This week brings yet another terrible car-based action film with Nicolas Cage, Drive Angry, and Javier Bardem’s second Oscar-nominated performance in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Biutiful. Meanwhile, Kaboom is a perfectly serviceable sex and drug-fueled midnight film from Gregg Araki.
But probably the most anticipated release this week is the third season of True Blood, even though Alan Ball’s HBO vampire series long ago jumped the shark to so trashy bad it’s good. Other TV on DVD out this week includes the fifth season of Psych, SGU: Stargate Universe – The Complete Final Season, and season 5 of The Dog Whisperer. And if you are a fan of white trash reality series, your new favorite show is now out on DVD: Swamp People, as seen on The Soup.
In foreign films, there’s forbidden love in Peru in Undertow and marital friction while an Australian couple picks up their adopted baby in Calcutta in Waiting City. Lots of films new to Blu-ray this week, including A Man Called Horse and Once Upon a Time in the West. There’s also the ultimate edition of Tom Cruise in Legend and a Midnight Run Movie Marathon, with the original 1988 Robert De Niro-Charles Grodin film and all the subsequent terrible sequels (Another Midnight Run, Midnight Runaround, and Midnight Run For Your Life) in a two-disc set. George Lucas has a new special edition of American Graffiti on Blu-ray, in which Greedo shoots first.
And best of all is the full new Blu-ray Kubrick collection. All nine films (Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, along with Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures) can be purchased separately or in one huge set.
In documentaries, The One Percent looks at the gap between the one percent of Americans that own about forty percent of the nation’s wealth and the rest of us. David Byrne: Ride Rise Roar combines classic Talking Heads concert footage with Byrne’s recent collaborations with Brian Eno. And there’s more live music available, in the forms of Eddie Vedder: Water on the Road, Death Cab for Cutie: Live at the Mount Baker Theatre, and Verdi: La Traviata.
In the grab bag, Passion Play is a truly terrible movie that sullies the good names of Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke. (No worries, Megan Fox is right in her element.) Backwash stars Michael Ian Black, Joshua Malina, and Michael Panes as inadvertent bank robbers, and features cameos by Jon Hamm, David Wain, and Allison Janney. And I’ll let the description of Old Dracula speak for itself: In this spoof of the Transylvanian legend, David Niven stars as Count Dracula, who sinks his fangs into a bevy of Playboy Bunnies in order to find the right blood type to resurrect his dear-departed wife.