DVD Rental Blog

All around the world, millions of people are members of street gangs. Clubbing together in groups they fight, stab, shoot, rob, rape and murder anyone outside of the fold. In his BAFTA award winning documentary series Ross Kemp on Gangs which has just been released on DVD, the hard-man of EastEnders travels round the world in an attempt to infiltrate these criminal gangs and discover who they are, what makes them tick and what the law is doing to curb their criminal activity. In his quest he talks to gang members, locals who have been affected by gang violence, and the authorities who are attempting to combat the problem.

Starting off in El Salvador, where earthquakes, volcanoes and gun war terrify the population, Ross meets members of the MS13, considered by the US to be “the most dangerous gang in the world”, including those who cannot walk to the end of their street without running the risk of being shot down and killed. Moving on to Pollsmoor High Security Prison in Cape Town, South Africa, he learns the fearsome power of the inmates who subject new arrivals to violent attacks and gang rape as part of their brutal initiations. During the course of his harrowing journey, the actor cum journalist joins an elite police riot squad in Poland as they escort a notoriously violent Neo-Nazi football hooligan, meets families in St Louis facing daily intimidation from gang members as well as a man trying to leave his gangster lifestyle behind him, and is set on fire as part of the initiation rites for a Neo-Nazi group from Moscow.

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Encompassing shifting tribal allegiances, a good friend turned sworn enemy and a loving relationship that lasts a life-time, Mongol presents an epic account of the dramatic and harrowing formative years of the young tribal warrior Temudgin, who will eventually become the mighty ruler Genghis Khan.

Based on leading scholarly accounts and shot on the steppes of China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, Sergei Bodrov’s historical biopic gives a full-blooded account of life in this harsh and unforgiving region that sticks closely to the established facts.

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The family feuds, criminal gangs and hard-eyed women who roam the streets of the gritty South Boston neighbourhood of Dorchester form the setting for Ben Affleck’s directorial debut crime drama.

Like Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel by author Dennis Lehane. Steeped in local colour, the film is a tale of abuse, loss and corruption. The film’s distributors actually pulled it from the Times BFI London Film Festival line-up and put back its UK release date because of the plot’s coincidental similarities to the Madeleine McCann case.

When four-year-old Amanda McCready goes missing, her junkie mother Helene (Amy Ryan) despairs. Unwilling to trust the cops, Amanda’s devoted uncle and aunt (Titus Welliver and Amy Madigan) call in a private detective (Casey Affleck – Ben’s brother) and his girlfriend (Michelle Monaghan) to search for the missing girl. The pair, working alongside the cynical, squinty detective on the case (Ed Harris) and the heartbroken police captain (Morgan Freeman) go down a long, winding road that leads them to the shadowy underworld of drug peddlers, ex-convicts and murderous paedophiles.

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Ever since Nintendo unveiled their wireless white wonder to the world (the Wii), practically everybody who saw the infra-red WiiMote control in action at some point thought the same thing: ‘Wouldn’t it be totally sweet if someone made a Star Wars game which allowed you to use the controller as a lightsabre?’

Well, turns out that someone did. The Star Wars ‘Expanded Universe’ – that is, stories set before, beyond and in between the narratives of the six films – is huge. There are hundreds of ancillary novels, comic books and video games set in the Star Wars universe, some of them great (see the Battlefront and the Knights of the Old Republic series’) some of them not so great (Empire at War). The Force Unleashed looks set to neatly slot into the former category.

The action takes place between Episodes III and IV, (so it’s technically Episode 3.241407 or something like that) and see players assuming the mantle of one Galen Marek, the secret apprentice of Darth Vader who is charged with hunting down the remaining Jedi after the Emperor orders their extermination.

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After the successful fusion of uninhibited bawdiness and showbiz satire in The 40 Year Old Virgin and pregnancy-centric rom-com Knocked Up, current chieftain of Hollywood comedy Judd Apatow looks to have scored another hit with Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Once again he takes a situation that really shouldn’t be funny – in this case the break-down of a long-term relationship – and sucks from it every last drop of laughs.

When Peter Bretter (Jason Segel), a genial underachiever who composes incidental music for American TV shows, is dumped by his beautiful actress girlfriend, Sarah Marhall (Kristen Bell), he is devastated. Standing stark naked in his kitchen and weeping buckets, he begs her to stay, but to no avail – her success has outstripped his and she has bigger fish to fry. He seeks solace in one-night stands but is haunted by Sarah’s memory. Tired of womanising, he takes advice from his step-brother Brian (Bill Hader) and escapes to Hawaii, only to discover that Sarah and her rock star boyfriend Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) are staying in the same hotel. The set up is textbook farce. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of Rachel (Mila Kunis), the pretty hotel receptionist with whom Peter strikes up a relationship.

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Named after the sticky mixture of lemon, sugar and water that is used as an alternative to leg wax, Caramel is an ensemble comedy set in and around a Beirut beauty salon where the women struggle to make the best of a society which so often limits their options.

Director Nadine Labaki plays thirty-something salon owner Layale. The daughter of Christian parents, Layale is in the throes of an ill-advised affair with a married man.

Her Muslim co-worker Nasrine (Yasmine Al Masri) is about to be married to the man of her dreams, but goes to desperate measures to hide the fact she is not a virgin from her conservative in-laws. Rose (Sihame Haddad), the seamstress from upstairs, would llove to be in a relationship, but must spend all her spare time caring for her senile older sister.

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Love in the Time of Cholera is based on the sumptuous, florid novel by Nobel Prize winning Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez. The film adaptation by Mike Newell, who is best known for Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, just goes to show that the best novels rarely work well on the big screen.

The setting is the small Columbian town of Cartanega around the year 1900. The young clerk Florentino (played by Unax Ugalde as a teenager and Javier Bardem as an adult) catches a glimpse of wealthy beauty Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) through an open window as he is going about on an errand. A poet of sorts, Florentino eventually wins Fermina’s heart by writing letters to her and the two embark on a breathless courtship (complete with Romeo and Juliet balcony scene).

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Fear and Trembling, adapted from Amélie Nothomb’s autobiographical novel, is the tale of downtrodden Belgian translator Amélie (Sylvie Testud) who takes a job in the head office of a Tokyo firm. Speaking fluent Japanese and determined to become a “true Japanese woman” in the land where she grew up as a small child, Amélie decides to forge for herself a new life in the East. However, her dream job turns into a living nightmare as Amélie suffers ridicule and bullying at the hands of her sadistic Japanese bosses. It is a tale of someone who speaks perfect Japanese, but in another sense does not understand Japan at all.

Working under the 29-year-old Mori Fubuki, Amélie comes to idolise her new boss, a tall picture of beauty, who is initially very kind to her. However, Amélie’s well-meant attempts to be useful in her new office turn out to be serious social blunders in her adoptive society, prompting her Japanese colleagues to question “how the nice white geisha became a rude Yankee.”

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A film about a young man who takes a life-size sex doll as his girlfriend could only be construed as creepy and sordid on paper. But don’t be put off by the premise – Lars and the Real Girl, directed by Craig Gillespie, is a truly beautiful movie which explores the isolation of mental illness with touching sensitivity and gentle humour.

27-year-old Lars, played with utter conviction by Ryan Gosling, is a socially inept loner who avoids contact with people wherever he can. Other than attending the local Lutheran church each Sunday, Lars spends the majority of time in the dark of his garage apartment, wrapped in the small quilt his mother sewed for him when he was born. His brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and pregnant sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer) try to bring him out of his shell, but their repeated invitations to dinner tend to be met with feeble rejections.

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Sally Hawkins is delightful as 30-year-old Poppy, a primary school teacher living in London with an attitude as sunny as the Costa del Sol. She is dippy, bubbly and optimistic, with a laugh which is at times charming, at times irritating. She is so relentlessly cheery that we spend the first half of the film in suspense – surely her chirpiness can’t last for long… surely that smile will be wiped off her face by tragedy, or some secret obsession (for a comparison, see review on He loves me… he loves me not? After all, director Mark Leigh’s last film, Vera Drake, was harrowingly dark, and he is renowned for the bittersweet melancholy that pervades his work.

Not so Poppy. Happy-Go-Lucky is a film about a genuinely happy person. It plays with and then dismisses our obsession with irony and reveals that there is indeed a brighter side to life. The title itself challenges our easy assumption that pessimism equates to realism. Indeed, after the film’s glorious reception at the Berlin Film Festival (Sally Hawkins won a Silver bear for best actress and Mike Leigh was nominated for a Golden Bear) Leigh explained: “It’s important to reject the growing fashion to be miserabilist, the growing fashion to be pessimistic and gloomy because the world is in a bad way. Everywhere there are people on the ground getting on with it and being positive.”

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