This Week's DVD Releases

It's the long holiday weekend, so it's good that there's lots of new movies out on DVD.  Let's run down the list of new films, care of our friends at Scarecrow Video (now with video games!).

The biggest release this week is definitely Hot Tub Time Machine, which I saw in a theater of people laughing so loudly that I will need to see it again, just to catch all the jokes I missed the first time.  There's also Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, based on the popular children's book series, and the remake of The Crazies, in which virus-infected water makes Timothy Olyphant something-something.

In terms of foreign films, there's the Oscar-nominated black-and-white looming dread of pre-WWI small-town Germany in The White Ribbon, which director Michael Haneke accurately described as "a horror film without the horror." There's also The Eclipse--no not that one.  This is an almost-perfect Irish ghost story set at a writers' conference.  Spooky scary!  Let's hope that there's never an American remake.  Same goes for Everlasting Moments, a delicate look at a female photographer challenging societal norms in early 1900s Sweden.  And for something completely different, Warlords features Jet Li and lots of epic Chinese battles.

Documentaries this week are on the musical tip, with When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors and Rush: Behind the Lighted Stage.  Cue drum solo.

Straight from SIFF and out this week is Linas Phillips' latest road movie Bass Ackwards.  And straight-to-video (or close to that) is a whole mess of films: Israeli queer romance Antarctica, Charles Darwin biopic Creation, Pauly Shore mockumentary Adopted, Hugh Dancy and Mamie Gummer in Coach, small-town thriller Don McKay, karaoke rom-com Once More with Feeling, Billy Crudup, Paul Giamatti, and a jet pack in Pretty Bird, and Jon Hamm in Stolen.