Kal Penn

The afterlife: With two weeks to go before the Academy Awards on Feb. 25, Warner Home Video is releasing "The Departed" Tuesday on DVD. Nominated for five Oscars, including best picture, the exhilarating gangster epic is the biggest commercial hit of director Martin Scorsese's nearly four-decade career. The thriller has grossed $128.8 million domestically and has done even better internationally with $142.5 million.

SERIES Everest: Beyond the Limit: In the third-season premiere of the unscripted adventure series, an avalanche buries a team of climbers (8 p.m. Discovery). In a second new episode, at 9, a storm front closes in on Mt. Everest as climber John Golden presses on to reach the summit on a surgically reconstructed knee, and in a third new episode, at 10, astronaut Scott Parazynski and senior citizen Dawes Eddy attempt a history-making summit bid. Emergency Level One: In the premiere of this unscripted series, two pregnant women are involved in a car crash and a police shooting puts a patient's life in the hands of the trauma team (8 p.m. TLC)

The romantic dramedy "Waitress" (Fox, $30), arriving today on DVD, is a thoroughly delightful film about a young woman working at a diner (Keri Russell) with a penchant for baking, who finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage to a brute (Jeremy Sisto).

1969 Tommy Chong hires improv comedian Richard "Cheech" Marin to perform between the bands and strippers at his family's Vancouver, Canada, night club. Nine years later, the godfathers of the stoner flick give birth to their first movie, "Up in Smoke." 1968-1970 Bill Clinton experiments with marijuana during this period while in England, but doesn't manage to actually inhale, thus preserving himself for a future stint as two-term occupant of the White House. 1974 Tom Forcade founds High Times magazine to do for drugs what Playboy did for sex -- complete with glossy pot-plant centerfolds.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The decision to move President Obama's speech indoors to avoid the rain isn't just a logistical nightmare for his campaign team. It cancels the plan to register tens of thousands of North Carolina residents to vote as they waited in line for the Thursday night event. But the change doesn't derail a larger plan by the Obama campaign to use the Democratic National Convention as a nuts-and-bolts campaign planning event. It's still an “organizing tool,” in the words of campaign manager Jim Messina.

President Obama came to town to discuss somber subjects: the nation's distressed economy, the housing crisis and the budget deficit. But the mood at the Los Angeles high school where he held a town hall meeting Thursday was an upbeat mix of rock concert and campaign event. Vendors sold T-shirts, buttons, framed photos and baby onesies; one enterprising young woman advertised "Presidential Concessions" -- bottled water for $1.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - It's time to talk about love. Love among Democrats, that is. For if the refrain from the Republican National Convention went something along the lines of “we built it,” one of the more commonly used words in the Democratic National Convention might have been “love.” And how do the Democrats love? Let us count the ways. There were the particularly cheesy expressions of love Thursday night, perhaps capped by Vice President Joe Biden's very public declaration to his wife, Jill.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part I Summit, $30.99; Blu-ray, $33.99 The "Twilight" saga's supernatural soap opera reaches a ludicrously high pitch in the first half of concluding volume "Breaking Dawn," which includes a wedding, an accelerated pregnancy and a major transformation for a major character. All that would be fine if the franchise's creative team had any sense of fun about what they're making (a la "True Blood"). Instead, new "Twilight" director Bill Condon continues what his predecessors started, making a movie that's dreary and self-serious.

Republicans dismissed President Obama's State of the Union address as more of the same, saying his call for renewed investment in American education, infrastructure and technology was simply a push for another round of federal spending that shows little commitment to reducing the deficit. "Whether sold as 'stimulus' or repackaged as 'investment,' their actions show they want a federal government that controls too much, taxes too much, and spends too much in order to do too much," said Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, in the GOP's official address after Obama's speech.

The folks behind Universal Pictures' new comedy "Baby Mama" must feel a bit like the guy in that old pop song: "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right." The female buddy movie starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, opening today on the final weekend before the summer movie season, had been scheduled to come out a week ago.