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When it comes to westerns, the big screen isn’t a very friendly home anymore, but several high-quality westerns have found a home on television and cable outlets. Such is the case with Broken Trail, which was the first original movie ever produced by American Movie Classics. Directed by veteran Western director Walter Hill and starring Robert Duvall and Thomas Hayden Church, the film won four Emmy Awards back when it was released in 2006.

That lineup of awards includes best miniseries, best lead actor, best supporting actor and best casting. Impressive lineup of gold, and Broken Trail is just about everything that another recent Western released on Blu-Ray, The Professionals, is not: It is a modern film, with modern pacing, featuring actors today’s generation will recognize, and was shot with modern-enough cameras to look sharp on HD. This helps it feel at home on the Blu-Ray format.

The story centers around an aging cowboy (Duvall) who wants to buy his own ranch and settle down, and so agrees to run a herd of horses from Oregon to Wyoming (in an era long before the convenience of Pacsafe, no less!) to sell to the British Army, and thus make the tidy sum he needs to make his dream come true.

Helping him along the way is his nephew (Church), who doesn’t really care for him. There are skeletons in the closet, and of course the journey gives them a chance to begin working out their differences.

Complications are tossed in when the pair come across a gang of ruthless slave-traders, transporting five Chinese women to a mining town where they’ll be forced into a life of prostitution. Our two horse-traders intervene and that drives the conflict of the longish movie.

Clocking in at over three hours, Broken Trail is a beautiful film, but not quite as compelling as the best “long” films, like Titanic or the Lord of the Rings movies. Still, there’s a nice set of special features and about the only drawback, really, is that the running time might seem a bit intimidating for some viewers.

The Professionals is a movie that’s about the same age as I am – and I’m no spring chicken. Made in 1966, the Richard Brooks-directed western starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, and a bunch of other folks anyone born during the Reagan presidency or later won’t even recognize, is a kidnap-and-rescue adventure flick, set in 1917, and involving a group of “professionals” whose task it is to sneak into Mexico and rescue the wife of a wealthy Texan from a band of outlaws.

Why The Professionals was set as a priority for the Blu-Ray treatment over so many other, more recent and potentially more profitable films is a bit of a mystery. Sure, if one is a fan of westerns, this is a solid one; but the market for westerns hasn’t been very good for the past thirty years or so, ever since science fiction kind of took its place in 1975 or so, with the release of the original Star Wars.

If you enjoy the western genre and older films, though, The Professionals is one of the better examples of the genre – at least among films that don’t star John Wayne. Still, the film is a product of its time.

While there’s been some restoration work done to the film, the quality of the picture in HD isn’t really up to snuff with more recent films made in the HD era. And as for director Brooks’ style, the pacing and storytelling are slow and ponderous, compared to the adrenaline-charged filmmaking that today’s action audiences expect.

The film has some snappy dialog, which is a highlight. Here’s an example:

Dolworth to Fardan: “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Fardan: “Most of us are.”

Sure, it’s not down to the exact science that Arnold Schwarzenegger made famous and vaulted away in a self storage container, but there’s a bit more substance and context to it, as well. The extras to this DVD are only OK, since nearly everyone involved with the film is “no longer with us.” Still, it’s a solid western for its time, and only because it is so dated will this film likely fail to find a massive audience.

Even in its second week of release, The Dark Knight, the follow-up to 2005’s Batman Begins, is still high atop the weekend box office with a grand total of over $75 million in receipts domestically. The movie broke the record for opening weekend last week, and by Friday had broken the record for quickest movie to reach the $300 million mark.

The Dark Knight sits at approximately $314 million in domestic ticket sales after 10 days of release, and with foreign markets added in, that total jumps to $355 million. That places The Dark Knight well ahead of SpiderMan 3’s pace, and has some in Hollywood even whispering about eclipsing Titanic’s final total before it’s all done.

That might be a bit premature after only two weeks, but the film is certainly valued far above Tahitian pearls at this point, and is well on its way to becoming the most successful superhero movie of all time. That’s due in large part to Chris Nolan’s continued sober treatment of the Batman character; whereas Batman Begins felt like a James Bond film, The Dark Knight has more of a feel akin to Scarface, The Untouchables, or perhaps a James Patterson thriller.

In other words, Batman doesn’t feel like a “superhero” movie so much as it feels like a solid crime thriller; the gangsters in the film are not bumbling fools that the Joker rules over, but are hardcore, ruthless criminals who might have stepped out of the set of Oz or The Sopranos, rather than a comic book adaptation, and The Joker is genuinely at risk to the lowlifes he’s seeking to control, staying atop only by being just a bit more bloodthirsty and less predictable than they are.

But enough with the love-fest for The Dark Knight; two new movies made their mark this weekend as well. The Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers notched a solid $30 million to take second place, and Mamma Mia!, the smart counter-programming film to The Dark Knight, held onto third place with a respectable $17.8 million.

The surprise of the weekend was the poor performance of the very-well-done X-Files movie, I Want To Believe, which barely squeezed $10.2 million out of the weekend. Of course, being nearly six years removed from the TV show’s final bow, and almost a decade since the franchise’s last big-screen appearance, didn’t help. The film has been well-received by reviewers, but perhaps the biggest reason the film has stumbled is that it pursues a very similar demographic to that of The Dark Knight, and was released only one week following The Dark Knight’s debut; Fox would have been wise to push X-Files: I Want to Believe back into August, to get more breathing room from what most of Hollywood knew would be a monster hit in the form of The Dark Knight.

If Fox doesn’t stop believing in the X-Files film, though, it could become one of those long-run quiet hits that never really has a huge weekend, but does solid business for a long time as folks get other films ticked off on their must-see lists, and start searching for those quieter films they missed when concentrating on The Dark Knight and other top hit movies.

Next week brings the last huge “box office blockbuster” of the summer, the long-delayed Mummy sequel, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emporer. Identical demographics to The Dark Knight’s audience spell trouble for that one, too, I’m afriad. Swing Vote isn’t expected to make a big splash either, and August is a wasteland of quiet films, so The Dark Knight could have a good, long run and X-Files: I Want To Beleive could easily bounce back, given the chance, over the next five or six weeks.

Step Into Liquid is the sort of Blu-Ray DVD that only has two levels of appeal; first, as a niche title appealing to a small but devoted demographic, and second, as a showcase for the wonders of 1080p high-definition format media. Watch the film on standard definition and it’s nowhere nearly as impressive on a visual scale, although the cinematography is quite nice throughout.

Step Into Liquid is a mix of documentary and pro-surfing propaganda, since 90 percent of those interviewed seem on a mission to convert everyone within earshot into a devotee of surfing while somehow, by and large, still maintaining a somewhat elitist tone. That’s a feat.

In the annuls of the Cold War, one of the most honest moments that led to a breakthrough in diplomacy is when pro-military strength Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan sat down opposite Mikhail Gorbachev and said, without blinking, “Here is why we don’t trust you.”

In similar fashion, while at times a great and thrilling testament to the sport of surfing, Step Into Liquid allows those it interviews to go off on elitist rants about the wonders of surfing, how surfers are so misunderstood and how only surfers “get” surfing. As such, Step Into Liquid stands as Exhibit A when this reviewer sits down opposite a surfing devotee and tell them, “Here’s why we think you’re an elitist snob.”

The movie gets a bit surreal as one moment, you have a seemingly down-to-earth guy like X-Files creator Chris Carter talking cogently about how surfers get wrongly portrayed as flakes, followed up by a nameless surfing elitist who then goes on a flakey rant about how maybe if we all just surfed a couple hours a day, there would be no wars. Way to undercut the flakiness charge, there, guys!

Still, there are some high points to the movie, like the five minutes or so spent on the Great Lakes surfing community in Wisconsin – something new I’d never been aware of before. Or how there was a real-life Gidget who the 1950s surfing movies were based on, and who is still an active surfer today, even though she needs more wrinkle creams than ice creams these days.

If someone is big into surfing and doesn’t mind some pro-surfing proselytizing, Step Into Liquid should be of some interest. However, after seeing it once to show off some of the details visible at 1080p that other lower-def screens just can’t achieve, I can’t imagine this being a long-term part of very many people’s Blu-Ray libraries. Unless, of course, as I said before, they are surfers.

No, you’re not in a time warp reading about a Jessica Alba sequel that won’t be made until 2012 (if ever). You see, The Eye may be familiar to US audiences as an Alba vehicle, but over in Korea, hot-shot Asian directors The Pang Brothers have already turned the movie into a somewhat successful series, of which The Eye 3 is only the most recent installment.

While the Pang Brothers’ version of The Eye and its American remake are similar, The Eye 3 may lead some viewers unfamiliar with the Korean original films a bit disoriented. By the third movie, gone is the concept of seeing ghosts because of a corneal transplant (The Eye) or because you attempted suicide while pregnant (The Eye 2), and instead, it is merely the challenge of getting to see the dead that drives the series forward.

Much like The Blair Witch Project 2: Book of Shadows, the action of The Eye 3 focuses on a group of college students who, one somewhat inebriated night, decide they want to see ghosts. One of them has a list of methods, which includes corneal transplants and the suicide-while-pregnant thing, as a bow and a nod to the first two films, but then start listing odder methods that are less drastic, like banging chopsticks on noodle bowls to get the “hungry ghosts” to come out and play.

Of course, there are risks in seeking out the undead, and it goes well beyond the one drunken night, as these foolish kids soon learn. You can guess at how the plot unfolds from there, because spoilers end now on this one.

To be honest, the third movie is already beginning to stretch the core concept to the point of no return and personally, I felt The Eye 3 jumped the shark a bit; what’s next, being able to see ghosts via the use of a Canon Powershot? Wait, no… that’s Fatal Frame. Kinda.

Played for more comedy than the previous installments, The Eye 3 his some fun, mind-bending moments, but is scarce on the genuine chills. Although it delivers a PG-13-level thriller as the previous two installments did, this one just falls flat, and the special features are minimal, although there are English subtitles, thankfully, to help those of us who don’t speak Korean.

Jessica Alba is the main reason most people will give The Eye a try, but the big secret of the movie is that it’s actually not that bad as a suspense-horror-thriller, either. An American remake of the 2002 original by the Pang Brothers, The Eye casts Alba as a blind violinist who has a chance to see again by undergoing a double corneal transplant.

The operation is an apparent success as Sydney (Alba) slowly learns to see again, her vision initially fuzzy and untrustworthy. She begins to see some things she thinks should not be there, although she is reassured by everyone that it’s all normal and part of her adjustment. But is it normal to see the spirits that reap souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead? Or is Sydney just paranoid and confusing dreams with reality.

It’s an intriguing premise that’s not unlike a handful of other horror stories where a transplant recipient of one sort or another have trouble when they find out the organ they received came from a criminal or a crime victim or some such thing. The core concept dates back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with The Eye simply being the latest variation on that general theme.

One of The Eye’s cinematic forebears is Blink, which starred Madeline Stowe as a very similar character in a similar plot; however, that movie went off in a different direction, so you won’t confuse the two by the time it’s all done. Fans of the Pang Brothers will be pleased to note that American directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud maintain some of the style of the original Asian film, including a cameo by the “report card boy,” who has appeared in all three installments of The Eye directed by the Pang Brothers.

With virtually identical special features on Blu-Ray and standard DVD, The Eye is a rare commodity in today’s world of “unrated special editions.” It is a genuine PG-13 thriller that maintains a sense of suspense and horror without resorting to “director’s cut” excesses that amount to nothing more than a couple seconds more nudity, a few more cuss words and other needless toys; fortunately, The Eye delivers its spookiness without relying on offensive excesses.

Ever since his debut in the well-received Napoleon Dynamite, comic actor Jon Heder has been stuck in a series of low-budget comedies playing, essentially, the same slacker-loser-nerd character. Mama’s Boy isn’t the movie that is going to change Heder’s typecast career, but it is a movie with a bit more heart to it than some of the pale imitators that followed in the wake of Napoleon Dynamite.

This time out, Heder plays Jeffrey Mannus, a slacker-loser-nerd who, at 29, still lives with his mother and window-shops men’s jewelry. Heder knows his set up is sweet, but when his mother meets a motivational speaker who starts courting his mother, Jeffrey feels his set-up is threatened and begins to engage in the movie-world-typical war of undermining his mom’s suitor in ways that just never happen in real life. And of course, motivational speaker Mert responds in kind.

At this point there were two ways the movie could go; it could really ramp up the undermining hijinks of Jeffrey and Mert, pulling the movie in a Farrelly Brothers direction, and leaving any sense of real humanity behind for the rest of the film, or it could show some character growth. Unexpectedly, Mama’s Boy chooses the road less traveled: character growth.

This growth is, in part, sparked by the relationship Jeffrey suddenly finds himself forming with Nora, an anti-establishment singer-songwriter whose work is a bit over the top and ridiculous; yet the script ignores this and takes her career aspirations seriously in another atypical move for a Hollywood movie.

It’s as though Mama’s Boy is the result of a collaboration between two completely different writers; one, a Farrally Brothers wannabe and the other striving to be the next William Goldman. The result is a watchable movie that, although enjoyable, seems to be suffering from a greater identity crisis than its main character.

Does Mama’s Boy want to be a rolling-in-the-aisles gross-out comedy? Then its script is far too humane and takes its characters too seriously. Does Mama’s Boy want to be more of a thoughtful comedy-slash-social commentary? Then why have Anna Farris perform songs that wouldn’t even be good enough to get her in to be ridiculed by Simon, Randy and Paula?

The movie is pleasant enough in a quiet kind of way, but lacks the punch to be either one type of movie or another. The end result’s middle-of-the-road approach leaves the viewer feeling like it’s a cinematic experience that never fully realized its potential.