Flick Picks 4/23/13: Gangster Squad, Promised Land, Central Park Five

New This Week!

ENTERTAINMENT:  Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling are members of The Gangster Squad, a post-World War II group of L.A. cops intent on bringing down crime lord Sean Penn. If you've enjoyed some of the more recent noirish takes on the crime film - think L.A. Confidential - then you'll want to take this one home. Also this week, the usage of the fracking technique to remove natural gas from the ground is explored in Gus Van Sant's Promised Land. The film stars Matt Damon as the natural gas company representative trying to convince members of a Pennsylvania town (including The Office's John Krasinski) to allow them to drill. Damon and Krasinski also wrote the script, from a short story by Dave Eggers and we've got it on DVD and Blu-ray.

We've got a new adaptation of Wuthering Heights that changes the original story radically by making Heathcliff an escaped slave who becomes involved with farmer's daughter Catherine. Finally, our indie pick this week is the late 1970's set Any Day Now, featuring a powerful performance by Alan Cumming as half of a gay couple fighting to adopt a child with Down's syndrome.

SERIES: The BBC series Mr. Selfridge stars Jeremy Piven as the founder of the Selfridges department stores, where London consumers were able to shop in luxury.

DOCUMENTARIES: Ken Burns' newest documentary might be shorter than many of his other films but it's no less ambitious. The Central Park Five tells in detail the story of the five teenagers who were wrongly convicted of raping and beating a New York City jogger in Central Park in 1989. It's also a portrait of New York in the 1980s as well as the ways that the media failed in its coverage of the crime.

All of our new and forthcoming releases can be found on Bibliocommons.

Talking Pictures
Susan Benjamin's next Talking Pictures program is Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and will be shown in the Hammond Room at the library on Thursday, April 25th. It stars Ewan McGregor as the British fisheries expert who tries to bring fishing to the desert at the request of a sheikh. The film is followed by a discussion.

Earth Week DVDs

Earth Day takes place on April 22nd every year and the surrounding week has been designated as Earth Week. We've got many great documentaries that will help you take better care of your planet!

• If you're looking for more information on the fracking process addressed in Promised Land give Gasland a shot. In Gasland, the director tries to track down the facts about fracking after discovering that his house is on top of a massive natural gas reservoir.
• The Last Mountain covers the battle between the Appalachian community that wants to blow up a mountain for the coal within and others who wish to preserve the mountain for a wind farm.
• No Impact Man follows a family that attempts to live for a year without many modern conveniences, including electricity, television and toilet paper!
• The Earth Liberation Front is a radical and controversial group that the FBI labels a terrorist organization, and If A Tree Falls tells their story.
• The title of the movie Dirt! tells it all - it's a documentary about the organic matter to which we will someday return.
• Tapped takes a look at the big business of bottled water.
• If you haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth - the filmed version of Al Gore's global warming lecture - then Earth Week is the perfect time to give it a try (or to revisit it)!