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 New Blu-ray & DVD releases w/c June 20th 2011: Once again, we look at a few titles in more detail which are due out next week. The prices listed are the current prices on Amazon.
The Fighter It would be a mistake to confuse The Fighter with the story of Mark Wahlberg, though the similarities are striking. Completely convincing as a boxer, Wahlberg plays welterweight Micky Ward, who grew up in working-class Massachusetts. Like the actor-producer, he had eight siblings, one more famous than the rest. Ward’s half-brother, Dicky Eklund (a gaunt, crazy-eyed Christian Bale), turned to boxing first, just as Mark’s brother, Donnie, preceded him as a performer (first by singing, then by acting). The similarities end there: Dicky, once known as “The Pride of Lowell,” traded his promising pugilistic career for a crack pipe (Sugar Ray Leonard cameos as his best-known opponent). As David O. Russell’s film begins, the smothering Alice (Frozen River’s Melissa Leo) manages Micky’s career, while the unpredictable Dicky attempts to train him. Despite his talent in the ring, though, Micky can’t catch a break until he meets Charlene (Amy Adams), a spitfire of a bartender who encourages him to stand up for himself. When Dicky ends up in prison, and Micky takes on a more experienced manager, his fortunes start to improve, but it isn’t in his nature to abandon the people who raised him, so he attempts to unite the various factions in his life before his shot at the world championship slips away. Though Russell paints Micky’s mother, brother, and sisters with a broad brush, Wahlberg anchors the scenario with his patient, level-headed performance. Rescue Me’s Jack McGee also deserves notice as his diplomatic dad, George. The Fighter is released on Blu-ray (£15.93) and DVD (£9.97). |
I Am Number Four 
D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye, Disturbia) helms an action-packed thriller about an extraordinary young man, John Smith (Alex Pettyfer), who is a fugitive on the run from ruthless enemies sent to destroy him. Changing his identity, moving from town to town with his guardian Henri (Timothy Olyphant – Die Hard 4.0), he is always the new kid with no ties to his past. In the small Ohio town he now calls home, John encounters unexpected, life-changing events—his first love (Dianna Agron), powerful new abilities and a connection to the others who share his incredible destiny. I Am Number Four is released on Blu-ray (£15.93), and DVD (£11.99). |
Doctor Who: Earth Story 
The Gunfighters: Starring William Hartnell (1966): The TARDIS arrives in the town of Tombstone in the Wild West and the Doctor, having hurt a tooth on one of Cyril’s sweets, decides he must visit a dentist. The local dentist is Doc Holliday, currently engaged in a feud with the Clanton family. Lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson are meanwhile doing their best to keep the peace. Special Features:
Doctor Who: Earth Story is released on DVD (£17.93). |
West is West 
Manchester, 1975. The now much diminished, but still claustrophobic and dysfunctional, Khan family continues to struggle for survival. Sajid, the youngest Khan, the runt of the litter, is deep in pubescent crisis under heavy assault both from his father’s tyrannical insistence on Pakistani tradition, and from the fierce bullies in the schoolyard. So, in a last, desperate attempt to ‘sort him out’, his father decides to pack him off to Mrs Khan No. 1 and family in the Punjab, the wife and daughters he had abandoned 35 years earlier. It is not long before Ella Khan (Mrs Khan No. 2) with a small entourage from Salford, England, swiftly follows to sort out the mess, past and present. West is West is released on Blu-ray (£10.93), and DVD (£11.99). |
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.