This Week’s DVD Releases

Now that Christmas is in the rear-view, there’s time to catch up on the latest DVD releases, care of our good friends at Scarecrow Video. The past few weeks have brought a bunch of the big summer (and early fall) releases, from the good-enough Salt to the don’t-bother A-Team to the the why-now Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I didn’t care for Ben Affleck’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone, but that doesn’t mean The Town isn’t worth a rental. Same goes for The Other Guys; I’m down for Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell as mismatched buddy cops.

There’s several new flicks for the children. Despicable Me got decent reviews, as did the Emma Thompson-written and -starring Nanny McPhee Returns. Not so for the dark Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. And when it comes to Step Up 3D…oh, why the hell not? The Scarlet Letter-lite Easy A is ostensibly for teens, but with a cast including Patricia Clarkson, Malcolm McDowell, and Stanley Tucci, it works for adults as well. And no one of any age should see Devil, the trapped-in-an-elevator thriller “from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan.”

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There’s three foreign films new to DVD that played SIFF earlier this year: Fatih Akin’s multi-culti restaurant crowd-pleaser Soul Kitchen, the latest spot whimsy from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Micmacs, and Peruvian plague drama Altiplano. And catch up with a glam bombshell via the five-disc Rita Hayworth collection.

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Indies aplenty in new releases. Sample mumblecore gone Hollywood with the Duplass Brothers’ oedipal love triangle Cyrus. Locally-made The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is now available on DVD, as is the latest from Repo Man director Alex Cox, the revamping of his own film Straight to Hell in Straight to Hell Returns. Alan Rudolph‘s Seattle-set 1985 neo-noir, Trouble in Mind, is finally out on DVD. And a trio of adoption-related stories (starring Naomi Watts, Samuel L. Jackson, Annette Bening, and Kerry Washington) makes up drama Mother and Child.

A lot of good documentaries out now too. Longtime lesbian couple Edie and Thea wait out the right to marry in A Very Long Engagement. Ghost Bird, a doc on the extinct-then-maybe-not-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker played at the Northwest Film Forum earlier this year. Banksy’s take on the art world Exit Through the Gift Shop, natural gas drilling nightmare Gasland, and Joan Rivers auto-doc A Piece of Work all appeared at Sundance this year, while Hitchcock doppelganger Double Take and Mugabe and the White African both ran at SIFF. Meanwhile, I saw A Complete History of My Sexual Failures a couple years ago, and it is awkwardly, painfully good.

In TV on DVD, Futurama Volume 5 is out now, as is the final episode of the Trailer Park Boys, Say Goodnight to the Bad Guys. And of course, there’s the latest Family Guy Star Wars special, It’s a Trap! In the grab bag, Vampire Circus is exactly what is sounds like: a cadre of shape-shifting vampires posing as a circus troupe in order to prey on children. If that doesn’t sound good to you, might I suggest The Horde? “In order to avenge the murder of one of their own by a group of ruthless gangsters, four corrupt cops go on a rampage against the mob responsible. A horde of bloodthirsty cannibal zombies complicates matters.”