February is in full swing and this week brings a host of new movies and some great classics hitting Blu-ray for the first time. This week’s releases include the first time on Blu-ray Casablanca, Unforgiven, Gangs of New York, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Godfather I and II.

There are also several Dr. Who TV movies, a couple seasons of TV’s Dynasty, Volume 3 of Batman: The Brave and the Bold and the Blu-ray release of Zombieland with Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin (pictured above).

Check out this week’s new releases:

Movies

Adam ~ Hugh Dancy, Peter Gallagher, Amy Irving (Blu-ray and DVD)

Amelia ~ Hillary Swank, Richard Gere (Blu-ray and DVD)

Casablanca ~ Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains (Blu-ray)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ~ Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro, Tobey Maguire (Blu-ray)

Gangs of New York (Remastered) ~ Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day Lewis, John C. Reilly (Blu-ray)

Planet Hulk ~ (Blu-ray and DVD)

Love Happens ~ Jennifer Aniston (Blu-ray and DVD)

Mystic River ~ Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon (Blu-ray)

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With Zombieland hitting DVD shelves across the country on tuesday, we thought it was only appropriate to share with you some of the cool features from the DVD and Blu-Ray release. We’ll be bringing you some cool bonus material from the release all week, but of course the most important material to any DVD: the deleted scenes.

With the film making over 3 times their production budget, and the film’s writers, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, getting picked up for such films as Deadpool and GI Joe 2, you can believe that the DVD will be as hot as the theatrical release. After the jump, we’ve got two brand new deleted scenes from the movie, including another rule to surviving the zombie apocalypse that never made the final cut, and an extended scene from the grocery store.

Be sure to check out the deleted scenes, and check back here this week for more of our coverage of the Zombieland DVD and Blu-Ray release.

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I firmly believe Zombieland was one of the best films of 2009. It simply came out of nowhere, defied expectations, and even went so far as to inspire some of us.  Given the films success it’s no surprise that a sequel would be on the horizon. Now, Variety is able to confirm that a sequel is in development and chances are it will be in 3D:

“Everyone had fun watching (the first) ‘Zombieland’; making it a more visceral experience can only make it better,” said the film’s producer Gavin Polone. “I don’t think you want to see ‘Ordinary People’ in 3-D. But ‘Zombieland’ is clearly one movie that will benefit from (the technique).”

Now, I’ve never been sold on the whole 3D thing.  Personally, I think it’s a gimmick and haven’t gone out of my way to see any recent 3D films.  Simply put, I have yet to find a compelling reason to see a film in 3D over its standard counterpart.

That being said, Zombieland may just be the film I actively seek out a 3D theater to see it in.  It was so brilliantly campy that it begs to bring that pseudo third dimension to the adventures of Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg). It’s perfect, and so would a title of Z3D.  Okay, that may work better for a third film, but it’s still cool.

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There are several things that director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) doesn’t seem too concerned about in the bloated, CGI-laden disaster movie 2012. These include, but are not limited to:  plot, character development, plausibility, restraint, and subtlety. I kind of understand why he chooses to ignore these elements. If you get bogged down with all these pesky details, how are you supposed to focus on THE SPECTACLE?

THE SPECTACLE is the star of this film, and clearly every resource available was used to ensure that this movie looks good, everything else be damned. 2012 is a full 2 1/2 hour visual assault of CGI, destruction, chase scenes, and every natural disaster a geophysicist could possibly imagine. It’s chalk full of action movie clichés, right down to the brooding and estranged ex-husband who happens to be near his old family when disaster strikes, and must lead them to safety. Not only is the movie wholly unoriginal, but it actually feels like Emmerich just cherry-picked his favorite scenes from action movies he likes, and found a way to throw them all into a threadbare story.

This is director indulgence gone too far. The movie is an hour too long, and a few key scenes would have had far more impact if there were not an action scene thrown in every 3-4 minutes. It’s as though Emmerich is saying to the audience: “You are going to sit there in your seat, and you are going to watch the crap out of this movie.”

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Oliver’s Stone’s Natural Born Killers is a movie that, even with its political and social overtones, still stands the test of time. It’s a bravura tour de force motion picture that still pushes the limits of the form to this day. And now, a brand new Uncut Version and Director’s Cut has been released by Warner Home Video, which is sure to delight fans of this controversial motion picture.

An extremely violent satire of modern media that still asks questions 15 years later, the film is a brutal, bloody, surreal and stylized journey along with terrible twosome Mickey and Mallory Knox. Their tri-state killing spree brings questions of the media and its obsession with “celebrity” into focus. Even though this film was created before people like Paris Hilton, or whomever, could be considered a “celebrity” simply by virtue of being on the Internet or videotaping themselves having sex, it predicts a culture obsessed with these pseudo celebs all too realistically.

The story is presented in extremely diverse ways utilizing different colors, film stocks, presentation styles and many other ways, sometimes causing the very sensory overload in the viewer Stone is trying to show has overcome society. This somewhat over-the-top approach to the film only serves to heighten the experience and provides a great deal of fodder for standout performances by leads Woody Harrelson and Juliet Lewis as well as co-stars Robert Downey, Jr., Tommy Lee Jones and Tom Sizemore.

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Though Zombieland hit theaters a week ago, it’s still making headway with viral marketing on its official site. Over at the site, we’ve just stumbled across a cool new tool that is bound to get even the most timid of zombie fans excited.

Welcome to Zombify-Yourself.net where you can turn yourself into a flesh-eating member of the undead, without having to go through all the trouble of being bitten and the actual eating of flesh. The site uses a flash application to upload a picture of your choosing, and adds in great features like “bleeding eye cavity” or “missing lips” to complete your zombie look.

With Zombieland coming it at number 1 at the box office last weekend, and taking home roughly $30 million in a week, we are bound to see more from this franchise, in either a possible sequel or, if we’re lucky, a good old-fashioned Hollywood reboot.

Catch Zombieland in theaters everywhere now.

We have been a bit hard around here on 2012, the new Roland Emmerich film about the end of the world, but given the director’s track record and the fact that the trailer doesn’t look like anything we haven’t seen dozens of times before on the big screen, we think we probably have just cause.

It looks like we aren’t the only people making fun of it, as a new fan film has popped up online using the first five minutes of the film. The edit proves that this film can become two things without it’s overblown special effects: quite pointless and outrageously funny.

For those interested in the film itself, it stars a cornucopia of celebrities from John Cusack to Woody Harrelson and Amanda Peet and is about a prophecy where the world comes to an end in December of 2012. Roland Emmerich is also the director that brought us gems like 10,000 BC and The Day After Tomorrow.

Check out the fan film after the jump. Catch 2012 in theaters everywhere this November.

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Zombieland opened this week and let me tell you it is, in my opinion, one of the best films of 2009. Only a day into its release Hollywood insiders were predicting the movie could go onto make $30 million in its opening weekend. If that happens it means Zombieland will have made back the $26 million and change it cost to make. While those numbers may not carry the weight of the billion dollars The Dark Knight made Zombieland’s rapid return on investment cannot be overlooked. Hollywood, take note, Zombieland should be the new standard of success.

All that said, I’m not writing a review of Zombieland by any means (Chris already wrote a great one), nor am I looking to talk about the merits of the film, of which there are many. No, I’m casting all the business stuff aside for the moment to speak about one thing: inspiration. You see, immediately after watching Zombieland I got home and was compelled to write (in this case a novel I’m working on). I had in me a burning desire to create. Therein lies the true success of Zombieland. For this writer, it spurred the creative forces that drive cinema.

How did it do this?  Simply put, the film was honest. There was no allusion to a grand design or twist ending. The characters were endearing and story practically A to B simple. Moreover, it defied stock conventions of the genre.  The girls weren’t running away screaming and guys not always the most heroic. These were characters anyone in the theater could relate to personally or through friends they probably know.  Being able to create that rapport with the audience was the secret weapon of Zombieland.  It connected with viewers (trust me on that, I saw the response from the packed theater first hand) and even if only for a few moments at a time they could see themselves in that world of zombies and loved it. Those are the moments writers, specifically, aspire to.

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Seeing as how October is the month of spooky and scary Halloween and its associated themed entertainments, we’ve got something here just for you. If you’re a fan of movies like Natural Born Killers and think you know the movie very well, we’ve got a website for you.

To commemorate the 15th anniversary of the film and its upcoming director’s cut release on Blu-ray and DVD on October 13th, Warner Bros has created a site and included a pretty detailed trivia game to test your knowledge of the movie. The questions range from the rather simple to the much more detailed and specific so if you are not sure of your Natural Born Killers knowledge, you may want to get the film first and then try your hand at the trivia.

You don’t win anything at the site except the right to post your score to your favorite social networking site — which allows for a certain amount of bragging rights at least. The film, which stars Woody Harrelson, Juliet Lewis, Robert Downey, Jr., Tom Sizemore and Tommy Lee Jones, is written by David Veloz and Oliver Stone and directed by Stone. Head on over to the site and test your knowledge today.

Part monster movie, part buddy road comedy with a dash of romance thrown in, Zombieland manages to deliver on pretty much every level. Featuring terrific performances by the entire cast, including Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, this film is able to deliver genuine laughs, genuine scares and genuine entertainment for its entire running time. Its a solid piece of filmmaking by director Ruben Fleischer, and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, that should definitely find an audience.

The premise of the film is, as it should be, relatively simple. The world as we know it has come to an end due to some unspecified reason and the dead are now walking the earth. In this world we first meet Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) who, being the introverted, Mountain Dew drinking, pseudo-loser he is, has managed to stay alive due to his nature and adherence to rules he’s come up with as a new citizen of Zombieland. His rules, such as “Cardio Good, Bathrooms Bad, Always shoot zombies twice, etc.” and his loner, anti-social nature have served him well and enabled him to survive.

So, its somewhat against his better judgment that he decides to team up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) on a road trip to find out if any of his family might still be alive in, you guessed it, Columbus. In case you’re wondering, the names characters call each other in Z-land are where they’re from and not their actual names. Better to not develop real ties with anyone seeing as how they might be eaten by zombies at any moment. This provides a bit of insight into the characters and also a bit of humor as well.

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Woody Harrelson seems to have had some pretty good luck with roles in his long career — especially lately. From playing the undead-bashing hero in next month’s Zombieland to the crazy conspiracy theorist in November’s 2012, Harrelson has accumulated 18 film roles in the past three years alone. It looks like Woody is finally taking on the world of superheroes, as he takes on the lead in Defendor.

The film was produced entirely out of Canada by actor-turned-writer/director Peter Stebbings, who’s only other film was 2008′s Jack and Jill vs the World starring Freddie Prinze Jr. The premise follows three characters, a teenage prostitute (Shorts‘ Kat Dennings) a psychiatrist (Sandra Oh) and a mentally disturbed man named Arthur who decides to fight crime as the dark crusader The Defendor (Harrelson).

With films like Kick-Ass hitting theaters and giving the general audience a glimpse at a super powerless superhero story, it makes sense that something like Defendor will do well, especially with it’s dark comedic undertones.

Check out the first full trailer after the jump. Defendor is screening at the Toronto Film Festival next week so expect to see it at your local theater soon after that.

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While most disaster movies of late have gone the way of the Poseidon Adventure remake, there has been some positive buzz about the newest “the world is ending” film, 2012. Though the film is getting a November release (most disaster movies are known to do better during the summer) and has 10,000 BC’s Roland Emmerich at the helm, we do have some hope.

From what we know, the film focuses on the main character and his family on a microcosmic level as ancient prophecies come true. The world begins to literally fall apart around us, as the Earth has an expiration date of 2012. The tagline of the film is simply “We Were Warned,” which hopefully has nothing to do with the actual production of the movie and its resultant quality.

Writer Herald Kloser helped with the epic script and the film stars, in no particular order, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Oliver Platt, and Amanda Peet. Check out brand new footage and dialogue in the Japanese trailer after the jump.

Expect the world to end as we know it, at least according to 2012, on November 13.

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