Susan Granger’s DVD UPDATE for week of Fri., Nov. 4:
Perhaps the “Cars” franchise is so inexorably tied to Paul Newman that “Cars 2” seems to stall out. The plot revolves around the friendship between racecar Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), a battered tow-truck, who get involved with spies at the World Grand Prix.
Given the quality and popularity of its visually rich, romantic source material, the stilted screen adaptation of “Water for Elephants” disappoints, despite efforts of Hal Holbrook, Robert Pattinson, Christoph Waltz and Reese Witherspoon, leaving it to Tai, a huge pachyderm, to steal the show.
Wayne Wang’s lushly melodramatic “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” is a tear-jerking, soap-opera’ish chick flick about love and loyalty between two sets of Chinese women in different centuries.
New documentaries include “The Last Mountain” celebrating everyday people in West Virginia heroically working together to stop a giant corporation from destroying their Appalachian community’s environment and economy. Citing the McDonald’s coffee case as a prime example of how citizens use ‘frivolous’ lawsuits to undermine America’s legal system, “Hot Coffee” examines the facts and the concept of tort reform. Errol Morris’ “Tabloid” focuses on a bizarre 1970s incident involving a woman kidnapping a Mormon missionary. And Alex Gibney and Allison Elwood’s rambling, often unfocused “Magic Trip” recalls novelist Ken Kesey’s LSD-laced 1964 trek, highlighting Neal Cassady, enshrined by Jack Kerouac in “On the Road.”
Deemed too dreadful to warrant a theatrical release, Joel Schumacher’s “Trespass” with Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman adds little to the timely subgenre of home invasion thrillers as a quartet of masked burglars ransacks an architecturally awesome suburban mansion.
Piotr Tchaikovsky must be spinning in his grave over Russian director Andrei Kanchalovsky’s stale schnitzel, “Nutcracker 3-D” with Elle Fanning as nine year-old Mary; not only is there no ballet but the lyrics are incompatible and often inaudible.
PICK OF THE WEEK: The fickle finger of fate is at work in the romantic comedy “Crazy, Stupid Love,” as a resolutely single womanizer (Ryan Gosling) takes pity on a dazed, distraught, cuckolded husband (Steve Carell) whose wife (Julianne Moore) wants a divorce.