Now that Blu-ray will officially take over the HD market with regards to DVDs, it's about time you pick yourself up a player. You'll find, though, that once you purchase a Blu-ray player, the DVDs are crazy expensive. Some, like massive special editions, cost up to $40-50. I'm sorry, but that's a lot of money for a movie. In fact, ever since receiving my Blu-ray player (in the form of PS3) back at Christmas, it took me forever to purchase my first Blu-ray DVD. That film came this past weekend when I splurged and picked up I Am Legend (for a whopping $35!). Ah, but now, Amazon has a wicked deal for those of you who desperately want more Blu-ray DVDs, but don't have the money to shovel out.

Right now, Amazon is running a buy two, get one free on a lot of their Blu-ray discs. Better yet, the discs are already on sale. For example, the Blade Runner (Five-Disc Complete Collector's Edition), originally priced at $40, is now only $27.95. You can even get 300 on Blu-ray for $23. Throw both of those in your queue, and you get to pick out one Blu-ray DVD for free! Not a bad deal if you ask me. Some of the DVDs they're offering on Blu-ray include Monty Python's Life of Brian ($19.95), The Departed ($23.95), Unforgiven ($19.95), Reservoir Dogs ($20.95), First Blood ($20.95) and a whole lot more. So check it out and have a blast -- you have until April 18.

[via Slashfilm]

Last year, a screenwriter making his directorial debut -- Tony Gilroy -- went and got himself a Best Director Oscar nomination. William Monahan already has an honest-to-goodness Oscar on his mantel for writing The Departed, but it looks like he'll soon get a chance to broaden his horizons. He's picked up the rights to a 2002 novel by Ken Bruen called London Boulevard, and plans to direct the film himself. It's a crime story about an ex-con who gets a job as a handyman for a rich actress but soon gets embroiled in the violent underworld he used to call home.

With its concentration on the music industry, it's easy to forget that the Grammys have a few movie-related categories. They include best compilation soundtrack album, best score soundtrack album and best song written for motion picture, television or other visual media. One thing that's always odd with the Grammys, though, is how many nominees are so old. Take a look at the score/composer nominees, for example: Babel (Gustavo Santaolalla); Blood Diamond (James Newton Howard); The Departed (Howard Shore); Happy Feet (John Powell); Pan's Labyrinth (Javier Navarrete); Ratatouille (Michael Giacchino). Only the last of those films came out in 2007. But the eligibility period for the Grammys is always October of the previous year until the end of September of the current year. All but Ratatouille's soundtrack were released in October, November and December of 2006. Since the Grammy ceremony is only a couple weeks prior to the Oscars, the ancient films honored are easily seen as that much more old news (Babel won the 2007 Academy Award for score).

Happy Feet was also recognized in the best song category, for "The Song of My Heart" by Prince (who already has the best soundtrack of all time), despite its not having received an Oscar nomination. Same goes for one of its competitors, Casino Royale theme song "You Know My Name", co-written (with David Arnold) and performed by Chris Cornell. Dreamgirls' "Love You I Do", written by Siedah Garrett and Henry Krieger (performed by Jennifer Hudson) is the only overlap from last February's Oscar nominees (it lost to Melissa Etheridge's "I Need to Wake Up" from An Inconvenient Truth). The other recognized tracks, both from 2007 releases, are Eddie Vedder's "Guaranteed" from Into the Wild and Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová's duet "Falling Slowly" from Once.

Once is also a contender for best compilation soundtrack, though it faces a huge challenger in The Beatles, who are recognized for the album for the Cirque du Soleil show Love (how does that fall into this category and not the one for musical show album?) and indirectly for the soundtrack to the movie Across the Universe, which features covers of the band's tunes performed by the movie's cast. Other soundtrack nominees are retro musicals Dreamgirls and Hairspray. Sorry, fans of High School Musical 2.

Variety reports that Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga (The Departed) have joined the cast of Dark Castle's Orphan. In a nod to Bad Seeds everywhere, the film focuses on a young couple (Sarsgaard and Farmiga) that have recently lost a child and decide to adopt a young girl to fill the void. Of course, nothing is ever that easy and the girl "is not nearly as innocent as she claims to be". David Leslie, a relative newcomer, wrote the screenplay based off an idea by Alex Mace. Already signed to direct is House of Wax helmer, Jaume Collet-Serra. Serra started off directing TV commercials and music videos, and Wax was his first big-budget production. Orphan seems like a definite step up for Serra; when your casting pool goes from Paris Hilton to Peter Sarsgaard you must be doing something right.

Sarsgaard has already completed the Philip Roth adaptation Elegy with Penelope Cruz, and is wrapping up work on two more literary adaptations. First up is In the Electric Mist; based on James Lee Burke's novel about "A detective in the deep South is led into a series of surreal encounters with a troop of Confederate soldiers" and Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Farmiga is currently filming Nothing But The Truth, a political drama with Kate Beckinsale and will next star in a literary adaptation of her own called The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas for Mark Herman (Brassed Off). Orphan is set to start shooting next week on location in Toronto and Montreal, Canada.

Well, it's official. The Writers Guild of America is going on strike tomorrow. Here's hoping the strike ends quickly and that all parties come away happy. And writers? Use this time off to study my choices for the seven best screenplays of the 2000's:

The 40 Year Old Virgin by Judd Apatow & Steve Carell

The blending of improvisation and the written word gives Apatow's two classic comedies -- Knocked Up would be the other -- a feeling of authenticity that is all too rare in today's film world. Apatow takes the strategy of writing for specific performers and their strengths, and it really pays off. Scoff if you want at a sex comedy making the list, but for a movie to be this incredibly funny -- while keeping an oddly touching romance and a spot-on character study afloat -- the screenwriters deserve high praise.

About Schmidt by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor

One of the saddest comedies ever made, and one of the most truthful and painful portraits of old age. Payne and Taylor specialize in scripts about people on the verge of cracking, depressed souls who tend to find the smallest redemption possible. Payne/Taylor characters never go from Point A to Point B over the course of the screenplay, they go from Point A to Point A.1. The small, gradual changes in their characters are reflective of the way actual humans (as opposed to movie humans) work. Warren Schmidt's personal growth is so minor that it is confined to the last thirty seconds of the film, but when it comes it's an emotional punch in the gut.

The festival has definitely stopped, yet news about deals keeps rolling out. Gina Kim's Never Forever did not even play at the Toronto International Film Festival, but a North American distribution deal was closed there. (And they say Toronto doesn't have a film market!) Prime Entertainment is representing the film for international sales and they came to an agreement with Arts Alliance America, formerly Hart Sharp Video, according to Variety.

Never Forever stars Vera Farmiga (Down to the Bone, The Departed). As Monika Bartyzel told us previously, Farmiga's character "is trying to have a child with her husband (David McInnis), but he is sterile. Distraught, he tries to kill himself and she goes a different route -- she finds an illegal immigrant [Ha Jeong-woo] and offers him a job in an attempt to save her marriage and have a baby." The "job" is to have sex with her until she conceives. Everything is complicated because Farmiga is Caucasian, her husband is Korean-American and the immigrant is Korean.

The film debuted at Sundance earlier this year. Writing in indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman praised the camera work and subject matter ("the rarely observed attraction between an American woman and an Asian man"), but criticized McInnis' performance and the story's descent into "broad overreaching melodrama." Adam Hartzell of Koreanfilm.org had much the same reaction, though he was more positive. On the mixed-race romance, he wrote: "U.S. media rarely shows me what I see on the streets of San Francisco every day." He also commented on the fascinating depiction of "the intricate flows from node to node of the network that makes up the Korean-American community." Prime Entertainment and Arts Alliance America plan to jointly distribute Never Forever in the first quarter of 2008.

Back when the 2007 Oscar nominees were announced, some films listed in the Best Picture category were accompanied by a note saying, "nominees to be determined." This was due to the Academy's difficulty in figuring out which producers of The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine would actually be qualified and named as primary producers of their respective films. Since 2000, the Academy has had a rule stating that at maximum only three producers could be handed trophies when the Best Picture was named. Because of the controversy regarding this year's producing credits, the Academy has now made some changes to the rule. Now, in "rare and extraordinary" circumstances, a fourth producer may be named as a Best Picture nominee.

The Academy altered a few other rules, which will also take effect for the 2008 Oscars. One rule is that for an animated film to be eligible for Best Animated Feature, it has to run at least 70 minutes, must be at least 75% completely animated, a significant amount of characters must be animated and those characters and all other animated sequences must be created using frame-by-frame techniques. For this change, I'm not sure what film the Academy is responding to specifically, but the report claims the rule is being more defined because we're in an age of changing technology. The third rule amended is for the Best Art Direction category. Before, only one production designer and only one set director was named, though in rare cases two set directors could be named (as in this year's nomination for The Good Shepherd). Now the rule is that either two production designers or two set directors -- but not both -- can be nominated (if two of one, only one of the other, whichever the mix).

I've come to notice a trend with the production company Vertigo Entertainment. Even more than they like to make remakes of foreign horror films (The Ring; The Grudge; The Eye), they really seem to favor the recruitment of foreign filmmakers. Here is a rundown of some of the acclaimed directors they've hired: Walter Salles, from Brazil; Alejandro Agresti, from Argentina; Oliver Hirschbiegel, from Germany; French duo David Moreau and Xavier Palud; Yann Samuel, also from France; Swedish duo Joel Bergvall and Simon Sanquist; Victor García, from Spain; Yam Laranas, from Philippines; and Takashi Shimizu, Hideo Nakata and Masayuki Ochiai, all three from Japan. I guess Jim Sheridan, from Ireland, counts too. It is weird, because sometimes a filmmaker is brought out to remake his own film, like with Shimizu and The Grudge and with Laranas and The Echo, and other times a filmmaker will be assigned the remake of someone else's film while his own original film is being remade by another acclaimed director, like with Nakata and Salles and Dark Water.

The sad thing is that many of these great directors have ended up making awful movies for Vertigo. The reason is probably coincidental, and we still have yet to see if Samuel can bring his fantastically romantic vision appropriately to a pic starring Jesse Bradford and Elisha Cuthbert or if the work Hirschbiegel did on The Invasion (before being replaced -- allegedly not fired) holds up to his Oscar-nominated breakthrough. But just in case there is a curse (how fitting) on the company to ruin these foreign filmmakers, then I am glad that the latest recruit, Spain's Daniel Calparsoso, is not actually that widely respected. Actually, I'm not familiar with him at all, but his most recent film, Ausentes, has a super-low rating of 3.9 on the IMDb. Not even The Grudge 2 rated that badly. So, he certainly can't do any worse with his film for Vertigo, a trapped-in-a-loony-bin-during-a-thunderstorm-set horror film called Incident at Sans Asylum (do asylums even exist anymore??). Another thing it has going for it: it isn't a remake. The script is an original, by chef-turned-cinematographer-turned-writer Craig Zahler, who also penned Vertigo's upcoming western The Brigands of Rattleborge. Zahler was also one of Variety's "10 Screenwriters to Watch" last year.

I'll admit I was surprised as the next person to hear about the possibility of a Leonardo DiCaprio movie that was not being made by Martin Scorsese. Variety has reported that DiCaprio is in talks to star in Body of Lies for Ridley Scott. The film is based on the novel by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, with a story that focuses on a CIA agent who's sent to Amman to work with Jordan's intelligence force in helping to track down an Al Qaeda leader who is planning an attack against America. The script is being adapted by William Monahan who also worked on The Departed, so it looks like DiCaprio could have at least one familiar face around on the film. Monahan has also worked for Scott before as a writer for Kingdom of Heaven and is working with DiCaprio on an American remake of Confessions of Pain.

DiCaprio is still negotiating his deal for the project, since he has a pretty packed schedule to try to fit this in. We have already had word that DiCaprio was re-uniting with his Titanic co-star Kate Winslet in the Sam Mendes film Revolutionary Road, and talks are still in progress for Scorsese and DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street (among their other project ideas.) Luckily Scott is still scouting locations in the US and in the Middle East, so Leo has some time to figure out his schedule for the next year or so.

It's rare that anything I see at the movies these days strikes me as profound, groundbreaking or revolutionary. I've been watching a lot of movies for a very long time. Visually, things have changed over the years. But it always comes back to the story, doesn't it? 300 is a movie that pushes the boundaries of conventional movie-making. And the story was OK, too. So we watch it and think, "Wow, that's pretty f**king cool." But if the story completely sucked, the movie wouldn't be nearly the smash hit it is.

So I went to see Meet The Robinson's at the famous El Capitan theater in Hollywood. My first thought when the movie started playing was, "Wow, this is pretty f**king cool looking." At about 600 hundred theaters across the country, the movie is shown in Disney Digital 3-D (yes, glasses and all). As I started getting roped into the movie about the orphan kid and his friend, I thought, "I really like these characters, and this is pretty f**king cool looking."

As I continued to watch the movie, I was totally engrossed. And I was aware that I was totally engrossed. (As a movie "reviewer" you actually start to monitor your own reactions. I know, it's a bit creepy and droid-like). I thought to myself, "This movie is totally fun and I love the characters, but why the hell am I so into it?"