November 27, 2007

Served Up Sweet

A good-hearted server, Keri Russell (The Upside of Anger, Mission Impossible:III) works to provide herself a better life, hoping to leave her loutish husband and open a pie shop in Waitress, which is helmed by director/actor Adrienne Shelly (Urban Legend, Sleep with Me) and features Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Serenity). The newest picture by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala) is The Namesake, where Kal Penn (Harold & Kumar, Van Wilder) tries to find a balance between the traditions of his Indian family and his place in modern America. Vitus is a Swiss picture of a wunderkind, a 12-year-old boy whose talents as a piano prodigy interfere with his desire to enjoy his childhood. Guy Pearce (Memento, The Time Machine) stars in First Snow, where a psychic tells a man that he will die before the first snow of the year, and the spiritual crisis this causes him.

I Know Who Killed Me is our newest thriller, putting Lindsay Lohan (Mean Girls, Georgia Rule) in the path of a serial killer, and, upon surviving her encounter, finds herself transformed toward a devious alter-ego. A horror/action picture, Skin Walkers is a werewolf picture, the story of a war between the werewolf pack that live with humans, and the pack that wants to hunt them.

The English comedy The Jolly Boys' Last Stand features Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Da Ali G Show), and sets a gang of Lads loose on a video camera, as they document their leader's leaving to be married. Jason Biggs (American Pie, Anything Else) is a soldier who wakes up stationed at the wrong base, in the tundra of Greenland instead of his post on Hawaii, and spends the duration of Guy-X on a comic adventure to find a better place to be. A man from the Australian outback sets out to be a singer in Nashville in Doing Time for Patsy Cline, but his journey is interrupted when the couple who picks him up end up being fugitives from the law.

Hot Rod is a stuntman comedy featuring a Saturday Night Live cast, starring SNL's Andy Samberg, as he vies for the film comedy heights reached by recent co-castmembers like Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler. Pigs is a college comedy centered around a bet: a campus ladies-man accepts a wager that he' can sleep with 26 girls, one for each letter of the alphabet.

The family friendly Mr. Bean provides his holiday romp in Mr. Bean's Holiday, sending the rubber-faced Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder, Rat Race) to France. Bratz: The Movie is a PG film that contests high school cliques, as the multicultural Bratz girls try to win out over peer pressure. A little younger, the thirteenth Land Before Time picture, The Wisdom of Friends continues the story of a group of dinosaur friends, and Ultimate Pandas is a film of frolicking pandas.

The newest anime feature by Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers) is Paprika, a near-future sci-fi about an apparatus that allows a person to enter someone else's dreams... while the device was intended for helpful purposes, when it falls into the wrong hands, the barrier between reality and the dream world begins to fall apart.

Resurrected after its 2002 cancellation, Futurama has returned in direct-to-video form, as Bender's Big Score reunites the original cast and writers in a feature-length film that sends Bender and Fry traveling through time.