A member of SEAL Team Six discovers that bin Laden’s pubes were left everywhere in that house.

It’s a big week for DVD releases as a bunch of the holiday season heavy hitters are now available for your home viewing pleasure.  Today sees the release of both The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey as well as Zero Dark Thirty, and in a few days both Les Misérables and This Is 40 come out as well. But wait, there’s more:  We’ve also got movies starring Lizzy Caplan, Luke Wilson, Parker Posey, and Haley Joel Osment.  We’ve got bachelorettes and shadow people, and also legless whale trainers and kickboxers. We’ve even got rust and bone.  All that and some cartoon lesbians as well!

The DVDs:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Zero Dark Thirty
Les Misérables
This Is 40
Bachelorette
Straight A’s
Price Check
Sassy Pants
Rust And Bone
The Girl
The Other Son
Hellgate
Shadow People
Adventures In Appletown
23 Minutes To Sunrise
Strange Frame

Streaming: check out your choices here.

I know you’re intrigued by the legless whale trainer, so continue reading to find out which movie has her. You might as well; you’re already going to in search of those cartoon lesbians.  On the other hand, if you insist that you only see movies with real, live, two-legged straight women, you can always just click the link for the streaming picks, but to be honest, most of the DVDs have straight, legged (and straight-legged) women in them as well, so it would still be your loss. Read the rest of this entry »

“This is my ACTING helmet.”

In keeping with Peter Jackson’s style of pacing, I briefly considered using the first thousand words of this review to describe just my journey from the box office counter to the concession stand. Sure, we wouldn’t get to the climactic culmination of our stated quest for another two or three reviews, but, so many fascinating things happened along way there! Me fixating on the ticket taker’s weird mole, fights over whether my compatriots and I should buy nachos or whoppers, debates over popcorn butter, conflict over who should be allowed to sit in our section… What seemed at first to any rational person like only a tiny hint at a complete story could, the more I thought about it, scrutinizing every asinine detail, surely become a tale all its own! HUZZAH! I SHALL NOW SING A 10-MINUTE SONG ABOUT MY QUEST, ACCOMPANIED BY THE PAN FLUTE!

O’er to the sneeze guard I didst go, yonder through the Starburst candies ‘neath flecked glass belooooowwww…

Phew! That was hard. And tedious. Luckily for you, reader, I am no Peter Jackson. I lack that level of dedication.

Okay, so I understood going in that was to be the first of three separate, nearly three-hour movies covering Tolkien’s shortest middle Earth book, and maybe that shouldn’t be the first complaint. Hell, I even liked that book. But it’s impossible to overstate how swindled you feel coming out of a movie where the characters spend hours talking about a climactic battle at a place they don’t even get halfway to. Think Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday Walk One Third of the Way to the OK Corral: A Very Peter Jackson Western (featuring a carefully-shot, 90-minute scene of Doc trying to mount his horse). I’m convinced Peter Jackson’s version of Chekhov’s Gun would hold that if you show a loaded gun onstage in the first act, someone better have gone on a side quest to buy an ornate holster for it at the end of three hours. What I’m saying is, there are ways to tell a story episodically (see: almost any cable show). The way not to do it is to constantly remind the audience of where the final ending will be and then not produce. If beer doesn’t show up until the second movie, don’t spend half the first giving us bottle openers, cozies, beer menus, steins, etc. F*CK, MAN, WHERE’S THE BEER?! OH THERE IT IS, OFF IN THE DISTANCE!

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been saying Peter Jackson sucks at editing for like five years now, but lately it seems his disdain for brevity has reached Kevin Smithian proportions. He recently revealed the total running time for the first of his three-part Hobbit series (the shortest of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books) to Empire, and surprise surprise, it’s almost three damned hours.

“It’s looking like [The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey] is going to be about ten minutes shorter than Fellowship was,” explains Jackson. “So it’s going to be officially our shortest Middle-earth yet. I mean, Fellowship was just under three hours and this is about 2 hours 40 minutes at the moment.”

That’s right, two hours and 40 minutes is the shortest one. This guy can’t take a dump in less than 40 minutes. My only explanation is that he started hanging out with Sting after he won his Oscar and he’s been on this Tantric filmmaking kick ever since.

There were three Lord of the Rings books and three Lord of the Rings movies. Back in July, Peter Jackson confirmed that the movie version of The Hobbit, which was more than 100 pages shorter than the shortest book in Lord of the Rings, would be split into three movies, because that sounded like a good idea to… uh… someone? I don’t know. Here’s the trailer for the part one, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which opens December 14th.

The adventure follows the journey of title character Bilbo Baggins, who is swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from the fearsome dragon Smaug. Approached out of the blue by the wizard Gandalf the Grey, Bilbo finds himself joining a company of thirteen dwarves led by the legendary warrior, Thorin Oakenshield. Their journey will take them into the Wild; through treacherous lands swarming with Goblins and Orcs, deadly Wargs and Sorcerers. Although their goal lies to the East and the wastelands of the Lonely Mountain, first they must escape the goblin tunnels, where Bilbo meets the creature that will change his life forever…Gollum. Here, alone with Gollum, on the shores of an underground lake, the unassuming Bilbo Baggins not only discovers depths of ingenuity and courage that surprise even him, he also gains possession of Gollum’s “precious” ring that holds unexpected and useful qualities… A simple, gold ring that is tied to the fate of all Middle-earth in ways Bilbo cannot begin to know. [Apple]

I feel like Jay Cutler in a bathroom with a Vandy alum reading that. DONNNN’T CAAAAAARE. I dunno, man, nine hours of this was already enough for me. The most interesting part of the trailer for me was that one of the dwarves sorta looks like Andy Samberg:

Neither here nor there (and back again): “COME ON, YOU PUSSIES! CHUG THAT MEAD! We didn’t haze Sweeli to death last harvest for you to act like bitches! Smaug is laughing at you! Now come on, we’re taking Nori’s mom quarter horse to Rivendell for the Wood Elf goblin auction where Bombur fingered that lake chick last shepherd’s moon!” -Bilbro Baggins

"Hi. I'm Peter Jackson."

We’ve got six more hours of Hobbit movies coming next winter, and now they have titles. Starring Martin Freeman (below right) in the lead role, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens December 14th, 2012, and The Hobbit: There and Back Again is set for a year later.  Because God forbid you call them The Hobbit Part 1 and 2.

Both films are set in Middle-earth 60 years before Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,”  The adventure of “The Hobbit” follows the journey of title character Bilbo Baggins, who is swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from the fearsome dragon Smaug.
Under Jackson’s direction, both movies are being shot consecutively in digital 3D using the latest camera and stereo technology. Filming is taking place at Stone Street Studios, Wellington, and on location around New Zealand.
Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf the Grey. Also reprising their roles from “The Lord of the Rings” movies are: Cate Blanchett as Galadriel; Orlando Bloom as Legolas; Ian Holm as the elder Bilbo; Christopher Lee as Saruman; Hugo Weaving as Elrond; Elijah Wood as Frodo; and Andy Serkis as Gollum. [press release via ComingSoon]

I can’t imagine devoting a full decade of my career to 70-year-old books about dwarves and dragons and elves who sing songs, but luckily Peter Jackson isn’t even close to being bored of it, because he grew up in New Zealand.  Those people are like X-Men when it comes to imperviousness to boredom. I heard The Olive Garden recently scrapped plans to expand to New Zealand after the locals deemed it “too zesty.”  Meanwhile, the hardest part for the rest of the cast will be the three months they have to spend in Delaware after shooting to get reacclimated.