Filed Under: Gears of War, Keller Williams, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Sherlock Holmes

Movie: Sherlock Holmes – Game of Shadows
The world’s favorite morphine-addicted crime-fighter could only be brought to life by the world’s favorite god-knows-what-he’s-been-addicted-to movie star. Robert Downey Jr. trades in his hi-tech gadgets for some old school revolvers and knives, and Don Cheadle gets just so slightly trumped by Jude Law (the mustache seals the deal). Game of Shadows introduces the most famous Holmes villain of all time, Professor Moriarty. Getting caught in a few gun battles here, flirting with tarot readers there, and cross-dressing for at least one crucial scene of the movie – Downey once again brings all sorts of crazy fun to the Arthur Conan Doyle classic.

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DVD: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Well, the apes finally got pissed about all those commercials we were making. Either that, or James Franco starts messing around with science where he shouldn’t, and some new super-smart apes set a revolution in motion that changes the world. Andy Serkis reprises his Gollum tricks to bring pioneer super-ape Cesar to life, and John Lithgow, Brian Cox, and Indian hottie Freida Pinto join the crew in support of Franco. The biggest star of the movie might be the special effects themselves – Serkis has always done amazing work with motion capture, but WETA (the FX team behind Avatar) makes him and his ape cohorts fantastically real.

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Music: Keller Williams – Bass
The one-man-jam-band from Virginia is either one of your heroes, or you’ve never heard of him. A frequent collaborator with The String Cheese Incident, Umphrey’s McGee, and former members of the Grateful Dead, Keller is a multi-talented instrumentalist whose use of loops allows him to sound like roughy 8 musicians at once (it’s not like half of those jam banders are changing their rhythm anyways, right?). For this album, Keller joins forces with the musicians of Kdubalicious, a reggae-funk band he’s played with for years. As you might be able to guess, this means that Wililams gets to focus exclusively on playing bass. We can only assume and hope that it gets as funky as possible.

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Video Game: Gears of War 3: RAAM’s Shadow
Everybody loves a good encore: usually it’s coming from a band on stage, but apparently video games can do it too. The downloadable content package RAAM’s Shadow offers about three hours of extra missions for Gear-heads (or anyone who owns Gears of War 3). In addition, players get a new “chocolate” weapon set, new characters, acheivements, and even the opportunity to play as evil general RAAM himself – because some days, you just want to be the bad guy for a change.