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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: Timothy Olyphant totes a gun, another bank heist movie gets made and – doh! – Ryan Reynolds gets stuck in a box.

Pick of the Week

For people who have a cowboy fix to fill: Justified: The Complete First Season

Allegedly, Justified is a good one. Myself, I couldn’t get past the pilot, in which Timothy Olyphant says no fewer than a handful of times that his transgressions – a bum shooting, and the ensuing bad press – in I want to say Miami were “justified.” Somebody would sit him down and try to shake the truth out of him. Timothy would bow his head or rub his cap or do something cowboy-y and then go, “It was justified…” in his velvety speech. It’s poison to judge a show on one episode, and I realize I’m doing that here. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get behind the thing. But I’m really an island here. The series scored basically universal acclaim on Metacritic.

I think one thing the series did (very) right is in casting Timothy Olyphant in the lead role. So many of the series premiere’s 4.2 million viewers – FX’s highest debut show since The Shield – tuned in solely to see Timmy in skinny jeans and boots. And that’s to be expected because Tim is a studly stud. In no way is it believable that a man as good-looking as Timothy would choose to be a cop over any number of vainer professions, but that’s what suspending belief is all about, yeah?

Disc includes: “Long Hard Times to Come” music video, Four cast and crew commentaries, Season Two: A Look Ahead featurette, What Would Elmore Do? featurette, The Story of Justified featurette, Justified: Meet the Characters featurette, Shooting for Kentucky featurette, The Marshals featurette

For people who wanna see Ryan Reynolds conveniently fit into tight spaces: Buried

The idea of an entire movie framed around a dude stuck in a coffin sounds about as suffocating as the stunt itself, yet critics and moviegoers alike seemed keen on the premise and, of course, execution. I’d assume the gimmicky story would fail to sustain for a feature-length movie, but Buried isn’t the case. According to Rotten Tomatoes, about 85% of people who saw the thing wrote home to tell about it.

Buried, I think, brings to mind that other “white guy stuck in a claustrophobic predicament” flick that was released in the last decade. That movie, of course, would be Phone Booth, which starred Colin Farrell as a guy who takes a call at a phone booth at the top of the movie and never leaves – in fact he can’t, unless he wants to get shot at – through the duration of the movie. I remember there being talk way back when to extend Phone Booth’s legs into, at most, a five-film franchise. That is until Fox realized how silly an idea that was and promptly canceled any and all plans they had for Phone Booth 2, 3 and beyond.

Like Phone Booth, Buried’s Ryan Reynolds comes armed with a handy piece of telecommunication. Instead of a hard-lined phone in a booth – a technology that hardly exists anymore – his character has a cell phone. Kinda like how were The Ring to be rebooted, it’d be done with a DVD or Blu-ray disc in lieu of the cassette.





Disc includes: Unearthing Buried: The Making of Buried

For people who don’t know how many more bank heist movies really need to be made: Takers

Had the producers of Takers spent about as much time on the script as they did casting, the project may have turned out slightly better than a mediocre heist film. The whole thing, really, reeks of fail to me. Even one of the flick’s official posters, with Matt Dillon and Jay Hernandez aiming at some unknown force while oversized images of Paul Walker, Idris Elba, et al. loom above them feels very straight-to-DVD. It wasn’t that the project was without money – Takers cost a reported $32 million – I just don’t know that it was spent as well as it could have been.

Erring on the side of the baddies, Takers follows a group of “professional” bank robbers who are reeled into “one last job” by their paroled ringleader. Standing against them are the aforementioned Dillon and Hernandez.

Disc includes: “Yeah Ya Know (Takers)” music promo by T.I., audio commentary, Executing the Heist: The Making Of featurette, Take Action! – Inside the Stunts featurette

January 18, 2011
Blu-ray
Animal Kingdom
Army of Crime
Buried
Checking Out
Cold Dog Soup
Death Race 2
Down Terrace
Fire On The Amazon
Freakonomics
Jack Goes Boating
Justified: The Complete First Season
Kathleen Madigan: Gone Madigan
Lebanon
The Naked Kiss (Criterion Collection)
Nomad: The Warrior
Paper Man
Shock Corridor (Criterion Collection)
Stone
Takers

DVD
21 Jump Street: The Complete Fourth Season
Animal Kingdom
Army of Crime
Dallas: The Complete Fourteenth Season
Daughters Of Darkness (Special Edition)
Death Race 2 (DVD +)
Denis Leary & Friends Present: Douchebags & Donuts
Down Terrace
Fire On The Amazon
Freakonomics
The Hannibal Lecter Collection (Triple Feature)
Hey Vern, It's Ernest: The Complete Series (Set)
Jack Goes Boating
James Bond: Connery Volume 1 (Set)
Justified: The Complete First Season
Lebanon
Merlin: The Complete Second Season
The Naked Kiss (Criterion Collection)
Paper Man
Shock Corridor (Criterion Collection)
Simon & Simon: Best of Season 2
Species I-IV (Set)
Species Trilogy (Triple Feature)
Stingray: The Complete Series
Stone
Takers
Thirtysomething: Season 1, Volume 1
The Very Best of The Price is Right
Waking The Dead: Season 5