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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: The Coen brothers get Serious, Dylan Walsh cheapens his resume and Vince Vaughn goes island hopping.

Pick of the Week

For people who think a fantastic trailer oftentimes leads to an even better movie: A Serious Man

Dudes like the Coen brothers are the lucky ones running around Hollywood. (Not that they haven't earned it). After a long history of producing quality flicks – seven of their 14 movies have earned at least an Academy Award or Golden Globe nomination – they're more or less worthy to make whatever the heck they want. A studio would have to be half crazed not to invest in one of their ideas. When your oeuvre includes No Country for Old Men and Fargo, you know you've got to be among the best of what the industry has to offer.

With that said, there are few movies from 2009 that I still have an urge to see. Taken, for some reason, is still on my list, as are State of Play and Cold Souls. Other than that, I'd like to finally get around to A Serious Man – recently named a contender for Best Picture – and then I'd feel complete. Its trailer dazzled me way back when. It was one of the more innovative ones I had ever seen since taking over BOP's Trailer Hitch column a few years back. Its two Oscar nods add proof that A Serious Man, about an ordinary man who's trying to find balance in the world, is another gem in the Coen boys' collection.

Disc includes: Becoming Serious: Explore the Creative Vision Behind A Serious Man featurette, Creating 1967: Neighborhoods and Set Pieces Used in the Film featurette, Hebrew and Yiddish for Goys: Unravel the Mysterious of the Hebrew and Yiddish Languages featurette





For people who don't think they'd be able to withstand a neck tie sleeper hold: The Stepfather

Oh Dylan Walsh. If movies like The Stepfather are what we have to look forward to in a post-Nip/Tuck world, I will be having none of it. Seriously, horror-thrillers are generally poorly received to begin with. So, when you're the muck of a genre that's already the laughing stock of the nation's critics, well then that's just sad. (Or, the sign of a flick that should have went straight to DVD). Obviously, I have not seen The Stepfather. Thankfully, I'm better than that. But I've included the movie in this week's column because it's simply regrettably a very slow week in new Blu-ray and DVD releases. I mean really, have you seen the other two movies I'm writing about in this space?

A remake of the 1987 horror-thriller of the same name, The Stepfather is about a young man (Penn Badgley) – fresh off returning from military school – who finds out his mother (Sela Ward) is happily married to what seems like the perfect father. That is, of course, until he goes psycho. Here in Los Angeles, I had an opportunity to see a free screening of the The Stepfather. And then I realized my time is more valuable then that.

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