With Star Trek into Darkness looming only a couple weeks away, Paramount is unleashing a load of Star Trek discs onto the market. Some of them – like all of the films – have seen high definition before with previous Blu-ray releases. However, the more impressive assortment of choices come from the newly remastered television series. Season Three of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the latest year to get that treatment. However, that season ends in one of the biggest cliffhangers in television history, and that can be frustrating. To offset any ill will, the two-part season finale and season premiere “The Best of Both Worlds” is also available packaged as a single movie. The remastered version of these two episodes also comes with a commentary track, giving some insight into one of the most popular episodes of the series.

What is Casting Couch? Today’s it’s just a little casting news column trying to get by at the hands of a Sundance-bound Kate Erbland. Nathan, we need you! We’ve been due for a truly gritty, really in-depth on fallen from grace Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno for months now, but it turns out, we’re now set to get an even better project than we could possibly have dreamed of, because director Brian De Palma and star Al Pacino have now teamed up to bring the true life story to the screen. Deadline Hollywood reports that the two are set for Happy Valley (apparently a working title, thank goodness), which will come from Joe Posnanski‘s book “Paterno,” with Dave McKenna (American History X, Blow) currently in negotiations to script. Pacino was first attached to the project last year. The project reunites Pacino and De Palma, as the two previously collaborated on Scarface and Carlito’s Way, which worked out pretty nicely for both of them.

Why Watch? It’s a short film starring Patrick Stewart with NSFW language and some truly bizarre adult situations. If you need more than that to coerce you (and if you do, I question your dedication to Sparkle Motion), it’s also an airtight study in weaving three separate situations into themselves for a pristine comic effect. Stewart is, of course, pretentious perfection here as a lovable poet attempting to bed down a hot young thing, but the story isn’t content to stay stuffy (or safe). Plus, it offers an excellent life lesson in regards to what you call someone’s sister. Hat tip to Short of the Week. What will it cost you? Only 5 minutes. Skip work. Watch more short films.  

What is Casting Couch? It’s starting to wonder how many times Hugh Jackman can play Wolverine before his sideburns start to stick that way. Hot on the heels of the announcement that the original Professor X and Magneto, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, would be joining Bryan Singer’s X-Men: First Class sequel, X-Men: Days of Future Past, comes word that yet another actor from the original X-Men trilogy, Hugh Jackman, is also negotiating. This makes sense, of course, because Jackman’s brief cameo in First Class was the first indication we got that Matthew Vaughn’s reboot and Singer’s original films might actually exist in the same universe. Now that Singer has Stewart, McKellen, and Jackman on board, the only other actors he needs to poach from those first X-Men movies is…well, no one. It’s kind of amazing how well those movies cast these three guys and how poorly they cast every single other character. Hopefully this is the end of the colliding of worlds. [THR]

What is Casting Couch? Despite the fact that the movie business seems to be slow to get back to work after the long weekend, it’s a column that’s managed to dig up a couple exciting casting coups. Bryan Singer out-scooped everybody in the news breaking business today when he suddenly started tweeting big updates on how the cast for his upcoming X-Men: First Class sequel, X-Men: Days of Future Past, was developing. He started off small by first confirming that a few members of the First Class crew would be returning. He tweeted, “I’d like to officially welcome back James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, & Nicholas Hoult to #XMEN for #DaysOfFuturePast.” But then he got a little crazy and started confirming rumors that actors from his original X-Men movies will be joining the film as well by tweeting, “Thrilled to announce @ianmckellen118 (Ian McKellan) & @SirPatStew (Patrick Stewart) are joining the cast of #XMEN #DaysOfFuturePast #magneto #professorX More to come…” Do you think we could get scenes where old Professor X and Magneto meet young Professor X and Magneto? The head spins with awesome possibilities.

Seth MacFarlane is one of those hit-or-miss type guys who seems to have been missing a lot more than hitting lately. Though his big TV show, Family Guy, started off well, the most recent seasons have succumbed to format fatigue. The show’s penchant for cutting away to complete non sequiturs has worn out its welcome and, even worse, it’s committed the cardinal sin of comedy – it’s just not funny anymore. Add to that his attempts to recapture the original Family Guy magic with shows like American Dad and its spin-off The Cleveland Show, and it would be easy to say that MacFarlane is kind of stuck in a rut. So why not try a feature film? MacFarlane’s predominantly a TV guy, and one who’s been down on his laughs recently so, despite its hilarious trailers, the odds seemed to be stacked against his new film Ted. In case you happened to have missed the aforementioned hilarious trailers, Ted is a movie about a young boy who wishes for his teddy bear to come to life. John Bennett is not exactly the most popular kid on the block. Even the little Jewish kid who gets his ass kicked every day hates John Bennett. The poor kid just doesn’t have any friends. So when his parents give him a big stuffed teddy bear for Christmas, he names it Ted and wishes that Ted could come to life and be his best friend forever.

All this Summer, Movies We Love is transforming itself (by getting into a bikini) to celebrate the movies we love that came out in the hottest months. This week, we fall in love all over again with X2. “Have you ever tried…not being a mutant?” Synopsis After a solitary mutant who can teleport attacks the President, a secret military squad led by a man named Stryker (Brian Cox) is given carte blanche to find and capture the students and teachers at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. But the mutants, especially Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), recently returned from his trip to the North, aren’t going to go quietly. Instead, the team made up of Storm (Halle Berry), Jean Gray (Famke Janssen), Rogue (Anna Paquin), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), and Pyro (Aaron Stanford) work to seek out the squad’s base where they are holding the captured Professor X (Patrick Stewart). But the X-Men aren’t alone. Joining in the hunt is the telaporting assassin, Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), Magneto (Ian McKellan) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), who have called a truce with the team in what may be an inevitable war with the human race.

I’m not one for hyperbole, but sometimes a movie warrants some. So, here goes: Gnomeo & Juliet is the greatest film ever made about living, breathing garden gnomes. Throw in the whole Shakespeare element, including references to a Rosencratz and Guildenstern moving company and an animated statue of the Bard himself, and you can be sure that there will never again be another picture quite like it.

Patrick Stewart, most affectionately known by the geek community as either Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation or Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday.

Casting has begun on Matthew Vaughn’s next film, X-Men: First Class. I know this because Fox announced today that James McAvoy has signed on to play a young Charles Xavier, a character made famous in previous X-Men films by a wheelchair-bound Patrick Stewart.

There is an apartment in the UK, that when you ring the doorbell you are greeted by Patrick Stewart saying “Welcome to the 24th century.”