Flick Picks 5/6/04: The Veronica Mars Movie, The Art of the Steal

New on DVD at the Library This Week

ENTERTAINMENT: The fans were begging for more Veronica Mars and now they've got it! Kristin Bell's modern-day Nancy Drew made the move from the TV to the big screen in 2014 thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $6 million from eager devotees. Fortunately, The Veronica Mars Movie also serves as an excellent introduction for new fans, as it returns young sleuth Veronica to her high school reunion where she must help her former boyfriend Logan to extract himself from a murder charge. If you feel the need to get caught up on the TV series on which the movie was based we also have it as part of our collection. Also this week, Kurt Russell, Matt Dillon and Terence Stamp team up in the fun and funny caper flick The Art of the Steal, in which Russell plays a motorcyclist/thief who is brought back in for one last job. Things go wrong.

SERIES: Republic of Doyle is a new lightweight crime show based in seaside Newfoundland that features a rule-breaking detective and his ex-cop father.

SUBTITLED: Simon and the Oaks is the moving drama about the relationship between two families - one working class and one wealthy and Jewish - in Germany during and after World War II. Also, originally screened as a German miniseries, Generation War brings together five young friends who are forced to deal with the consequences of Hitler's ascendance in different ways.

DOCUMENTARIES: British historian Simon Schama gives us the epic five episode Story of the Jews, originally shown on PBS. If you are looking for an adrenaline-filled but very real film, you should try Burn, which follows Detroit firefighters as they face their daily pressures in a city that is going through difficult times. It wasn't so long ago that our ancestors were swimming around with gills, and Your Inner Fish is a fascinating look at what we've inherited from our piscine progenitors. Finally, this week we've got an American Masters look at sculptor Alexander Calder.

You can find all of our new and upcoming films in our Bibliocommons catalog.

Mom in Movies

Mother's Day is coming up (you did remember, didn't you?) Here are some vivid portrayals of mothers in film, some of whom may not exactly win any "mother of the year" awards.

• In Terminator 2 Sarah Connor must fight to keep her son alive, which is a good thing for all of us since he will eventually save humanity.
• Next time you face difficulties with your child remember that you could be giving birth to the devil's progeny, as in Rosemary's Baby.
• Mother-daughter relationships are explored as are race and class issues in the classic Douglas Sirk melodrama Imitation of Life.
• Norman Bates is both the protected kid and the (spoiler alert!) overprotective mother in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
• Are there any more troubling childhood memories that seeing Bambi's mother die? Yeah, we didn't think so.
• You'd need telekinetic powers to deal with a mother like Stephen King's Carrie's (here in its 2013 remake).
• The Manchurian Candidate features perhaps the ultimate controlling mother-son relationship between Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra.
• The powerful Korean import Mother brings us a mom who gives up everything to find out who framed her son for murder.