substantial 25-minute making of featurette, seven minutes of storyboards and a commentary by Harris, MacDonald and fellow actresses Krysten Cumming and Anna Skellern to round out things.

How much Jeunet is too much Jeunet? MicMacs answered that question for me most definitively. Jean-Pierre Jeunet at his most Jeunetiest, MicMacs is a hyperactive Rube Goldbergian bit of whimsical fluff about… the horrors of land mines. When a mild-mannered video store clerk gets a stray bullet in his head he opts to take a unique form of revenge – going after the company that made the bullet. Along the way he falls in with a veritable circus sideshow of weirdos, living in a repurposed junk pile. Together they take the long way around to giving the execs their comeuppance. 

There will be many who disagree with me. Jeunet fully cracked out is what they’ve been waiting for. This is a film that’s all about the look, and for many folks that’s what they want. But it was almost impossible for me to sit through, especially because Jeunet’s style feels so cliched here. It’s everything you would expect, with all of the contraptions and pipes and dirt in just the right places. It’s the opposite of the liveliness of a film like The City of Lost Children or Amelie – everything feels plastic and placed and perfectly designed. There’s no messiness to this mess, and the art direction dies like overproduced punk rock. 

BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE
STUDIO: Grimoire
MSRP: $26.98
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Not much

The Pitch

An alternate world is full of dirtbags. Watch their adventures.

The Humans

Bill Zebub, Peter Steele, Kerri Taylor, Elyse Cheri and Suzi Lorraine

The Nutshell

A female goddess appears and informs us of the multiple realities in existence. She provides a spiel about an alternate world full of dirtbags and then we get to the meat of the film. The meat being nearly two hours of directionless meanderings that feature some decent camera work. This comes after the viewing clips and tips that I decided to illustrate below. Read those tips and commit them to memory.

Another way to configure your DVD player is to unplug it from the fucking wall.

The Lowdown

Dirtbags is
another terrible film from Bill Zebub Productions. There’s a bunch of loose stories that feature Bill Zebub as the hero. He’s dealing with a bunch of dirtbags that keep him from the girl he wants and the life he wants to live. While fighting against the odds, he flips off the camera and drops a few slurs. When you get around the posturing and the faux rebel characters, you’ve got nothing. It’s akin to public access broadcasting in low-rent rural locales. A bunch of kids that desperately want to be taken seriously by an audience that’s too hopped up on goof juice to give a damn.

The film is a remake of a 2002 prior work from Zebub.  I haven’t had the chance to view it, but I don’t feel like I’m missing anything essential. That’s why I’m asking Bill Zebub to prove the point of this film. You shot it twice and obviously gave a little thought to its construction. What is the damn point of this film? Don’t give me some bullshit answer about how it’s guerilla cinema. There’s nothing subversive here. All we have is a paper thin story about a bunch of assholes fucking each over. There’s no point to the action we see at minute 1 to minute 104. You can buy a copy of the Poetics from Amazon and try to Robert McKee your way through it. Zebub has to understand that there is a need for a narrative underlined by a compulsory directive.

What kills me about this film is that there will still be some fucktards that will want to draw comparisons to John Waters and Ed Wood. The difference between their work and this film is that you were dealing with people that love cinema. Sure, they were unskilled in the basics of film grammar, but they cared. There’s no passion to the direction and it shows. Any asshole with a camera can make a Bill Zebub movie. I feel bad using the guy’s name as an adjective as that implies there’s a slight bit of auteurship. There is no cinematic master to this beast. Dirtbags is a foul creature that demands to be put down in the dregs of forgotten lore. Don’t watch this film, forget about it.

I don’t tell you how to make shitty movies, you don’t tell me how to do my infrequent hobby.

The Package

The
DVD
comes with a case for the disc. There’s box art and some plastic to keep it shiny. When the disc is not in the player, you can fling it like a novelty flying disc. You may want to fling it into your garbage can. Make sure to pour coffee grounds and dirt upon the disc. If possible, wrap it in gas soaked rags and try to burn this crap. Only together can we stand up to bad cinema.

In the story about the new Scott Pilgrim vs the World character banners I told you that when the Scott Pilgrim Facebook page hits 100,000 fans Universal would release the new trailer.

Well, it did. And they did.

For some dumbass reason said trailer is not embeddable, so you’re going to have to click here to watch the awesomeness at hand Actually you should be able to watch the trailer below. Thanks to @IAmKent for the info. I think that the second half of the trailer really showcases how this movie is not just special, but truly in the exact same spirit as the comic, and how Michael Cera makes a great Scott Pilgrim.

At one point Tony Jaa was the most
exciting martial arts star on the planet. Then he became a big weird
joke. And now he’s done. Twitchfilm
is reporting that Tony
Jaa has quit filmmaking and become a monk in Thailand.

This
doesn’t necessarily mean his career is at an end, though. Twitch points
out that it’s not uncommon in Thai culture to take some time to join a
monastery, and Jaa could eventually leave the religious life and return
to kicking ass in movies, but it’s unlikely that this will happen any
time soon.

Jaa’s
career has been on a downward spiral; after demanding directorial
control on Ong Bak 2 he got it, and turned in a movie
with good action but really shitty everything else. I haven’t seen Ong Bak 3 but
hear that it’s terrible – according to Twitch it’s essentially a
failure in Thailand.

And while making Ong Bak 2 Jaa famously flipped his shit,
disappearing for two months, possibly getting involved in black magic.
That was just the tip of the crazy iceberg – Twitch has a full rundown
of Jaa’s turbulent last few years, which you can read by
clicking here. Let’s
just say that there’s the makings of a great Thai martial arts movie in
all of this. Sadly it looks like Tony Jaa won’t be starring in it.

Truly awful cameraphone pictures of new banners for Scott Pilgrim vs the World showed up on Bleeding Cool today. The six character posters are for the seven evil exes that Scott Pilgrim must battle to win the love of Ramona Flowers; you see the big baddie, Jason Schwartzman as Gideon Graves, above.

Hopefully new images will show up soon – official Universal releases, hopefully – because most of these are impossible to even see.

Meanwhile, the next trailer for the movie is ready. Universal won’t release it until the movie’s Facebook page has 100,000 fans; as of this writing they’re about 250 away. What are you waiting for? Make this happen! Click here!

Guillermo
del Toro has left The Hobbit
movies. As a director at least. This was reported first on TheOneRing.net.

The man has been sequestered in New
Zealand already for a massive chunk of time writing and prepping the two
movies with Peter Jackson and all the while his myriad projects are
announced or wallow in uncertainty.

No more, says Guillermo. Though his
passion is as strong as passion can be, Guillermo is no longer adrift in
a sea of studio uncertainty and a commitment that began at three years
and has evolved into six years, a number too great to sacrifice for the
grueling though rewarding Tolkien stories.

Life’s too short. And fragile.

This
actually pleases me greatly, for this means we get more work from the
man over the next few years. As good as his Hobbit films would have
been, I believe original work of his trumps them. He casts a huge shadow
of his own, and there’s a thought that at the end of the day he’d still
have to exist under the great ones of Mr. Jackson and Mr. Tolkien.

Personally,
I’d love to see him blot out the tall lanky one of Howard Phillips
Lovecraft with the definitive movie of his career.

But I’ll settle for one of the many
great things bursting from that head of his. He’s one of the great
creators we have and one of the best people I know. A talent like his
can’t lie in stasis for too long. It’s unfair to him and unfair to his
fans.

And
frankly, I know there are things he needs to be close to on this side
of the world that are much more important than hairy-toed dumpling men.

All
the details of the departure are here, but as someone in one of outer
rings of his hemisphere of friends I see this as a healthy and positive
decision. The Hobbit doesn’t need a Guillermo del Toro to be a delight.
But there are are many things Guillermo has that are uniquely his own
that require his grace. And we need a chance to see them!