Smile Politely. Speak Directly. Champaign-Urbana's Alternative Daily

A few people have spent time predicting the end of the superhero movie in recent months, but the genre-movement whose demise I'm anticipating (sooner and with more glee) is the children/teen-oriented fantasy film. The Lord of the Rings films were decent, but let's be honest with ourselves here: how many similar films since then have been any good? Four out of five Harry Potter films are complete dreck, and you know when Hollywood starts tossing out adaptations of His Dark Materials and Eragon that the genre is in trouble.

The Christmas shopping season starts this weekend, but the disc everyone wants for their respective holiday is still two weeks away. But I'm sure that there will be no shortage of mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends wandering around Best Buy in five days, asking where they can find it. On behalf of the overworked retail employees of America, I would like to help spread the word: really, The Dark Knight isn't out until December 9. You'll have to use that Black Friday discount on WALL-E.

A slew of films are out today on DVD, including a couple of the summer's biggest hits. There's also one of those holiday-convenient box sets. But before we get into all that, have you seen the trailer for the new Star Trek movie?

Movie previews are not usually within this column's purview, but this is a significant event for a geek community that hasn't gotten much love in recent years, and I feel it should be mentioned somewhere on Smile Politely. It's been six years since the last Star Trek film and four years since the last Trek series was canceled. The new Trek film is the end of the longest gap we've had between new Trek material since the gap between the original series (canceled in 1969) and the first movie (1979).

Click the jump to read more new releases.

The prominence of self-conscious genre films in (post-) postmodernism is a phenomenon which at times can grate the nerves, as anyone who has tried to watch Shoot ‘Em Up more than once can tell you. It surely speaks to the importance of this type of film that some of the highest-grossing and fastest-rising directors of the last ten years are Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings), Sam Raimi (Spider-Man), and Guillermo del Toro (Blade II, Hellboy, and Pan’s Labyrinth), all of whom started as imaginative creators of wacky, often self-referential horror films.

Today’s releases include at least three post-modern genre films, and at least one-and-a-half good ones. We get one from Japan’s foremost genre (-crossing) director, one from the sci-fi/fantasy guru everyone loves to hate, and one from the aforementioned Spanish director, Mr. del Toro.

Click the jump to read about the new releases.

Now that Halloween is over, we're getting dangerously close to the holiday season, so be on the lookout for expensive box sets of DVDs you already own and the bigger movies from this summer, including, yes, THAT one. The Dark Knight is out on DVD and Blu-Ray in just over a month, in time for Christmas and to remind Academy voters that if they don't give Heath Ledger a Best Actor statue, they are literally spitting on the grave of the dead.

This week we get more blockbusters from this summer, some Halloween Horror-Hangovers, the tentative relaunch of a much-loved but deceased show, and a re-release of an imperfect reconstruction of that weird film you had to watch in CINE 104 by the Citizen Kane guy.

Click the jump to read about the new releases.

More than any other holiday, with the debatable exception of Christmas, the Halloween experience is very much defined by the films we associate with it. The Halloween season lasts for about a week — it's one of those "it's that time already?" holidays — but it's almost required that during that week you watch at least a couple horror movies. After the costumes and the trick-or-treating have gone, it's the horror films that make Halloween, “Halloween.”

So what are you going to watch this week, when you realize there's no way The Shining, The Exorcist and, if you're of my generation, Hocus Pocus are still on the shelf at your local video store? Let me tell you.

The special features section of popular DVDs has become a place for a film's creators to advance an argument for the quality of their film. The behind-the-scenes features and exclusive interviews are little more than propaganda, insisting sometimes despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that the film you have purchased or rented is worth your time and money.

Steven Spielberg does more than his share of evading, equivocating and fibbing on the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls disc. In the special features Spielberg doesn't seem to realize what he's admitting when he tells the story of how George Lucas approached him with the idea of "Indiana Jones vs. Aliens" in the mid-nineties. According to Spielberg, he didn't like the idea, and dismissed it entirely after enjoying the alien-based Independence Day. He was done with the franchise: "There's a reason I had Indy ride off into the sunset at the end of the third film," he admits.

There was once a video game known as Captain America and the Avengers for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Game Systems. Playing the game as a child, I always chose the stalwart Avenger Iron Man and despite my professed dorkiness, this was the extent of my experience with the character of Tony Stark/Iron Man before I saw Jon Favreau's Iron Man. So, unlike most of my analyses of superhero media, my perspective on Iron Man was rather neutral: I was, for once, a normal moviegoer, an unbiased observer. And I have to say, I didn't like it that much.

Have you ever been to a party and hovered awkwardly around a group of the party-goers, trying to engage in the conversation but feeling completely left behind, without anything resembling a frame of reference by which to understand the particulars of language, gestures, euphemisms, and the very subjects of their talk? That's what Sex and the City: The Movie was for me. While watching it, I felt excluded, like I was standing at a party to which I was not invited: not bored, really, just uncomfortable.

It has often occurred to me that there existed a time as recently as my early adolescence when television shows were not regularly released in DVD box sets. I wonder how people survived in the days before you could sit down for five or six hours with your favorite TV show without commercial breaks and before you were able to skip the intro you've seen a million times — back when you had to start watching your show at precisely the same time each week.

Bigger releases (i.e. films that you remember being in the theaters) this week include Tina Fey's venture into movie stardom, Baby Mama, and Jackie Chan and Jet Li's collaboration The Forbidden Kingdom. The consistently disappointing and yet never-ending Smallville sees its seventh season come out today, along with David Caruso's latest operatic television masterpiece CSI: Miami, which has also somehow made it to a seventh season and beyond.

Assuming you're not into CSI (and all apologies if you are), this week offers a couple choices for the discerning video renter. First up is The Fall, directed by Tarsem Singh, one of the many people with only one name who seem to be drawn to the arts. As Tarsem explains in the rather terrible making-of feature on the disc, he doesn't care if his movie is "the biggest piece of shit you've ever seen," as long as he and his crew have fun making it. Whether or not this is a healthy attitude for a filmmaker to have doesn't seem to have bothered directors David Fincher or Spike Jonze, who "present" The Fall which assumedly means they footed a lot of the bill for it.

In autumn, Tuesdays are exciting as summer blockbusters, Cannes and Sundance films, and straight-to-video horror titles all find their way to DVD. But autumn is still a few weeks away and some weeks, like this one, are pretty dry. Sure, Season Four of The Office is out today, but as much as I'd like NBC to convince me that Jim and Pam aren't just the Ross and Rachel of the 00s, my busy schedule doesn't allow for the dedication a TV show requires. Besides, I'm in the middle of The Wire and Battlestar Galactica.

So if you're not waiting for something to break up Jim and Pam (it's going to happen, trust me, and I will hate them for doing it), this may be the week you catch up on the Criterion Collection. If you're not familiar with the Criterion Collection, you are clearly not a cinephile. A self-dubbed "continuing series of important classic and contemporary films on DVD," Criterion lives up to all of its proclaimed adjectives and modifiers, releasing multiple beautifully transferred discs of excellent and important films each month.

An interesting thing I noticed while going through this week's DVD releases: although this last TV season was shortened by the writer's strike, television on DVD is as expensive as it ever was. Thus you can own 10 episodes of The Shield for $59.95 or 18 episodes of the resurrected One Tree Hill for the same price. Considering the addictive nature of television, it's not surprising that the studios would try to crank up these prices as high as they can, but $6 for one episode?

Those are crack prices.

Heroes' abbreviated second season is also out on DVD today, as Producer Jeph Loeb continues his quest to make traditional cult material into the stuff of boring prime time soap operas. There is something about Heroes that is unappealing to the full-time nerd, or at least this one, in the same way that Loeb's Smallville show has always been. Here's looking forward to Joss Whedon's return to cult television with Dollhouse, which will surely be canceled after a season and a half but will live forever in our hearts and hotel convention rooms.