In accordance with the Movie Fan Act of 1972, all Americans are required to see all five Best Picture nominees before the Academy Awards are handed out each year. (Non-Americans are not obligated, unless they are living on American soil. Residents of U.S. territories such as Guam and Puerto Rico are exempted.) Being stalwart patriots, the folks at AMC theaters have set up one day, Saturday, Feb. 21, where you can see all five of ‘em back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back at select locations. It’s your chance to do your duty and avoid a hefty fine from the Department of Movie Watching!

The event is happening at about 100 AMC theaters in 42 U.S. and Canadian cities, and the cost is $30. For that you get all five movies, plus unlimited popcorn all day long. The schedule is the same everywhere. You’ll start the day at 10:30 a.m. with a serving of Milk, then follow it up at 1:05 p.m. with The Reader. That takes care of all of the day’s nudity, leaving you free to focus on other things. At 3:45, you’ll see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, then watch Slumdog Millionaire at 7:15, and wrap things up with Frost/Nixon at 9:45. You can buy passes to the event online starting today.

But what if there isn’t a participating AMC theater near you? Well, then you’ll have to find a theater that’s showing a couple of the nominees, buy a ticket to one, stick around for the other(s), then go to another theater and repeat the process with the remaining films. If you arrange it properly, you could probably spend less than $30, though you wouldn’t get the unlimited popcorn. Also, I think it’s illegal, so don’t do it. I’m just saying you could.

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Tales of the Black Freighter was always my favorite part of Watchmen and as much as I’m looking forward to the film, it’s the DVD spin-off that keeps me awake at night. We’ve got details on the animated DVD — which unfortunately hits shelves on March 24 instead of before or on Watchmen’s release date of March 6.

Tales of the Black Freighter is a comic book within the graphic novel, a gruesome pirate story that has very little to do with pirates, and everything to do with what’s going on in Watchmen itself. It follows the lone survivor of an attack by the dreaded Black Freighter, and his desperate journey to get back home before the Freighter attacks his town. It’s a nice little journey into madness, depravity, and horror as the sailor realizes what the ultimate goal of the Freighter is. Good stuff. I only wish it could have been done live action — but at least they snagged Gerard Butler to voice the main character. The adaptation runs 30 minutes — and oddly is carrying a PG-13 rating (Blu-Ray is currently Unrated) despite previous reports that it would be R.

Also on the DVD is the Hollis Mason tell-all, Under the Hood. A combination of CG and live action, it sees all the necessary Watchmen actors reprising their roles to tell the history of the first costumed adventurers, the Minutemen. DVD extras on both regular and Blu-Ray include a first look at The Green Lantern (it’s not specified whether it’s the much hoped for live-action version, or a preview of the animated film), and Story Within A Story: The Books of Watchmen. The Blu-Ray version also includes a digital copy of the film.

At some point, this will be incorporated into an ultimate DVD release of Watchmen and be interspersed through the film the way it is through the book. But can you really wait that long to watch it? Check out larger images of art below.

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So the good news is that shortly following the Superbowl commercial for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, all of us will then be able to rush over to our computers and watch it again online (according to Michael Bay, that is). In a new message over on his blog, Bay says this of the much-anticipated premiere: “The Super Bowl spot is coming Sunday in the third Quarter (few minutes into the quarter slot). The spot will be online a few minutes after that - The full length teaser trailer will only be on Friday the Thirteenth. It will not hit the internet until a week later. The Teaser really only teases stuff - I’m holding so much stuff back from the final trailers because I personally hate going to movies where you have seen it all.” God, it’s like reading from a third-graders fanboy journal. But anyway …

… aside from the fact that a producer screws up his own film’s title (it’s Friday the 13th, not Thirteenth), did you see the part when he says — and I quote — “It will not hit the internet until a week later.” No, not the Superbowl ad; he’s talking about the teaser trailer in front of Friday the 13th that, for whatever stupid corporate reason, they’re holding for ONE WHOLE WEEK before putting it online. Guess what that means, folks. Yup, YouTube. This site, along with several others, will be forced to chuck up some cruddy bootlegged version of the Transformers 2 teaser so that our readers (aka you) are satisfied.

Sure, chances are the teaser will be some short boring affair as is (since Bay doesn’t want to spoil anything up front), but I can’t stand this tactic — this holding it from the online audience for a whole week while we fight to discover the cleanest bootleg on YouTube. Is this really how Michael Bay wants us to watch his first teaser trailer? Because wayyy more people are going to watch it on YouTube than in front of Friday the 13th. Seriously, Bay, there’s no reason why this teaser shouldn’t be online Monday morning, first thing, for those fans who couldn’t make it to the theater over the weekend.

But since you’re making us wait a whole week to see it, I suppose you’d rather us watch the crummy, bootlegged version. I guess that’s how you want most of the world to view the first teaser for your beloved robots-kicking-ass sequel. And if that’s the case, so be it. We’ll all happily oblige.

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A lot of the time, watching a movie, we recoil or start at something in it: That’s fake, we say, and dismiss the whole film. On many occasions, that impulse is correct because the film is fake, but on rare occasions, we feel that sensation of dislocated wrongness not because the film is fake but because our world is; we can’t wrap our heads around the facts and ugly truths of what we see, can’t comprehend how such things are possible, and recoil from them out of refusal to believe, not because they aren’t believable. This is one of the challenges Defiance, the newest drama from Edward Zwick (Glory, Blood Diamond) faces as it tells the true story of the Bielski brothers, three Belorussian Jews and outlaw petty criminals who, during World War II’s pogroms and purges, protected hundreds of Jews from the Nazis, some surviving and others actively fighting back.

We witness Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig) make the decision to kill his horse so it can be eaten, and we cannot imagine such hunger. We watch Zus Bielski (Liev Schrieber) fight alongside Russians who hate him to stop Germans who hate him, and we cannot imagine such a grim choice. We watch Asael Bielski (Jamie Bell) fall in love, or a quick quip between two supporting characters, and we cannot imagine love, or laughter, in such a place. But there must have been such hunger; there must have been such anger; there must have been laughter, and love, in the years of exile. It’s hard to imagine, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Unfortunately, Zwick is a gifted storyteller who’s greatest Achilles’ heel has always been the confining starched-suit constraint of his earnest nobility. Throughout Defiance, Zwick falls into easy Hollywood and moviemaking moments, and can’t quite find a way to make the material resonate as something other than a curious historical footnote –as a Jewish friend of mine noted after the AFI Fest premiere, when she said “I didn’t know we could fight like that. ….” Now and then, Defiance has a stark, sharp edge to it; too many other times, it plays as a high-minded soap opera, with maudlin music and quick cuts turning unknown truth into familiar clichés.

The problem isn’t that Defiance is the Hollywood version of the Bielski story — for all his inventions and storytelling, Zwick’s fairly unsentimental about death, sickness and starvation, about how deprivation and danger can bring out the worst in humans and not necessarily the best, about how for many people in Europe, much of life during the Second World War required horrible choices between hateful possibilities. The problem may be that we do have a frame of reference for the parts of the film that don’t work, and we have no frame of reference for the parts of it that do. We know what bad, overdone musical cues are like; we cannot imagine being so starved and cold that we would fight for a bite of dog meat. I can’t help but think that Defiance will play slightly better in Europe, for example, where bombs fell from the sky and troops marched in the streets, than it will in America, where the war was something soldiers went to and the home front only saw in newsreels and movies and letters home. …

The actors are all fine, even in roles that the script cinches about the fairly tightly. Craig is hot, hunky and haunted as the reluctant leader of the camp; Schrieber is agreeably ratty and amoral as the ‘bad’ Bielski, more interested in payback than protection; Bell grows up fast and hard in ugly circumstances. The brothers all find love, as well — again, it’s hard to imagine such a thing, but considering that the Bielski camps were out in the forest for two years, hardly impossible. And the action is competently well-staged as well, whether it features people running from trouble or running to cause it; some of the sequences where Schrieber fights alongside Russian troops are nicely-cut, tense and enjoyable film making. But then a sad, mournful fiddle will play — a weeping strain so maudlin you half expect Mandy Patinkin to walk out and sing — and we’re taken from the pleasure of watching a film by being reminded we’re watching a film.

Shoehorned into the end of awards season, Defiance is an uneasy mix of action and suspense with meaningful themes, of emotion and adrenaline. Many film makers can move our emotions and spike our adrenaline (it’s painfully obvious to say so, but Spielberg could have made this material into a very different, far better movie). Zwick tries to be one of them with every film, but keeps getting caught on his own humanism, the ethical equivalent of tripping on your shoelaces. Would a run-and-gun, pure action version of this story be a betrayal of the suffering of the real people with the Bieslkis, or the best possible tribute to their resistance? It’s hard to say, but it might be suggested that might be a better movie, albeit not as “important” a “film.” I don’t think that Defiance is bad — it’s bad in spots, certainly, like when Allan Corduner’s waaah-waaah laugh-line wise man slouches into view — but more that it can’t quite bear the burden of the studio’s award season expectations while trying to carry the weight of moral responsibility Zwick places on it and himself. Defiance is one of those movies where, as you’re watching it, you sincerely hope it sends people to the truth even as it fails as fiction.

As ever, Zwick’s technical team is literally the best money can buy; the score is by James Newton Howard (The Dark Knight, Michael Clayton), and if it’s overdone in some moments, it’s strong in others. Cinematographer Eduardo Serra (Unbreakable, Girl with a Pearl Earring) paints the verdant, lush scope of the forest and the aching cold of winter white across the screen. Editor Seven Rosenblum (X-Men, Pearl Harbor) brings excitement to the action and grace to the quieter moments in the film. What does it say about Zwick’s career that when you look at his films you can say definitively that not all of them have worked, but they have all tried to be about something? Zwick seems like an intelligent, compassionate and engaged man; in modern Hollywood, that may be a disadvantage, and we’ll have to hope he might one day feel liberated to stop making movies out of good intentions and simply makes movies that are good in and of themselves.

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