The DVD/Blu Ray Shed: Dec. 8

Come on to the shed where the DVD at.

Submitted by mike, 12/08/09 3:58 PM

Every week or three, Mike takes a trip out back to the DVD/Blu Ray Shed with the best yeah that's right the best DVD's and Blu Ray Discs coming out that week. Come on with Mike on a journey to adventure and a shed.

THE PICKS OF THE WEEK FOR THE WEEK THAT HAS DECEMBER 8TH IN IT:

#1: The Cove (2009, dir. Louie Psihoyos)

A runaway favourite at this year’s local HotDocs festival, The Cove is part nature doc and part espionage thriller. Director Psihoyos, a former National Geographic photographer, attempts to expose the recurring slaughter of dolphins in a hidden, secluded bay in the small Japanese town of Taiji. It won like a gabillion awards this year, and is not only compelling, but really beautiful to look at.

#2: Julie & Julia (2009, dir. Norah Ephron)

The extremely talented Norah Ephron departs slightly from her usual boyey girly milieu to direct this twin tale tracking the dawning of the Julia Child age and a lonely, frustrated blogger’s vicarious triumphs and failures cooking her way through Child’s seminal French cookbook. Streep is as always fantastic, and while the film suffers from some tacked-on, manufactured angst near its conclusion, there’s enough joy previous that it’s still quite enjoyable, even for… a… well a dude, I guess.

#3:Public Enemies (2009, dir. Michael Mann)

How I tried to love this film, how I tried. Mann continues his career-long trajectory here directing handsome men playing stoic, unreadable but volatile stalwart antiheroes, with a great score and spectacularly impressive, pick-the-art-up-and-move-the-art-forward cinematography, but fails to generate any drama whatsoever. Public Enemies is a triumph of attention to period detail, costuming and set design, but it’s deadly serious and so earnest that it bores a little. Or maybe more than a little.

#4: World's Greatest Dad (2009, dir. Bobcat Goldthwait)

Yeah, that Bobcat Goldthwait. The guy from the Police Academy movies who talks like a snake eats has turned into a pretty talented director of black-ass comedies. He’s followed up 2006’s Sleeping Dogs Lie (in which a woman struggles to reveal to her fiancé that she has had sex with her dog) with World’s Greatest Dad, which stars Robin Williams as a frustrated writer who uses his son’s suicide as a means to personal success. Goldthwait was always an original, and that’s continued here as he’s making funny, funny films that no one else would even touch.