May 1, 2007
Faux-town
This week brings the Golden Globe winner Dreamgirls to Reckless' shelves. Based on a Tony Award winning Broadway musical and offering a Best Supporting Actress Oscar to American Idol's Jennifer Hudson, it features celebrated performances from Beyonce Knowles (The Pink Panther), Eddie Murphy (48 Hours), and Jamie Foxx (Ray), as well as a 70's style soundtrack that helped make the show so popular. Kate Winslett (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Heavenly Creatures) was also nominated for an Oscar for her role in Little Children, is the acclaimed drama dissecting family life and domestication. The Oscar nominated shorts (including the winners) are all collected in the 2006 Academy Award Shorts DVD, which is also new this week.
Of the smaller films, Happily N'ever After is the new animated comedy, where fairytale reality is suddenly skewed, and must be fixed by a Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Grudge) voiced Cinderella. Bruce Willis (Die Hard, Pulp Fiction) helps ease pop singer Justin Timberlake into the movie ring with the kidnapping-gone-awry film Alpha Dog. The story of a woman who discovered the value of her thrift store purchase is told in the documentary Who the #$@& Is Jackson Pollock, and Following Sean offers a documentary look into the current life of the then four-year-old Shaun, the subject of 1969 short film about being young, wild, and free in San Francisco. On the other side of the country, Diggers is a coming of age story about a working class group of friends on Long Island.
Though the remake of The Hitcher, featuring Sean Bean (Fellowship of the Ring, Goldeneye) in Rutger Hauer's original role, is the marquee horror film of the week, we have also brought in several of the Afterdark Film Festival's "8 Movies to Die For:" The Gravedancers aims for the classic horror movie conventions when friends "gravedance" to wake a departed comrade and end up stalked by murderous ghosts; The Hamiltons is a suburban satire where the perfect family tends to remain perfect until the moment they invariably kill their neighbors; a more traditional slasher picture is Dark Ride, featuring a serial killer stalking an amusement park ride; Penny Dreadful features Mimi Rogers (The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Rapture) in the story of a therapist and patient experiencing the fears they had hoped to overcome; and Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge) tells the story of an actress in a horror film whose screen life and real life begin to blur in Reincarnation.
Reckless has recently brought in a great deal of new Anime. The entire first season of Samurai X (also called Rurouni Kenshin) is now in the store, as well as Samurai X: The Motion Picture and two other Rurouni Kenshin movies, Trust and Betrayal and Reflection. Though we have had the four-disc Hellsing series for years, the brand new reworking of Kouta Hirano's original manga has just been released in Hellsing Ultimate. We also have the complete first season of the popular Naruto, an energetic anime about three young ninja in training, as well as the first volume of both Bleach, a newer anime where a boy who can see ghosts is enlisted to maintain the balance between the living and the dead, and Blackjack, about a mercenary surgeon who performs supernatural cures for unspoken costs.
Several television shows are new this week, too. Michael Palin's newest non-fiction series Around the World In 80 Days has just been released, as well as BBC productions of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now. Bob Hoskins (The Long Good Friday, Unleashed) stars in Flickers, set in the era of silent films, and Masterpiece Theatre brings us the Victorian drama The Real Charlotte. The second season of Without a Trace is also new this week, as well as a four disc "best of" set of The Larry Sanders Show. The IMAX documentary Deep Sea rounds out the collection.
