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Beating the Odds
Hot on the heels of last week's The Bank Job, 21 is another crime caper based on a true story. Inspired by their professor (Kevin Spacey: K-Pax, The Life of David Gale), a group of MIT students learn to apply their math skills to counting cards and winning blackjack. As the students, including Jim Sturges (Across the Universe, The Other Boleyn Girl) and Kate Bosworth (Superman Returns, Blue Crush), take their skills to Las Vegas and start raking in the winnings, until casino security (Lawrence Fishburn: Akeelah and the Bee, The Matrix) starts to take notice.
Famke Jensen (Rounders, X-Men) plays a pool shark in Turn the River, who has to win and keep winning in the hopes of earning the money to reclaim her son from her alcoholic ex-husband (Good Night and Good Luck, Down with Love).
Successful at Cannes, Heartbeat Detector is a blackmail and suspense story starring Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, La Moustache) as a successful psychologist sent to analyze the head of a German company (Michael Lonsdal: Munich, Goya's Ghosts). Digging into the the CEO's past becomes a dangerous occupation as more scandalous details are unearthed, and the full scale of how dangerous an enemy he might be come to light.
Big Dreams, Little Tokyo is a new independent comedy about an American businessman selling his Japanese translating skills and his Japanese-American roommate, too small to be a sumo wrestler at 200 pounds. As the pair go door-to-door on a tandem bike, they find an odd collection of characters and eventually find themselves appreciated for who they are, instead of who they keep trying to be.
A mockumentary about a once-prominent horror film maker, Brutal Massacre: A Comedy stars David Naughton (An American Werewolf in London) as fading director Harry Penderecki who finds himself a Hollywood outsider. A documentary crew films the process of his comeback picture, Brutal Massacre, but it could either put Harry back on top or mark him as an 80s relic forever.
Two documentaries are new this week: Heavy Metal in Baghdad follows Acrassicauda, the only Iraqi metal band, as they try to keep rocking during the regime of Saddam Hussein, after the Iraq War, through the American occupation, and eventually as expatriates in Syria, and the views of Iraq from the perspective of everyman rock guys. Expo: Magic of the White City is a documentary detailing the beginnings of the Chicago World's Fair, a vision of the future called "The White City," in a film narrated by Gene Wilder (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein).
New to Reckless Video's TV New Release section includes the complete series of Spaced, the ambitious BBC show that established the team from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and director Edgar Wright. Co-written by Pegg and Jessica Stevenson, Spaced follows the tennants of a house in North London as they write, obsess over comic books and Star Wars, go clubbing, take temp jobs, and try to carve out their individual slices of happiness in their mid-20s. Also new is the Robot Chicken: Star Wars half hour special, as well as the first hundred installments of Strongbad Email from the popular Homestarrunner.com
