DVD Releases
Big movies coming to the small screen
By Marni Weisz
November 4
KIT KITTREDGE: AN AMERICAN GIRL
Stars: Abigail Breslin, Julia Ormond
Director: Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park)
Story: In Depression-era Cincinnati, little Kit Kittredge (Breslin) watches as her dad loses his job, her mom (Ormond) is forced to take in an assortment of strange boarders and her neighbours lose their houses because they can’t pay their mortgages. (Good thing that’ll never happen again.) But Kit never loses her plucky attitude, especially when it comes to her dream of writing for the local paper.
November 9
KUNG FU PANDA
Voices: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman
Directors: Mark Osborne, John Stevenson
Story: Po the Panda (Black) loves kung fu. But that doesn’t mean he’s any good at it. He is, after all, lazy. But when, to everyone’s surprise, Po is identified as the chosen one from an ancient prophecy he must train, train, train with Master Shifu (Hoffman) and the Furious Five if he’s to have any chance of defeating the evil snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane).
DVD Extras: “Meet the Cast,” Cee-Lo music video, “How to Use Chopsticks,” “DreamWorks Animation Video JukeBox,” printables and weblinks
November 11
THIS CHRISTMAS
Stars: Loretta Devine, Regina King
Director: Preston A. Whitmore II (Crossover)
Story: It’s been four years since the Whitfield family last spent Christmas together — a long time to build up secrets, like secret marriages, secret debts, secret dalliances... Let the bickering begin!
DVD Extras: deleted scenes, Chris Brown music video
November 25
FRED CLAUS
Stars: Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti
Director: David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers)
Story: Broke, Fred Claus (Vaughn) is forced to return home and ask for money. His brother Nicholas (Giamatti) — a.k.a. Santa — agrees to lend a hand, but only if Fred helps out at the family factory prior to their busy season.
HANCOCK
Stars: Will Smith, Jason Bateman
Director: Peter Berg (The Kingdom)
Story: John Hancock (Smith) is a bad superhero. Every time he saves someone he does damage that offsets the good. So a PR whiz (Bateman) offers to help improve Hancock’s miserable public image.
DVD Extras: “Seeing the Future,” “Building a Better Hero,” “Bumps and Bruises”
MEET DAVE
Stars: Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Banks
Director: Brian Robbins (Norbit)
Story: Murphy plays the captain of a spaceship full of tiny humanoid aliens that assumes human form in order to disguise itself on a trip to Earth. Get it? The ship looks like a person. And the person that it looks like is its captain, Murphy. Their mission on Earth is to drain our planet of its water and take the H2O back to their dying planet. But after falling in love with a hot Earthling (Banks), the captain has second thoughts.
DVD Extras: gag reel, crew confessions
Vicky Cristina Barcelona |
SPACE CHIMPS
Voices: Andy Samberg, Cheryl Hynes
Director: Kirk De Micco (debut)
Story: Having lost an important probe in a wormhole, NASA
recruits HAM III (Samberg), a descendent of HAM I, the first chimpanzee
sent into space, to follow in his grandfather’s hairy footsteps and
find it.
DVD Extras: casting session, still gallery
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA
Stars: Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson
Director: Woody Allen (Scoop)
Story: Two bestest friends from the States — repressed Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and carefree Cristina (Johansson) — spend the summer before Vicky is to
get married in Barcelona. There, the women are propositioned by a lusty
Spanish artist (Bardem) who wants to take either, or preferably both,
to bed.
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Spotlight
WALL•E
Scathing satire on the lazy American lifestyle, or insensitive
affront to the overweight? Either way, just the fact that this animated
movie spawned such debate is saying something.
The tale of WALL•E, a trash-compacting robot left on Earth to clean up
our mess after we hightailed it into space, was one of the most
acclaimed movies of 2008 (following in the footsteps of its creator
Pixar’s last feature-length cartoon, Ratatouille).
Several hundred years after humans evacuate Earth they send another
robot, EVE, back to investigate. WALL•E instantly falls for the
egg-shaped automaton. But when EVE comes in contact with a living plant
she speeds back to her mother ship to report that Earth is once again
habitable.
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Little WALL•E manages to hitch a ride on her spacecraft, and once he reaches the mother ship finds it populated with grossly out of shape humans who ride around in chairs and slurp sodas all day.
The DVD comes with “Presto Amazing,” the short film that was shown in theatres before WALL•E, plus a brand-new animated short, deleted scenes, “WALL•E’s Tour of the Universe,” a conversation with sound designer Ben Burt (the voice of WALL•E) and a director commentary. There will also be a three-disc Collector’s Edition with loads more.
Release date: Nov. 18