Growing up is hard, especially if you aren’t a member of the cool crowd. Kids are cruel, and not fitting in can lead to some of the roughest years of someone’s life. Sometimes, kids have got to wish they had someone to stick up for them, to help them navigate those troubled times. You know, someone like Owen Wilson.

In Drillbit Taylor, that’s just what a couple of (un)lucky kids get, when a down-on-his-luck soldier played by Wilson agrees to take on their cause for a small fee. Co-written by Seth Rogan and produced by Judd Apatow, it features some of the same great talent that brought us recent hits such as Superbad, Knocked Up, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. And if you’re a fan of, well, dumb humor involving body parts and functions, you definitely won’t be disappointed.

Events are remembered differently by different people, with eye witness accounts varying greatly depending on just who that witness is. That’s the idea behind Vantage Point, an action packed new thriller that’s unravels an attempted presidential assassination by visiting the perspectives of a number of different people who were there to witness it.

With a cast featuring such big names as Matthew Fox, Forrest Whitaker, William Hurt, and Dennis Quaid and enough explosions, car chases, and gun fights to populate three movies, you know you’re in for a treat. And when you mix in the complex, twisting and turning storyline, you’ve got a movie that’ll have you on the edge of your seat from the get go. You’ll never be able to trust a single person’s eye witness account of something again.

In his first feature film titled The Take, Brad Furman weaves a suspenseful and gripping tale about an armored-truck driver who barely survives after being shot in a heist, only to emerge as the primary suspect in what the authorities believe to be an inside job. In an attempt to clear his name, the armored-truck driver (played by John Leguizamo) hunts down the actual culprit of the heist. The movie was well paced, exciting and never overdone. You felt emotionally connected to the characters. For some you felt empathy, for others disdain.

I had the privilege to interview Brad Furman last week. We talked about how he got involved in filmmaking, The Take, and what we can expect from him in the future.

Tell us a bit about yourself, your background, where you are from and how you got involved in filmmaking.

Brad: I was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for film school. I’ve always been a lover of films. I enjoyed going to the movies, but I never really saw it as a potential career path or future.

I actually went to Emory University my freshman year to play basketball and I hurt my lower back. I wasn’t playing and, at the time, was taking a film theory course and got very friendly with the professor. He began to show me that there could be a career in this (film). He had graduated from the AFI Institute and he let me know that if I wanted to be a filmmaker, it was probably never gonna happen learning or studying there because they just had film theory, they didn’t have production.

I decided to throw my hat in the ring and apply to NYU ironically that same year they had gone to the division 3 National Championship finals. Fortunately, I got in and I got to play basketball, as I had mentioned. That opportunity really opened my eyes that filmmaking and achieving my goals were possible, as I was just 19. Also my cousin passed away around the time I transferred. He was very young, only 24, so I kind of saw in life, as cliché as it may be, that you only go around once so I should pursue my dream by being a filmmaker. If I could do that for a living, then that would be the ultimate dream.

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Persepolis, based on the autobiographical graphic novel by Majane Satrapi, is a wildly imaginative coming of age story about growing up as a girl in Iran. The animated film is a wonderful story about a young girl who overcomes countless obstacles that most Americans could never imagine.

A movie that deals with heavy subject such as war, death, racism, and oppression, it never becomes difficult to watch due to the positive spirit of its protagonist and the fanciful visuals of the animation. It’s the kind of movie that you feel like you learn something from without being browbeaten, a movie with a message that doesn’t forget to entertain. It’s a wonderful journey, one you’ll be happy you went on.

How much do you know about John Adams? Unless you’re a middle school history teacher, I’m guessing not all that much. Sure, he was the second president of the United States, but what else do you know? Nothing. But there’s hope: you can delve into his life and times without feeling like you’re back in the classroom thanks to HBO’s epic miniseries John Adams, out now on DVD.

Featuring an all star case with such names as Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, and Tom Wilkinson and produced by Tom Hanks, the miniseries takes you deep inside the incredible life of one of history’s greatest names. Based on the acclaimed book by historian David McCullough, it gives you a college course worth of history while delivering the kind of entertaining, satisfying television that you generally only find on HBO. It’ll keep you glued to your seat, interested and excited in history for the first time in ages. If that’s not the sign of arresting television, I don’t know what is.

Why is it that some of the best shows on TV are inevitably some of the ones with the worst ratings and the ones to come under the axe first? While dreck like Deal or No Deal will be on the air for the next decade, smart, good shows such as Jericho only survive two short seasons before being led to the pasture. It’s criminal.

At least we have DVDs. If you have never seen Jericho, the new Jericho - The Complete Series DVD set is a great way to get into it. If you’re a fan, you already know you’re getting it.

Jericho is about a group of Kansas residents dealing with what’s essentially the apocalypse after a nuclear explosion isolates them from the rest of the country. It’s a brilliant, tense, timely show with excellent writing and acting, one that’s up there with the shows on HBO in terms of quality. Of course, because it’s difficult and complicated it never caught on the way it should, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy what did come out of it.

One of the most famous cops in movie history is Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, a brutal, cold cop who has nothing to live for but tormenting both his superior officers and the lowlife scum that he takes on every day on the streets. The original Dirty Harry movie is a classic, and it spawned another four movies with the same character that live up to that first film.

Now, for the first time, all five Dirty Harry films have been completely digitally restored and remastered to make them look and sound better than the day they were originally released. You can get them all as a set on either DVD or high definition Blu-ray with The Dirty Harry Series. It includes all five movies: Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, and The Dead Pool. They’re the types of movies you’ll want ot put on again and again, classic cop flicks that have been often imitated but never bested. And now, with them looking better than ever, there’s never been a better time to bring Dirty Harry home.

It seems that these days anyone could come up with a premise for a Will Ferrell comedy. You take a sport, invent a blundering superstar (played by Ferrell, of course), create an evil opponent that threatens him in some way, and have a hilarious series of competitions that ends up with Ferrell retaining his glory. It’s a formula, really.

That’s not to say the formula doesn’t work. Semi-Pro lives up to the hilarious past comedies staring the former SNL mainstay, providing all the ridiculous situations, hilarious jokes, and outrageous moments you’ve come to expect. Ferrell plays Jackie Moon, the star, owner and coach of the Flint, Michigan Tropics, an American Basketball Association team in the 70s. His league and team are about to be put out of business by the NBA, but if they can somehow become one of the top teams in the league, his team will survive and become an NBA team. The requisite wackiness follows, but Ferrell manages to make the whole thing seem somehow fresh. It’s a gift, I guess.

With it being summertime and baseball season, the memories of the Giants historic upset of the undefeated New England Patroits in the Super Bowl earlier this year might be fading from your memory. Which is really too bad, isn’t it? I mean, let’s be honest here: you’re not going to see a much more exciting season or game from a New York sports team anytime soon unless something really crazy happens. You’ve got to soak in the glory for as long as possible as to not waste it.

What better way to do so than by having the complete Super Bowl and run up to the big game on DVD? That’s just what you get with NFL Road to Super Bowl XLII. It’s the ultimate DVD for the die hard Giants fan, allowing you to relive every moment of the historic game whenever you want. And hey, it’s not like the Knicks are going to be providing any sports-related glory anytime soon, so you might as well take what you can get with this, eh?

In case you’ve been living under a rock as of late, let me inform you that there’s a brand new Indiana Jones movie coming in mere weeks. Yes, starring Harrison Ford and everything, old age be damned! Now that you know that, it’s time to get properly prepared for this monumental summer movie event. And that means catching up with the original trilogy so you can properly complain about how much better the original movies are than the new one.

And there’s no better way to do that than with the forthcoming “Adventure Collection” of the Adventures of Indiana Jones Trilogy. Featuring all three of the classic adventure films, the set also has tons of bonus features that’ll keep you loaded up with movie trivia. And while sure, if you didn’t know about the new movie before now, you’re probably not the biggest fan in the world, it’s never too late to hop on board the bandwagon.