This Week's DVD Releases: More Than a Cold Black Crude Zombieland Fine Happens

Last week, I was too caught up in the Sundance bubble to pay attention to what was coming out on DVD (answer: nothing), so let's just focus on this week's releases, care of our good friends at Scarecrow Video. (And check out their take on Tuesday's Oscar noms for all your Academy Award-preparation needs.)

Woody Harrelson may have just received an Oscar nomination for The Messenger--as far as I'm concerned, he should've gotten one for No Country for Old Men--but his work in Zombieland is strong, too. Sure, it's a light-hearted action-horror-comedy, but Harrelson is so, so right as a hick who loves killing zombies. The flick as a whole is downright fun, and there's even a celebrity cameo in the latter half that delightfully has not yet been ruined for everyone by spoiler-happy critics (looking at you, Anthony Lane). 

Speaking of the New Yorker, the mag makes a cameo of its own in Cold Souls, a metariffic existential comedy by director Sophie Barthes, starring America's Schlubheart™ Paul Giamatti as Paul Giamatti. Burdened by the emotional toll doing Ibsen has had on his psyche, Giamatti has his soul removed and put into storage for the duration of Uncle Vanya's run. Of course, things aren't as simple as that, especially when a Russian soul smuggling ring gets into the mix.

Black Dynamite is a modern take on blaxploitation that played well to camp-loving audiences at SIFF last year.  Highly recommended for you to watch with your Black Friend.  Now on to the mediocre:  There was a lot of buzz about Hilary Swank receiving her third Best Actress nomination for playing Amelia Earhart.  And then the movie came out.  WOOF.  New York, I Love You is a series of vignettes by various directors that act as a love letter to the city à la Paris, Je T'aime, some more successful than others. Love Happens is an ostensibly Seattle-based Jennifer Aniston-Aaron Eckhart rom-com only worth renting if you want to determine which scenes were actually shot in Seattle (not many) and which were in Vancouver. 

There's also a few documentaries out this week: More Than a Game chronicles LeBron James and his high school basketball team, while Crude is a look at the oil industry's exploitation of people and resources in Latin America. And as always, there's at least one stinker. This week it's Everybody's Fine, the American remake of Stanno Tutti Bene, about an aging dad traveling to visit his kids who live all over the country. Because somehow Robert DeNiro, Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore, and Sam Rockwell look as if they could be related. It is quite possibly the worst film I saw last year.