Despite an interesting cast and passionate pleas from more than one film critic, Brett Simon’s Assassination of a High School President is the latest project to be burped out of the gaping, bankrupt maw of the Yari Film Group and directly onto the DVD market. Yari’s failure has claimed some terrific films - most notably a pair of Rod Lurie movies - and although Assassination doesn’t quite deserve to be lumped in with the best of the studio’s aborted litter, it’s certainly better than most direct-to-video projects, and well worth a rental and 90 minutes of your time. My review after the jump:

It was created with Claymation, its main characters speak with adorable accents, and funny-looking animals are involved - but “Wallace and Gromit” this ain’t.

Director Adam Elliot won an Oscar for 2003’s “Harvie Krumpet”, a 23-minute animated short about a one-testicled, Tourette’s-ridden World War II survivor and animal rights activist, and he brings that same gift for unique characters and melancholy overtones to his debut full-length feature “Mary and Max”. My review after the jump:

For most people, just coming up with a cast of characters as wonderfully lovable as the Muppets - to say nothing of helping spearhead a pair of television classics as durable as The Muppet Show and Sesame Street - would be enough to justify an early and lucrative retirement. For Jim Henson, however, those feats only scratched the surface of his ambition, and by the early ’80s, the man who helped turn puppets from a sideshow trick into an art form was ready to try his hand at slightly more grown-up fare. The results were 1982’s The Dark Crystal and 1986’s Labyrinth, a pair of PG-rated fantasy films that connected the dots between The Muppet Movie and The Lord of the Rings. Neither film made much of an impression at the box office, but they’ve both acquired cult status over the years - and now they’ve both been given rather painstaking hi-def upgrades courtesy of Sony Pictures. My reviews after the jump:

Though it’s never been a ratings powerhouse, finishing outside the Nielsen Top 50 in each of its five seasons, NBC’s “The Office” has everything else a network could want in this increasingly fragmented era of television entertainment: Mountains of great reviews, a likable cast that stays in the public eye with budding film careers, plenty of opportunities for product placement, and a devoted following among the coveted 18-49 demographic. In fact, if you didn’t have any idea what the Nielsen rankings were, you might think “The Office” was a phenomenon of “Cheers” proportions, when in fact it hasn’t even managed “Night Court”-sized ratings. More after the jump:

Unspeakably vulgar, unbelievably rude, and the virtual textbook definition of “politically incorrect,” Eddie Murphy’s Delirious is not only a classic piece of standup, but an honest-to-goodness cultural touchstone for an entire generation of comedy fans. If you came of age during the ’80s or ’90s, chances are you’ve spent at least one evening - if not dozens - gathered around a television with friends, trapped in gales of helpless laughter as you watch Murphy unleash one of Delirious‘ many timeless bits. If you’ve ever screamed “ICE CREAM MAN IS COMING!” or sung “G.I. Joe is swimming in the water,” you understand - and you’re probably interested in Starz/Anchor Bay’s new double-disc reissue of the special, which first aired on HBO in 1983. (Clearly, someone at the studio isn’t so good at math, but whatever.)

In his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman lays out what is essentially the unifying theory of Johnny Carson - the idea that the advent of cable and the home video market, not to mention the Internet, has splintered public tastes to the point that there’s no longer any such thing as a shared cultural experience anymore; according to Klosterman, the last patch of common ground was Johnny Carson, and once he disappeared from the airwaves, he took the last link in our pop culture chain with him.

Klosterman had a point, one which grows ever more relevant with each passing year - but every so often, a cultural event comes along with enough significance to achieve true water cooler status. Case in point: the long-awaited debut of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace in 1999, a breathlessly anticipated extension of a film franchise that was virtually inescapable in its day. When George Lucas announced he was working on a prequel trilogy that would fill in the story behind the original films, pretty much everyone was at least curious to see what they’d look like - and the hardcore fans were on pins and needles.

When we say a movie is influential, it’s normally meant as a compliment; fans point back to films like Alien, Die Hard, or The Manchurian Candidate to give them credit for inspiring entire genres, and sometimes even schools of thought for subsequent filmmakers. In the case of 1998’s There’s Something About Mary, however, “influential” has a decidedly negative connotation - which is understandable, given the sea of shitty gross-out comedies that Mary spawned, but still unfortunate, because as much as excessive repetition may have numbed us to its original impact, it was one of the funniest comedies of the ’90s - and it remains the best thing the Farrelly brothers have ever done.

When last we saw the cast of “Friday Night Lights,” they were suffering from a particularly brutal version of the sophomore jinx. Barely renewed for a second season after a low-rated (but critically praised) initial run, “FNL” added “bad timing” to its list of problems upon its return; thanks to the 2007-08 writers’ strike, production halted after 15 episodes, and despite the fact that the show was one of the only scripted series on NBC’s schedule during the strike, it continued to languish in the lower reaches of the Nielsens. The closing moments of the season’s final episode - which saw the Dillon Panthers on the verge of the playoffs, and star running back Brian “Smash” Williams (Gaius Charles) dealing with the aftermath of a brawl that cost him a scholarship - seemed likely to wind up going down as a terribly unsatisfying conclusion to a series that never had a chance to really hit its stride.