Avatar The Most Popular Movie

More than a decade in the making, James Cameron's 3-D fantasy about a colony of human astronauts hoping to plunder an alien rainforest represents a quantum leap in movie magic; watching it, I began to understand how people in 1933 must have felt when they saw King Kong. Motion-capture animation, which transposes actors’ physical movements and facial expressions to digital characters onscreen, has never been executed with such accuracy and delicacy, and the planet's strange, colorful landscape is so minutely realized, with such careful study of botany and biology, that the movie's standard eco-parable feels effortlessly sincere. None of this would matter, though, if not for Cameron's perfectly arcing story line, in which a paraplegic military man (Sam Worthington) gets a chance to inhabit an ambulatory alien body and ultimately must choose between his own people and the tribal community they're about to attack. With Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, and Giovanni Ribisi. PG-13, 162 min.

Avatar showtimes: Tuesday, December 22
Official Site: www.avatarmovie.com
Director: James Cameron
Writer: James Cameron
Producer: James Cameron and Jon Landau
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi, CCH Pounder, Joel Moore, Laz Alonso and Wes Studi

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New DVDs: ‘A Throw of Dice’ and Summer Serials

There’s hardly a frame in the 1929 film “A Throw of Dice” that doesn’t provide a surge of visual pleasure. Produced by the German director Franz Osten and the Bengali lawyer and crusading nationalist Himansu Rai, the movie itself seems poised between two cultures, balancing the highly developed technique of German silent filmmaking and the rich iconography of Indian tradition. Jungles and palaces, elephants and tigers, princes in silk and servants in rags were photographed on location in Rajasthan and presented with the meticulous lighting, enveloping depth effects and rhythmic editing patterns of the Weimar cinema at its height.

Based on an episode from “The Mahabharata,” the ancient Indian epic, the film tells the story of two kings, the open-hearted Ranjit (Charu Roy) and the devious Sohat (played by Rai himself) who, during a hunting expedition, fall in love with Sunita (Seeta Devi), the beautiful daughter of a wise man who lives deep in the wild. Ranjit wins Sunita’s heart, but on the day of the wedding, the conniving Sohat lures his rival into a game of chance using trick dice. Ranjit loses her, along with his kingdom and his personal freedom, and returns to Sohat’s palace as a slave. Chance has led Ranjit to this dreadful pass; chance, perhaps, will rescue him.

Largely forgotten until a restoration by the British Film Institute made a splash last summer at a screening in Trafalgar Square in London, “Dice” was the third film produced by Osten and Rai. (The first, “The Light of Asia,” has been restored by the European cultural channel Arte.) All three seem to have been substantial successes in Europe and Asia, a phenomenon explained partly by the decision to cast Indian actors (although Ms. Devi, born Renee Smith, was Anglo-Indian) rather than the European performers in dusky makeup who had populated previous German visions of India, like Joe May’s 1921 film “The Indian Tomb.”

Though hardly free of the colonialist curse of Orientalism, “A Throw of Dice” seems less concerned with presenting its characters as exotic/erotic “others” than with creating a common ground of artfully presented spectacle. Osten returned to India in 1935 to work at the studio Rai had created, the mellifluously named Bombay Talkies Workers Industrial Co-Operative Society, where he directed 15 more features — a run that came to an end during the production of “Kangan” (“The Bangle”) in 1939, when Osten, a member of the Nazi party, was arrested by British colonial officials and held through the end of the war.

The new disc, originally produced for British release by Tim Pearce and Nadine Luque, features an appropriately cross-cultural score by Nitin Sawhney that blends Western orchestrations and Indian motifs. (Kino International, $29.95, not rated)

SUMMER SERIALS

Columbia Pictures thought so little of its serials that it apparently didn’t bother to maintain the copyrights for many of them, and it has fallen to individual collectors and enthusiasts to keep them in circulation, often in substandard prints.

One of the independent companies fighting the good fight is Restored Serials (restoredserials.com), which a few months ago came out with a digitally cleaned and polished version of one of Columbia’s most entertaining efforts, “The Green Archer” (1940). Based on a 1923 novel by Edgar Wallace, its 15 lively chapters describe the epic battle between Spike Holland (Victor Jory), a passionately dedicated insurance investigator, and Abel Bellamy (James Craven), a waspish antiques dealer whom Spike suspects of heading a gang of jewel thieves.

The main setting is Garr Castle, a sprawling edifice that serves as Bellamy’s headquarters and is honeycombed with a satisfyingly large number of secret passages and trap doors. The Green Archer of the title is a mysterious masked figure who materializes whenever Holland needs a hand or the plot needs advancing, popping up to pump arrows into bad guys or deliver crucial clues.

“The Green Archer” was one of four Columbia serials directed in 1940 by James W. Horne, a veteran filmmaker best known for his comedy shorts and features starring the likes of Laurel and Hardy (“Way Out West,” 1937), Charlie Chase (“Looser Than Loose,” 1930) and Buster Keaton (“College,” 1927). Like all of his serials, “The Green Archer” is a frequently hilarious exercise in self-conscious camp, created decades before that concept entered the mainstream with the television version of “Batman” in 1966.

Carried along by the surprisingly deft performance of the unknown Craven (whose first film this was), Horne turns the villainous Bellamy into a study in slow-burning, comic frustration. Like the perennially exasperated Edgar Kennedy of the Laurel and Hardy shorts, Craven’s Bellamy stares in disbelief as his bungling minions mess up his most elaborate plans, his temper eventually erupting in torrents of sarcasm. At one point Horne shows three of Bellamy’s hulking henchmen engaged in a fierce game of tiddlywinks.

Stunts like that could have gotten you fired over at Columbia’s chief rival, Republic Pictures, where serials were taken seriously. In his engaging 1995 autobiography, “In a Door, Into a Fight, Out a Door, Into a Chase,” the Republic director William Witney describes exactly that happening to one of his colleagues, Alan James, when he tried to slip a much tamer gag into “S.O.S. Coast Guard” (1937). Republic believed in its serials, even when they weren’t believable, an attitude that might benefit many of today’s popular filmmakers, even as they continue to exploit Republic’s basic formulas. (Hello, Indiana Jones.)

Working with John English, Witney created many, if not most, of Republic’s best serials, among them “Daredevils of the Red Circle” (1939) and “Drums of Fu Manchu” (1940). (The two directors would alternate behind the camera, one filming while the other prepared for his shoot the next day.) Recently the independent distributor VCI (vcientertainment.com) added English and Witney’s rare 1938 “Dick Tracy Returns” to its catalog of digitally restored serials, and it’s a pip: 15 chapters of magnificently staged, marginally plausible action, starring Ralph Byrd as Chester Gould’s pointy-jawed comic-strip cop.

Tracy’s nemesis, as was the custom in the newspaper strip, is a stylized version of a notorious gangster then in the news, in this case, one Pa Stark — a sort of Ma Barker, complete with killer brood, recovered for the patriarchy. Stark is played by one of the most identifiable actors of the form, Charles Middleton, who lent his long, sour face and grand, Shakespearean diction to Ming the Merciless in the three “Flash Gordon” serials.

“He was always cast as the head of the orphanage,” Witney wrote about Middleton, “the one who loved to beat little kids. In real life, he was the nicest, most gentle person imaginable.” (“The Green Archer,” Restored Serials, $19.95, not rated; “Dick Tracy Returns,” VCI Entertainment, $29.99, not rated)

source: www.nytimes.com/

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Where The Light Is: John Mayer Live In Los Angeles

Where The Light Is: John Mayer Live in Los Angeles captures the multi-Grammy® Award-winning, Platinum-selling singer/songwriter in the element where fans love him the most: live on stage. This special concert includes three sets: an acoustic performance, a rare set with John Mayer Trio (John Mayer, Steve Jordan and Pino Palladino), as well as a set featuring Mayer's full band.

John Mayer's Where The Light Is includes 22 songs and features a one-of-a-kind song list made up of the three distinct performances - all recorded the night of December 8th, 2007 at the NOKIA Theatre in Los Angeles.

Disc Tracklisting
Acoustic Set:
1.Neon
2.Stop This Train
3.In Your Atmosphere
4.Daughters
5.Free Fallin'

Trio Set:
6.Everyday I Have The Blues
7.Wait Until Tomorrow
8.Who Did You Think I Was
9.Come When I Call
10.Good Love Is On The Way
11.Out Of My Mind
12.Vultures
13.Bold As Love

Band Set:
14.Waiting On The World To Change
15.Slow Dancing In A Burning Room
16.Why Georgia
17.The Heart Of Life
18.I Don't Need No Doctor
19.Gravity
20.I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)
21.Belief
22.I'm Gonna Find Another You

Special Fetures:
Slow Dancing on Mullholland Drive
Who Did You Think I Was- Steve Jordan & Pino Palladino Multi-angle Cam
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #52 in DVD
* Released on: 2008-07-01
* Rating: NR (Not Rated)
* Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
* Number of discs: 1
* Formats: Color, DVD-Video, PAL
* Original language: English
* Number of discs: 1
* Running time: 164 minutes

Customer Reviews

Great Music, Great Value5
I paid even less by pre-ordering but that's of no consequence. The DVD is a top-shelf production with a great variety of music (I mean come on--22 tracks!) and worth two-times the retail price. I'm a BIG JM fan...this is the next best thing to an actual concert experience...I couldn't be more pleased.

Buy it! PERIOD5
It is amazing to watch Mr. John Mayer and the musicians he hangs with.
Guys old enough to be his father but Mayer showing that respect that can only come from a true music man!

His respect for the different genres and players of those genres is very appealing!
And did i say he plays the hell out of a guitar - cheez - that boy is on fire!!!!

Go Johhny, Go Johnny - Go Johnny GO!!!

like punching underwater5
Having been a John Mayer fan since I first heard his Why Georgia song two years after it came out I knew there was more than meets the eye. So I explored and found all the JM info I could..and then Any given Thursday came out and City Love and Covered in Rain proved me right.. So needless to say I was waiting for him to come out with a lengthy live DVD, and people this is it.John Mayer approaching his prime, this is a great performance(specially Paparazzi part) and you won't regret this purchase. Mayer can shred with anyone out there alive right now.. BUY IT or and...
REMEMBER DUANE ALLMAN

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New DVD releases: `Step Up 2 the Streets'

Selected home-video releases:

"Step Up 2 the Streets"

Are you ready to rumba? This follow-up to the 2006 teen mini-hit "Step Up" again mingles the raw world of street hoofing with the refined circles of formally trained dancers. This one lands a rough but talented street dancer (Briana Evigan) at the Maryland School of the Arts, where she tries to blend in with snooty classmates and teams up with a hotshot student (Robert Hoffman) to compete in an underground dance competition. The DVD and Blu-ray releases come with deleted scenes, two behind-the-scenes segments and five music videos, including tunes by Flo Rida and Missy Elliott. DVD, $29.99; Blu-ray, $34.99. (Disney)

___

"College Road Trip"

Martin Lawrence makes life miserable for Raven-Symone as they hit the highway in this family comedy. Lawrence plays a well-meaning but meddlesome dad who butts into his daughter's hunt for the right college, accompanying her and her friends on their mishap-laden trip. The DVD and Blu-ray discs have an alternate opening and alternate endings, plus deleted scenes with commentary from director Roger Kumble. The full movie has commentary with Kumble, Raven-Symone and the screenwriters. Raven-Symone also pitches in with a music video and a video diary of her experiences on the set. DVD, $29.99; Blu-ray, $34.99. (Disney)

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"The Bank Job"

Jason Statham makes an unauthorized withdrawal in this solid heist flick from director Roger Donaldson. Statham stars as a car dealer who meets up with a beautiful woman (Saffron Burrows) from his old haunts and gets in way over his head after she lets him in on a robbery of cash and jewels from a London bank. Two-disc DVD and Blu-ray editions come with extended footage, a making-of featurette and a segment on the 1971 Lloyd's Bank job that inspired the film. Both releases also include a digital copy of the movie for portable video players. The movie also comes in a bare-bones single-disc DVD. Single DVD, $29.95; two-disc DVD set, $34.98; Blu-ray, $39.99. (Lionsgate)

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"Shutter"

This horror tale centers on a photographer (Joshua Jackson) and his new wife (Rachael Taylor) who are exposed to a vengeful spirit from beyond on a trip to Japan, where the photos that result contain ghostly images of a woman on a haunting mission. The movie is available on DVD in the theatrical version or an unrated cut, both containing a couple of background featurettes. The unrated DVD and Blu-ray releases also have deleted scenes and an alternate ending, five more behind-the-scenes featurettes and commentary with Taylor and some of the filmmakers. DVD, $29.98; Blu-ray, $39.98. (20th Century Fox)

___

"Penelope"

Christina Ricci is the fairest pig-faced girl in the land in this contemporary twist on fairy-tale romance. The comic tale stars Ricci as a young woman afflicted by a family curse _ the snout of a pig _ with James McAvoy as a suitor who may hold the key to lifting the curse. Ricci and McAvoy are backed by a great cast that includes Catherine O'Hara, Peter Dinklage, Richard E. Grant and Reese Witherspoon, who also is a producer on the film. The scant DVD extras include a making-of featurette and a sneak peak at this fall's teen vampire tale "Twilight." DVD, $25.99. (Summit)

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"Trafic"

French filmmaker and actor Jacques Tati returns to his Monsieur Hulot persona one last time with this 1971 comedy about an automotive designer who encounters endless troubles while taking his gadget-loaded camper to a car show in Amsterdam. Highlighting the extras in the two-disc set is the 1989 two-part documentary "In the Footsteps of M. Hulot," made by Tati's daughter, Sophie Tatischeff. The set also includes a 1971 interview with cast members from French television, the 1973 TV show "The Comedy of Jacques Tati" and an essay by film critic Jonathan Romney. DVD set, $39.95. (Criterion)

___

TV on DVD:

"Saving Grace: Season One" _ Academy Award winner Holly Hunter heads to the small screen for this unusual crime drama, playing a cop whose life is heading into the drink when an angel steps in from above to help her turn things around. The first 13 episodes are packed in a four-disc set, along with commentary on the pilot and a handful of background segments. DVD set, $49.98. (20th Century Fox)

"Evening Shade: Season One" _ Burt Reynolds returned to TV with this 1990s comedy about a former pro football player who takes a job coaching his hometown's high school team. The cast includes Hal Holbrook, Marilu Henner, Ossie Davis and Charles Durning. The five-disc set has the first 24 episodes. DVD set, $42.99. (Paramount)

"Dallas: The Complete Ninth Season" _ J.R. Ewing would love to be in business with today's oil prices. Larry Hagman and the rest of the conniving Ewing clan are back in the prime-time soap about a Texas oil family. Year nine's 31 episodes come in a four-disc package. DVD set, $39.98. (Warner Bros.)

"Eureka: Season 2" _ The real brain trust of America lives in an idyllic, secret Northwest town set up after World War II for the best scientific minds to hatch all our great technological advances _ and complicate their lives with the same interpersonal issues that trouble the rest of us. A three-disc set has the second season's 13 episodes. DVD set, $39.98. (Universal)

"Reno 911! The Complete Fifth Season" _ The band of rough and not-so-ready Nevada cops are on the beat again with a three-disc set packing the fifth year's 16 episodes, along with cast commentary and extended scenes. DVD set, $39.98. (Paramount)

"Birds of Prey: The Complete Series" _ This short-lived 2002 spinoff of the Batman universe, arriving just days before "The Dark Knight" hits theaters, follows the adventures of Batman and Catwoman's daughter (Ashley Scott) and two allies (Dina Meyer and Rachel Skarsten) as they fight crime in New Gotham City. All 13 episodes come in a four-disc set. DVD set, $39.98. (Warner Bros.)

"Swamp Thing: The Series _ Volume Two" _ Dick Durock returns as the man transformed into a plant-humanoid hybrid battling evil. The first 25 episodes from season three are contained in a four-disc set. DVD set, $39.99. (Shout)

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New DVDs: ‘Mishima’ and ‘Framed’

caption: Ken Ogata as Yukio Mishima in Paul Schrader’s 1985 film


In Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985), the Japanese writer and cultural warrior Yukio Mishima is played by the cocky, square-jawed Ken Ogata, an actor best known to Western audiences as the businesslike serial killer in Shohei Imamura’s “Vengeance Is Mine” (1979). It’s a difficult role, because Mishima himself was always playing Mishima: a fantastic character of his own invention.

Mr. Schrader’s movie, which the Criterion Collection is releasing on Tuesday in a handsome, superbly restored edition, does a fine job of describing how the sickly, withdrawn Kimitake Hiraoka, the son of a minor government official, recreated himself under the pen name Yukio Mishima as a modern-day samurai and omnipresent media figure.

In between writing some of the most popular and critically respected novels of postwar Japan, Mishima bulked up through weight lifting; appointed himself the head of his own private army (with uniforms he designed himself, “with help from de Gaulle’s tailor”); starred in a series of action films (for directors like Yasuzo Masumura, Kinji Fukasaku and Hideo Gosha); displayed his toned physique in book and magazine photo layouts; and expounded his peculiar brand of Japanese nationalism, which managed to offend both the right and the left.

In American culture Mishima’s only equivalent as an author-exhibitionist is Norman Mailer, and even Mailer could not equal the audacity of Mishima’s final gesture. On Nov. 25, 1970, he led four of his recruits into the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, took a general hostage and made an impassioned speech to the troops, urging them to rise up and reclaim the glory of imperial Japan.

When the troops laughed and jeered in response, Mishima returned to the general’s office and committed seppuku, ritual suicide, by disemboweling himself. It was a gesture he had imagined many times before, most notably in his 27-minute film, “Patriotism” (1966), in which he plays an army officer who takes his own life. (Criterion is also releasing “Patriotism” on Tuesday, on a disc that includes some fascinating Mishima material.)

Mr. Schrader’s film takes that November day as its point of departure, and spins a complex structure around it, with flashbacks to Mishima’s smothered youth and visualizations of three of his novels: “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” (1956), “Kyoko’s House” (1959) and “Runaway Horses” (1968). Moving between biography and fiction, Mr. Schrader (who wrote the screenplay with his brother, Leonard) underlines the similarities between Mishima’s life and his work, but also draws important distinctions.

While the biographical material is presented in realist terms, the fiction is extravagantly stylized, broadly acted and shot on constrained studio sets designed in bold colors by Eiko Ishioka. Mr. Schrader’s camera sometimes looks over the top of these four-walled constructions as if peering into the compartments of Mishima’s brain, where his characters are doomed to endure forever, endlessly repeating the same gestures and reliving the same stories.

Mishima might have been his own greatest creation, but he’s also the ultimate Paul Schrader character: a wounded visionary, a compromised saint, a seeker of truth and transcendence. Like the protagonists of “Taxi Driver” (Mr. Schrader’s most perfect screenplay) and of “American Gigolo,” “Light Sleeper” and “Affliction” (to name three of his best films as a writer-director), Mishima is brought back to earth by the sordid facts of material existence: the need to make a living, to get along with other people, to eat and sleep and deal with the whole range of inconvenient human appetites.

Ours is no longer a world, Mr. Schrader suggests, that tolerates saintly ambitions; psychological wounds and physical circumstance drag such men down, turning would-be heroes into monsters, and messiahs into figures of ridicule. His triumph in “Mishima,” his most completely satisfying film, lies in creating a seeker who is aware of his own absurdity, and who is willing to embrace the ridiculous on his way to the sublime. (The Criterion Collection, $39.95, R)

FRAMED

Released in 1975, “Framed” is among the last of the old-school films noirs. Three principal members of its creative team were part of the genre’s prime: the director Phil Karlson (“99 River Street,” 1953), the producer and screenwriter Mort Briskin (“Quicksand,” 1950), the cinematographer Jack A. Marta (who shot close to 200 B movies for Republic Pictures). The plot is practically a pocket guide to noir conventions. Joe Don Baker, a big man with a sad mouth, stars as Ron Lewis, a professional gambler who stumbles across a homicide involving some unknown, powerful people, who get him out of the way by sending him to prison on a trumped-up charge.

When, four years later, Lewis returns to the unnamed Southern metropolis he calls home, he finds that his adversaries have taken political control of the city and are moving in on the state. But Lewis, dehumanized by his experiences, isn’t deterred: with the help of a prison buddy, a syndicate hit man with a Sonny Bono haircut (Gabriel Dell, one of the original Dead End Kids back in the 1930s), he sets out to exact a terrible, bloody revenge.

“Somebody I don’t know took everything I had away from me,” he says, in a line from the Film Noir Hall of Fame, “and I’m going to make him pay. Double.”

Karlson and Briskin enjoyed a freak hit in 1973 with “Walking Tall” — essentially, a retooling of Karlson’s noir classic of 1955, “The Phenix City Story” — with Mr. Baker as a Southern sheriff fighting corruption. Their “Walking Tall” clout allowed them to make “Framed” without compromises, and this is a harsh, unlovely film, charged with unsettling anger and filled with a violence that was quite graphic for the time, and is still startling today.

Although “Framed” would prove to be the last film for both men, it is no nostalgic farewell. It’s a poison-pen letter filled with bitterness, paranoia and despair. When Lewis finally tracks down the individual responsible for his suffering, he finds — in another classic noir device — a man much like himself, with personal reasons for what he’s done. At the end of the journey lies its beginning, a film noir way of knowledge. (Legend Films, $14.95, R). [source: NYTimes]

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