This Week's DVD Releases: Where the 2012 Private Gentlemen Live in Public Beaches

Here we are, just a couple days away from the Oscars, so let's take a look at the films new to DVD, care of our good friends at Scarecrow Video. This week features the release of two recommendable family films, Ponyo and Where the Wild Things Are, though the latter is more for dysfunctional young adults than actual children. Also out this week is Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, a tribute to the author directed by Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze, made during the filming of Where the Wild Things Are. There's plenty of Maurice in it, but it also features James Gandolfini, Meryl Streep, Catherine Keener, and Tony Kushner giving Sendak some love. 

This week also brought the DVD release of 2012, which you should not see, and which I have already discussed at length. I did not see Gentlemen Broncos, the latest from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess, but I heard it was bad, like, unwatchable-even-on-a-plane bad. Yes, even with Jemaine Clement.

On the indie front, this week brings plenty of films made by the ladies. There's Rebecca Miller's The Private Life of Pippa Lee, which received pretty good reviews for a random name-heavy cast (Keanu Reeves, Alan Arkin, Blake Lively, Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder, Monica Bellucci, Maria Bello, and starring Robin Wright Penn as the totally cray-cray lead). There's also The Beaches of Agnes, French director Agnes Varda's self-portrait, which--as a documentary on a filmmaker made by the filmmaker herself--actually has a lot in common with We Live In Public, Ondi Timoner's look at web guru Josh Harris. Harris made (and lost) tons of money by being way ahead of his internet time, in terms of foreseeing things like virtual communities, user-generated video content, and the voluntary surrender of any expectation of online privacy. As a documentary, We Live in Public is great (and po-po-po-mo freaky), but as a human being, Josh Harris is a FAIL.

And as for a random pick of the week, there's Bollywood Hero, in which Chris Kattan plays Chris Kattan...in India! It was an "IFC musical comedy miniseries event" last summer.