Susan Granger’s DVD Update for week of Friday, March 16:
Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with Sue Bourne’s lively documentary “Jig,” tracking eight international aspirants, their families and teachers en route to the 2010 Irish Dancing World Championships in Glasgow. Or stomp with Mumble and his musical friends of “Happy Feet Two” in Antarctica’s Emperor penguin community.
Alexander Dumas would scarcely recognize Paul W.S. Anderson’s reinvention of his swashbuckling “The Three Musketeers” with its airborne CGI galleons and an intrepid, armed Milady (Milla Jovovich) securing rappelling apparatus within her corset.
Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” is a bizarre disaster tale, revolving around a bride (Kirsten Dunst), groom (Alexander Skarsgard), her sister (Charlotte Gainsborg) and brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland), as a wayward planet, Melancholia, hurtles on a collision course with Earth.
Charlize Theron portrays a brazen, narcissistic former ‘prom queen’ who tries to revive the romantic days of her youth, despite warnings from a nerdy former classmate (Patton Oswalt), in the disheartening Diablo Cody/Jason Reitman film “Young Adult.”
In “Loosies,” actor-turned-screenwriter Peter Facinelli is a New York City pickpocket disguised as a stockbroker who tempts fate by lifting the badge of a detective (Michael Madsen), placing him in conflict with his fence (Vincent Gallo) just as he discovers his girlfriend (Jamie Alexander) is pregnant.
France’s #1 comedy smash hit, “The Women on the 6th Floor,” serves 1960-era upstairs/downstairs charm, as the arrival of a sassy Spanish maid rattles a Parisian couple’s bourgeois existence.
The documentary “A Second Knock at the Door” offers a rare glimpse into the heart-breaking experiences of four military families who have lost loved ones to “friendly fire.”
“Scooby-Doo! Music of the Vampire” finds the animated, intrepid gang traveling into Southern bayous for the Vampire-Palooza Festival.
PICKS OF THE WEEK: For fun-filled, family viewing, Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of TinTin” animates a Belgian comicstrip hero, a plucky reporter named TinTin, whose relentless pursuit of a good story leads him into a world of high adventure. For mature audiences, Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh deliver captivating performances in “My Week With Marilyn,” as a young British aristocrat (Eddie Redmayne) recalls an impudent interlude in the summer of 1956, when Marilyn Monroe was making “The Prince and the Showgirl” with Sir Laurence Olivier.