hmm, I didn't have much success with just straight up VLC. It played like 10 seconds of the movie--I just dragged the .rar file. I guess it doesn't like .rar archives that have been split like most videos are from torrents. Also, VLC RAR-Loader doesn't seem to support seeking--but at least I just had to drag the .rar archive and it played the whole movie (of CD1, at least :).

that's good to know

The current VLC version has this option built in. Just drop a .rar in and it will play it. Even partitial .rar's will work.