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Movies Keep Killing Your Loved Ones
(But in an endearing, heartwarming, or funny way)
This week brings us a bevy of films that communicate with people no longer with us, the largest of which is PS I Love You. When Gerard Butler (Dear Frankie, 300) dies of a brain tumor, his wife (Hillary Swank: Million Dollar Baby, The Core) begins to receive mysterious letters... her husband sends her messages and tasks to help her overcome grief and move forward with her life, including having her and her girlfriends travel to Ireland and revisit the places where they fell in love.
Mitch Albom's For One More Day stars Michael Imperioli (The Inner Life of Martin Frost, The Sopranos) as a suicidal ex-baseball star. Returning to his hometown, alcoholic and depressed, he is magically granted one more day with his departed mother (Ellen Burstyn: The Fountain, Requiem for a Dream) in a story of redemption in a film presented by Oprah Winfrey.
The comedy of the group is Over Her Dead Body, in which Eva Longoria Parker (Harsh Times, Desperate Housewives) dies on her wedding day in an ice sculpture mishap. When her grieving fiance (Paul Rudd: The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Shape of Things) meets a beautiful psychic (Lake Bell: The Practice, I Love Your Work), what's a ghost to do? She does her heavenly best to drive off her flesh and blood competition.
There, or not there?
Based on the image, icon, and legend of Bob Dylan, the critically acclaimed I'm Not There stars a variety of different actors as different incarnations of the star in different stages of his life and career. Among the different Dylans are Heath Ledger (The Four Feathers, Brokeback Mountain), Christian Bale (The Prestige, Empire of the Sun), and Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal, Oscar and Lucinda), who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the role.
Ice Cube (Friday, Ghosts of Mars) and Tracy Morgan (Little Man, Are We There Yet?) are a pair of bumbling thieves in this week's biggest name comedy, First Sunday. Sentenced to 5,000 hours of community service, but needing to pull one quick heist, they set out to rob the community church building fund... only to find it's already been taken. Also starring Katt Williams (Norbit, Epic Movie).
The other new comedies are a pair of mockumentaries: Gamers 
follows four slacker friends as they document themselves and their dedication to the role-playing game "Demons, Nymphs, and Dragons." Military Intelligence & You! is a parody of the 1940s training films and public service announcements, doing for the military and military intelligence what the Reefer Madness parodies did for drug culture...
The collection of Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning shorts is new on DVD this week, in the Collection of 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films, including the winners The Mozart of Pickpockets and the animated Peter & the Wolf. Our new documentary films this week are War Dance, about Northern Uganda children who use song and dance to bring joy to war torn lives, and The Business of Being Born, which provides parents-to-be insight into the journey from pregnancy to birth.
The family-approved Bella stars Eduardo Verástegui (Chasing Papi) as a famous soccer star and Tammy Blanchard (The Good Shepherd, Stealing Harvard) as a struggling waitress who both find their lives turned upside-down, but find an indelible connection in kindness even more powerful than romance.
Five women struggle through one night at a restaurant in I Really Hate My Job, as they find their individual ways through a hard night, coping with their dreams and slowly getting older, as an actress (Neve Campbell: Scream, Wild Things) and a writer (Shirley Henderson: Bridget Jones' Diary, Topsy-Turvy) chafe at working in food service jobs.
The 4th Dimension is an independent science fiction thriller about a man who becomes obsessed with analyzing time after finding Albert Einstein's journal on the Unified Field Theory, which has never been solved. Our newest Bollywood film is Saawariya, a passionate musical romance based on Dostoevsky's White Nights, and Middletown focuses on a small Irish town as the new preacher returns home to find the town may need more guidance than he can provide.
In our TV New Releases this week, the third volume of Book 3 of the popular animated Avatar series has arrived, as well as the 4th season of the science fiction series The 4400. Also new is the continuation of Greg The Bunny, once cancelled and now picked up by IFC, providing a new 2-disc set: Greg the Bunny: Best of the Film Parodies.
