DVD/Blu Ray Shed: January 3, 2012

It’s “we missed the holiday shopping season” week in the DVD/BluRay Shed, as we take a gander at all of this week’s new releases and wonder why they picked now to be… new releases, when you’d figure there’s more money to be made a couple weeks ago when people were panicking looking to buy something for their office secret santa or whatever. Although, this week could also be the “we got a new TV on boxing day and want to watch something on it”, so perhaps these new release folks aren’t as unclever as we’d initially suspect:


Contagion

Dir. Steven Soderbergh

The scariest horror film of the year – bar none – was , somehow, directed by an Oscar winner and starred Gwyneth Paltrow. Thanks to the year’s best editing job by Stephen Mirrione, Cliff Martinez’s second best electronic score (the best being his work in Drive) and “Peter Andrews”’ work shooting, Contagion ends up being massively scary and more than a little disturbing instead of a celeb-filled Outbreak update.

The Guard

Dir. John Michael McDonagh

The most successful independent Irish film of all time features Calexico providing the score, and Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle providing the laug- alright look, I haven’t seen it. I had dinner at an Irish friend’s house a couple months ago, here in Toronto, and she was lauding this film as the best she’d seen all year, it was so great, it was marvelous, etc. etc., and when I found out the film itself was Irish, I irrationally decided not to see it. At the time I felt, subconsciously and very rudely, that she was engaging in that weird dance of cultural nationalistic exaggeration where for example I tell German people that poutine is incredibly delicious and a truly authentic version in all its sublime glory can only be found in Quebec, when in reality, it’s a salty brown pile of mush that you can make at home, were you interested in spending 40 minutes labouring to make salty brown mush. However, I was clearly an idiot, because literally everyone, including a whole bunch of non-Irish, are saying that this movie is fantastic.

Shark Night

Dir. David R. Ellis

Crud. Neutered, joyless crud.