Veritgo's 'Prince of Cats.'

When it comes to Shakespeare, there are basically two settings for an adaptation: New York City, and outer space. From Ethan Hawke's Hamlet to Men of Honor (in which John Turturro plays an Italian mobster whose rise to power resembles the story of a certain Scottish play), to West Side Story, the Bard's work has often been played against the backdrop of bustling NYC.

And while the conceit of a modern take on Shakespeare might be worn in theory (O, anyone?), Veritgo's new comic book, Prince of Cats, found a way to update the most cliched classic--Romeo and Juliet--without it coming off as kitschy.

Maybe it's the subject matter: Instead of focusing on the two lovers, Prince of Cats turns its eye on Tybalt, Juliet's tyrannical cousin. In the story written and illustrated by Ronald Wimberly (who has done graphic work on issues of Lucifer, Swamp Thing and John Constantine, among others), the story is as much about hip-hop and urban life as it is about love and different names for roses.

While the Montagues and Capulets fight on the tops of buildings and trains, Tybalt angrily fires off cultural allusions to Wu-Tang Clan and The Warriors. And the gritty, street-art inspired illustrations paired with the realistic dialogue will almost make you forget the source material.

Which is good, because we're pretty much done with these adaptations until someone makes an underwater version of King Lear.

Halloween might be over, but that doesn't mean the scares have to stop. We wouldn't go so far as to call Vertigo a "horror movie," but Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock ratchets the tension to such unbearable levels that parts of it are more terrifying than anything you'd see in whatever torture porn is defiling theaters in a given week. Of course you've watched Vertigo before, so we aren't going to tell you anything new—Bernard Hermann's score is fantastic, Jimmy Stewart is perfectly obsessive, Kim Novak is the epitome of cold, blah, blah, blah—but did you know that Turner Classic Movies is now available in HD for Time Warner subscribers? It's true! If you thought Vertigo looked great before, wait until you see it now. [TCM, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: By the People
Because what you need is more opportunities to watch Barack Obama on television, here comes By the People, a new HBO documentary produced by Edward Norton (who presumably took time out his busy schedule of Modern Family watching and New York City marathon preparation to do so.) By the People is a behind the scenes look at the 2008 presidential campaign, which should be fun, if only to remind us that just a year ago we were so much more optimistic than we are now about the future of America. It'll be nice to see now-president Obama once again telling us that yes, we can. [HBO, 9 p.m.]

Wednesday: The Girl Next Door
If a movie came out today starring Emile Hirsch and Paul Dano, chances are you would expect it to be some serious indie drama directed by Sean Penn. But back in 2004, the movie they co-starred in was a teen sex comedy about a high school senior dating a porn star, and it did so poorly at the box office, you probably forgot it even existed. Not us though! You can write off The Girl Next Door as trite and silly, but Luke Greenfield's film is kinda brilliant—funny, smart, poignant and raucous. And if nothing else, you can just watch for the music cues. Does anything go better with coming of age angst than "Baba O'Riley" and "Under Pressure?" We didn't think so. [FX, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: Community
And now we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a weekly plea to watch Community. For reasons that we cannot figure out, this show hasn't caught on the way it should. The ratings are poor (despite a full season order from NBC, Community averages just under 6 million viewers per episode) and, worse, there seems to be quite the negative stigma attached to the series. People don't want to like! When we tell friends it's funny, they get a look on their face like we're telling them to watch Family Guy. Wake up, everyone! Whether or not Community makes it longer than one season remains to be seen, but what we have on our hands is the quickest and snarkiest show on network television since Arrested Development. Seriously, the jokes fly out at a clip that would make even 30 Rock jealous. That you aren't watching this on a weekly basis is borderline criminal. [NBC, 8 p.m.]

Friday: The Darjeeling Limited
Wes Anderson made quite a stink in the blog world last week when he (facetiously?) wondered to the New Yorker why Slumdog Millionaire was the India-based movie that hit with the populace and not his 2007 travelogue of ennui, drugs and broken familial bonds. And as you read that description, perhaps you can figure out the answer. In the oeuvre of Mr. Anderson, The Darjeeling Limited sits somewhere towards the bottom, but it's never terrible thanks almost totally to Adrian Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman who play the least believable-looking set of brothers we've ever seen. Whenever the three are allowed to riff off each other, The Darjeeling Limited is quite fun; when it bogs down with sentimentality and spirituality, it's not. Still, the real problem is that unlike Slumdog Millionaire, there isn't a dance number during the credits. Next time, Wes. Next time. [More Max, 4:15 a.m.]

Halloween might be over, but that doesn't mean the scares have to stop. We wouldn't go so far as to call Vertigo a "horror movie," but Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock ratchets the tension to such unbearable levels that parts of it are more terrifying than anything you'd see in whatever torture porn is defiling theaters in a given week. Of course you've watched Vertigo before, so we aren't going to tell you...

In The Philadelphia Story, for instance, he's condescending, too wry, a tabloid reporter stuck covering a society wedding who gets loaded and tries to bone the bride-to-be. In Rear Window, it's bad enough that he's become, trapped in that wheelchair, this peeping tom, creepy, obsessed, but he also treats Grace Kelly most of the time like she's a flesh-eating virus he might catch. And in It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey may be the bulwark that prevents Bedford Falls from devolving into Potterville, but the man is also self-righteous, self-pitying, driven easily to suicide, and a screamer. This is the bravery of Jimmy Stewart. He didn't hedge for your sympathies, he screwed with them. He undermined his sappy, sad face with nasty, sinister eyes; and used that timorous, aw-shucks voice to say the most terrible things.

Which brings us to Vertigo. It's on TCM, this Saturday evening, at 5:45. Don't count on doing much afterward, because it tends to leave a person pretty fucked up. But it's Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece and maybe the finest American movie ever made, our apologies to Godfather fans.

Here, Jimmy Stewart plays Scottie, a detective forced to retire because dizziness hits him at any height above chair level. Kim Novak plays the rich woman he's hired to tail, who is probably sick in the head but may be possessed by the ghost of a Spanish noblewoman, whom he falls in love with and loses. Ms. Novak plays too the shopgirl he meets later on, also loves, wants to possess.

So, he remakes the shopgirl in the image of the dead rich woman. He's like a Hollywood talent agent manipulating some kid fresh off the bus into the shape of a starlet. He re-creates the style of gray suit he remembers, dies her hair platinum blond and twists it back up into the tree-ring knot he longs to caress. "Judy, please, it can't matter to you!" is what he pleads, as he dolls her up and destroys her.

Maybe the detective parts of him are still whirring and humming inside, putting her puzzle together piece by piece, deducing with great difficulty why the rich woman and the shopgirl look so much alike, making the mystery make sense. But he's also so deeply disturbed, so awful and broken, that Freud and a whole team of Viennese psychiatrists wouldn't be able to figure him out. Hell, they couldn't even name what he's got. His vertigo, bad enough, becomes a disequilibrium that can never be righted. We think Scottie's weirder and scarier than Heath Ledger's Joker, but because he wears a Jimmy Stewart suit and Jimmy Stewart seeming-good intentions instead of facial scars and war paint, it's hard to see.

Anyway, for anyone who doesn't already know, we're loathe to spoil the ending, so all we'll say is that Scottie cures himself of his vertigo, but the cure is tragic.

And about Kim Novak, who you'll mourn twice, she had the crazy knack of acting both earthy and uncanny. We recommend following Vertigo up with one of two other Kim Novak movies: Kiss Me Stupid, a Billy Wilder sex-farce co-starring Dean Martin as a grosser, hornier, even drunker version of himself, or The Notorious Landlady, the comic thriller she made in London with Jack Lemmon and Fred Astaire. In each of these films, she again plays someone pretending to be someone else, but these masquerades end happily. Of course, there's no real antidote for Vertigo.