DVDs of the week

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In your face: Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Abnormal: XXY

Fine cops: Street Kings

Average: Smart People

Watchable: Tin Man

Look here too

• Eden Lake review
• The Women review

DVD OF THE WEEK
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Universal, 15, £19.99
***
It's tough to forget someone when you went out with them for five-and-a-half years. It's even harder when they're constantly on telly as the star of low-rent cop drama Crime Scene. Which is why freckly, broken-hearted wallflower Peter (Knocked Up's Jason Segel) is ready to gnaw his own face off when he jets off to a posh Hawaiian resort to escape his recent ex, actress Sarah Marshall, and promptly finds she's holidaying at the same place - and shacked up with a pretty-boy Lothario pop star who's shallower than a puddle (Russell Brand, perfectly cast).

This sweet debut effort from Nicholas Stoller comes from the Judd 'Superbad' Apatow stable, thus bags of heart and male bonding join Segel's nippy script. Sex-mad Brand is put to good use here, given easy lines such as: 'I mean, I've heard that women do fake orgasms, but I've never seen it...' and even coming over as a rather sympathetic figure at the film's close. But it's Segel who shines, turning the thoughtful, sensitive Peter from a pained and reticent type to a man ready to kick-start his love life and, in a slightly bizarre turn, churn out the Dracula musical he's always dreamed of. In this film about forgetting, it's his nuanced performance that makes it so memorable.
Extras: Extended version, deleted and alternative scenes, gag reel, commentary, music, featurettes and more. Sharon Lougher

XXY
Petit Peché, 15, £17.99
***
The XXY title refers to an abnormal number of chromosomes, namely those of teenager Alex, who was born a hermaphrodite. Sick of negative reactions to her condition, Alex's parents move from place to place, finally settling in a remote Uruguayan fishing village. Here they're visited by a family friend, her plastic surgeon husband and their sexually confused son, Alvaro (Martín Piroyansky).

Argentinian director Lucía Puenzo brings the families together adroitly, pitching the overly earnest manners of one against the bourgeois prejudices of another. Meanwhile, Alex and Alvaro are left to muddle through their anxieties, clashing together in some dramatically captivating scenes.

The cast, particularly Inés Efron as the troubled Alex, is gripping to watch and Puenzo's depiction of adolescents coming to terms with their place in the world is alternative and well observed. But it comes across as a humourless exercise, made more oppressive by the setting: gusty, grey weather over a barren, coastal landscape may reflect the lonely wilderness the pair metaphorically wander but it makes for relentless viewing.
Extras: Interview with Efron and Piroyansky. Zena Alkayat

Street Kings
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 15, £19.99
***
If it's corrupt cops you're after, then David Ayer is your man. The writer of Training Day and the underrated Dark Blue is in the director's chair for Street Kings, a solid tale of LA's far from finest. Keanu Reeves is Detective Tom Ludlow, a maverick playing by his own rules, 'a damn fine cop' who 'bleeds blue'. In case the character threatens to stray from being a complete stereotype, James Ellroy's script even gives him a dead wife and a drink problem.

How Reeves makes this credible is anyone's guess, but he holds the film together, no thanks to jarring turns from Forest Whitaker and Hugh Laurie. The House doctor is about as welcome in a gritty police drama as Reeves was in Dracula. Casting gripes aside, watching Ludlow probe an officer's killing is worth the effort, even if the last act dwells on revelations that were evident about ten minutes in. An almost damn fine cop movie.
Extras: Director's commentary, deleted and alternate scenes, making-of doc, featurettes.
Ross McGuinness

Smart People
Icon, 15, £17.99
***
Professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) is unhappy. Not only is he busy scarring generation after generation of youths with his bad grades, he's still holding on to the memory of his dead wife - until he meets former student turned doctor Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker). His teenage daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) isn't doing much better. She's a precocious smart alec who seems to be hurtling towards middle age far quicker than her father while getting a little too close to her adoptive no-good uncle (Thomas Haden Church). Treading much the same wittily acerbic territory as films such as The Squid And The Whale, Smart People gamely tries to untangle the brittle knots of dysfunctional families but the snoozy 'comedy' fails to engage, due to a dislikeable protagonist and an unconvincing romance.

There aren't many laughs, either, as it strains to be deep, profound and, well, smart. Unfortunately, it rushes into a forced epiphany that dumbs down any intentions it may have had to be more than just your average romantic comedy.
Extras: None.
Ann Lee

Tin Man
Brightspark Productions, 12, £19.99
**
That this splashy, over-digitised modern retelling of The Wizard Of Oz is the most watched miniseries in the Sci Fi Channel's history is testament to the timeless pull of L Frank Baum's 1900 fairy tale, because it boasts no other outstanding qualities. Going for generic sci-fi gloss over genuine style, an emotionally uninvolving, spun-out three-parter sees Zooey Deschanel's bored, pigtailed smalltown American diner waitress get tornadoed away to the land of Oz, or rather OZ (meaning Outer Zone). Here she meets a lot of expensive yet strangely unspecial effects, including a man with a zipper on his head (Alan Cumming), while realising her destiny of being 'the chosen one' who'll deliver OZ from evil.

The makers really missed a trick to give this classic story a new spin. Try as I might, I just couldn't engage with the blank characters, bland storylining and non-magical visuals in what feels like the cowardly vision of a committee of studio producers. It's watchable, yet fails its own quest to find a brain and a heart.
Extras: Making-of doc.
Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

 

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