Susan’s dvd/video update for week of Friday, Dec. 4th:
There’s no doubt that the Yuletide season is here! “Four Christmases” is a romantic comedy chronicling the emotional maturation of a self-absorbed, happily unmarried San Francisco couple (Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaughn) who ditch their dysfunctional families on Dec. 25th, saying they’re doing humanitarian work abroad but, instead, indulging in sybaritic pleasures. But when they’re trapped at the airport by a fogbank and caught on camera by a TV reporter, they’re forced to visit their divorced parents (Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen, Jon Voight).
The dysfunctional family theme travels to Roubaix, Northern France, in “A Christmas Tale” with Catherine Deneuve as the venerable Gallic matriarch recently diagnosed with early-stage leukemia and looking for a bone-marrow donor for an experimental treatment.
In the new CGI-animated “Gotta Catch Santa Claus,” William Shatner voices old St. Nick as a 12 year-old boy sets out to catch him to prove his existence and put the skeptics at rest. And from Smithsonian Networks, “In Search of Santa Claus” reveals how a holy man was transformed into a treasured icon of holiday joy.
As the fourth installment in the adrenaline-fueled series, “Terminator Salvation” finds John Connor (Christian Bale) time-traveling to 2018 to search for a teenager (Anton Yelchin) who will turn out to be his father in the future; the DVD is packed with explosive footage not shown in theaters, plus many bonus extras.
Before “Twilight,” the brooding vampire heartthrob Robert Pattinson played an aspiring musician stuck in a rut in the comedy “How To Be.” Hopeless and depressed, he discovers the best-selling self-help book “It’s Not Your Fault” and hires its author as his live-in life-coach.
PICK OF THE WEEK: In “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” Ben Stiller, as the former security guard at New York’s Museum of Natural History, discovers his diorama friends – Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), the miniature cowboy (Owen Wilson) and the Roman centurian (Steve Coogan) – are being shipped off to storage in the Federal Archives beneath the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and he must save them.