Glee Season 2, Volume 1 is out this week from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, giving you the opportunity of watching Chord Overstreet's shower scenes and Darren Criss' Blaine singing "Teenage Dream" to Chris Colfer's Kurt over and over again. (And by "you," I mean me.) But once you've seen these 10 episodes again and watched the extras (which include a salute to the wit and wisdom of Heather Morris' Brittany S. Pears and a look at the making and unveiling of Jane Lynch's Madame Tussaud's wax figure), where else can you turn to see photogenic teens make music? So glad you asked:
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Happy Oscar nominations, babies. You got what you wanted, though you have to throw those gold-plated, NSFW Andrew Garfield valentines in the trash. It could be worse. You could be living in 1994, when the Academy honored not Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, or my darling Quiz Show with a Best Picture victory, but a staggering sh*t fortress of offensive "whimsicality" called Forrest Gump. You saw it. It's dumb. Loony. It's got a lot of nerve. But here's a secret you and I share: We're both attracted to bastards, and Forrest Gump's the slimiest john I know. Let's love it.
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Samuel Fuller's twisted 1960s masterpieces The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor (both of which made their Blu-ray debuts last week from the Criterion Collection) may feature whores, child molesters and nymphomaniacs among their lead characters, but beneath the sensationalism, both films rank as fascinating portraits of their time and rare explorations of society's outcasts. They're also incredibly entertaining.
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Dozens of filmmakers are screening their work at the Sundance Film Festival, and a lucky few will leave Utah with a distribution deal. Those who don't could take a page from filmmaker Dennis Hensley, who collected together his various short films and is marketing them as The Dennis Hensley Five-Pack, a project he says was inspired by the "insulting" offers made by DVD companies who wanted to include his work in compilations of gay shorts.
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The 2011 Sundance Film Festival kicks off today, and this prestigious annual event has yielded dozens of essential indies over the years, from sex, lies and videotape to Poison to The Kids Are All Right. But let's not forget that the last few decades have included countless twee, precious, and generally irritating indies for every great one. Which brings us to Paper Man (out on DVD this week from MPI Home Video).
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One of the best films of 2011 that's not getting much love during this awards season (outside of the Independent Spirit Awards, which bestowed three nominations upon it) is Philip Seymour Hoffman's directorial debut, Jack Goes Boating (out this week from Anchor Bay Entertainment). And while Mott Hupfel's gorgeous cinematography -- which turns wintry New York City into a gleaming bauble -- looks great on Blu-Ray, the DVD itself comes up a little short in the special features department.
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Certain comic book characters remain popular on the page but seem to defy adaptation to the big screen -- Entertainment Weekly recently asked whether or not we'd ever see a Wonder Woman movie. But for filmmaker and former Black Entertainment Television president Reginald Hudlin, writing first a comic book and then an animated series of Black Panther (out today from Shout! Factory) was a way to visualize a cinematic adventure for a character that Hudlin calls the African equivalent of Captain America.
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While Network is the movie that prophesied the future of corporate-controlled TV news, James L. Brooks' 1987 Broadcast News was more zeitgeist-y. The shift toward happy-talk infotainment had been going on long enough that Brooks had satirized it in the 1970s on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but the battle against what Holly Hunter's character calls "the historic influence of Entertainment Tonight" had not been so roundly lost as it is now.
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One of my most entertaining moviegoing experiences had to be the full-on freak-out of Piranha 3D on the big screen, but I worried that the 2-D version of home video -- even on Blu-Ray -- wouldn't compare. As it turns out, Piranha (out this week from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) maintains its thrill-a-minute gonzo pace even on the small screen.
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When one of the most popular actresses in Hollywood walks away from show business at the height of her career, it's natural for people to assume that her early retirement has to be the fault of her last movie. And so Two-Faced Woman (out on DVD for the first time from Warner Archive Collection) has always had the stigma of being the film that made Greta Garbo leave her career behind. But it's funnier than you may have heard.
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David Fincher's let's-try-it-again method of shooting, whereby each take is done dozens, if not hundreds, of times, has gotten some mixed reviews from veterans of his films, most notably Jake Gyllenhaal. But the young up-and-comers who starred in The Social Network just love, love, loved it, if the making-of documentary, "How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Facebook?" -- featured on the new DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment -- is to be believed.
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If you haven't already had friends leave you a message on your Facebook wall to get yourself over to Netflix Instant immediately to watch Someone I Touched, a 1975 TV-movie about a syphilis outbreak, let me be the one to tell you. The fact that Cloris Leachman, at 49, stars as a pregnant housewife, and that she sings the theme song, is just the icing on the cake of looniness. (Not to mention the fact that Leachman was at that time starring in the spin-off sitcom Phyllis, making one long for the inevitable Sy-Phyllis mash-up.)
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The pun may be the lowest form of verbal wit, according to some no-fun-having people, but wordplay is central to the ongoing adoration of Rocky and Bullwinkle, whose complete adventures are contained in the new DVD box Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends: Complete Series (Vivendi Entertainment). Every cliff-hanging chapter ended with alternate titles for the following episode that were thoroughly quippy, and the shows themselves were filled with some of the greatest groaners ever:
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Lest you think this is going to be one of those knee-jerk articles that assumes that the subtitled version is always better, let me begin by granting that Dinner for Schmucks (on DVD this week from Universal Home Video) actually improves upon its source material, Le dîner des cons -- by opening up the story and making it feel less stage-bound -- without being particularly good itself. But the disappointment of Schmucks is par for the course when Americans decide to remake French comedies.
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Much of the press around the upcoming (and final) season of HBO's Big Love seems to be saying, "It's good again," after the widespread harumphing about last year. But with this week's release of Big Love: The Complete Fourth Season (HBO Home Video), it's worth taking another look at this maligned set of episodes.
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