Susan Granger’s DVD Update for week of Friday, January 27:
While it’s delusional to consider “Drive” an action film, Ryan Gosling has been acclaimed as the nameless, monosyllabic, emotionless wheelman, as has comedian Albert Brooks, who switches gears to show his mean side as a mobster.
Neither a sequel nor a remake, “The Thing” is a fright-filled prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 horror thriller, set in frigid Antarctica, where a group of Norwegian explorers discover a deep crevasse containing a huge spacecraft piloted by a shape-shifting alien encased in ice.
Justin Timberlake, Olivia Wilde and Amanda Seyfried team up for “Gattaca” writer/director Andrew Niccol’s slickly stylized, dystopian allegory, “In Time,” set in the bleak future, when money buys time and income inequality determines life-and-death.
“The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom” is a poignant, sometimes funny coming-of-age drama about an average, suburban 11 year-old who discovers her whole life has been a lie, which leads to a cross-country trek by a mother searching for a daughter who’s searching for a mother.
The remarkable, revelatory documentary “Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?” explores the integral role of the honey-field insects and the world-wide peril of Colony Collapse Disorder. And “Hell and Back Again” is a powerful documentary about Marines in Afghanistan and peppered with battlefront footage.
“The Revenge of the Electric Car’ is the highly anticipated sequel to the conspiratorial “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” going behind the closed doors of the auto-industry giants to track the race to create the first car that doesn’t require a single drop of foreign oil.
For youngsters ages 2-7, “Timmy Time: Timmy Needs a Bath” follows a day in the life of barnyard friends, learning life lessons that every preschooler needs to know.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Family-friendly “Reel Steel” is set in 2020,
when eight-foot-tall, 2000-pound robots brutally battle in boxing rings with
their owners holding remote controls. So when a scheming former heavyweight
boxer-turned-promoter (Hugh Jackman) realizes that his estranged 11 year-old
son has discovered a remarkable, if battered sparring ‘bot’, they find
something that bonds them together..