TITLE: Battlestar Galactica – The Complete Series
GENRE: Science-fiction
STARS: Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, Katee Sackhoff, Jamie Bamber, James Callis, Tahmoh Penikett, Kandyse McClure, Lucy Lawless
FUN FACT: In the original 1978 cult classic TV show, the womanizing, gambling, wise-ass, cigar-smoking Starbuck character was male and played by Dirk Benedict. The Sci-Fi Channel’s re-imagining of the show featured the luscious Katee Sackhoff in the role, drinking, cursing, and sexing up a storm. You’d have to be a robot to not be excited by that decision.
WHY COMPLEX IS CO-SIGNING IT: Battlestar Galactica, a complicated chronicle of the outer space conflict between mankind and the sentient machines it created and enslaved, is arguably the best science-fiction television series ever (sorry if you just Shatnered in your pants)…
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TITLE: Coraline
GENRE: Animated/Fantasy/Horror
STARS: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French.
FUN FACT: In order to achieve the look Selick wanted, over 130 sets were built across 52 different stages, spanning 183,000 square feet. The 52 stages were the most ever used for a stop-motion animated feature.
WHY COMPLEX IS CO-SIGNING IT: While we here at ’Plex love Pixar movies as much as, or maybe a little more, than the kids they’re aimed at, after a while, all that saccharine shit gets tiring. Even with Wall-e and Up!’s morbid undertones, they’re still crazy bubbly. Enter Henry Selick. The man who tamed Tim Burton’s classic macabre holiday flick, The Nightmare Before Christmas, aims to deflate all the sweetness in children flicks and his latest movie Coraline does just that.
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TITLE: Eastbound & Down: The Complete First Season
GENRE: Comedy/Sports
STARS: Danny McBride, Katy Mixon, Will Ferrell, Craig Robinson
FUN FACT: Fans speculate that Kenny Powers is based on MLB bad boys like John Rocker, John Kruk, and Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams, but McBride says that he’s simply a “greatest hits of all of the shamed ballplayers.”
WHY COMPLEX IS CO-SIGNING IT: We’re on Danny McBride’s jock—his horny, arrogant, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, foul-mouthed, drugged-out, washed-up jock, Kenny Powers, that is. McBride, who stood out in The Foot Fist Way, Pineapple Express, and Tropic Thunder, is pitch perfect as the disgraced and penniless former Major League Baseball star flame-thrower who’s forced to live amongst the little people and teach physical education at his middle school while he tries to make a comeback. Eastbound has filthy humor on the reg, Katy Mixon’s super twos on the reg, Will Ferrell and Craig Robinson guest appearances on the reg, and all sorts of other cool shit on the reg. The first season of this HBO gem—six half-hour episodes—leaves us wanting more, but when a pitcher who throws “faster than fuck” hurls a perfect game, they don’t dick around about it, they just bring the heat, get in and get out. If you’re not going to bat for this series, quite simply, you’re fuckin’ out!
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TITLE: Waltz with Bashir
GENRE: Animated/Documentary/War
DIRECTOR: Ari Folman
FUN FACT: At the 2009 Academy Awards, Israel’s Waltz with Bashir became the first animated film to be nominated for the “Best Foreign Language Film” Oscar. It lost to the Japanese nominee, Departures.
WHY COMPLEX IS CO-SIGNING IT: Few films capture the surreal, traumatic experience of war like Waltz with Bashir does. The fact-based animated documentary centers on its director, Folman, an Israeli veteran of the 1982 Lebanon War who can’t remember anything from that period in his life. When a fellow vet recounts a recurring nightmare he has from his days in Lebanon, it awakens a vision of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Folman, only he can’t tell if it’s real or imagined. By speaking to other soldiers whose minds are playing tricks on them to cope with their trauma, he attempts to piece together what really happened to him in Beirut. Animation, we find, is the perfect tool to express things so horrific that the human mind refuses to accept them as real. If there are winners in war, this film is one.
DVD SPECIAL FEATURES: Director commentary, “Q&A with Director Ari Folman,” “Surreal Soldiers: Making Waltz with Bashir,” “Building the Scene: Animatics,” and the theatrical trailer.
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