by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian
DVDs account for about twenty percent of the materials
checked out at the Litchfield Library.
For some people in our community, library DVDs are the only way they
watch television. Other people still are
surprised to learn that the library offers DVDs for check out, because they
thought we only had books.
Litchfield Library has about 2700 unique video titles; we
don’t have more than one copy of any of them in the local collection. Pioneerland Library System has almost 50,000
DVDs available to order, although obviously there are many of the same movies
and TV shows in different libraries.
We get new DVDs every month in Litchfield; let me tell you
about a few of the newest.
Netflix rebooted the familiar TV show Lost in Space last
year. You may remember the original from
the late 1960s, which in turn was based on the 1812 book The Swiss Family
Robinson. There was also a movie in the
1990s, which was apparently awful. This new
version is geared to young teens and older, and it has gotten decent reviews
for having great effects and sets, plus some more character development than
the original. If you love the 1965
series for the campiness, you won’t find that here, but it’s still some
relatively family-friendly sci fi.
The Mustang is a
drama based on a real animal therapy program for prison inmates in Nevada. In fact, three of the actors in the film came
from the program. The movie stars Bruce
Dern and Matthias Schoenaerts in a story about a violent convict who gets the
chance to participate in training wild mustangs. One reviewer said it’s an unusual mix of a
gritty prison movie blended with an inspiring horse movie, but in general critics
love it.
Did you know there’s a new movie called Virginia Minnesota? I hadn’t heard anything
about it until just recently when it was released on DVD. This indie film won the award for best
Minnesota-made narrative feature at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film
Festival, and it has been recognized at other small film festivals around the
country. It’s a comedy-drama about two
young women who go on a 24-hour journey together after becoming estranged in
childhood. It might be interesting just
to see the Iron Range scenery where it was filmed.
The new documentary Maria by Callas tells the story of
opera singer Maria Callas’ life in her own words. The Greek-American soprano was an
international star in the middle of the twentieth century, an extraordinarily
talented performer for the ages and a notorious diva. This sympathetic portrait tries to tell her
story as she would have, through interviews and other footage, letters she
wrote, unpublished memoirs, home movies, and personal photos, almost none of
which has been made public before. While
recognizing that it isn’t a balanced portrayal, reviewers praised this movie as
an absorbing new look at a famous person.
Another new documentary is a big hit in our library system
right now. Apollo 11 is put together
from archival footage that the public hasn’t seen before, and the director
managed to make it crisp and beautiful.
One movie critic after another says that the movie makes audiences
awestruck about the moon landing all over again.
Some of the other new DVDs you can find at the Litchfield
library include Captain Marvel, Five Feet Apart, Hotel Mumbai, PBS’s The Mueller Investigation, and My Dinner with Hervé. If we don’t have a movie or television show,
new or old, that you’re looking for, ask library staff for help and we will do
our best to borrow it from other libraries in Minnesota.
