Thursday, December 27, 2012

Flick Picks 12/24

This week and next week are going to be slow for new releases but there are some noteworthy titles coming out that you'll want to place holds on:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis star in the mind-blowing time travel action flick Looper, available on DVD and Blu-ray.

David Cronenberg's strange but watchable adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis, starring Robert Pattinson, should be interesting way to start your new year.

Season 3 of the Western-esque series Justified arrives, as U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens takes on a new arrival from Detroit.

Season 6 of the British cop show Trial and Retribution also comes to DVD this week.

Flick Picks will see you again in January with loads of new DVDs including season 3 of Downton Abbey, which arrives towards the end of the month! Be sure to get your holds in for this one! Have a great New Year's holiday!!!
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Monday, December 17, 2012

Flick Picks 12/17

New This Week!
ENTERTAINMENT: Just in time for winter break there are LOTS of new films being released this week. Clint Eastwood directs and stars in Trouble With the Curve, in which he plays a major league pitching scout who is starting to lose his vision. Amy Adams plays his daughter who is reluctantly brought in to help her father while Justin Timberlake plays his protege. We have this on DVD and Blu-ray.

The well-reviewed Richard Gere comeback vehicle Arbitrage also arrives this week. Gere plays a hedge-fund manager whose financial empire is threatened, driving him to desperate methods to protect his fortune and family, including his wife Susan Sarandon. It's available on DVD and Blu-ray. Also, the audience favorite bike messenger thriller Premium Rush, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who is truly proving himself to be one of our best young actors) comes out this week on DVD and Blu-ray. The big budget Total Recall, starring Colin Farrell in the Arnold Schwarzenegger role, comes to DVD and Blu-ray this week as well.

There are a couple of family friendly films arriving this week. The latest installment in the hit Diary of a Wimpy Kid series comes to town this week, as Dog Days' Greg Heffley tries to survive summer. Meanwhile, teen (and adult!) Glee fans will want to watch the Anna Kendrick vehicle Pitch Perfect, a PG-13 musical comedy about a college a capella group.

There are also a number of films coming out this week that you might have missed at the theaters. Sleepwalk With Me stars comedian and NPR celebrity Mike Birbiglia in a series of vignettes based on his comedy material. It won the Sundance Film Festival audience award. Spike Lee returns with a controversial look at growing up in Brooklyn called Red Hook Summer. Academy Award winning director William Freidkin and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tracy Letts team up with the ultra-violent Killer Joe in which Matthew McConaughey plays a Texas cop who is hired by a father and son in a small town to murder the mother. Finally, Liberal Arts is a love story starring the wonderful Elizabeth Olsen as a college student who falls for an older man whose life peaked when he attended her university 15 years earlier.

SERIES: Season 1 of Showtime's House of Lies is the newest must-see series that you'll want to place a hold on asap. It's a dark comedy starring Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell as management consultants who will do anything for their clients. The second season of Showtime's Shameless, the raucous Chicago-set William Macy comedy about a poor family trying to survive, is released this week as well. The fifth season of David Duchovny's Californication has also arrived.

SUBTITLED: If you are a fan of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring then you'll want to see The Well-Digger's Daughter. Daniel Auteuil, who starred in the earlier films, directs and stars in a remake of Marcel Pagnol's 1941 film of the same name, and it was Pagnol's source material that Florette and Manon were based upon.

All of our new releases and upcoming are always available through Bibliocommons!

Mike's Films You Might Have Missed
Damsels in Distress
One of the most pleasurable aspects of my job is picking out little Hollywood, foreign and documentary films that you might have missed in the theaters and bringing them to your attention. Take a chance on a film that you might not have heard of and you might find a real gem. In the case of subtitled and documentary films it doesn't cost a dime! Also, please ask at the reference, reader's advisory and circulation desks because chances are that somebody has seen the films that you are curious about.

So spend this vacation enjoying your home and your family and most importantly, watching lots of great DVDs! Here are some of my favorite DVDs from the year (ignoring blockbusters and concentrating on smaller entertainment, subtitled and documentary films):

Entertainment:
The Hunter
Subtitled:
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Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Flick Picks 12/10

New This Week!
ENTERTAINMENT: The surprise comedy hit of the year Ted comes to DVD and Blu-ray this week. Ted stars Mark Wahlberg as a man whose best friend is his living teddy bear. Seth MacFarlane, who created Family Guy, is the writer, director and voice of Ted and on the heels of this film's success and his funny Saturday Night Live hosting gig he will be emceeing the 2013 Oscars. The movie is profane, foul-mouthed, hilarious and surprisingly moving.

The latest film in the Bourne saga - The Bourne Legacy - also arrives this week. It stars Jeremy Renner as another graduate of the secret government program that created Jason Bourne. Also out this week is Ice Age: Continental Drift which follows Manny, Diego, Sid and Scrat on a high seas iceberg adventure where they run up against pirates! It's the fourth film in the successful Ice Age franchise and is available on DVD and Blu-ray. Finally, director Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight trilogy) is one of our most gifted filmmakers so we are excited that his first film, the Memento-esque Following, arrives on DVD for the first time!

SERIES: Lena Dunham's controversial HBO hit Girls comes to DVD this week following a group of twentysomething women living in New York City who try to navigate personal relationships and careers. It's sexually frank and vividly entertaining and Dunham is a real talent worth keeping tabs on.

SUBTITLED: Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos follow up his unusual Oscar nominated Dogtooth with Alps, the tale of an organization that impersonates the deceased in order to help mourners get over their loss.

DOCUMENTARY: If you truly love movies then you will want to pick up the 15 part opus The Story of Film: An Odyssey. It starts at the dawn of film, ends in today's digital age and is filled with clips of the greatest films of all time.

Next week we will be getting hit by a blizzard of new releases so stay tuned! You can always see all of our current and upcoming DVD and Blu-ray releases in Bibliocommons.

Special Monday at the Movies Event!
Next week we will host an extra special Monday Night at the Movies of Mulberry Child where Jian Ping, the subject of this documentary, will be present at the 7:00 showing on December 17th! We will also be showing the film at 1:00 but Ms. Ping will not appear at that screening. All of our Monday Night at the Movies screenings are held at the Women's Library Club at 325 Tudor Ct.

Celebrate Monday Night at the Movies Anytime
We've enjoyed another wonderful year of Monday Night at the Movies features! We began the season with a drama about religious faith (Higher Ground) and are wrapping things up with a fascinating documentary about a woman's return to China (Mulberry Child). In the months between we enjoyed films about art, food, chimps and many fascinating people. If you missed any Monday Night at the Movies picks please check out these lists in Bibliocommons. You'll find all of our films back to 2003 (the year the program began) for you to take home.


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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Flick Picks 12/3

New This Week!
ENTERTAINMENT: The second highest grossing film of the year comes to DVD this week and it's also the second highest grossing superhero movie of the year! In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce Wayne once again dons the bat outfit to protect Gotham from Bane. Batgirl is also along for the ride. It's a superhero flick but it's not for the kids as Christopher Nolan gives us a dark vision of a bleak society. It stars Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman and we've got it on DVD and Blu-ray.

Adults who are looking for something a little milder will want to pick up Hope Springs, starring Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as a couple who try to spice up their marriage. The Odd Life of Timothy Green is the story of a couple wanting to start a family who find an unusual child on their doorstep one night. It stars Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton. Beasts of the Southern Wild was the surprise hit of the summer, with an unknown cast in the story of a young Louisiana girl's quest to find her mother.

SERIES: The eight-hour epic miniseries adaptation of Ken Follett's World Without End, which follows the story of four siblings in medieval England, arrives this week. Also out this week, is the third season of Eastbound and Down with loudmouth baseball pitcher Kenny Powers back from Mexico and headed to a Florida minor league team.

SUBTITLED: Unforgivable is a moody French thriller, set in Venice, in which a crime writer hires a detective to look into his new wife's past.

Holiday Movies
It's December so we've brought the holiday movies out! You can grab Eight Crazy Nights to get your Adam Sandler fix for Hanukkah (and we've got some educational kids movies about Hanukkah as well). Of course there's no shortage of Christmas movies, in all genres:



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