Angela Lansbury, Jason Statham and Valentino Garavani walk into a bar. The bar explodes. End of joke. Start of the weirdest week in movies on DVD ever.

If you thought Neveldine and Taylor's previous film outings, Crank and Crank High Voltage, were like live-action video games, Gamer takes it to the logical next step. Imagine the kinetic violence and sex of Crank combined with that Chappelle's Show sketch where Dave goes on the Internet, a nondescript mall where Ron Jeremy shows you his junk and people give you free illegal movies, and you start to get an idea of what this movie is like.

Who could have predicted that James Cameron's follow-up to Titanic would take 12 years to realize and would be entirely about blue aliens living on another planet? A lucky few got to see 20 minutes of preview footage in IMAX theaters across the country on Avatar Day, but the rest of you have had to content yourselves with the online trailer, which has a lot going on in it, a lot of which looks kinda familiar. Luckily, Omar G. and Pablo G. watched it as well, and they talk all about in in their latest video installment of "Trailers Without Pity"... or, rather, their blue, animated avatars talk about it, which makes the whole thing very derivative. Like Avatar! Check it out below!

After Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 was defeated in its opening weekend by The Final Destination in 3-D, the producers of the Halloween franchise revealed that the just-announced Halloween 3 will actually be Halloween 3-D. While unsurprising, given the resurgence in 3-D's popularity, this particular 3-D-ification is a sly homage to the early 1980s, when it seemed like the third installment of a horror franchise -- Jaws 3-D, Amityville 3-D, Friday the 13th Part III -- was legally required to be watched through cardboard glasses. (The original Halloween 3, ironically, passed on the gimmick.) And that got us thinking -- what if all third installments of movies had to be released in 3-D? Some would be awesome, and some just plain ridiculous. Here's some quick takes.

As an office full of Crank fans, we're psyched to see Gamer, the next project from Crank and Crank: High Voltage directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. Maybe it's because it looks like it has a lot in common with the Cranks, as far as hyperkinetic action and video game iconography go, but it may also be that the plot reminds us of some of our favorite movies of the past. In Gamer, a convict named Kable is a remote-controlled soldier in a real-life video game, and he only needs to win three more games to win his freedom. Maybe it's on purpose, maybe it's just coincidence, but here are a few of the films that we think of whenever we watch the Gamer trailer.

In the past, we've wondered if James Cameron's project, Avatar, could really live up to the hype. Even the trailer, released last week, left us feeling kind of meh. But on Friday, Cameron released 20 minutes of 3-D footage in IMAX theaters nationwide, and it was instantly apparent why Cameron felt an Avatar Day was necessary, and why non-3-D footage of the movie doesn't convey how amazing the movie looks. Not that the movie is some groundbreaking piece of cinema: the storyline is a sci-fi take on Dances With Wolves (with a dash of Soul Man), the designs for the aliens and the military vehicles are old hat, and some of the dialogue is horrible. But when you're watching naked, blue versions of Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington running around the jungle in high-definition 3-D, all of these worries melt away. Read on for a day-after description of the footage; I may be hazy on some details, but it's mostly the same as the footage that was shown at San Diego Comic-Con. And don't worry about spoilers, as a 3-D James Cameron informed us a the beginning that these are all from the first half of the movie.

As we get closer to the fall television season, studios pick up the pace in releasing their previous season's TV shows on DVD -- even the canceled ones! Still, a couple of gory flicks managed to sneak into stores amidst all of the TV offerings, as well as a teen girl musical, an old man comedy and a retro sci-fi actioner celebrating its 25th birthday. Happy birthday!

Looking to find out what the big movie releases of the fall are? Well, barring any unfortunate incidents like last year's surprise postponement of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, MWoP has put together the essential guide to the final season of 2009, broken down into five convenient categories: Comedies and Dramedies, Serious Dramas, Chills and Thrills, Animation and Sci-Fi, Action and Adventure. There's a bit of cross-pollination in there, but all of the big releases this season are covered in one of those galleries, as well as some little gems we can't wait to see. Sure, there are a lot of Oscar-bait movies and horror flicks, as is the season's wont, but there are also a lot of big spectacles and even a few potential blockbusters, so start planning your calendar appropriately!

We love Eric Bana. The Australian actor has played three major roles this summer, in three different genres -- the villainous Romulan Nero in Star Trek, Leslie Mann's straying husband in Funny People and the titular time traveler in The Time Traveler's Wife -- which leads us to believe that there's nothing the man can't do. Who else could have played Hector, Henry Tudor and Bruce Banner?! While his schedule certainly wouldn't have allowed it, we wish Bana had appeared in more of this summer's movies, since so many of them were miscast or just plain disappointing. Perhaps if he were really a time traveler, he would be able to go back and join the casts of the following films, thereby making them a whole lot better than they came out.

Here at MWoP, we've been taking a "wait-and-see-but-don't-hold-your-breath" approach to the G.I. Joe live-action movie. Early on, the visual disparities from the cartoon were pretty jarring, but then, so were the X-Men movie costumes, and that worked out okay. (I'll leave the Transformers movie designs aside, since A. I still don't like them and B. the movies were successful in spite of them, making my opinion moot.) But when the commercials and action scenes started showing up -- including performance-enhancing accelerator suits, which were never part of the G.I. Joe mythos until very recently -- we started to worry a bit more. And now they've declined to screen the movie for the press. But given the fact that negative buzz got so bad at one point that director Stephen Sommers (Van Helsing) was rumored to have been fired, that may be a wise choice. Regardless, it seems there may be nothing to worry about.