Here’s the German trailer for DOA: Dear or Alive. Is this the greatest film since Mortal Kombat? Probably.

You should click on that link. It’s amazing. Like D.E.B.S. meets Van Damme’s Street Fighter. You’ve never seen anything like it.

Bonus: Here’s the U.S. trailer. The plot seems to make less sense in English.

Also, there’s Chris Guest’s new For Your Consideration, whose play-within-a-play is called Home for Purim. Try to stop laughing. The trailer also has the great Fred Willard telling a gag about blind prostitutes. “You know what they say about blind prostitutes, don’t you? You’ve really gotta hand it to them?”

Wha’ happen!

Galley Friend and Early Adopter S.B. is worked up over this less-than-lucid piece in USA Today:

According to USA Today’s Michelle Kessler, “Problems with high-definition DVD players are dragging down the entire high-end television market.” Intrigued, but skeptical, I took a look at the piece. I was so confused at the end of it that my head kind of hurts now . . .

The analysis starts by showing that high def DVD players are selling more weakly than expected; instead of 4.5 million units being sold, only 1.5 million have sold. None of this is particularly surprising since, a.) consumers are wary about investing many hundreds of dollars in a player when either HD-DVD or Blu Ray will obsolete in two or three years, and b.) the Blu-Ray’s primary inroad, the PS3, has yet to hit the shelves (and when it does, it will do so with far less units than originally anticipated). OK, fine, I’m with her so far.

But then comes this headscratcher: “The problems have been brewing for years. They’re starting to have a financial impact now since players are finally in stores. And they’re affecting:

* Programming. Since high-definition TVs and players aren’t yet mainstream, content for them remains limited. On TV, HD is generally limited to sports, news, prime-time shows and premium channels such as HBO. Only about 100 HD DVD and 50 Blu-Ray DVD titles are out.”

To which I responded with a resounding ‘Huh? What does one have to do with the other?’ What does the number of HD/Blu Ray DVDs have to do with the programming options? Furthermore, people have been buying HDTV sets for the last couple of years before next gen DVD players had even been released, let alone become widely available/affordable. How could it possibly make sense that a wider variety of HD movie-watching options would hamper the growth of the market? People may be confused about which next gen DVD player to buy, but I don’t know why the new options would deter the purchase of a television itself, since whichever format wins will work with any HDTV.

Kessler finally gets to the point at the end when she says that 60% of HDTVs are bought by sports fans, and that only 1 in 5 HDTVs is sold with a corresponding DVD player–“Presumably a must-have for a movie fan.” But I say: poppycock. I’m about as big a movie fan as there is, and if you have a decent progressive scan DVD player to go along with your HDTV (especially if it’s a model featuring 1080p) you’re just fine for now without an HD DVD/Blu Ray player. We’re not talking about audio cassettes vs. CDs, here. The difference in picture isn’t big enough to justify the outrageous current cost. In a few years, Blu Ray or HD DVD will probably become the standard, especially since they’re both backward compatible, but at this point the cost vs. the benefit is pretty small.

Furthermore, the piece’s overarching point that HDTV sales are off is clearly contradicted by the chart included with the piece. I see a pretty steady 45 degree climb between 2003 and the end of 2006 (1.2 million HD homes to a projected 9.4 million HD homes). Once again, I don’t doubt that next gen DVD sales are off; you’d be a sucker to buy one before the dust settles (never forget Betamax!). That being said, nothing at all suggests that the lack of a legit high def DVD format is slowing growth in the market, because the growth of the market isn’t slowing! Yeesh. Kind of shoddy story.

I’ve been busy, in case you’ve been wondering. But with what? Trying to start a family? Finding new ways to put bread on the table? Feeding the hungry?

As it turns out, I’ve spent the last week mesmerized by our new Samsung LCD. As you know, it is the official television of the NFL. After the Comcast technicians replaced a defective cable box, the Mrs. and I were finally able to sit down, turn it on, and in high definition watch … Dancing with the Stars. You could actually see Jerry Springer glistening. My wife is a big fan of CSI but do I really want to see all those morsels of bload-soaked brain matter that close? Oh right, there was baseball. And that was truly amazing. Except I’m not really interested in the playoffs (I think the Nationals were only 300 games behind first place in the NL East).

Besides that, there is so much more. Did you know you can watch Bill Maher on HD? That nose! Or The McLauglin Group? Quick, back to Saw!

But all I could think was, Wait ’til Sunday. I’ll sprawl out on the couch, wear a bib, eat, drink, and belch from noon to 11pm. It figures the first game on CBS turned out not to be in HD. Which in the end was a good thing since my Skins decided to implode, but that is another story.

Also interesting to watch in HD was a program that ran on Cinemax last Thursday at around 11pm.

No, not the ’80s group. They’re turning the game into a movie. And it has Jaime Pressly, naturally.

But do they, at any point, play volleyball?

The UMD format is toast, but Sony says:

“We’re pretty pleased with UMD,” Sony UK MD Ray Maguire told MCV. “UMD has a fantastic attachment ratio. Where we’ve struggled a little is getting a decent proposition for full-length movies.

“UMD is not the problem–it’s getting the right content that’s the challenge. When we put shorts on UMD they sell really well, and that’s related to PSP usage. It’s about getting the offer right, and we will do that.”

Success is just around the corner! It’s always darkest before the dawn!

Blog Crush has the word that tonight on WWE’s Raw, Kevin Federline wrestles John Cena. This is the lowest point for professional wrestling since David Arquette held the WCW belt.

Holler if you miss the Human Torture Rack.

Jenny has a very, very mean post about Tara Reid’s Plastic Surgery Nightmare. It almost made me cry. Why is everyone so mean to Tara? Why is it that everyone thinks Lohan and Hilton are chic tramps but Tara is just pathetic.

But then I remembered Tara and the good days of Bodyshots and Big Lebowski. They’ll never be able to take that away from her. No they won’t.

P.S.: Did you notice? Not one word about the Cowboys? That’s because any team that gets a W after giving up a rushing TD to Drew Bledsoe should be quietly grateful.

Sent in by a Galley Commenter, this article about Yalie Aleksey Vayner’s attempt to get a job on Wall Street is flat-out unbelievable. Vayner put together a 7-minute video presentation of himself explaining, in detail, the keys to success. It involves weight-lifting. And karate.

Oh sure, the video is awesome, but then there’s the follow-up, here and here. It seems that Vayner is something of a huckster-in-training:

Now let’s turn to Vayner’s charity, Youth Empowerment Strategies — not to be confused, of course with this Youth Empowerment Strategies. Why are there two? Well, we’re gonna break it down real simple: one is real, and the other isn’t.

Vayner’s site has a “Charity Navigator Four Star Charity” logo from Charity Navigator, an organization that ranks good charities and weeds out frauds. We called them this morning. “Oh, we’ve heard of them,” Leonie Giles, a program analyst there, said immediately. They asked Aleksey’s site (which lists a non-existant Manhattan address on its “Donate Another Way” page, btw) to take down the fake “Four Star” logo two months ago, and are considering legal action against them. Giles recommended we contact the freaking Connecticut attorney general.

Vayner lists on his resume his self-published book, Women’s Silent Tears, which he calls a “gendered look at the Holocaust.” You can’t read the whole book online, but you can preview the first few pages. We examined a section on euthanasia, and guess what. The entire passage is lifted from the online Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Of course, the real joke is that the only people who seem to have fallen for Vayner’s schtick were the ones at the Yale admissions office.

Bonus: But wait, there’s more!

Turns out Aleksey is somewhat infamous among Yalies as the “Crazy Prefrosh” profiled in 2002 by Yale’s Rumpus tabloid. If you thought Vayner’s credibility was shaky after seeing the video, wait til you read the profile. It is devastating. For starters, his name back then was Aleksey Garber. He claimed to have spent much of his childhood in a Tibetan monestary in post-Soviet Uzbekistan before moving to the United States, where he was employed by both the Mafia and the CIA. He was also a tennis instructor whose students include Harrison Ford and Sarah Michelle Gellar. And oh yeah: he met the Dalai Lama along the way and is the second greatest martial arts fighter in the world.