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Robot Wars
Ushering in the biggest money-maker of the summer, Director Michael Bay (Armageddon, The Island) helmed Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, new this week to DVD and Blu-Ray. In the few years since the first Transformers movie, Optimus Prime and his Autobots have been hunting the few Decpticons still on Earth... as Sam (Shia LeBouf: Eagle Eye, Disturbia) and his girlfriend (Megan Fox: How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen) prepare for college life. When the Decpticons find that the secret to resurrecting their fallen leader resides in Sam's head, an international chase and a globetrotting adventure ensue, propelling our heroes to the Egyptian pyramids where the ultimate Transformer battle is destined to take place. Now with Rifftrax!
Splatter
Adapted from anime, Blood: The Last Vampire is an English-language supernatural/horror/action film about Saya (Jeon Ji-Hyun: Uninvited), a vampire hunter who goes undercover at an American Air Force Base in Japan. Posing as a schoolgirl, Saya saves Alice (Allison Miller: 17 Again, Kings), killing two demons who had been posing as her classmates... but when Alice tells the story, no one believes her: the buckets of blood and strewn limbs have been cleaned up.
Suddenly, Saya is Alice's only friend, the only one who knows about the monsters she's seen, and the only one who can protect her from the hordes that are on their way.
The second sequel in the backwoods-mutant series, Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead, features the insane, deformed, and inbred Appalachian cannibals from the first two movies, but this time the people lost in the woods aren't naive campers: a prison bus crash lets some of the most brutal killers in the country loose in woods, and the line between victim and monster blurs. With Janet Montgomery (Hills Run Red), Tamer Hassan (Eastern Promises, Unleashed), and Gil Kolirin (Return to the House on Haunted Hill).
Smaller Titles
Legendary animator Bill Plympton's Guns on the Clackamas is a live-action mockumentary about an ill-fated western. As an ambitious cast and crew attempt to get the film made, their technical difficulties escalate to fatalities on the set (featuring death by everything from improperly maintained equipment to poorly refrigerated potato salad), and eventually the fate of the movie rests on anyone on the set being alive to finish it.
Mira Nair's (The Namesake, Vanity Fair) now classic Monsoon Wedding is new this week on Criterion Collection released DVD and Blu Ray, a story of the arranged marriage of a well-off Indian family's only daughter, and the dramas that arise from her secret personal life and the family of a husband-to-be she's never met.
Set in the early 1900s, Cheri is the story of a young man (Rupert Friend: Pride & Prejudice, The Last Legion) and his affair with an older woman (Michelle Pfeiffer: Stardust, Batman Returns) in Paris... but after he marries another woman, and the two spend months apart, they realize that
their affair was more than casual, and it defined both of their lives. With Kathy Bates (The Day the Earth Stood Still, About Schmidt).
At the urging of his mother (Ellen Burstyn: The Wicker Man, Requiem for a Dream), a young man (Tate Ellington: Taking Chance, Descent) travels to Thailand to retrieve his brother in The Elephant King. The two become entranced by their surroundings and fall victim to their basest selves in Chiang Mai, and come to face the realities of their lives and relationships. With Josef Sommer (Patch Adams, Nobody's Fool).
The Icelandic film White Night Wedding is a loose adaptation of a Checkov play, where a middle-aged professor is one day away from his marriage to a woman half his age... but has to overcome a hostile reverend, a sizable debt to his mother-in-law-to-be, and his blustery best friend, who also happens to be incredibly drunk.
Non-Fiction
Objectified is the newest documentary from Helvetica director Gary Hustwit, studying the design and practicality of the objects surrounding all of us on a daily basis,
and looking into the form and function of how everything in any household has been designed and refined over time.
The History Channel's Art of War centers on Sun Tzu's legendary book, as well as the life of Sun Tzu, and the historical records of the applications of The Art of War throughout history, in actual battles.
They Killed Sister Dorothy investigates the 2005 murder of Ohio-born nun Sister Dorothy Stang during her time in Brazil, working to preserve the Brazilian rainforests. The film presents the controversies and courtroom developments that followed the shooting of the 73-year-old activist.
The story of the fifty-two men who compete to become Miss Gay America, Pageant details the craft of the men who use makeup, costumes, and elaborate musical numbers to compete for the highest prize as female impersonators.
New this week to Reckless Video's TV New Releases are the 6th and final season of Showtime's The L-Word, as well as season 5 of the mathematics procedural Num3rs. Ken Burns' 6-disc series The National Parks is also new this week, as is the Cartoon Network animated series Ben 10. Finally, Reckless has the remastered Black Adder Goes Fourth, the 4th series of Rowan Atkinson's (Mr. Bean) historical farce.


