Here's a selection of new movies on DVD for November 2008.
Vince Vaughn stars in this holiday comedy, and other actors in the cast include Paul Giamatti, Miranda Richardson, Rachel Weisz, Kathy Bates, rapper Ludacris, Elizabeth Banks and Kevin Spacey. The story begins with Mother Claus (Bates) and her first-born son welcoming a new baby boy. The younger child, Nicholas, grows up to be saintly and becomes Santa (Giamatti). The elder son, Fred (Vaughn), becomes a Chicago repo man with a good-looking girlfriend (Weisz). But he needs money and goes to work for his younger brother at the North Pole. There all manner of complications arise, including the presence of an efficiency expert (Spacey).
In this action comedy based on the 1960s TV sitcom that starred Don Adams, who plays main character Maxwell Smart? In the idiom popularized by Adams: Would you believe Steve Carell? When the movie begins, Max works a desk job at the US spy agency CONTROL. But he soon becomes Agent 86 and is teamed with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway in the role Barbara Feldon originated on TV). Together they battle the enemy organization KAOS, which hatches a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. As in the TV show, there's a shoe phone.
This is a documentary made by Alex Gibney (
Taxi to the Dark Side,
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) about Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005), a colorful journalist and author best known for his 1972 novel
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson's work popularized the term "gonzo journalism," an exaggerated, highly subjective, sometimes-metaphorical style of reporting with an emphasis on the journalist as an active participant in the subject matter. In the documentary, Gibney uses evocative archival materials, and Johnny Depp reads from Thompson's work.
In this offbeat superhero movie, Will Smith plays John Hancock, who possesses immense physical strength, is invulnerable and can fly. But he drinks to excess, looks like a Skid Row bum and has a disagreeable personality. His feats can be heroic, but they often have devastating side effects that bring lawsuits and bad press. He saves the life of Ray (Jason Bateman), but in the process causes a train wreck. Then Ray, who is a PR guy, helps the superhero improve his image, but it turns out Ray's wife (Charlize Theron) leads to a big reveal about Hancock that is surprising.
Directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, this fantasy is the sequel to
Hellboy (2004). Again the characters are based on those in Dark Horse Comics, and actors Ron Perlman, Selma Blair and Doug Jones are back. The superhero Hellboy (Perlman), the combustible Liz Sherman (Blair) and the amphibian Abe Sapien (Jones) still work for the secret US paranormal lab. This time around an ancient feud between elves and humans is revived, leading to a huge battle involving 4,900 mechanical warriors. Del Toro (
Pan's Labyrinth) creates astonishing creatures.
The main character in this animated comedy that takes place in the Valley of Peace is the chubby black-and-white panda Po (voice of Jack Black), who works for his father in a noodle shop. Other residents include martial-arts master Shifu (voice of Dustin Hoffman) and his five students (voices of Jackie Chan, Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu and David Cross). When the feared Tai Lung (voice of Ian McShane) threatens the valley, a Dragon Warrior is chosen to meet him in combat. The surprising choice for this honor turns out to be Po, who must rise to the challenge.
In 1961 the US sent a chimpanzee named Ham on a space mission that paved the way for America's first human astronaut. This movie is a family animated comedy where three chimps go through a wormhole to retrieve a missing space probe. They are Titan (voice of Patrick Warburton), Luna (voice of Cheryl Hines) and Ham's grandson, Ham III (voice of Andy Samberg). The trio arrives at an inhospitable planet ruled by the evil tyrant Zartog (voice of Jeff Daniels). There's also Kilowatt (voice of Kristin Chenoweth), a walking light bulb who incandesces when she gets scared.
This animated movie tells a story set between
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The characters are nearly all familiar from
Star Wars live-action films, but few of the previous actors' voices are heard in the animated movie. (Exceptions: Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee, Anthony Daniels.) The story is driven by a kidnapping of Jabba the Hutt's baby and the attempt by Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker and his new female Padawan, Ahsoka Tano, to rescue the infant. They must fight their way past Count Dooku's droids.
Based on novels by Ann Brashares, this is the sequel to
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005), and Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively and Alexis Bledel are all back. This time around the four main characters have just finished their first year in college. Tibby (Tamblyn), an NYU film student, works in a video store in New York. Carmen (Ferrera), now at Yale, gets involved in summer theater in Vermont. Bridget (Lively), a student at Brown, goes to Turkey on an archaeological dig. Lena (Bledel), studying at Rhode Island School of Design, has a romance.
This is an upbeat holiday dramedy about what happens when an African-American family gets together for the first time in four years. At the center is the Whitfield family matriarch (Loretta Devine), now divorced and living with her boyfriend (Delroy Lindo). Also present are a businesswoman daughter with a lot of 'tude, another adult daughter and her philandering husband, a college student daughter and her boyfriend, a son who's AWOL from the Marines and has married a white woman, a son (Idris Elba) in financial hot water, and a teenage son who wants to become a singer.
