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 crochet dwarf helmet and beard (SO MUCH BEARD!) seems like a rather elaborate way to keep your tits warm, but I must admit that it is fetching. This is allllmost enough to make wish I’d learned to crochet. Me, I prefer crotchet. It’s like crochet, but with more thrusting. By the way, did you know “crotchet” is a real word? It means “an odd fancy or whimsical notion.” Aren’t you glad we learned something while I was wildly digressing?

This beanie/tit blanket may look labor intensive, but think of it this way: you could teach yourself to crochet and complete one of these in less time than it would take to watch all three Hobbit films. Or, if you wanted to do it Peter Jackson style, you could just attempt this, be completely ineffective the entire time and then have Gandalf come in at the last second and miracle your ass one.

[DeviantArt via IanBrooks]

It seems like it was only yesterday that I was telling you about Denny’s new The Hobbit-themed menu, featuring items such as the “Hobbit hole breakfast,” “The Ring Burger,” and “Radagast’s Red Velvet Pancake Puppies,” because who wouldn’t want to eat food named for a character with bird sh*t caked down the side of his face? I hope he prepares it himself! Ah, remember when all Denny’s needed to sell their food was an old lady who couldn’t get the name right? Those were the days. Anyway, a pair of brave souls, Rob and Heather Beschizza of BoingBoing, recently embarked upon a quest to sample these menu items. I go to Denny’s for non-gross food like I visit hookers to learn calculus, so it’s no surprise what they found – fried stuff, more fried stuff, and soggy disgusting sandwiches with unspeakable amounts of mayonnaise. Did you know “Gandalf’s Gobble Melt,” in addition to being a great euphemism for your mother’s vagina, is actually a grilled cheese sandwich filled with fried cheese sticks? Yum! At least, that’s what the picture said it was supposed to be. In the video, it actually looks like a mayo-braised turkey sandwich topped with dog puke and a side of gravy. Check, please!

Surprisingly, the red velvet pancake puppies actually look like the most appetizing of the bunch, probably because it’s hard to f*ck up fried balls of dough (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In any case, I’ve helpfully included pictures of all the food featured, so you can experience this hobbit feast vicariously. You can practically feel the diarrhea through the screen! I heard Peter Jackson wanted to design it so that each breakfast takes three hours and you don’t get bacon until the third visit. In the “number one”, you actually just pay to watch the waitress walk from the table to the kitchen.

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For a lot of us, high frame-rate curiosity was the only reason to see The Hobbit (for others, a hairy-foot fetish), and it was those and other premium-priced tickets that helped make it the highest-grossing movie of the Lord of the Rings franchise. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey earned $84.78 million for the all-time December opening record, thanks to 3D and IMAX screenings. Based on actual attendance, it fell between the first and second Lord of the Rings movies (ahead of the first, just shy of the second).  It received an A Cinemascore, but then so did Alex Cross, Here Comes the Boom, and Breaking Dawn Part 2. If the marketing tells people exactly what kind of movie they’re going to get and then it gives them strictly that, the Cinemascore will be good. It’s like buying a hamburger.

3D showings accounted for 49 percent of ticket sales, which is about on par with most major releases right now. Warner Bros. isn’t currently providing a breakdown for the high-frame-rate (HFR), though a distribution executive there suggested it had the highest per-screen average among the three main formats (2D, 3D, HFR 3D). That may not sound overly convincing, but IMAX is reporting that HFR did $44,000 per-theater compared to $31,000 at regular IMAX 3D locations. Overall, IMAX contributed an estimated $10.1 million (12 percent) this weekend.

It’s hard to rag on a new monthly record, but it does feel like this $84.8 million debut is a slight miss for The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings is one of the most popular movie franchises ever, and adapting the prequel story should have been a box office slam-dunk. Unfortunately, Warner Bros. marketing almost exclusively focused on The Hobbit’s connection to Lord of the Rings, and therefore failed to show what’s special about this movie. Add in confusion about the trilogy situation (which WB didn’t make much of an effort to correct) and some middling reviews (65 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), and many casual moviegoers likely decided to take a “wait-and-see” approach here.

Long-term, though, The Hobbit should be in fine shape. December releases typically have a slow start but hold well through the Holiday season, and that will likely be the case with The Hobbit as well thanks to solid word-of-mouth (it received a strong “A” CinemaScore from audiences this weekend). [BoxOfficeMojo]

So it was really good but not great, and maybe not as good as it could’ve been but still pretty good. Jeez, I haven’t been this bored since I saw The Hobbit. HEYO! That’s right, suck on that sweet burn, Peter Jackson, you unfathomably rich demigod to millions. Feh, I say. According to *this* reviewer, you, sir, are overrated. (*smugly takes bite of flamin hot Cheeto, with pinky out*)

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“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!

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