Pick Of The Week: New
Girls: The Complete First Season (HBO)
Lena Dunham’s HBO show plays like the anti-Sex And The City, following the misadventures of another set of entitled, promiscuous New Yorkers while constantly, viciously undercutting them at every turn. The young writer/star has become a magnet for controversy—Gawker’s ugly obsession has manifested itself in recaps and a mocked book proposal—but the show is mostly a pleasure, a candid and merciless comedy about women trying to figure out what direction they want their professional and romantic lives to take. Along with Louie, it’s also one of the few shows on television that bears the unmistakable stamp of its creator. The set includes five audio commentaries with Dunham and her producer (and co-writer, in the season’s best episode, “The Return”) Judd Apatow, as well as a Dunham-Apatow interview and conversations with the cast.
Pick Of The Week: Retro
Miami Connection (Drafthouse)
For fans of cheesy ’80s martial-arts movies, Y.K. Kim’s Miami Connection is the year’s most important discovery. Made in 1987 and released in a few Orlando theaters a year later, the film was banished to the land of wind and ghosts until a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse picked it up on eBay for $50. Rereleased on Drafthouse’s in-house label, the film has steadily gained momentum on the midnight circuit for its disarming mix of sweetness and ineptitude, as well as its pervasive ’80s-ness, which comes through strongest in synth-rock band called Dragon Sound, whose members are also tae kwon do masters. (Just try to get “Against The Ninja” and “Friends” out of your head.) The DVD/BD somehow comes with over two hours of bonus materials, and real obsessives can get a poster and 7-inch vinyl copy of the songs through the website.
Don’t Break The Seal
Mansome (MPI)
Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock is known for pulling stunts—eating nothing but McDonald’s for a month, personally embarking on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, living on minimum wage for 30 days—but trying to make a 90-minute feature out of the fact that some dudes have facial hair may be his most audacious effort to date. Mansome attempts a whimsical look at male grooming, with appearances by funnymen like Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Zach Galifianakis, but its conclusions about phenomena like “metrosexuals” are thinly drawn, and Spurlock’s first-person style, in this context, smacks of vanity. Bottom line: There just isn’t a movie here.
What else?