Coming out this week is a film that's been garnering some Oscar buzz since its showing at the Toronto Film Festival.
Directed by Oscar-winning brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 'A Serious Man' is the story of an ordinary man's search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry.
Larry's unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolf) is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet to save up for a nose job. While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter writer is trying to sabotage Larry's chances for tenure at the university.
Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Plus, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person – a mensch – a serious man?
On DVD and Blu is the animated film, 'Monsters Vs. Alien,' featuring the voices of Seth Rogen, Reese Witherspoon, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, and Paul Rudd.
When Susan Murphy is unexpectedly clobbered by a meteor full of outer space gunk, she mysteriously grows to 49-feet-11-inches tall and is instantly labeled a "Monster" named Ginormica. The military jumps into action, and she is captured and held in a secret government compound filled with other "monsters" like herself. This ragtag group consists of the brilliant but insect-headed Dr. Cockroach, P.H.D.; the macho half-Ape-half-fish The Missing Link; the gelatinous and indestructible B.O.B.; and the 350-foot grub called Insectosaurus. Their confinement time is cut short however, when a mysterious alien robot lands on Earth and the motley crew of Monsters is called into action to save the world from imminent destruction.
In 'Kicking It,' the documentary chronicles the summer of 2006, when the football world's attention was focused on Germany but thousands of players around the world were training hard and competing to be a part of another World Cup -- the Homeless World Cup. It had been a wild idea by a Scot and an Austrian to give homeless people a chance to change their lives through an international street soccer competition. Five years later, the annual Homeless World Cup had become an internationally recognized sports competition. Five hundred homeless players from 48 nations would ultimately be selected to represent their countries in Cape Town, South Africa, coming from such disparate parts of the world as war-torn Afghanistan; the slums of Kenya; the drug rehab clinics of Dublin; the streets of Charlotte, N.C.; the overflowing public shelters of Madrid; and the unforgiving city of St. Petersburg, Russia, where the homeless have no rights or identity. Win or lose, for these players it would be the journey of a lifetime.
