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Welcome to How to Spend $20, BOP’s look at the latest Blu-ray discs and DVDs to hit stores nationwide. This week: bureaus adjust, wimpy kids get bloggy again, an eagle lands and the rest is unknown.

For people who want a movie that may remind them of Inception, The Matrix or The Thirteenth Floor (if a person can be reminded of a movie they don’t know): The Adjustment Bureau

While the first quarter of 2011 had a widely rejected slate of new movie offerings, there were still several worthy of some attention. Several of them are coincidentally (?) released this week, making it one of the best batches of new releases in many months if not a year or more.

The Adjustment Bureau is a title that is ostensibly a box office winner (it has earned $125 million worldwide against a $62 million budget) yet it feels like more of a box office disaster averted than a hit. For an imaginative science fiction project with an A-List actor such as Matt Damon, a $62 million domestic performance is something of a missed opportunity. Movie lovers should ignore this aspect of the reputation of the title, because The Adjustment Bureau is a very solid outing. It is simply a film that requires more work than usual on the part of the viewer and what we have seen with 2011 box office ticket sales is that in the war between art and commerce, art is getting its ass kicked. Again.

Given that the readers of BOP are a bit more discriminating in terms of pop culture taste, The Adjustment Bureau is right in your wheelhouse. It is currently fresh at Rotten Tomatoes with 72% of critics giving it the thumbs up. It has also been quite the discussion topic amongst our staff and while not all of us are sold on it, this is definitely a movie we encourage you to watch. If you don’t, you might as well buy a I Heart Fat Suit Comedies t-shirt. Better yet, get a tattoo of Big Momma on your neck.

For people watching with interest the shocking career ascension of Ed Helms: Cedar Rapids

A rite of passage for rising comedians is the small scale indie film that establishes their credibility. Recent examples of this are Will Ferrell’s work in the unheralded but wonderful Winter Passing and Steve Carell’s much more commercially viable outings in Little Miss Sunshine and Dan in Real Life. As we recently chronicled in Monday Morning Quarterback, Helms has startled Hollywood with his celebrated work in the two outings of The Hangover. He has become someone who has earned the right to higher profile acting gigs within the industry and while anyone who says they saw this coming for the bit actor on The Office is lying, it’s a remarkable feat on the whole.

Cedar Rapids is Helms’ small scale indie film that demonstrates he can find the core of a character while still mining the nature of small town America for big laughs. Helms portrays an insurance salesman who is given a primo assignment at a major insurance convention. This happens quickly because the company’s first choice for the assignment pulls a David Carradine. During the course of his preparation and attendance at the convention, Helms’ character learns how the corporate insurance industry works and he also finds some time to work blue a lot himself, which is fitting for a star of The Hangover. Most of the reviews of this film blithely state that Cedar Rapids is not an original concept, but those statements largely miss the point. The plot is just the framework to explore some very funny themes and the universally positive reception of the film (88% fresh among top critics at Rotten Tomatoes) reveals the underlying quality of the film. If Cedar Rapids had not been on your radar before now, it should be from this moment forward. This is one of the best movies of 2011 to date.

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