Susan Granger’s dvd update for Friday, January 9:
“An American Carol” is a no-holds-barred, off-the-wall comedy that “lampoons contemporary American culture, particularly Hollywood,” written, directed and produced by the master of questionable taste, David Zucker (“Airplane!” “Scary Movie 3 & 4”).
Based on the same historical events that inspired Tom Cruise’s “Valkyrie,” “The Plot to Kill Hitler” is David Wolper’s historical recreation of the 1944 attempt by Nazi High Command Officers to seize control of the German government.
Al Pacino and Robert De Niro team up as veteran NYPD detectives in “Righteous Kill,” investigating 14 vigilante murders targeting those who slipped through the judicial system, including a pedophile priest. Much of it was filmed in Bridgeport.
Those “Superbad” dudes Seth Rogen and James Franco are back in the reefer-raunchy “Pineapple Express,” as stoners-on-the-run tracking a rare, high-grade of marijuana.
Nicholas Cage is a brooding, introspective hitman-for-hire in the toxic, tedious “Bankok Dangerous,” a misadventure more accurately described as Bangkok Boring. Even more dismal is “Babylon A.D.,” a futuristic, sci-fi thriller that’s been publicly disowned by its writer/director Mathiew Kassovitz as “pure violence and stupidity.”
Influenced by Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You,” Alain Resnais’ “Same Old Song,” is a series of interconnected love stories in which characters break into song – lip-synching popular French hits – to convey their unspoken thoughts. It’s an engaging adult romp.
PICKS OF THE WEEK: Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson and Billy Bob Thornton star in “Eagle Eye,” a race-against-time thriller in which a mysterious phone call transforms two unsuspecting Americans into the country’s most wanted fugitives who become unwitting accomplices in a diabolical assassination plot. And Ricky Gervais channels the supernatural in the wryly sardonic comedy “Ghost Town,” as meddlesome spirits bedevil him after a ‘biochemical anomaly’ occurs during a routine colonoscopy.