Ham it up all you want, Stiller. I’m still watching that old dude pick his nose instead of watching you.

There are a lot of new DVDs this week, and The Watch (pictured above) is just one of them. There’s also the latest Pixar flick and the latest Oliver Stone film.  There are films starring Christopher Walken, John Travolta, Chris Rock, and Sean Astin.  There are vamps and vampires, dark horses, devil’s angels, British thieves and British prison guards. We’ve got two Dove Foundation-approved films, and one of them even stars an Oscar-nominee. It’s an exciting week to watch films on DVD -especially if you don’t limit your viewing choices to this week’s admittedly mediocre new releases.

The DVDs:
The Watch
Brave
Savages
Vamps
2 Days In New York
Dark Horse
The Queen Of Versailles
Natural Selection
Highway
Amazing Love: The Story Of Hosea
Comes A Bright Day
Lukewarm
Prairie Love
A Beer Tale
Screwed
Dust Up
The Ghostmaker
3 Times A Charm
Devil’s Angel
Vampires: Brighter In Darkness

One of this week’s movies has a loose tie to The Beatles.  If you want to know which one, continue reading.  Curious which Oscar-nominee is making Dove-approved films now?  Continue reading. Want to watch a movie right this very second?

Streaming
Click here for the Netflix suggestions, but if you do, you’ll never find out which film involves a cannibalistic drug lord -unless you come back and read the article after you’ve watched your Netflix movie, in which case, we’re all good.  But seriously, why the rush? Read the rest of this entry »

Queen of Versailles opens today in San Francisco and a handful of other markets.

The Queen of Versailles is essentially a story about having to atone for the sins and hubris of the middle 2000s, when the country and the world was lousy with free credit we thought would never end and spending buttloads of money that wasn’t ours on a parade of silly sh*t that we didn’t need. The tale is exemplified here by David Siegel (left), CEO of Westgate Resorts, the world’s largest time-share company, and his fake beachball-titted former beauty queen of a 30-years-younger trophy wife, Jackie (right). “I… learned to love him,” Jackie tells director Lauren Greenfield.

Director Lauren Greenfield begins following David and Jackie just as they’re becoming local news fluff-piece fodder for building a 90,000 square-foot home in Orlando based on the castle at Versailles (“gaudy” doesn’t even begin to describe it). As they break ground, it turns out that theirs will be the single largest tacky McMansion in all of ‘Murka. Not only do they personify the sub-prime era with their own ridiculous house, the entire house itself was paid for on the back of sub-prime. David’s time-share company that made him his fortune happens to be a business that works by conning working people into believing it’s a better idea to buy a share of a vacation property on credit than spending money they do have on something significantly less opulent. Remember that South Park episode where the family goes on a free vacation to Aspen, but the whole time they can’t escape the guys trying to convince them to by a time share? Westgate are those guys. And not only is David a perfect emblem for Bush-era overextension, it turns out he also helped get the man elected. “I personally got George W. Bush elected,” he boasts at the beginning of the film.

Read the rest of this entry »