If you haven’t been watching HBO’s series Treme, you’re really missing something. The show is very well done, features an outstanding cast and comes from the creative team behind one of the greatest shows ever to grace our television screens: The Wire.

Treme deals with the city of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As season two begins it’s more than a year since Katrina and its aftermath. The national spotlight on the Crescent City has dimmed, and residents are finding it harder than ever to rebuild their lives.

Some have become expatriates in distant cities. The insurance checks that never arrived for homeowners were followed by the bureaucratic nightmare that was the Road Home program, and a land-grab is underway as developers and disaster capitalists press their advantage. Crime and drug use are up, and corruption and graft are endemic, with civic institutions unable to counter any of it.

And yet the culture of New Orleans somehow endures. To help you get ready for the new season of the show we’ve got a preview video for it as well as a recap video of what happened last season.

Check out both videos after the jump. Treme returns to HBO for season two on Sunday, April 24th at 10/9C.

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Just a short while after it was announced Pixar’s upcoming sequel to 2001′s Monsters Inc. will actually be a prequel, it looks like Pixar and Disney may have spoken too soon, as the film is now getting pushed back to 2013.

We’re not looking at a massive push, just 6 or 7 months. According to THR, that hasn’t stopped Disney from filling up that prime open box office time.

Disney is pushing back the release of Pixar’s sequel Monsters University from Nov. 2, 2012 to June 21, 2013. As a result, Disney toon Reboot Ralph will now open Nov. 2, 2012 — Monsters’ old date — instead of March 12, 2013.

Within several hours, Paramount and DreamWorks Animation announced they were moving The Croods from March 1, 2013, to March 22, 2013.

Needless to say, both November and now the following June are going to be pretty big months for animation fans, especially families. Sadly, this does mean that fans of Billy Crystal and John Goodman’s characters from the original will have to wait that much longer.

For the longest time, not much was known about Kevin Smith’s newest written film since 2008′s Zack and Miri Make A Porno, which is also the writer/director’s first horror film, titled Red State.

The cast was revealed a few months ago, with a pretty interesting bunch of names like John Goodman, Kevin Pollak, Stephen Root, and Michael Parks. And then we got this synopsis.

Red State begins by following three horny high school boys who come across an online ad from an older woman looking for a gang bang. Boys being boys, they hit the road to satisfy their libidinal urges. But what begins as a fantasy takes a dark turn as they come face-to-face with a terrifying “holy” force with a fatal agenda.

So you’re probably asking yourself what a writer director like Kevin Smith has to do with horror, but this film has allegedly been in his nerdy vault of a brain since the early days of View Askew.

Going along his grassroots style that made him famous 16 years ago, Smith released the very first teaser for Red State on his site, the Smodcast. Check it out after the jump, and catch the flick in theaters early next year.

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The Screen Actor’s Guild has announced their nominees for best in film and television for 2110.  Since these awards are voted on by other actors, they usually carry a certain prestige. Rosario Dawson and Angie Harmon announced the guild’s nominees this morning in Los Angeles.

For those keeping score, The King’s Speech leads the film pack with four nominations, along with Black Swan. On the TV side, Modern Family came in with 4 awards, followed by Dexter, Glee, and Mad Men with three nominations each.

The awards will be  given on Sunday, January  30th on TBS. For a complete list of nominees, visit the official SAG website.

FILM

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role

JEFF BRIDGES / Rooster Cogburn – TRUE GRIT

ROBERT DUVALL / Felix Bush – GET LOW

JESSE EISENBERG / Mark Zuckerberg -THE SOCIAL NETWORK

COLIN FIRTH / King George VI – THE KING’S SPEECH

JAMES FRANCO / Aron Ralston – 127 HOURS

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role

ANNETTE BENING / Nic - THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

NICOLE KIDMAN / Becca – RABBIT HOLE

JENNIFER LAWRENCE / Ree Dolly – WINTER’S BONE

NATALIE PORTMAN / Nina Sayers – BLACK SWAN

HILARY SWANK / Betty Anne Waters – CONVICTION

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A long time coming, the definitive bio-pic of Jack Kevorkian, the controversial physician who made headlines in the late ’90s by performing physician-assisted suicides, is here. You Don’t Know Jack covers the main events from Kevorkian’s tenure as “Dr. Death”: His first assisted suicide, his meeting Geoffrey Fieger, the subsequent trials culminating in Kevorkian’s trial for the death of ALS patient Thomas Youk (in which the doctor, with great difficulty, represented himself), and ends with his incarceration.

These scenes and others are obligatory, but the film is less concerned with presenting an argument for assisted suicide or depicting history as it is with understanding Kevorkian the man.

As the doctor, Al Pacino holds the film together with one of his more subtle performances in recent memory. Likewise, it’s been a while since Pacino so immersed himself in a role that you forget you’re watching the actor. He plays Kevorkian as a man so convinced of his own view that he often falls into the same sort of dogmatic stubbornness he attacks.

When he shows up to a courthouse dressed in colonial garb and encased in a prop stock, one can’t help but think of the scene from The People Versus Larry Flynt when Woody Harrelson similarly goes to trial wearing the American flag as a diaper, both men putting aside the furthering of their cause for petty grudges. But Kevorkian at heart is not first and foremost a showman.

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I was hooked on this show about New Orleans life three months after Hurricane Katrina as soon as I had watched the first five minutes and apparently, HBO feels even stronger about it that I do. Why do I say that? Because the cable network has already given a second season order to Treme after only airing the first episode.

According to reports, Treme, created by The Wire‘s David Simon and Eric Overmyer, is already tracking higher than Simon’s previous effort and has drawn 1.1 million viewers for its first airing. However, as HBO is a cable network and doesn’t really care that much about ratings, they have obviously given the show another season for a different reason.

“This is too good of a show and too important of a show not to invest in a second season,” HBO’s president of programming Michael Lombardo said. I could not agree more.

Production on the second season of the show, starring Wendell Pierce, Steve Zahn, Clarke Peters, John Goodman, Kim Dickens and Khandi Alexander, will start in the fall in New Orleans. Now if I can just get them to bring back Rome and Deadwood.