This Week's DVD Releases: Under the Afghan Sherlock Complex Education...the Squeakquel

Here we are at the weekend, so let's take a look at this week's DVD releases, care of our good friends at Scarecrow Video. I was actually out of town last week, so here's a brief rundown of the movies I missed. Worth your time: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Mad Men Season 3, The T.A.M.I. Show, The African Queen. Not worth your time: Brothers, The Men Who Stare at Goats.  Poor Sandra Bullock: The Blind Side. And file under local films: the documentary Twilight in Forks and the self-explanatory Zombies of Mass Destruction.

Phew. With that out of the way let's move on to this week. I didn't see Sherlock Holmes in the theaters, but it seems like it would be a fine enough rental. An Education was great great GREAT--well-written (by Nick Hornby), -directed (by Italian for Beginners' Lone Scherfig, who will assuredly have many other fine films in the future), and -acted (by Peter Sarsgaard and a-star-is-born turn by Carey Mulligan). I didn't see Alvin and The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel either, but both the movie and the soundtrack made a 'munk-ton of money.

The Baader Meinhof Complex is a thriller about the rise of left-wing terrorism in '70s Germany, while the gothic horror I Sell the Dead stars Dominic Monaghan and Ron Perlman as graverobbers. On the documentary tip, there's Afghan Star--2009's best-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes--about the American Idol of Afghanistan, The Yes Men Fix the World, in which the political pranksters strike again, talhotblond, about an online love triangle gone awry, and Under the Sea, which even on your 52" flatscreen isn't going to be as impressive as when it played in IMAX. 

And finally, there's Arizona Dream, a 1994 "offbeat psychodrama" about the residents of a small desert town, starring Johnny Deep, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, Vincent Gallo, and Lili Taylor.  I saw it in college and remember it as being completely wackadoodle magical realism.