J. Crew ads are strange.

My best friend (category: crystalline mineral) Morton Salt is away on vacation this week, so I said, “Sure, I’ll step in and see what’s out on the ol’ DVD and Blu-Ray this week.” And if you’ve been complaining that you haven’t had much time to shave your back or teach your toddlers how to box, then you’re in luck, because there’s not much worth watching this week.

At least not an awesome movie about Chris Kattan playing twin brothers, one running an insane asylum and the other being a patient. How the hell do I miss out on the classics?

Anyway, here are your non-Kattan DVD releases for this week:

Gangster Squad
Any Day Now
The Central Park Five
Promised Land
The Impossible
Pawn
Thale
Wuthering Heights
Cloned: The Recreator Chronicles

As for your streaming choices, I only recommend 50 Cent’s Gun on Netflix. Watch it this week so you’ll be up to speed with my next installment of Netflix Instant Theater, so I can close the book on Cheetah Vision’s great trilogy and immediately check myself into Chris Kattan’s mental hospital for recovery.

Now let’s get synopsisizing!

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Ryan Gosling has always been a human cup of hot cocoa, so it only follows that his beautiful Baby Goose face would be the perfect adornment to a cocoa mug (much the same way Matthew McConaughey should be on tubes of KY). Unfortunately, this special edition Tim Horton’s mug is the only one made. The lucky guy or gal who gets to take a steaming sip of Gosling? Baby Goose himself, as it turns out.

It all started with an interview with Tribute.ca in which Baby Goose said he hoped Gangster Squad would finally be the movie that got his face on a commemorative fast-food cup (stupid Blue Valentine and their lazy tie-in department really whiffed on that one).

“I thought I might get a cup out of this deal,” said Gosling. The interviewer suggested the coffee-and-doughnuts chain would be a good fit. [Grubstreet]

It makes sense that that’s what attracted him to the project, it certainly wasn’t the script. From there, a Buffalo.com writer suggested a mug (a “Gosling Goblet”) to Tim Horton’s, and, being Canadian, Tim Horton’s came through with the above mug, gifted to Gosling. “Sure we’ll do it, eh,” Tim Horton III probably said. “But not for money, though, yeah? There’s nothing worth owning in life that you can’t suck from trees or shoot in the forest, I always say.”

The best part of drinking coffee out of a Baby Goose mug? It’s self-sweetening. The worst part is that it turns water into hummingbird feed. He’s that sweet. If more people drank out of Baby Goose coffee mugs, there’d be no war.
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The opening title card of Gangster Squad says “inspired by a true story,” which is pretty funny, considering the movie immediately following it is Sin City meets Young Guns in the form of a Jimmy Cagney parody. As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but think “wait, wait, slow down, which part of this is the true part? Is it the black guy who throws knives? The evil mobster who says things like ‘I miss that red snatch!’ and ‘you know the drill,’ before he kills guys with a power drill? Ooh, or maybe it’s the lead evil henchman with a scarred eye, or the part where the cop and the bad guy drop their weapons to ‘settle it like men’ in a climactic fist fight!” Goodness, am I even going to be able to review this without a history degree? Books should have more slow-motion shell casings falling to the floor, I always say.

I haven’t read Tales from the Gangster Squad, the stylized non-fiction book by LA Times reporter Paul Lieberman (collected from his series in the Times) upon which the Will Beall script was based, but as far as I can tell, the true part of Gangster Squad is that some of the names and places are real, as well as a couple throwaway lines about Frank Sinatra and the idea that there was a unit called “the gangster squad” in the first place. The rest? Let’s just say… liberties seem to have been taken. I can’t help but doubt the veracity of a movie that begins with a fake-nosed Sean Penn laughing as he has an enemy torn in half by two cars pulling in opposite directions. “Do ya woist, Mickey!”, the doomed guy shouts, defiant until the bitter end, as eighties action movie logic would dictate. No need for empathy here! When underlings fail him, Penn’s Cohen has them shot, burned alive, murdered with power drills, etc., like the Darth Vader of Sin City, only without Frank Miller’s penchant for high contrast and constant crotch trauma. I realize “Mickey Cohen” was a real guy, but if we depicted Al Capone as a mustache-twirling evil-doer, cackling as he tied a swooning dame to the railroad tracks, what would the compelling part of that be? That it was… uh… inspired by… true-ishness? I don’t get it.

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Two new big trailers released last night/today, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad. Watch ‘em both below, ya lucky so-and-so.

Zero Dark Thirty
You can’t overhype the pedigree here, with Kathryn Bigelow reteamed with her Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal and a cast that includes Jessica Chastain, Chris Pratt, and Mark Strong, taking on the events of the Bin Laden raid. Oh and look, it’s Kyle Chandler playing a government dude again. Oh Kyle Chandler, why do you love the government so? But I’m not gonna lie, I’m not sold on this. Can you name me a single example of a good movie that was made depicting events as recent as this? It takes time to digest history into nice, nuanced story. They couldn’t have made Argo in 1981. Maybe they’ll prove me wrong, but so far I’m seeing a lot of explosions and dramatic music without a lot of substantive content. Plus the title sounds like bad dialog from an interracial porno. “Come here, baby, you know what time it is. Aw yeah, girl, isss zero dark thirty.” (*schlong*)

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"These hands touched ScarJo's titties. Wanna smell 'em?"

We already knew WB was reshooting Gangster Squad to take out the scene where the characters shoot people in a theater out of respect to the Aurora shooting victims, now it seems that reshoot is going to delay the movie, originally scheduled for September 7th, possibly until 2013.

The move is necessary to accomodate reshoots because of a scene of a movie theater shooting in the completed film that became problematic in the wake of the Aurora, Colo. massacre.
One date the studio is looking at is Jan. 11. Before making a final decision, though, the studio is currently looking at several factors, according to sources, such as how quickly the cast can be reassembled for the reshoot, concerns about cast availibility to do press in January and the competition on the calendar. The only other release currently scheduled for Jan. 11 is Paramount’s Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, starring Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton. [THR]

I don’t understand how a movie that’s set in the forties is going to remind people of a shooting that happened in 2012, or, especially, how delaying the release of a movie is supposed to be respectful to a group of people who were united only by their desire to be the first to see a movie. But PR was never about making sense, only the appearance of making sense. This is bullsh*t. At a time like this, this country needs Baby Goose now more than ever. He’s the original uniter! He breaks up street fights with hugs! He stops traffic accidents using only his strong yet gentle arms! Wherever you stand on the gun control debate (and please please please, don’t feel the need to tell me), I think we can all agree that if Baby Goose had been in The Dark Knight Rises, this never would’ve happened. Huggalos Unite.