DVDs In Brief: June 17, 2009

by The A.V. Club Staff June 17, 2009

Here’s how unimaginative Marcus Nispel gets with his “re-imagining” of Friday The 13th (Warner Bros.), which comes on the heels of his 2003 Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake: At one point, immortal/invulnerable slasher Jason Voorhees gains access to a shed full of potential weapons… and then proceeds to ignore them and continue killing disposable, sexed-up teens with a machete. It’s like a metaphor for the film itself, which comes with a big budget and infinite special-effects possibilities, but uses them to churn out the same old starts, shocks, and paint-by-numbers hack-’em-up action…

Tyler Perry put his golden Madea fat suit in cold storage for a while, only to triumphantly return to the grotesque drag show that made him an unlikely pop-culture force in Madea Goes To Jail (Lionsgate), a characteristically lumpy, schizophrenic, and wildly lucrative comedy-drama about a sassy troublemaker (Perry) and a drug-addled prostitute (Cosby Show cutie Keshia Knight Pulliam) who end up doing hard time together…

A compelling chronicle of one of rock music’s more curious and reclusive talents, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (Oscilloscope) draws out the reticent and surprisingly personable figure for some perspective on his long, eclectic career in music. From his early days as a ’60s British pop idol with the Walker Brothers to his evolution into a more experimental songwriter, Walker has proven vastly influential even while slipping into semi-obscurity…

Here today, gone tomorrow. A mere three weeks after a brief run in a few theaters, where it bowed to mostly withering reviews, the star-laden indie What Goes Up (Sony) turns out to be better than the buzz might suggest, though only slightly. There’s a germ of a good movie in the story of a New York reporter whose puff-piece on New Hampshire teacher-turned-astronaut Christa McAuliffe turns out to be a major, tragic scoop. But it gets lost in a lot of small-town quirkiness, courtesy of a cast that includes Hilary Duff, Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby, and Molly Shannon.