Movies You Didn’t Know Were Coming: January Edition

So this is 2011… so far I’m unimpressed and I’d hate to say it but… the DVD releases this month aren’t doing much to change my lack of thrillment (yeah I just made that word up; call me up Webster). It’s going to be a short run down this month so let’s just treat it like a band-aid and just rip it off quickly as possible.

Kicking it off in Blu-Ray January 4^th, and we have a variety of films ranging from the great action/westerns Once Upon a Time in Mexico and the Double Feature disc of El Marachi and Desperado, the mediocre with Coraline (3-D edition) to the shameful Ishtar, which at $18 on amazon must be desperately attempting to get back some of the $55 Million budget that it failed to make back the last 23 years. For me though The pick of the Week is only available on DVD and that would be the Complete Series of Rocky & Bullwinkle. While most of the jokes are cheesy and miss more often than hit; this cartoon set the template for the future of “adult humor in Children cartoons”.

January 11^th the surf-documentary Endless Summer comes to Blu-Ray alongside cinematic masterpieces like Once Upon a Time in America and Raging Bull as well as everyone’s favorite White-Guilt movie (NO -not Avatar) Dances with Wolves. Sadly I’m not going to call any of these my pick of the week, instead I’m going to recommend picking up Piranha 3-D one of the most underappreciated films of 2010.

After a lackluster week, get ready to spend some heavy cash on January 18^th when we get a DVD and Blu-Ray release of the direct-to-DVD Death Race 2. Okay… well… maybe we won’t be getting that, but fans of weird cult movies and TV shows will be excited because I have 3 Picks this week. There’s the Roger Corman Sci-Fi Triple Feature which contains not only War of the Satellites and Not of this Earth but one of the greatest bad movies ever made Attack of the Crab Monsters. Beyond that H.R. PufNStuf and Hey Vern, It’s Ernest are both getting a DVD release (and we’re talking the complete series here).

Finally to close out the Month; Open Season 3 (groan) and Broadcast News (shrug) will be released on Blu-Ray/DVD on January 25^th. Meanwhile on Blu-Ray we get The Color Purple, A Beautiful Mind and Malcolm X (you know if you want to have a “pick-me-up film festival”) however my pick of the week is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the best film of Jim Carrey, Michael Gondry, and Charlie Kaufman’s career.

All that I can say at this point is… better luck next month?