Susan Granger’s dvd/video update for week of Friday, Sept. 25:
Joining the hoopla surrounding Dan Brown’s latest novel, “The Lost Symbol,” “Mysteries of the Freemasons” is an A&E documentary revealing the untold story of the world’s oldest secret society with influential members like Mozart, George Washington, Paul Revere, Ben Franklin and Duke Ellington.
The frothy “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” imagines Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” as a romantic comedy with Matthew McConaughey in the Scrooge/womanizer role, Jennifer Garner as his love interest and Michael Douglas as his playboy Uncle.
Seth Rogen stars in “Observe and Report” as the lonely, self-delusional, misanthropic chief of security at Forest Ridge Mall who is determined to protect patrons from an elusive flasher despite the efforts of a real law-enforcement officer (Ray Liotta).
Based on the childhood experiences of director Derick Martini, the engagingly irreverent “Lymelife,” starring Alec Baldwin, Kieran Culkin, Rory Culkin, Emma Roberts and Cynthia Nixon, centers on a 15 year-old on suburban Long Island.
Reversing the sci-fi concept of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” “Battle for Terra” revolves around two rebellious, tadpole-shaped alien teens (voiced by Justin Long and Evan Rachel Wood) whose world is brutally invaded by Earthmen whose habitat has been destroyed by civil war and environmental catastrophe.
And “Trumbo” is the stirring story of one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters, Dalton Trumbo, who was hauled before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 as a suspected subversive and subsequently blacklisted; Kirk Douglas claims that breaking the blacklist by insisting Trumbo get “Spartacus” screenplay credit was the proudest moment of his career.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Ben Niles’ documentary “Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037” profiles the progress of a single 9-foot grand piano from its first step as a laminated strip of mahogany through its production at Steinway & Sons, the 154-year-old piano factory in Astoria, Queens, to its delivery 12 months later. While virtually every other piano maker has mechanized, Steinway continues to do it the old-fashioned way, an approach that Harry Connick Jr and other featured musicians say gives each instrument its unique feel and sound.