Black College Football Experience – The Doug Williams Edition (XBOX 360)

Featuring over 35 HBCU schools, real-time interactive halftime shows, a jukebox with authentic music recorded from HBCU bands, and well-polished graphics, this football game takes the college HBCU experience and successfully translates it into unique sports gaming experience.

Watchmen: The End is Nigh Part 1 & 2 (XBOX 360/PS3)

Though you can only play as two of the Watchmen (Nite Owl and Rorschach) this movie-inspired adaptation of the heralded comic book packs a major one-two punch.

G-Force (All Consoles)

G-Force is a fast-paced action game based on the movie of the same name. If you’re into rocket powered hamsters, this is probably your thing. If not, give it a pass and stick with Call of Duty 4.

Reviews of Watchment: Director’s Cut, Coraline and Explicit Ills
Watchmen
Warner Bros.
Theatrical Cut: $29
2-Disc Director’s Cut: $35
Blu-ray: $36

Plot: When a retired superhero is killed, his former colleagues investigate his death and wind up stumbling upon an apocalyptic plot that may have been hatched by one of their own.

Opinion: Like every other fanboy who discovered Alan Moore’s groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen as a teenager, I anticipated and dreaded the arrival of Zack Snyder’s film version.  On the one hand, it’s hard not to geek out at the promise of seeing the comic’s beautifully drawn panels recreated so meticulously on the big screen.  At the same time though, I had enormous reservations about Snyder, whose previous film—the slow-mo-a-go-go adaptation of Frank Miller’s ultraviolent 300—was a triumph of style over substance.  I’m sorry to say that my fears were justified.  On a purely technical level, Watchmen is undeniably impressive.  The special effects are largely seamless, the production design is obsessively detailed and the characters all look like they’ve stepped right off the page onto the screen.  But as an adaptation—as well as a movie in its own right—it’s a profound disappointment.  The problem is that the filmmakers have tried to include too much of the book onscreen.  While it would have been hard to lose certain fan-favorite moments and subplots, a trimmer running time would have forced Snyder to really focus the film’s narrative, as well as find a way to make its themes relevant to modern audiences.  As it is, it’s difficult to tell what Watchmen is about…and this is coming from someone that has read the book multiple times.  This director’s cut adds 24 minutes to an already substantial runtime, but doesn’t improve the movie in any significant way.

Bonus Features: The 2-disc edition features a half-hour documentary about the impact of the graphic novel on the comic book industry and pop-culture at large as well as the 11 video journals that were posted online during the film’s production.  The Blu-ray version comes with considerably more extras, starting with a “Maximum Movie Mode” that allows viewers to watch the movie with picture-in-picture commentary from cast and crew as well as in-depth onscreen commentary from Snyder where he compares specific frames of the movie to the same frames featured in the comic book.  Also included are two additional making-of featurettes not found on the standard edition.  If you’re still hungry for more goodies after all that, you’ll have to wait for the Ultimate Collector’s Edition, a 5-disc set due to hit shelves this fall, just in time for the holiday season.

Verdict: Personally I say Skip It, but who am I kidding?  If you’re a fan of the comic, you’re obviously going to Buy It or at least Rent It.

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Coraline
Universal
$30
2-Disc: $35
Blu-ray: $40

Plot: A little girl discovers a passageway to a parallel world, which offers many delights…and a few horrors.

Opinion: Let’s cut to the chase: I love this movie.  On a technical level alone, Coraline is a stunning achievement and may just be the finest example of stop-motion animation yet put onscreen.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that you’ve never seen anything quite like the fantastical images that director Henry Selick and his team of animators have conjured up here.  From squeaky circus mice performing an elaborate song-and-dance routine, to a lush garden filled with giant snails and chatty flowers, to a seemingly ordinary room that transforms into a giant spider web, Coraline offers one dazzling setpiece after another.  It’s the very definition of movie magic—the world onscreen is so beautiful, so enveloping, so real, you feel like you’re a part of it instead of simply observing the action from your couch.  There are things about the film I could pick apart if I really wanted to—some of the vocal performances aren’t quite as strong as they could be—but none of these minor flaws can dampen my enthusiasm for what Selick has accomplished.  Coraline may look like a kids’ movie, but it’s a movie for anyone of any age who wants to experience the joy and wonder that comes with seeing a true cinematic artist at work.

Bonus Features: About 10-minutes worth of deleted scenes introduced by Selick, an in-depth half-hour making-of documentary and a featurette profiling the film’s vocal cast.  But the best bonus feature is the inclusion of both the 2D and 3D versions of the film on one disc, with a few pairs of 3D glasses tossed in as well.

Verdict: Buy It

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Explicit Ills
Peace Arch Entertainment
$30
Blu-ray: $35

Plot: A few days in the life of a run-down neighborhood in North Philadelphia, where residents are doing their best to get by.

Opinion: Although he’s never worked with critically acclaimed director David Gordon Green, actor Mark Webber has clearly studied his movies closely for his own directorial debut, Explicit Ills.  Modeled after Green’s breakthrough feature, George Washington, this stylized slice-of-life story places mood and atmosphere ahead of plot.  One area where Webber trumps Green is star power: Rosario Dawson, Naomie Harris, Paul Dano and The Roots’ Tariq Trotter are among the famous faces featured in this film’s ensemble. Thanks to the talented cast and Webber’s confident presence behind the camera, Explicit Ills is eminently watchable.  At the same time though, it’s never really all that compelling.  Instead of drawing the viewer into this community, Webber keeps us at a distance, which makes it hard to feel the full weight of the tragedy that eventually befalls the characters in the film’s final act.

Bonus Features: A batch of deleted scenes.

Verdict: Rent It

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Also on DVD:

The force is clearly with Robot Chicken.  After the success of their first Star Wars parody, Seth Green and the rest of the cast and crew of Cartoon Network’s hit stop-motion animated series return with Robot Chicken: Star Wars—Episode II (Cartoon Network, $20), which offers more hilarious Star Wars-themed sketches with a particular emphasis on the many bounty hunters (including, of course, Boba Fett) that populate that far, far away galaxy.  The disc comes with a smorgasbord of bonus features, including star-studded commentary tracks, lots of behind-the-scenes stuff and a video diary from the episode’s premiere at Skywalker Ranch.  A heartfelt tribute to the iconic crooner, who passed away just before the film was completed, Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer (RED Distribution, $30) mixes vintage archival footage with recently taped interviews with the star and her many admirers.  Although the film is accessible for all audiences, it will be best appreciated by those with a working knowledge of O’Day and the era of music she represents.  90-minutes worth of additional performances and interviews are included on the DVD.  John Malkovich won some strong reviews for his star turn in the indie comedy The Great Buck Howard (Magnolia, $27) even though the movie itself received lukewarm notices.  Only weeks before the live-action Joe hits theaters, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: Season 1.1 (Shout! Factory, $30) packages the first season of the ’80s animated series that a generation grew up watching.  Fans of Hong Kong cinema will enjoy Dragon Dynasty’s latest offering, last year’s An Empress and The Warriors (Dragon Dynasty, $20) starring Asian superstars Donnie Yen and Leon Lai.  Turning to TV releases, all three seasons of the cult British comedy series The Mighty Boosh: Season 1, 2 and 3 (BBC America, $30 each) cross the pond offering a surreal mixture of science-fiction and fantasy humor a la The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Stargate SG-1: Children of The Gods (MGM, $27) is a re-edited version of the pilot episode that launched the popular Stargate TV-franchise, which is still going strong on the SyFy network.  Finally, a moment of silence for two departing shows: Pushing Daises: Season Two (Warner Bros., $40) collects the final 13 episodes from ABC’s brilliant but cancelled detective show and Prison Break: The Final Break (Fox, $27) brings the exploits of expert jail-breaker Michael Schofield to a not particularly satisfying conclusion.

Nicolas Cage delivers a box-office smackdown to Dwayne Johnson.

It took awhile, but moviegoers finally got tired of seeing the same films–Slumdog Millionaire, Taken and Paul Blart: Mall Cop–over and over again.  Three new movies hit the marketplace this weekend and all three finished at the top of the charts.  The Nicolas Cage disaster movie Knowing came out on top with $24.8 million.  That’s the fifth-best opening of Cage’s career, behind both National Treasure movies, Ghost Rider and Gone in 60 Seconds.  Landing in second place was the Paul Rudd bromantic comedy I Love You, Man with $18 million, while the Julia Roberts/Clive Owen romantic thriller Duplicity had to make do with the bronze medal, earning $14.4 million.  That’s not great news for Roberts, whose last #1 hit in which she had a starring role was The Mexican way back in 2001.

After topping the box-office charts last weekend, Dwayne Johnson couldn’t fend off Nic, Paul or Julia his second week out.  Race to Witch Mountain fell to the number four spot with $13 million.  Witch Mountain stands to take another heavy hit next weekend as the family-oriented animated blockbuster Monsters vs. Aliens crashes into theaters.  Still, with $45 million already in the bank, the movie should finish its theatrical run with a decent $70 million haul and stands to turn a profit on DVD.  And at least Race to Witch Mountain cost substantially less than Watchmen.  The Zack Snyder-helmed comic-book blockbuster reportedly cost around $150 million and, after its fifth place finish this weekend, has only earned $98 million.  Somewhere, Alan Moore is chortling.

Our long national nightmare is finally over: Paul Blart: Mall Cop finally dropped out of the Top Ten, ending its improbable two-month run as 2009′s biggest hit so far.  The Liam Neeson action flick Taken continues to hang in there, finishing in seventh place behind The Last House on the Left.  Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire finished in eighth place and will probably drop out of the Top Ten this weekend, just in time for its DVD debut next Tuesday.  Madea Goes to Jail took the number nine spot and looks to finish just shy of $100 million.  No wonder Tyler Perry has already announced that he’s donning Madea’s wig again for his next film, I Can Do Bad All By Myself, which as GIANT reported, is also set to star Mary J. Blige.  Finally, Henry Selick’s Coraline made what will undoubtedly be its final Top Ten appearance in tenth place.  But the movie can leave with its head held high; with $72 million in the bank, Coraline is the second-highest grossing stop-motion animated film in history, finishing just behind Chicken Run.

Looking at limited releases for a moment, the new documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor, which chronicles the months leading up to the legendary fashion designer’s retirement, set records in its premiere at New York’s iconic Film Forum theater.  The Matt Tyrnauer-directed movie has earned $39,106 since it opened last Wednesday, making it the highest-grossing doc so far this year and one of Film Forum’s highest-grossing premieres ever.  Pick up the March issue of GIANT Magazine, on stands now, to see our review.

The full Top Ten list appears below courtesy of the-numbers.com.  Next week, look for Monsters vs. Aliens to dominate the competition, while the action movie 12 Rounds and the horror title The Haunting in Connecticut fight each other for the scraps.

The Top Ten: March 20-22, 2009

1. Knowing: $24.8
2. I Love You, Man: $18
3. Duplicity: $14.4
4. Race to Witch Mountain: $13/$44.7
5. Watchmen: $6.7/$98
6. The Last House on the Left: $5.9/$24
7. Taken: $4.1/$133.1
8. Slumdog Millionaire: $2.7/$137.2
9. Madea Goes to Jail: $2.5/$87.2
10. Coraline: $2.1/$72.8

Dwayne’s #1!  Dwayne’s #1!

GIANT’s March cover boy Dwayne Johnson scored the fourth #1 opening of his career with this weekend’s Race to Witch Mountain, the action-packed revival of the ’70s family franchise.  It’s Johnson’s second-best start after 2002′s The Scorpion King, which opened to $36 million and $3 million ahead of his last box-office hit, 2005′s The Game Plan.  Johnson handily bested the screwed-up superheroes in Watchmen, beating out last week’s box-office champ by a solid $7 million.  The Zack Snyder directed adaptation finished second with $18 million, bringing its total gross to $86 million.  $100 million doesn’t seem out of reach, but that’s still a disappointing decline that suggests word of mouth on the film is mixed-to-negative outside of the most dedicated fanboy crowds.  The Alan Moore box office jinx continues!

Debuting in third place was the horror remake The Last House on the Left, followed closely behind by Taken (which refuses to drop out of the Top 5) and Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail.  Fox Searchlight might want to reconsider rushing their Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire onto DVD so quickly.  Although the disc is scheduled to hit stores on March 31, only two weeks away, the movie continues to print money in theaters, adding another $5 million for a $132 million total gross.

Speaking of surprise hits, there are still people out there still going to see Paul Blart: Mall Cop, as evidenced by its seventh place finish.  Like Taken, the movie has been a Top Ten list stable since January and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon.  He’s Just Not That Into You and Coraline finished eighth and ninth respectively, while the Playboy-themed comedy Miss March came in dead last with $2.3 million, just barely beating out Confessions of a Shopaholic.

The full list is below courtesy of the-numbers.com.  Next week should be an interesting one as three very different movies open chasing three very different audiences.  For the date movie crowd, there’s the Clive Owen/Julia Roberts romantic thriller Duplicity; for Judd Apatow slackers there’s the Paul Rudd/Jason Segal bromance I Love You, Man; and for Nic Cage fans (there are still some left, right?) there’s Knowing, a disaster movie from the guy that made The Crow.  Your guess is as good as mine as to what’s going to finish first.

The Top Ten: March 13-15
1. Race to Witch Mountain: $25
2. Watchmen: $18/$86
3. The Last House on the Left: $14.6
4. Taken: $6.7/$126.8
5. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail: $5.1/$83.2
6. Slumdog Millionaire: $5/$132.6
7. Paul Blart: Mall Cop: $3.1/$137.7
8. He’s Just Not That Into You: $2.9/$89
9. Coraline: $2.6/$69.1
10. Miss March: $2.3

For more Dwayne Johnson, click here to his GIANT photo shoot!

And for more Watchmen, click here to win “Watching The Watchmen”!

If you saw Watchmen this weekend, and it seems like a lot of you did, then you are going to want more of the big screen’s newest action heroes! And who better than GIANT to give it to you?

GIANT scored not 1, not 2 but 5 copies of Watching The Watchmen, Dave Gibbons’ ultimate companion piece to the graphic novel, and we’re giving them away to you!

All you have to do is know your GIANT! In a post about the movie, GIANT resident film expert Ethan Alter talked about how foreign trailers differed from the American one. The question is: In the Japanese trailer, which Watchmen did they suggest killed John F. Kennedy?

If you know, just leave that name in the comments section. The contest will take place from today (March 9, 2009) through Monday, March 16, 2009. For the full rules, please click here.

And for more comic book goodness click these:

Watchmen review

More “Watchmen” Goodness

Nick Fury: Samuel L. Jackson Vs. David Hasselhoff

Trailer of the Week 2: Wolverine

The Urban Daily’s Gallery of Black Superheroes

As expected, Watchmen topped the charts this weekend.  So why are some folks calling it a disappointment?

There are two ways to interpret Watchmen‘s $55.6 million haul this past weekend.  On the one hand, that’s an impressive number for a hard-R rated film based on a less-than-mainstream comic filled with bone-breaking, bloody violence, soft-core sex scenes and a giant blue schlong.  At the same time though, Watchmen is lagging substantially behind other recent comic-book blockbusters like Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and The Dark Knight.  And considering how mixed word of mouth is–even amongst the film’s target fanboy audience–there’s no way Watchmen will match the $210 million earned by director Zack Snyder’s previous film, 300.  In fact, even $150 million looks like a long way off right now.  Snyder can take heart in knowing that Watchmen will likely be a cash cow on DVD as the studio has already announced plans to offer at least three different versions of the movie.  But let’s just say it’s a good thing he never planned on making a sequel, because based on these preliminary numbers there’s no way Watchmen 2 is ever getting a greenlight.

With no other movies going into wide release on Friday, the rest of this week’s Top Ten remains more or less locked in place.  Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail continues to print money, earning $8.8 million for a $76.5 million total gross, making it Perry’s biggest hit to date.  Liam Neeson’s Taken is holding up like a champ as well, finishing in third place with $7.4 million.  Slumdog Millionaire took fourth place with $6.9 million and cruised past The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to become the highest-grossing film of 2008′s Best Picture nominees.  And Paul Blart: Mall Cop rounded out the top five, adding another $4.2 million to its substantial box-office girth.

Next to Watchmen‘s debut, perhaps this weekend’s biggest surprise was the total collapse of the Jonas Brothers phenomenon, as their 3-D concert movie crumbled all the way down to ninth place.  Guess its time for an image makeover guys–ditch those purity rings for some Tommy Lee-style tattoos!  Instead of spending time with the brothers Jonas, families apparently decided to hang with the pint-sized heroine of Coraline, as that stop-motion animated film continues to show impressive staying power, holding strong at seventh place.  Chick flicks He’s Just Not That Into You and Confessions of a Shopaholic occupied sixth and eight places respectively and the cheerleading comedy Fired Up! beat out The Reader for tenth place by thismuch.

Check out the full Top Ten below, courtesy of the-numbers.com.  Next week, GIANT cover star Dwayne Johnson takes on the Watchmen with his family-oriented action film Race to Witch Mountain and the Last House on the Left remake looks to attract the horror crowd.

The Top Ten: March 6-8, 2009
Watchmen: $55.6
Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail: $8.8/$76.5
Taken: $7.5/$118
Slumdog Millionaire: $6.9/$125.4
Paul Blart: Mall Cop: $4.2/$133.6
He’s Just Not That Into You: $4/$84.6
Coraline: $3.3/$65.6
Confessions of a Shopaholic: $3.1/$38.3
Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience: $2.8/$16.8
Fired Up!: $2.6/$13.3

I’m sorry to say that my fears were justified.  On a purely technical level, Watchmen is undeniably impressive.  The special effects are largely seamless, the production design is obsessively detailed and the characters all look like they’ve stepped right off the page onto the screen.  But as an adaptation—as well as a movie in its own right—it’s a profound disappointment.  A complex meditation on the nature of heroism and living in the shadow of a global apocalypse, Watchmen demands a more thoughtful approach than Snyder seems willing to bring.  While the director’s passion for the book is obvious from the first frame, it’s never clear that he really understands what Moore was trying to get at when he wrote Watchmen in the mid-’80s, at the height of the Reagan era and the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

For the uninitiated, the plot kicks off with the murder of Edward Blake, who once battled evildoers as the masked hero The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).  The mysterious circumstances surrounding his death spurs one of his former colleagues, a psychopathic vigilante known as Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), to pay a visit to other ex-crimefighters, including the reclusive Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), the bodacious Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) and her big blue boyfriend Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the only hero on this alternate Earth with actual super powers.  As their investigation continues, they stumble upon a vast conspiracy with consequences that are literally apocalyptic.

Sounds like a fairly straightforward plot, but on the page, Moore employs such devices as a fractured chronology and multiple points-of-view to provide potent psychological and sociological insights into these characters and the world they inhabit.  That kind of context is largely missing from the movie, even though the screenwriters hit all of the major story points Moore laid out in the book and use much of his original dialogue with little re-writing.  The result is a movie that looks and sounds like Watchmen, but doesn’t feel much like Watchmen.  It’s clunky and plodding where the book is elegantly paced with not a single wasted moment.  The problem is that the filmmakers have tried to include too much of the book onscreen.  While it would have been hard to lose certain fan-favorite moments and subplots, a trimmer running time would have forced Snyder to really focus the film’s narrative, as well as find a way to make its themes relevant to modern audiences.  As it is, it’s difficult to tell what Watchmen is about…and this is coming from someone that has read the book multiple times.

It’s also a shame that Snyder willingly surrendered his own imagination by deciding to follow the book’s visual style so closely.  For all my complaints about his surface-level reading of Moore’s dense text, the guy is obviously creative and has a great eye for striking images.  In fact, the film’s most inspired scene doesn’t appear in the book at all—an opening credits sequence that walks viewers through an alternate history of America via a series of comic-book like tableaus.  The only other significant creative choice Snyder makes behind the camera is to carry 300‘s slow-mo heavy action sequences over into Watchmen.  But that exaggerated style doesn’t mesh well with this material; after all, the heroes of Watchmen aren’t larger-than-life Spartan warriors—they’re (mostly) ordinary people.  So seeing them scramble up the sides of buildings like Spiderman (as Rorschach does) or deliver devastating slow-motion flying kicks like something out of an old Jean-Claude Van Damme movie (as Nite Owl and Silk Specter do) comes across as vaguely absurd rather than badass.  Casting is another area where Snyder drops the ball.  While Haley is effectively creepy as the sociopathic Rorschach (although the movie makes him into more of a hero than I’m comfortable with), none of the other actrors bring a lot of personality to their roles.  Akerman and Crudup prove the biggest washouts, turning two of the book’s most interesting characters into flat, boring whiners.

Unlike some Watchmen readers—as well as Moore himself, who has repeatedly called the book unfilmable—I still think it’s possible to make a great movie out of the comic.  But doing that requires a director that doesn’t feel entirely beholden to the source material or to the fanboys that demand nothing short of devout reverence to their Holy Book.  Frankly, I would have loved to have seen the version that Paul Greengrass was preparing to direct—which was rumored to take place in a post 9/11 America—before it was scuttled at the last minute due to budget concerns.  Snyder’s version captures Watchmen‘s style, but completely misses its substance.

Verdict: The two-star rating merits a Skip It, but who am I kidding?  If you’re a fan of the comic, you’ve obviously gotta See It

To see more superhero goodness, check out:

More “Watchmen” Goodness

Nick Fury: Samuel L. Jackson Vs. David Hasselhoff

Trailer of the Week 2: Wolverine

The Urban Daily’s Gallery of Black Superheroes

Head over to Cubeecraft and browse through a lengthy list of your favorite pop characters—from the ’60s version of Batman to our new super-prez, Barack Obama—and follow the easy steps to print, fold, and construct your little friend.

The list of characters offered is pretty amazing. There’s Darth Vader and a Stormtrooper, Spider-Man and Venom, Indiana Jones and a fertility idol, Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach, Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees, Mulder and Scully, Two-Face and the Joker, Pee-Wee Herman and Chairy. And every week they drop someone new for your desktop collection.

If you’re feeling adventurous, there’s some characters on there that may test your patience…

Gotta love a brilliant design scheme. Better stockpile your office’s printer paper.

Be glad we live in the YouTube era–it means you don’t have to make the trip to Japan to see the international version of the Watchmen trailer that offers dozens of new scenes (and much less slo-mo) not seen in the American cut.

Things to look out for:

*The first glimpse of Richard Nixon, who is still the Commander in Chief in Watchmen‘s alternate America.

*A peek at Nixon’s war room, complete with Doomsday clock.

*Numerous shots of the various conflicts happening all over the globe, which are pushing the world towards the brink of nuclear war.

*A clip of the JFK assassination that strongly suggests The Comedian was responsible for Kennedy’s death.

*A shot of an exploding Manhattan that basically confirms that Dr. Manhattan has taken the place of the giant space squid.  (Fanboys will know what I’m talking about.)

Also up today is the first in a new wave of behind-the-scenes featurettes about the making of the movie.  This installment covers how the filmmakers created the costumes for the Minutemen, the first generation team of heroes that ran around New York in colorful tights.  Check that video out here.

2008 is in the history books, so here are the flicks and TV shows that have us looking forward to the year ahead.

9. The Tonight Show Starring Conan O’Brien (June)
It took sixteen years, but that red-headed goofball who pals around with a masturbating bear and an insult comic dog finally becomes NBC’s main man in late night.  Victory would be sweeter if former host Jay Leno had departed the airwaves for good instead of simply moving to the 10pm slot, but look for Conan to make the Tonight Show timely and relevant for the first time in more than a decade.

8. The Brothers Bloom (May 15)
Originally set to be released last October, Rian Johnson’s quirky con-man comedy—which features a career best performance by Oscar winner Rachel Weisz and an awesome supporting turn by Japanese starlet Rinko Kikuchi—reaches theaters at last.  Because a smallish distributor is releasing the flick you might have to look hard to find it, but you won’t feel ripped off after its over.

7. Shutter Island (October 2)
Martin Scorsese follows up his Oscar-winning crime drama The Departed with a ’50s-era action flick starring Leo DiCaprio (yes, again) as a U.S. marshal searching for an escaped mental patient on the titular secluded island.  Although it sounds closer to Cape Fear than Taxi Driver, every Scorsese picture is a must-see.



6. The Return of Geek TV
I can’t remember the last time I was this excited to see ABC’s Lost return to the airwaves.  The two-hour premiere kicks off on January 21 and the advance word is that the show is better than ever.  And with only one more year to go before its final batch of episodes, you know we’re in store for some major, major revelations.  I have seen the first episode of Joss Whedon’s highly anticipated new show Dollhouse (debuting February 13 on Fox) and I’m happy to say the Buffy creator is off to a strong start with his latest venture.  Between these two shows and the return of Battlestar Galactica (see below), geeks will have three good reasons to say inside glued to the TV during the cold winter months.

5. Watchmen (March 6)
While I’m not completely on board with all of Zack Snyder’s choices for the big-screen version of Alan Moore’s brilliant, groundbreaking, swoon-inducing graphic novel (for the love of God, stop with the slow-mo Zack!), I already know that I’ll be seeing it at least three times in theaters.  Of course, thanks to recent legal issues, we might have to wait a little longer to see Watchmen brought to life, but don’t freak out too much fanboys: this movie will get released.  It’s just going to cost Warner Brothers a heck of a lot of money.

4. Mad Men Season Three (Summer)
Instead of bailing out Detroit, why doesn’t the Fed give $700 million to Matthew Weiner so he can produce weekly episodes of Mad Men for all of 2009?  Because this year long wait to see the continuing adventures of ad man Don Draper is just not cool.

3. Avatar (December 18)
It’s been more than 10 years since James “King of the World” Cameron directed a feature film.  In that time, he’s released multiple versions of Titanic on DVD, helped get buddy Arnold Schwarzenegger elected governor of California and played himself on Entourage.  Some might call this creative loafing, but Cameron insists he was just waiting until CGI-technology caught up with his grand ideas for his next movie, Avatar, a top-secret sci-fi epic about a futuristic female warrior (played by Zoe Saldana).  Will the final product be worth the long wait?  You got me—all I know is, I’m buying my advanced tickets now.

2. The End of Battlestar Galactica (March)
Okay, so Battlestar Galactica as a franchise won’t be signing off for good two months from now.  There’s still a direct-to-DVD movie due out later this year and a prequel series Caprica launches in the fall.  There’s also a comic-book series and endless amounts of fan fiction all over the web.  But the show that launched this cult phenomenon is going away in March and television will be the poorer for it.  Memo to creator Ronald Moore: If Adama turns out to be a Cylon, I’m tossing my TV out the window.

1. Inglorious Bastards (August 21)
Holy crap, Quentin Tarantino has finally done it!  He’s made the World War II movie he’s been talking about since Pulp Fiction came out.  And somehow he convinced Brad Pitt to star in the damn thing.  So Quentin, does this mean we’re going to be seeing The Brothers Vega in 2010?  Travolta and Madsen aren’t getting any younger…

Watchmen

The movie every comic book geek thought could never be made has in fact been made.  And against the odds, it looks pretty damn awesome too.  I still have major reservations about some of the casting decisions director Zack Snyder has made with his adaptation of Alan Moore seminal graphic novel (to say nothing of the overuse of slo-mo in the trailer) but I’ve got to hand it to the guy: it looks like these characters stepped right off the pages of the comic book and onto the big screen.

This week, Iron Man soars onto a two-disc DVD; comics legend Alan Moore discusses life, the universe and everything; Bigger Stronger Faster* takes on steroids in sports and Forgetting Sarah Marshall brings the funny.

Iron Man
Paramount
$39.99

The Dark Knight may be this summer’s biggest comic-book success story (not to mention the highest-grossing comics-based movie of all time) but another little flick called Iron Man also racked up impressive grosses when it kicked off 2008′s summer movie season in May.  Despite coming from the same source, the two movies couldn’t be more different.  The Dark Knight is as dark and brooding as its titular hero, while Iron Man just aspires to be a good time.

It mostly succeeds, thanks to Robert Downey Jr.’s witty, wonderful performance in the title role and his alter ego Tony Stark.  Refusing to take himself (or the movie) particularly seriously, the actor actually makes being a superhero look like fun instead of a depressing burden.  That’s why I hope director Jon Favreau avoids working one of the character’s best known storylines into the next film, one in which Stark’s alcoholism forces him to hand over his suit to a temporary replacement.  Do we really want to watch Downey Jr. wrestle with the “demon in the bottle” particularly considering his own history with substance abuse?  Better the filmmakers just concentrate on dispatching Iron Man on globetrotting adventures filled with lots of one-liners and exploisions and leave the dark soul-searching to the dude in the bat suit.

Extras: Favreau surprisingly didn’t contribute a commentary track to the disc, but he and the rest of the cast appear in a multi-part making-of documentary that covers ever aspect of the movie’s production, from casting to shooting to the world premiere.  An additional six-part documentary examines Iron Man’s comic-book history and provides hints at what storylines we might see in future films.  Also included is Downey Jr.’s original screen test for the role, deleted and extended scenes and a featurette devoted to the movie’s impressive special effects.

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The Mindscape of Alan Moore
The Disinformation Company
$29.95
Alan Moore may have penned some of the greatest comic-book stories ever published—Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Killing Joke and his masterpiece From Hell among them—but he’s also one of the industry’s biggest critics.  The reclusive writer sounds off about the current state of comics, along with dozens of other topics, in this 78-minute documentary/feature-length interview directed by Dez Vylenz.  Surprisingly, Moore has very little to say about his own work, so don’t go into Mindscape expecting to hear in-depth explanations of how seminal graphic novels (a term that Moore ridicules at one point) like Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came to be.  He’s more interested in discussing what comic books represent in our culture and how they all too often fall short of their true potential.

An analog guy in a digital world, Moore is also preoccupied by the huge strides being made in communication technology, developments he sees as pushing the world to a tipping point where humanity is overwhelmed by the  sheer volume of information being transmitted at any given moment.  (Considering that this interview was conducted in 2003, one can only imagine how he feels about such recent innovations as the iPhone.)

As you can tell, Moore is a bit of a crackpot, but he’s a completely engaging crackpot and the sheer force of his personality cuts through a lot of the unnecessary visual clutter Vylenz piles on top of the movie, from psychedelic computer generated backgrounds to silly recreations of scenes from classic Moore books.  (Let’s just say that based on this film’s bargain basement version of Watchmen’s Rorschach, Zack Snyder has nothing to worry about when his big-budget version hits theaters in March.)  I don’t know that anyone outside of die hard comic-book fanboys and fangirls will want to spend over an hour listening to Alan Moore, but if you fall into that camp, you’re probably already on your way to Amazon to order this DVD.

Extras: Two hours of additional interviews with Moore collaborators like Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons and Lost Girls‘ Melinda Gebbie, a making-of featurette, an introduction to Moore’s comic book work and a commentary track.

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Bigger Stronger Faster*
Magnolia
$26.98
Between the ongoing Roger Clemens/Brian McNamee soap opera, Lance Armstrong’s return to cycling and the Beijing Olympics, the subject of steroids in sports has been in the news a lot lately.  Most of the time, we’re encouraged to look down on athletes that use performance enhancing drugs to get ahead, but Christopher Bell’s new documentary Bigger Stronger Faster* asks us to ponder the provocative question: “Are steroids really that bad?”

The first-time director draws from his own life experiences to advance his argument.  Bell and his two brothers Mike and Mark grew up competing in amateur wrestling and weightlifting events and while Chris eventually left that world behind, both of his brothers have continued their careers with the assistance of steroids.  Instead of transforming into bulky monsters prone to bouts of irrational anger—as the “roid rage” stereotype goes—both guys seem like well-adjusted family men.  Furthermore, according to Bell’s statistics, steroid abuse in general results in far fewer emergency medical cases than addictions to substances like alcohol and hard drugs.

But Bigger Stronger Faster isn’t a promotional video for the benefits of steroids.  Bell also highlights the health complications that can result from prolonged use and openly wonders whether athletes that use steroids should be branded as cheaters.  Bigger Stronger Faster* may not be a perfect documentary—Bell could be a more probing interviewer, for starters—but it does leave viewers with plenty to think about.
Extras: 40 minutes of deleted scenes and additional interviews as well as a five-minute featurette that outlines the multi-year process of making this documentary.

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Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Universal
$34.98
Written by and starring Jason Segel, formerly of Freaks and Geeks and currently of How I Met Your Mother, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is another loose and rambling comedy from the Judd Apatow Factory.  Segal plays Peter, a musician who experiences the worst break-up in the history of break-ups at the hands of actress girlfriend Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell a.k.a. Veronica Mars).)  Distraught, the poor guy heads off to a Hawaiian resort to recuperate.  But guess what?  His ex and her new rocker boyfriend (Russell Brand) are also vacationing there and can be spotted canoodling all over the place.

Enter Rachel (Mila Kunis) the gorgeous concierge who starts hanging with Peter, first out of pity and then because she genuinely likes him.  I’m also not entirely certain that the film does right by its female characters, who seem to have no inner lives beyond their relationship to Peter.  The fact that Kunis and Bell are so appealing in their respective roles makes the script’s shortcomings that much more pronounced.

That said, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is frequently very funny and is a great showcase for Segel’s peculiar comic stylings. The movie’s ace in the hole though, may be Brand, who is absolutely hysterical as pompous British musician Aldous Snow. Any other leading man might worry about being upstaged, but Segel seems more than happy to cede the biggest laughs to his co-star.

Extras: Forgetting Sarah Marshall is available in a single disc edition for the price tag conscious, but the meatiest bonus features can be found on the three-disc release that sports at least an hour’s worth of deleted scenes and outtakes, as well as numerous featurettes and a digital copy of the film for your portable media players.

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Also on DVD
There’s one reason I’m curious to check out Pulse 2 (Dimension Extreme, $19.97), a direct-to-DVD sequel to the awful American remake of the creepy J-horror film Pulse and that’s because it features Jamie Bamber in his first non-Battlestar Galactica American production.  Set after the events of the first movie, where the spirit world found its way into our reality via the Internet and cell phones and wreaked ghostly havoc, Pulse 2 opens in a devastated cityscape and follows a devoted dad (Bamber) searching for his missing daughter.  Maybe he should consider making an alliance with the Cylons.

September 16 was ’80s teen movie day here on the DVD Round-Up, so it’s only appropriate that we end the month with a ’90s favorite, Can’t Hardly Wait: 10 Year Reunion Edition (Sony, $19.94).  Released in 1998, this comedy featured a Who’s Who of then-famous teen stars, including Jennifer Love Hewitt, Seth Green, Ethan Embry and Lauren Ambrose.  This special edition reunites some of the cast for a new commentary track and also features a new retrospective documentary.

Two new concert films from ’60s rock icons make their way to disc this week.  Directed by artist/filmmaker Julian Schnabel, Lou Reed’s Berlin (Genius Products, $22.95) is the first time Reed has performed his classic 1973 album Berlin in its entirety in over three decades.  CSNY/Déjà vu (Lionsgate, $14.98), meanwhile, presents select performances from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s recent “Freedom of Speech” tour, which traveled around the country in 2006.  Neil Young himself directed the film under his pseudonym Bernard Shakey.

In TV-news, A&E continues to thrill fans of British television, this week by releasing an anniversary edition of the classic ’80s miniseries The Jewel in the Crown (A&E, $39.95), a stunning adaptation of Paul Scott’s four-book series The Raj Quartet, set in the waning days of British rule in India.  On the lighter side of things, The Best of Mr. Bean, Volume 2 (A&E, $9.95) collects six episodes of Rowan Atkinson’s Chaplin-esque Mr. Bean.  Sure, Atkinson has since torpedoed this character by starring in sub-par fare like Mr. Bean’s Holiday, but the original TV sketches remain hilarious almost two decades later.  Finally, Beauty and the Beast: The Complete Series (Paramount, $90.99) houses all three seasons of the cult ’80s TV sensation, which starred Linda Hamilton as a New York district attorney who falls in love with a human/animal hybrid named Vincent (played by Ron Perlman a.k.a. Hellboy).  Wow…who knew that bestiality was once permitted on TV?  The ’80s really were a wild, weird time.