If you live life a quarter mile at a time you might want to pick up Fast & Furious on DVD or Blu-ray today, but if you don’t, well there isn’t much else to choose from. Dragonball: Evolution and Miss March are in stores this week along with the animated Green Lantern: First Flight movie and a couple of Magnet imports, Big Man Japan and Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America. Meanwhile, sci-fi junkies are probably eager to revisit the final season of Battlestar Galactica and possibly give Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse another chance on DVD, but if you ask me the week’s only essential release is This is Spinal Tap on Blu-ray.

• Fast & Furious (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Dragonball: Evolution (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Miss March (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Big Man Japan
• Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America
• Green Lantern: First Flight (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Bart Got a Room
• The Green Hornet
• The Green Hornet Strikes Again
• Repulsion: Criterion Collection (DVD, Blu-ray)
• An American Affair
• Torso
• Acolytes
• Generation Rx
• Battlestar Galactica 4.5 (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Dollhouse: Season 1 (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Knight Rider (2008): Season 1
• Life on Mars (UK): Series 1
• Spectacular Spider-Man: The Complete First Season
• Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Torchwood: Children of Earth (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Voltron: Fleet of Doom
• Transformers: The Complete Series Box Set
• This is Spinal Tap (Blu-ray)
• Bad Boy Bubby (Blu-ray)
• 12 Monkeys (Blu-ray)
• The Fast and the Furious (Blu-ray)
• 2 Fast 2 Furious (Blu-ray)
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (Blu-ray)
• The Inglorious Bastards (Blu-ray)
• A River Runs Through It (Blu-ray)

The tale of Dorian Gray is one that has been told many times over the years and in many different variations. The character comes from a Victorian Era novel written by Oscar Wilde called The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a handsome young man who sells his soul so that he may never lose his good looks. He indulges in sex, drugs and murder but with each act, a painting of him changes to reflect a disfigurement of some sort, revealing his hidden secret.

There is new take on the story directed by Oliver Parker (The Importance of Being Earnest, St. Trinian’s, Othello), that stars Prince Caspian himself, Ben Barnes, along with Colin Firth and Rachel Hurd-Wood. An international trailer has arrived online and while the music is a bit over the top, the Victorian Era setting and lush cinematography by Roger Pratt (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Twelve Monkeys) are intriguing to say the least. It hits theatres on September 9th in the U.K., no word on a North American release as of yet. Check out the trailer after the jump.

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0:00 – Intro
4:00 – Headlines: Gary Oldman Says Next Batman Shoots in 2010… Or Not, Avatar IMAX Preview, David Cronenberg to Direct Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, Adoption Groups Upset over Orphan, Kurt Russell in Red Dawn Remake?, James Wan to Direct Castlevania, D.J. Caruso to Direct Dead Space, Sam Raimi to Direct World of Warcraft, Star Wars in Concert
30:00 – Review: Big Fan
44:20 – Review: Ong-Bak 2
56:20 – Trailer Trash: Alice in Wonderland, Ninja Assassin, Tron Legacy
1:13:50 – Junk Mail: Wipeout, Christopher Nolan, They Came From Beyond, Weirdest Things Seen in a Movie Theatre
1:30:00 – Other Stuff We Watched: Green Lantern: First Flight, Kamikaze Taxi
1:37:10 – This Week’s DVD Releases
1:42:30 – Outro

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A new red band trailer for the upcoming comedy The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard has arrived online this week courtesy of Funny or Die. It seems only appropriate since the movie is produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, who also run Funny or Die. Although there doesn’t seem to be a ton of buzz surrounding this movie as of yet, the trailers have been consistently funny, and the cast is solid.

This new trailer shows off a lot more of Ed Helms, no doubt thanks to his role in The Hangover (a movie that seems to be influencing everything around it). There’s almost an Anchorman feel to the whole thing with the competing teams of car salesmen, not to mention the presence of David Koechner. The only unproven quantity here is director Neal Brennan, who worked on Chappelle’s Show for years, but who has only directed the made-for-TV comedy Totally Awesome. The other thing is that it seems to be trying a bit hard too hard to be edgy, but that could be a result of the fact that this is a red band trailer. What do you think? The Goods hits theatres on August 14th; the trailer is embedded after the jump.

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The Movie Club Podcast is a monthly roundtable podcast where we select two movies to dissect, analyze and discuss with a group of fellow movie bloggers and film fans.

Somewhere in our busy summer schedule we managed to find time to sit down with our friends from Row Three to talk about two more movies for the latest episode of The Movie Club Podcast. This time around the choices were Oliver Stone’s 1994 classic Natural Born Killers and Andrew Dominik’s directorial debut Chopper starring Eric Bana. Both movies address the idea of violence in the media, while also providing plenty of on-screen violence themselves.

Head over to The Movie Club Podcast website (linked below) to grab the MP3, or simply update your feed in iTunes. Don’t forget to leave your own thoughts about these films on the site and cast your vote for next month’s poll too. On the next episode we will be discussing A.I. and Prince of Darkness… should be a good one as well.

After the runaway success of The Hangover, it’s easy to see why director Todd Phillips is in high demand right now. He’s been juggling a number of potential upcoming projects, including a possible sequel to The Hangover, but before he gets to that it looks like he will likely be shooting a movie called Due Date sometime this fall.

Due Date reteams Phillips with Zach Galifiniakis, and starring alongside him in the lead role will be none other than new fanboy fave Robert Downey, Jr. RDJ will play a father-to-be who is paired on a road trip with an oddball companion, as he races to get home in time for the birth of his child. The script was written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland (King of the Hill) with a rewrite by Adam Sztykiel (Made of Honor). No doubt comedies with road trip elements are becoming second nature to Phillips, who is calling the flick “a buddy comedy without the buddies”. Either way, it looks like all the right elements are there for Warner Brothers to have another hit comedy on their hands… don’t you think?

Have you ever wondered what Stanley Kubrick’s classic sword-and-sandals epic Spartacus would look like through a Zack Snyder filter? Well wonder no longer, friends, because this week Starz released the first trailer for their upcoming TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand. I have to admit, they’ve done a pretty good job of replicating the look of 300 here… but is an on-going series like this really going to work?

Of course, Zack Snyder actually has nothing to do with the show. It’s produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, who did Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. I’m guessing this will be more successful than their most recent series Legend of the Seeker, but a lot will depend on the writing (it looks like they have a lot of writers from Smallville working on the show… not sure how that will play out). Newcomer Andy Whitfield plays the lead role, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Gerard Butler. What are the odds? Spartacus: Blood and Sand premieres sometime in 2010; check out the trailer after the jump.

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Looks like EA’s sci-fi/horror game Dead Space is the latest video game property to be set up as a feature film, with director D.J. Caruso (Disturbia, Eagle Eye) signed on to head up the adaptation. Caruso will direct and produce along with EA, who are currently accepting pitches from screenwriters. No studio has been set as of yet.

The game centers on an engineer named Isaac Clarke (an amalgamation of science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke), who is sent to investigate a distress signal from the interstellar mining ship USG Ishimura. He finds the ship plagued by an alien virus that turns humans into zombie-like creatures known as “Necromorphs”. During his investigation he discovers that the ship’s captain was an agent of the Church of Unitology sent to steal a religious relic known as “The Marker”, which is when all the trouble started.

The game was critically praised for its tense atmosphere and stellar graphics, and sold over a million copies. The movie is believed to be a bridge between the second and third game, which are currently in development. Variety notes that EA also has movies based on Army of Two, The Sims and Mass Effect currently in the works, but if this is going to help support for the release of new games, I suspect we may see a Dead Space movie sooner than the others. Are you interested in seeing Dead Space on the big screen or will it be just another Alien clone?

I’m not sure if it was the sound of Nicolas Cage’s soothing voice, the appearance of new comedy superstar Zach Galifianakis, or simply the prospect of cute guinea pigs in 3-D that did it, but somehow Disney’s G-Force managed to break the spell that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince held on the box office last week. Harry Potter tumbled 61% from last week to earn just $30 million, with the R-rated romantic comedy The Ugly Truth not far behind with $27 million. Orphan scared up $12.8 million in its opening weekend, while Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs rounded out the top 5. Meanwhile, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno plummeted yet again, and will likely be out of the top 10 by next weekend. There’s a good chance it will gross less than half of Borat’s grand total when all is said and done.

1. G-Force — $32.2M
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — $30M
3. The Ugly Truth — $27M
4. Orphan — $12.8M
5. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs — $8.2M
6. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — $8M
7. The Hangover — $6.46M
8. The Proposal — $6.42M
9. Public Enemies — $4.17M
10. Brüno — $2.72M

The Hurt Locker
Directed by: Katherine Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce, Evangeline Lilly, David Morse

Movies about the war in Iraq have been notoriously unsuccessful with audiences over the past few years, and for the most part it makes sense: people go to the movies to escape reality, not to be preached to or to be reminded of terrible things that are happening in other parts of the world. Movies like Stop-Loss and The Lucky Ones definitely have a political slant, and on top of that, they all deal with soldiers who have returned home after serving in active duty. While I’m sure there are some stories worth telling here, it does seem a bit strange to cut out the most compelling part of a soldier’s life.

I guess I can understand why there haven’t been more modern war movies that put you in the middle of the action, especially since it’s so easy to be accused of exploitation or glorifying violence. But the fact is, war makes for some incredibly compelling drama and intense thrills, and veteran action director Katherine Bigelow is keenly aware of that fact. With her new film The Hurt Locker, she has delivered the first Iraq war movie that is truly built for entertainment first, and one of the must-see movies of 2009.

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