I never thought the DVD would fall from grace so quickly. The digital media revolution was inevitable but who knew it would happen so fast? Places like Netflix, Crackle and Hulu haven't just eliminated the need for a DVD player to watch movies. Traditional broadcast and cable television may very soon become obsolete. At this rate, it won't be long before you won't need a television to watch your favorite shows. Someone can just beam a broadcast directly into your central cortex and you can watch anything you've ever wanted until your mind literally melts from all the radiation such a signal would produce.

It's a shame because it wasn't that long ago when VHS tapes were still around and even the most horrid productions gave us hours of awkward, hilarious entertainment. Thankfully, the folks behind The Found Footage Festival are out there collecting these relics of poorly lit productions from garage sales and thrift shops to present them the way God intended them to be seen: in a theater by a crowd of drunken voyeurs.

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Christopher Nolan's space epic Interstellar is a big, ambitious picture but it didn't connect with our critics. We discuss the film at the top of this week's podcast before moving onto a few other notable films on screens large and small this week.

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Jane the Virgin is this fall's most charming new show.

BY INKOO KANG

There's more television today than at any other point in the medium's history, but there's a good chance you're stuck in a TiVo rut. That's because, with a handful of exceptions, this fall has delivered a truckload of mediocrity and dead-on-arrival trends. (Goodbye, "rom-sit-coms" like the already canceled A to Z and Manhattan Love Story. Farewell, hopefully forever, comedies about women whose defining characteristic is their poor job performance, like spring's Bad Teacher and autumn's Bad Judge.)

Fortunately, there are a few new shows with fresh perspectives, novel conceits, encouragingly diverse casts, and/or deep emotional undercurrents worthy of your Hulu queue. And, of course, there are the season's letdowns -- not necessarily the worst the small screen has to offer, but the ones that suffer the greatest lapse between expectations and execution. Here are this fall's five best new series -- and its five biggest disappointments.

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Keanu Reeves in John Wick

On this week's Voice Film Club podcast, we welcome Village Voice contributor and filmmaker Zachary Wigon, who tells us about his paranoid thriller The Heart Machine (iTunes).

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Courtesy of Alamo Drafthouse

The Alamo Drafthouse is about to launch a massive invasion on the Dallas-Fort Worth area, opening several new theaters, and it starts downtown with a new movie house on South Lamar Street. Developers for the new theater announced plans to break ground on the construction next month but a gathering of geekdom like the Alamo Drafthouse would never let a gaggle of rich guys break ground on theater.

No, fans of the Austin-based institution just wouldn't stand for it. There would be an uprising with torches and pitchforks that would make the raid on Dr. Frankenstein's monster in the original 1931 classic look like a high school pep rally.

In keeping with the theater chain's reputation for cinematic good times, it will celebrate the groundbreaking on Saturday, November 8 on the South Lamar Street site with a free outdoor screening and plenty of chances to fill up on food and drink.

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Alison Rosa

Michael Keaton and Edward Norton put up their dukes in Birdman.

It's awards season and the hyped movies are starting to land in theaters. On this week's Voice Film Club podcast, we talk about Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, starring Michael Keaton, and Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip, and carve out some time to recommend Nothing Bad Can Happen and Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me. All four of those films have received high praise and some have been hit with some pretty damning criticism, including the description that Iñárritu is a "pretentious fraud," leveled by film critic Scott Tobias of The Dissolve. Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly, along with Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, dive into what stirs critics use loaded words like those when reviewing a movie. Ahh, must be Oscar season.

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Photos by Danny Gallagher

The great comedians know that they don't have to create fiction, they simply have to pluck out the insane bits of a world trying to wrestle with its sanity and present it in the way a carnival barker would just before he pulls back the curtain to reveal some horrid mistake of human nature.

Actor and comedian Harry Shearer is one such performer, obsessed with presenting the raw, naked truth of politics and media whether it's the invasiveness of reality TV when he helped write director Albert Brooks' first movie Real Life or the inefficient preparation and inhumane response that led to massive flooding in New Orleans with his documentary The Big Uneasy. Even This is Spinal Tap, the seminal rock comedy movie that launched the mockumentary genre, sprang from real moments.

"We didn't make anything up in that movie," Shearer says atAMS Pictures headquarters in Dallas. "It was stuff that either happened to us or people we knew. Editing reality to get the good part is sort the ideal version of my job."

The Spinal Tap and Simpsons star recently turned his sharp eye for the satirical to one of American history's characters who always seemed to good to be real, former President Richard M. Nixon, for a new web series for My Damn Channel called Nixon's the One. He'll premiere the series tonight at the Angelika Film Center as part of the Dallas VideoFest where he'll receive the festival's Ernie Kovacs Award.

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Justin Simien's Dear White People.

With the news that Paul Feig is going to reboot Ghostbusters with an all-female cast, we wonder on this week's Voice Film Club podcast what it would be like if they re-did another '80s classic: Young Guns. We then move onto the latest Brad Pitt World War II movie, Fury, which is ultra violent. Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly says, "I like a war movie where they talk about how war is just really awful...this is muddy in-the-trenches war movie." Joined as always by Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, the trio then moves onto Justin Simien's much-anticipated new film, Dear White People (be sure to read our interview with Simien), and then to post-apocalyptic Western Young Ones, written and directed by Jake Paltrow.

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MTV

Set a show like this in Highland Park? Sure, it sounds awful, but you know you'd watch at least one episode.

Vinnie Potestivo of Vinnie Potestivo Entertainment is looking to make a Laguna Beach-type show -- but in our very own Highland Park.

If you don't remember MTV's Laguna Beach because you had better things to do than watch spoiled California kids get drunk, then you missed out on MTV's prime reality show days. OK, not really, but they were the days before Jersey Shore.

The part where Laguna Beach fell short, however, was none of it was shot in the high school. All of the scenes took place on the beach or the mall or house parties. That's where Potestivo wants to make this Highland Park show different.

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Brothers Ben and Eric Kusin make their pitch on Shark Tank.

It started with a stink.

After one of Ben Kusin's usual smoke breaks and before an important work meeting, he stopped by a gas station for something to freshen up his clothes.

"He had a conversation with the clerk and he suggested Purell and breath mints, but he was worried about his clothes," his brother Eric Kusin says.

After a few minutes of getting nowhere, the clerk told him nothing he wanted was on the shelves. "I don't think what you're talking about has been invented yet," Eric recalls the clerk telling Ben.

So that's when Ben, son of the inventor of the world's smallest chocolate chip cookie, created Reviver, a smell-good swipe used to freshen clothes after a baby's spit-up, a smoke session or really anything else. Eric joined him for the business venture shortly after.

On Friday, the Dallas brothers will present their invention on national television to Shark Tank's famous entrepreneurs, or rather, sharks.

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