Here's a selection of new movies on DVD for November 2008.
Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer star in this suspense movie that takes place mostly on a cramped, shabby train during its several-day journey from Beijing to Moscow. Aboard are Roy (Harrelson) and Jessie (Mortimer), an American married couple who have just completed a two-year church-related mission. On the train they meet a 20-ish American woman and her much older Spanish boyfriend. But there's suspicion that someone is involved in dealing drugs, and somewhere in Siberia, someone is killed. Then a Russian narcotics detective (Ben Kingsley) boards the train.
Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. star in this politically incorrect action comedy that lampoons everything Hollywood. The story concerns a group of actors who go to Vietnam to do a war movie and end up running afoul of drug dealers. Downey plays a white method actor who has his skin darkened to portray an African American. Stiller's character generally plays action heroes, except for his role as an intellectually disabled person in
Simple Jack. Actor-comedian Brandon T. Jackson portrays a rapper named Alpa Chino, who markets the energy drink Booty Sweat.
Set hundreds of years in the future, this is a Pixar animated movie. The story opens on an abandoned city whose only remaining inhabitants seem to be a robot and a cockroach. The robot is WALL-E, an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class. He collects, compacts and stacks trash all day, and in the evening he watches a videotape of [i]Hello, Dolly![/i]. Humans have become fat and lazy, living in space stations, where they move about in chairs while watching video screens. They send a probe robot called EVE to Earth, and WALL-E gets into a romance with her.
