This Week’s DVD Releases

You know it’s a week full of quality movies on DVD when the biggest release is a television show. Yes, the biggest DVD for the week was the sixth and final season of Lost, which includes (zomg) another eleven minutes of never-before-seen bonus scenes of Ben and Hurley on The Island. There’s also a new crazy-ass box set of the whole series.

Besides that, the next biggest release is The Back-up Plan, Jennifer Lopez’s getting knocked up and then meeting the man of your dreams rom-com. There’s also City Island, a family-with-secrets comedy that’s actually one of the top box office earners amongst indie films this year. There’s a mediocre movie version of Dorian Gray and the latest zombie installment from George A. Romero, Survival of the Dead.

Ajami is well-reviewed, but to me the intersecting storylines just sound like Crash in the Middle East. Shirin is an experimental film with Juliette Binoche, in which a theater audience watches a film based on a poem, while The Square is a noir thriller from Australia. Nightfur is a sci-fi romance with a soundtrack by Band of Horses, and Abandoned looks to be the final (direct-to-DVD) release with Brittany Murphy.

---

In terms of special editions, there’s the 30th anniversary release of Shogun Assassin, the Bluray of cult British comedy Withnail and I, and 1969 gangster flick Machine Gun McCain, starring John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, Britt Ekland, and Gena Rowlands. This week also marks the release of three silent films by Josef Von Sternberg from Criterion: Docks of New York, The Last Command, and Underworld.

---

And in the realm of documentaries, there’s La Danse, which follows the rehearsals and performances of seven ballets by the Paris Opera Ballet. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg covers the life and work of TV pioneer Gertrude Berg, who created The Goldbergs, one of the first sitcoms, which also helped to introduce Jewish culture to the American mainstream. The Age of Stupid is a quasi-documentary in which forty-five years from now, on a scorched earth, one man watches news footage from our time to understand what went so wrong.

Chuck Close is a portrait of the photo-realistic painter, while The Comeback studies washed-up German boxer Jürgen “The Rock” Hartenstein. Generation Rx is a look at the side effects of the unmitigated prescription of psychiatric meds in children. And for something completely different, Legends of the Canyon tells the story of all the great music borne of Laurel Canyon in the late ’60s, from Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and many more.