Clichéd road movie not without charm
A look at some of the most recent DVD releases
We’re the Millers ★★★
Jennifer Aniston jiggles, Jason Sudeikis giggles and Ed Helms gets nasty in We’re the Millers, one of this year’s surprise juggernauts at the box office. Directed Marshall Rawson Thurber, this movie about a middle-aged drug dealer gets added mileage by turning this raunchy road movie into a quiet critique of mainstream, white-bread, Costcoshopping, Dockers-wearing, vaguely Christian America. The socio-economic angle is front-loaded into the very setup as we meet David Clark (Sudeikis), a pot dealer who sells his wares to suburban moms, affluent architects and old college buddies. When David gets into trouble for unpaid bills, his supplier (Helms) sends him to Mexico to pick up a shipment, which forces David to pose as a suburban dad alongside a faux family that includes Aniston and Emma Roberts. Though clichéd and predictable, and somewhat squirmy in Aniston’s scenes as a stripper, the film does offer enough naked charm and subtle social commentary to make it past the checkpoint. Special features include extended cut, Don’t Suck Venom, The Miller Makeovers, Extreme Aniston, gag reel, outtakes and more. Hannah Arendt ★★★ 1/2
Hannah Arendt had one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. After witnessing and surviving the Holocaust, Arendt penned entire- ly modern treatises on the nature of men and what she would famously call “the banality of evil.” Margarethe von Trotta’s new biopic scans all the great lines from this great thinker’s work, but it zeros in Arendt’s chronicle of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel. Opening with the action-packed capture of Eichmann by the Israeli secret service in Buenos Aires, we soon meet Arendt as she paces her Manhattan apartment in pencil skirts, forever puffing on cigarettes and clacking away at her typewriter. Arendt caused a firestorm when she suggested in her coverage of the trial that Jewish leaders played a role in the ghettoization, and eventual extermination, of their own people. New York’s Jewish community erupts: They call her a traitor, a turncoat. Arendt’s reaction is very interesting because she intellectualizes the entire denouement. The film sculpts an entirely heroic portrait of intellectual fortitude and a woman who refused tyranny in any form. Planes ★★
We had to suffer through talking cars that have romantic interludes on the Interstate, and now Pixar wants us to sit through talking aircraft. Dusty Crophopper is, duh, a crop-dusting plane who dreams of being at the international terminal instead of the grassy runway. He beats the odds and earns a place to in a race around the world, allowing the cliché-loving screenwriters to create archetypes that come a little too close to Archie Bunker terrain as Asian planes wear bamboo hats and Mexican planes play in a mariachi band. Planes feels like a product — without passion. Special features include digital copy and bonus short. The World’s End ★★★
In the recent run of apocalyptic comedies, this effort from Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) got a little lost amid the zombie parade of competition, but no matter. It’s a movie perfectly suited to home video and a night on the couch —- because that’s sort of what the people in this movie would rather be doing. Because the acting is bulletproof, even the scarier moments in this movie feel surprisingly lethal, which may not lead to comedy, but it leads to bloody fun nonetheless. Special features include cast commentary and more.