Father Features

For those planning some couch potato time a few months from, keep an eye on some dads who will shortly be moving from screen to DVD.

The biggest pop in terms of stardom and girth is real-life father of two, Kevin James who stars as a single dad in Paul Blart: Mall Cop — and not the Kevin James who wrote Surviving the Single Dad Syndrome. Released today, the reviews are less than kind, but the slapstick save of his screen daughter who is taken as a screen hostage should keep it on the Blockbuster shelves for a few years to come.

Real life single fathers in Baltimore will be mostly unexposed to the multiplexes prior to the release of their lives to DVD. A dozen stay at home dads and their daily strife and successes are the subject of Michael Ivan Schwartz's documentary Happy SAHD.

A movie, whose distribution will fall somewhere between the megascreen release of Blart and handful of arthouse "success" of SAHD is Peter Bratt's La Mission, the tale of a father who rejects and then rediscovers his son.

Naturally, when it's movie night, make sure you have plenty of POPcorn on hand.