Greg Mottola's low-pressure charmer Adventureland hasn't done the business it deserved, but as a major studio release, it at least stands the chance of an afterlife on DVD. Maybe if the gods are kind, somebody will roll the dice on getting Mottola's debut film, The Daytrippers, back into print on home video. When this comedy first started drifting into theaters in 1997, it stood apart from the indie-film pack for its unflashiness and lack of condescension towards its middle-class characters. Seen today, it may inspire a certain nostalgia for its movie era: here are the indie-film all-stars of the late '90s in the full bloom of youth, before they started lining up to take on Wolverine or competing with each other to see whose new TV series could get cancelled quickest. The Daytrippers begins with Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci as an apparently happily married couple living in Long Island. Tucci works at a Manhattan publishing firm, and after he heads off for work with plans not to be back home for a couple of days, Davis finds what seems to be a love letter that was written to him by someone named Sandy. Confused and nervous, Davis invites her family--including her parents (Anne Meara and Pat McNamara), her sister (Parker Posey), and the sister's boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber)-- to talk her into believing that it's nothing. The upshot is that the whole pack winds up venturing into the city to confront Tucci, piled into a broken-down station wagon with a busted heater on a late-November day that isn't getting any warmer.

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Since its premiere on the fall festival circuit, Danny Boyle’s new film Slumdog Millionaire has ridden a wave of ecstatic buzz, one which many believe the film will ride to numerous Oscar nominations. With his crowd-pleasing arthouse hit, it seems that Boyle has finally arrived for real in Hollywood, a full dozen years after his breakthrough films, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. However, it wasn’t supposed to take this long. In the wake of Trainspotting’s international success, Boyle was tapped by Fox to bring his directorial sensibility to America with his subsequent project A Life Less Ordinary, which paired Boyle’s favored leading man Ewan McGregor with hot Hollywood starlet Cameron Diaz. Life was the director’s take on the romantic comedy, and Boyle’s goal was to infuse the warm fuzzy genre with a liberal amount of mid-nineties post-Tarantino edge while simultaneously indulging the audience’s romantic urges.

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George Romero's Diary of the Dead opens this Friday, and it's the fifth in his legendary zombie film series. We thought about dedicating this week's Take Five to an overview of each installment, but not only could we not swing a screening of Diary (dammit!), but we figured, what better time to look at some of Romero's other films? Yes, it's true: the man who invented the modern conception of the zombie, who's responsible for one of the most durable and appealing of the Famous Monsters of Filmland, has actually made a couple of movies that do not feature the living dead! We're the first to admit that we're suckers for the low-budget, foul-mouthed, expatriate Pittsburgher, though, and while he seems to save his best stuff for the zombie pictures, that's not all there is to the man. True, he sticks with bloodshed and horror — we aren't expecting a Shakespeare adaptation or a minor-key family drama from him anytime soon — but at least a few of his non-zombie pictures are worth checking out for various reasons. So if you're in one of the many cities where Diary of the Dead won't open for a while, head to your local grindhouse video emporium or fire up your rent-by-mail queue and have a Romero-fest in which the dead don't walk: they just die.

THE CRAZIES (1973)

Romero's fourth film overall, and his best to immediately follow the original Night of the Living Dead, this is similar to his original zombie masterpiece in many ways: the Pittsburgh-area filming locations, the largely amateur cast and the ultra-low budget, and the dreadful atmosphere of paranoia and nameless fear. It concerns the government's attempt to control a bizarre outbreak of a strange virus that causes instant, violent insanity in all who contract it; but the government, as it often is, isn't telling all that it knows, and the faceless federal agents in stark white biochemical hazard suits quickly become as menacing as the maddened townsfolk. A fascinating, underseen movie that creates a terrific mood of terror and insanity, with some of Romero's pointed social commentary; he's currently working on a big-budget remake.

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That Guy!'s salute to Black History Month continues with a look at one of our favorite contemporary African-American character actors, Ving Rhames. A powerfully built six-footer with an intimidating mein and a penchant for playing bruisers and bad-asses, Rhames is in fact one of Hollywood's most notorious nice guys, a deeply spiritual and profoundly humanitarian person with a reputation in America's most backstabbing town for always being the touch for someone in need. Born with the substantially less intimidating Christian name of "Irving" in 1959, Rhames picked up his stage name not from the mean streets of his native Harlem, but from the decidedly non-superfly Stanley Tucci, a classmate of his at SUNY-Purchase. After formative experiences at the High School of Performing Arts and on Broadway, he launched a successful film career in the mid-1990s and has gone on to become something of a go-to guy for casting directors looking for a deft blend of intimidation and intelligence. (Which is not to say that his film career is nothing but bluster: he not only played a drag queen in a TV movie entitled Holiday Heart, but recently appeared in the excrable I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, singing "I'm Every Woman" while naked in a locker room full of men.)

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