Clockwise from top left: Get Smart, Transsiberian, Kung Fu Panda, Budd Boetticher Box Set, Planet of the Apes 40th Anniversary Collection.

Welcome to this week's edition of Spin-ematical, chock full of alternatives to election coverage!

Kung Fu Panda
Though some of the celebrity voices were useless, Jack Black is great, and the film itself is pleasant, good-natured, and respectful of Asian culture. Available in at least seven editions, including widescreen, full-screen, Spanish, a Christmas gift set, with and without Secrets of the Furious Five (a 20-minute short), and on Blu-ray; oddly, this doesn't release until Sunday. Buy it.

Transsiberian
Traveling by train in the dead of winter from Beijing to Moscow should be much more restful than what happens to Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer in this adventure / suspense / thriller; Ben Kingsley plays a menacing Russian detective. I'm recommending this one sight unseen because Brad Anderson (Session 9, The Machinist) directed. Includes a 34-minute "making of"; also available on Blu-ray. Replays are inevitable. Buy it.

Get Smart
The bumbling Maxwell Smart as a generic action hero? (*sigh*) Steve Carell makes the character his own by repeating the old catchphrases without enthusiasm and proving to be far too adept for his own -- or the movie's -- good. Anne Hathaway is a very sexy spy, but Dwayne Johnson is miscast and even Alan Arkin struggles. The TV series never took itself too seriously; if only the movie had done the same. Available in widescreen and full-screen editions, as well as a two-disk version and on Blu-ray; a plethora of bonus scenes are included, notably a 5-minute "vomit reel." Ugh. Skip it.

After the jump ... Indies on DVD, more Blu-ray debuts, and Collector's Corner.

This summer's Get Smart reboot, with Steve Carell as Maxwell, was far from brilliant, but sweet Jebus, Carell is funny. His improvised dance with a bewildered-but-willing overweight partygoer is one of this year's comic highlights -- a perfect blend of good-natured mockery and non sequitur. So the official announcement of the inevitable sequel strikes me as a good thing. I doubt they'll ever come up with any sort of finely tuned masterwork, but I figure it's guaranteed to have a bunch of great moments. Big budget comedies are often so dire that "uneven with flashes of inspiration" is music to my ears.

Even better, the success of Get Smart has earned Carell a three-year deal with Warner Bros., giving him a chance to develop both starring vehicles and projects for others. It's good to see the right people take off like this, y'know? On the other hand, it's kind of unfair: why do today's teenagers get to inhabit a comedic landscape dominated by the likes of Carell, Judd Apatow, Michael Cera, Seth Rogen, etc., while I got Adam Sandler and Mike Myers? Kids these days, they don't know how good they got it.

I guess I liked Mike Myers back when; I was 13 when the first Austin Powers came out. I still kind of like him. But he's certainly overshadowed by the crop of comics in today's mainstream.

If you were watching Get Smart this past weekend (and many of you had been) and thought to yourself, "Self, whatever were those two gadget-crafting nerds played by that guy from 'Heroes' and that other dude up to while Steve Carell was off being less funny than he tends to be back home on the television set?," then do I have an answer for you!

And by I, I mean Warner Premiere, the studio's direct-to-DVD arm. See, for over a year now, they've had it up their sleeves to release a spin-off entitled Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd: Out of Control*, which would correspond to the events of that film's story and arrive on shelves within weeks of that film's release (next Tuesday, July 1, to be exact).

If the official website and its trailer are to be believed, the 71-minute supplement involves Bruce (Masi Oka) and Lloyd (Nate Torrence) as they construct, test, and tweak robotic agent Hymie (Patrick Warburton), who made an appearance at the end of Smart.

Whether it turns out to be actually amusing or just superfluous, the whole deal's a smart move on Warner Premiere's part; I suspect that they just shot stuff amidst regular filming, which in turn cut down both production and promotion costs, as opposed to the relative gamble of dusting off titles such as House on Haunted Hill, The Cell, and The Lost Boys.

Regardless, GS'sB&L:OOC hits shelves on DVD and Blu-Ray - and on-demand - next week.

*Get it? Because Control's the name of the government organization they work within. No, not because they got booted from their Joy Division cover band.

As a long time fan of the original TV show, and as a grown up version of the kid who used to memorize William Johnston's paperbacks ... as a former elementary school student who went in for as many tedious "Would you believe?" jokes as the legions of film critics writing about this week's box office success ... as all of these things, I'm not expecting anything more heart-breaking this summer than Get Smart. From the under-performing villain (the usually savory Terence Stamp) to the dull direction by Peter Segal, the film was a complete tick-off.

Richard Schickel spelled out his own disappointment in the opening paragraph of his review in Time Magazine:

"A schlemiel may be, must be, grievously acted upon by the always malevolent world. But he can never be permitted to act effectively against that world. At the end of his adventures he must, somehow, triumph over the forces of darkness that surround him - but only accidentally so...In that spirit of genial fantasy, we permit out surrogate that utter self-confidence, that sublime sangfroid, with which with he cheerfully motors his way around and through disaster."

Both of last week's new releases dropped like a rock to make room for Warner Bros.' Get Smart, which landed smack in the middle of expectations with a nice $39.2 million bow. As many people guessed, toxic word-of-mouth on The Happening led to a steep drop -- 67% -- and a fifth place, $10 million finish for the Shyamalan thriller. The $50.3 million cume is far from an embarrassment, but the descent is hopefully a signal to the filmmaker that he needs to, if not go back to the drawing board, at least steal a glance at it.

Slightly more surprising is the 61% drop for The Incredible Hulk, which finished third with $21.6 million. That's a measurable improvement on the 69.7% hit that Ang Lee's Hulk took in 2003, but the new film is still running behind the old one, and its lack of legs in a summer where big movies (Iron Man, Indiana Jones) have held up admirably might be an indication that the "less arty" reboot didn't solve the problem with the franchise, whatever that may be.

Welcome back to another edition of Insert Caption -- the game where you don't have to be a guru in order to win fabulous movie-related prizes. Last week, we asked you to point, laugh and get your caption on with a photo of two heads (belonging to Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway) from the film Get Smart. And that you did! Congrats go out to David R. for turning us on and off in the same sentence.


1. "That better be your shoe-phone, Max." -- David R.

2. "Um, I think we are just about in over our heads." -- Cherlyn

3. "I told you the Marie Antoinette spa treatment was a bad idea!!" -- Tim

See full image and all captions





This week, we're searching for a little love (and advice) from Guru Pitka (Mike Myers) in The Love Guru. Our old friend returns to live-action comedy with this flick about a self-help guru who travels from India to the states to help a star hockey player whose wife left him for a rival athlete. Sound familiar? Have you found yourself in a similar romantic squabble as of late? And are you seeking advice from all the wrong people (like that guy with the wooden leg who keeps asking to square off against you in a game of naked Twister)? Well, look no further my fellow caption-ers, because the three winners from this week will prance away with one The Love Guru Guru Pitka magic 8- ball action figure (pictured right, click to enlarge). This way, next time trouble comes knocking at your heart, you'll have your own personal guru to help steer you in the right direction. Sound off below ...



Read the official rules for this contest

Bringing TV properties to the big screen is a dicey proposition; for every success, there's a fistful of failures that didn't make the cut. (Hands up if you remember I Spy. ...) But gathered in Hollywood for a press conference, the stars and creative staff of Get Smart were relaxed and calm, fielding questions about everything from the tricky business of mocking intelligence in a post-9/11 world, what it takes to play a bad guy, and what it's like to make out with Steve Carell.

The cast was asked if they actually went back to the '60s TV show to get a sense of playing their parts; each of them had a different answer. Steve Carell explained "I didn't want to do an impersonation of Don Adams; I figured there was no way to improve upon what he had done, and I thought the more I watched of him, the more inclined I would be to do an impersonation, because he was so good, so definitive in the role; so no, I sort of backed off."

During the opening of Get Smart, the new big-screen re-visitation of the '60s spy spoof TV show created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, we're shown a montage detailing the mighty workings of the modern intelligence apparatus; covert microphones, satellite communications intercepts, frantic translation, secretive meetings. As top analyst Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) walks the streets of Washington to the hidden headquarters of the secret agency where he works, listening to intercepted conversations to better understand the plans and thoughts of America's enemies, his iPod switches over ... to Abba's "Take a Chance on Me." Spies, it seems, are people too.

And pause here to think about the challenges facing any director who wants to make a spy comedy in our modern times. If you depict spies as too competent, the audience unconsciously fears for their civil liberties; depict spies as too incompetent, the audience unconsciously fears for their lives. Make the film's threat to the free world too credible, and the film's more scary than silly; make the threat to the free world too fantastic and foolish (as in the earlier Get Smart big-screen project, 1980's The Nude Bomb) and the film's more goofy than gripping. The makers of the new Get Smart seem to have thought about this, and have transformed the character somewhat from Don Adams's nasal know-nothing in the '60s TV show; as played by Carell, Smart is a bright, dedicated, insightful analyst for the secret agency CONTROL who dreams of being a field agent. And Max learns he's passed the field agent's exam with flying colors; still, his boss The Chief (Alan Arkin) rejects Max's request for transfer to field work because he needs Max behind a desk.

With the pending release of the new version of Get Smart, and many fond childhood memories of the original series, I thought I would assemble a list of TV spies who made great movies. Unfortunately, I was confronted with a mountain of evidence that international men and women of mystery have suffered horribly in their transition to the big screen.

That conclusion sounds counter-intuitive. After all, a movie can focus on a single defining story in a spy's life, while a television series, by its very nature, must include many routine episodes that fit into a familiar formula. The movie can have a much bigger budget, allowing for a variety of international settings, while the TV show often takes place in just one or two locations on the back lot.

But I think the best TV spies were successful because the producers made sure that the characters were the stars. Two-shots and close-ups of people talking work really well on the small screen, and sharp, well-written dialogue is always a bonus. Just a list of character names invokes pleasant nostalgia, while the movie versions have, for the most part, justifiably faded into oblivion.

1. Wild Wild West

Two words: Giant spider. Need I say more?

I caught a screening of Hancock last night. We still have a couple weeks to go before we get to that film, but I am very curious to hear what you folks think of this flick. It's certainly ballsy (especially for a Fourth of July weekend), and I loved that about it -- so we'll see. My mouth shall remain shut for now. That said, this weekend is a peculiar one because we have two comedies competing against one another. Sure, one (Get Smart) could probably pass itself off as an action-comedy, but it will be fascinating to watch the old school (Mike Myers) go up against the new school (Steve Carell).

On paper (and from what I've been hearing), Get Smart seems like the better all-around choice if you only have cash for one film and want a taste of typical, popcorn summer entertainment. Then again, Mike Myers hasn't starred in a live-action film since 2003's The Cat and the Hat, and so fans might be itching for that familiar Myers absurdity (with a twist of Mini Me thrown in for extra punch). If you choose your films based on the female factor, well, Get Smart gives us the beautiful Anne Hathaway, while The Love Guru features the equally-as-beautiful Jessica Alba. My opinion: Hathaway's the better actress, but Alba's the fan favorite. As far as directors go, Love Guru gives us a first-timer, and Get Smart is brought to us by the guy behind films like Tommy Boy, Anger Management and 50 First Dates.

So, based on my shoddy analysis, which film will you be seeing this weekend?