This Week on DVD & Blu-ray (03-20-12)

 

 

Look what we have here – a big-screen adaptation (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”), a resuscitation (“The Muppets”), and a remake (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) – all three Oscar-nominees and two of them actually took a golden boy home! Each of them are easy recommendations. And then there’s “Hop” one of those odd holiday releases that take a year to come out, because the studios know they have to wait for the particular holiday the movie coincides with – in this case, Easter. It’s no coincidence that one of the highest grossing movies in Japan, the controversial “Battle Royale” from 2000, is finally coming out here in the States, the same week as “The Hunger Games” – it is after all a story about a class of teenagers who are forced by their government to compete in a deadly game, where they must kill each other in order to win. I am eager to catch up with it, as it stars one of my favorite Japanese actors, Takeshi Kitano. Fans of Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet would do well to check out “Carnage”, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the play “God Of Carnage” in which two supposedly civilized couples gather in a Brooklyn apartment to discuss an altercation their children had, too bad John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz don’t fare as well.