New Releases for the Week of December 7, 2012

PLAYING FOR KEEPS

(FilmDistrict) Gerard Butler, Jessica Biel, Uma Thurman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dennis Quaid, Noah Lomax, Judy Greer, James Tupper.  Directed by Gabriele Muccino

A down on his heel retired soccer star dreams of a career in broadcast journalism while trying to make ends meet. In order to try to connect with his son he becomes the coach for his youth soccer team, hoping to reconcile with his ex-wife who is on the verge of getting re-married. Just when it looks like he’s making headway, the opportunity of a lifetime comes up which might throw all his dreams into disarray.

See the trailer, featurettes and a clip here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Romantic Comedy

Rating: PG-13 (for some sexual situations, language and a brief intense image)

Bad Kids Go to Hell

(Bad Kids Productions) Judd Nelson, Ali Faulkner, Ben Browder, Chanel Ryan. Based on the comic book series of the same name, a group of kids locked in detention on a Saturday find themselves tackling a serial killer on the loose and what may or may not be supernatural phenomenon that are clearly malevolent in nature.

See the trailer and promos here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Horror

Rating: R (for violence, language, sexual content and some drug use)

End of Watch

(Open Road) Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena, Anna Kendrick, America Ferrera. A re-release of the gritty L.A. cop drama that played to critical acclaim and decent box office.

See the trailer, clips and a promo here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Cop Drama

Rating: R (for strong violence, some disturbing images, pervasive language including sexual references and some drug use)

Hitchcock

(Fox Searchlight) Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Danny Huston. The greatest director in the movies takes on a project that is so controversial that the studios won’t touch it. His partner and love is skeptical but as Alfred Hitchcock risks everything to get this film (which the world would come to know as Psycho) made, the stakes get incredibly high.

See the trailer, a clip and a featurette here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Biographical Drama

Rating: PG-13 (for some violent images, sexual content and thematic material)

Khiladi 786

(Eros International) Akshay Kumar, Asin, Mithun Chakaborty, Paresh Rawal. The eighth installment of the most successful franchise in Bollywood history. Here to prove his worth to his father, the owner of a marriage bureau, a ne’er-do-well son winds up arranging a marriage between a cop and the sister of a mob figure. In order to make the marriage work, the criminals pretend to be cops but what they don’t know is that the family of cops are actually conmen pretending to be cops. Oh, who cares what it’s about, it’ll have plenty of singing and dancing.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Bollywood

Rating: NR

Searching for Sugar Man

(Sony Classics) Sixto Rodriguez, Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, Clarence Avant, Eva Rodriguez. A Detroit “can’t-miss” phenom in the ’70s records a single critically acclaimed album that bombs and disappears from the rock and roll radar admit reports of a gruesome onstage suicide. The reports of his demise set a group of some of his South African fans on a quest to find out what really happened to him and to their surprise, those reports turn out to be greatly exaggerated.

See the trailer and a clip here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Documentary

Rating: PG-13 (For brief strong language and some drug references)

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop

Conan O’Brien pauses during rehearsal for his tour.

(2011) Documentary (Abramorama) Conan O’Brien, Andy Richter, Jimmy Vivino, Stephen Colbert, John Stewart, Jack Black, Kyle Gass, Jack McBrayer, Jon Hamm, Jack White, Jim Carrey, Eddie Vedder, Scott Healey, Margaret Cho, Craig Robinson, Kristen Schaal. Directed by Rodman Flender

In 2010, “Tonight” show host Conan O’Brien was embroiled in a terrible situation that was really not of his own making. His predecessor Jay Leno had taken on what could only charitably be described as the unrealistically ambitious task of a daily show at 10pm – prime time – taking up five hours a week of valuable real estate on the NBC schedule. That experiment was an unequivocal failure and the network deemed it a better use of Leno to bring him back to late night.

However, he didn’t want to follow Conan’s Tonight Show gig with his own new late night program; he felt himself to be with some justification the headliner in the late night NBC family; after all, he’d been the host of the Tonight Show, the highest rated program in late night since Johnny Carson retired. The network then asked O’Brien to start the Tonight show later instead of the traditional 11:30pm start time it had been in for decades.

But Conan balked at this. He’d worked too hard to get where he was and now he was being penalized; in fact his ratings were starting to improve in certain desirable demographics. After some negotiation, he was released from his contract with the stipend that he not perform on television for a minimum of six months after the end of his 22-year tenure with NBC.

But he couldn’t just sit still. While his agents were negotiating a new show on TBS, he was getting ready to take his act on the road along with Andy Richter, Jimmy Vivino and the band (with which Conan, who isn’t a bad musician in his own right, often performed) and assorted guests. Thus armed, they went on a tour of the U.S. and Canada.

This documentary shows not only the show as the audiences saw it but looked behind the scenes to show you a little bit of what makes Conan tick and what motivated him to go on such a grueling tour when he had a new job already lined up. In many ways we get no closer to the man himself – he seems to keep people at a distance as far as I could tell but that might be more a sense that he is protecting his privacy as well.

In all honesty, I’m a big fan of his late night show. I find him to be a really funny guy, but not everybody does so that will definitely color your decision as to whether to check this out or not. It’s not an earth-shattering topic after all – your life will pretty much go on as it is with or without Conan in it. Fans of his show who haven’t already checked out the movie will probably want to do it because its more of the same.

However, the backstage content is fascinating and seeing how they pulled a pretty ambitious tour together in a remarkably short amount of time is interesting. While the situation is set up with his release from his NBC contract, he really doesn’t say much about how he feels about the way things ended with his long-time employer (quite possibly for contractual reasons) and it’s a shame because the movie could have benefitted with a little more insight into Conan the man and into the situation that spawned the tour.

But it’s still pretty damn fun.

WHY RENT THIS: The concert footage is funny; the behind the scenes stuff is fascinating.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: If you don’t like Conan O’Brien you won’t like this much. Also you really don’t get very much into who he is as a person.

FAMILY VALUES: Plenty of good ol’ fashioned foul language.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The tour ended just three weeks before O’Brien began his new talk show duties on TBS.

NOTABLE HOME VIDEO EXTRAS: There’s a lengthy interview with O’Brien but you’ll want the Blu-Ray for the commentary track which is one of the funniest you’ll ever hear.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $267,965 on an unreported production budget; I’m not sure if this is just box office receipts (I believe so) but it’s debut on On Demand probably doubled that at least; I believe the movie was solidly profitable.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Tour

FINAL RATING: 6.5/10

NEXT: A Late Quartet