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People should love the superhero
Will Smith (Independence Day, I am Legend) stars as an unlikable superhero in Hancock, an inventive take on superheroes, powers, and immortality by director Peter Berg (Very Bad Things, The Kingdom). Hancock doesn't know why he has powers and doesn't remember where he's from, and he balances the goodwill he might earn from stopping crimes and saving people by drinking too much, causing more damage than he prevents, and generally being a jerk. Trying to change the world, Ray (Jason Bateman: Arrested Development, Smokin' Aces) is a publicist who tries to make Hancock into a proper hero: gracious, appreciative of the police, and dressed in a superhero costume... but his wife, Mary (Charlize Theron: The Italian Job, Monster), sees Hancock as trouble, and Mary might know more than she lets on. On DVD and Blu-Ray.
You know, for kids...
Vince Vaughn (Wedding Crashers, Dodgeball) plays Santa Claus' black sheep big brother in Fred Claus. In trouble as usual, he needs Santa (Paul Giamatti: Sideways, Shoot 'Em Up) to loan him some money... but instead, he gets put to work at the North Pole. With Christmas right around the corner and an efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey: K-PAX, The Negotiator) ready to shut the North Pole down for good, it might not be the best time to have Fred Claus causing trouble.
A spaceship that looks like Eddie Murphy crashes to Earth in Meet Dave, sent from the planet Nil to collect Earth's water. The ship's one-inch-high captain (Eddie Murphy: Dreamgirls, Daddy Day Care) tries to keep the human-seeming ship/robot looking natural and interacting with normal sized humans long enough to find their water stealing device... which
ended up in the apartment of Elizabeth Banks (Slither, Spider-Man) and her son. The rest of the ship's tiny crew (including Gabrielle Union: Daddy's Little Girls, Cradle 2 the Grave and Scott Caan: American Outlaws, Ocean's 11) has to try and complete the mission when the captain becomes infatuated with Banks.
The grandson of the first chimp in space, Ham III (Andy Samberg: Hot Rod), is recruited to bring back a missing space probe in Space Chimps. He can't do it alone, though, so two other chimps are sent up with him: the professional Luna (Cheryl Hines: The Grand, RV) and a straight laced commander, Titan (Patrick Warburton: The Venture Brothers, Get Smart).
Stranger odds & ends
Harmony Korine's (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy) newest film is Mister Lonely, following a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna: The Terminal, Y tu Mama Tambien) around the streets of Paris, until he meets a Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton: Control, Enduring Love) who takes him to a special place for impersonators, and introduces him to Abraham Lincoln, Shirley Temple, The Three Stooges, and more.
Christmas on Mars is new this week, a psychedelic science fiction film by Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips. A project begun in 2001, Coyne shot most of the film in his own house and yard, ostensibly about the first Christmas on newly colonized Mars.
George Carlin's final HBO special is It's Bad for Ya, offering another hour of new material, as well as the documentary Too Hip for the Room, about his development and writing process, and a video his 1969 performance on the Jackie Gleason Show.
The BBC drama Another Life stars Natasha Little (Vanity Fair, Greenfingers) as a woman who is made miserable by marrying the wrong man (Nick Moran: The Amazing Grace, The Musketeer). When she meets Mr. Right (Ioan Gruffudd: King Arthur, Horatio Hornblower), she might have to go to extreme lengths to get out from under her husband's controlling hand.
The Mark of Cain is a British war film about two 18-year-old soldiers serving in Iraq, only to have their company start to fall apart when their captain is killed by a roadside bomb. With morale declining, the platoon begins to spiral out of control, and the question of what must be done starts to get more controversial answers.
Volume 1 of Darker than Black kicks off the new anime series by the creators of Cowboy Bebop and the Ghost in the Shell series. A group of humans called "contractors" have emerged, each with a unique, superhuman power, and no conscience or moral compass... the government keeps their existence from the public, but the Contractors have become the world's most controversial assassins, and, when they can be captured, research subjects.


