Great Movies
TV/Streaming
Home Entertainment Guide: June 2023
A guide to the latest and greatest on Blu-ray and streaming, including Evil Dead Rise, Avatar: The Way of Water, John Wick: Chapter 4, and a 4K release of The Rules of the Game.
A guide to the latest and greatest on Blu-ray and streaming, including Evil Dead Rise, Avatar: The Way of Water, John Wick: Chapter 4, and a 4K release of The Rules of the Game.
The newest on Blu-ray and streaming includes 1917, The Grudge, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and Leave Her to Heaven.
A look ahead at the films set to come out in the fall season, starring ten of our most anticipated titles.
The latest on Blu-ray, DVD, and Netflix, including Heart of a Dog, Southside with You, Florence Foster Jenkins, and many more!
An interview with writer/director Fede Alvarez and actor Stephen Lang about their new film, "Don't Breathe."
The first Unloved of 2015 tackles Michael Mann's Public Enemies.
Marie writes: allow me to introduce you to Travel Photographer, founded by Chris and Karen Coe in 2003 and their annual contest "Travel Photographer of the Year".After years spent working in the travel industry as a professional photographer and finding it was mostly conventional images making it into print, Chris decided to create a way to showcase great travel photography and broaden people's perception of what it can encompass - namely, that it can be much, much more than a pretty postcard image.The contest is open to one and all; amateur and professional photographers compete alongside each other. Entrants are judged solely on the quality of their photographs. There's a special competition to encourage young photographers aged 18 and under; Young Travel Photographer of the Year. The youngest entrant to date was aged just five, the oldest 88. The competition is judged by a panel of photographic experts, including renowned photographers, picture buyers, editor and technical experts.And the 2010 winners have now been announced. Here's a few random photos to wet your appetite - then you can scroll through the amazing winners gallery!
Enal is around 6 years old and knows this shark well - it lives in a penned off area of ocean beneath his stilted house in Wangi, Indonesia. Photo: James Morgan, UK (Portfolio Encounters: Winner 2010) [note: click images to enlarge]
Marie writes: Club member and noted blog contributor Tom Dark took this astonishing photograph near his home in Abiqui, New Mexico. The "unknown entity" appeared without warning and after a failed attempt to communicate, fled the scene. Tom stopped short of saying "alien" to describe the encounter, but I think it's safe to say that whatever he saw, it was pretty damned freaky. It sure can't be mistaken for anything terrestrial; like a horse pressing its nose up to the camera and the lens causing foreshortening. As it totally does not look like that at all. (click to enlarge.)
... for confirming a few details in Entertainment Weekly: about CGI techniques (and your intentions) that I noticed when I saw "Avatar." James Cameron, I see you:
"[Bob Zemeckis ("Polar Express," "Disney's A Christmas Carol"] essentially is making animated films using an actor-driven process. His visual choice on 'Beowulf' didn't require photo-realism. 'Avatar' is a different kettle of fish. We were intercutting live-action footage with CG footage, so our CG had to be interchangeable with photography."
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There's a rumor going around that some of the humans in "Avatar" are CGI creations. Any truth to that?
''There are a number of shots of CGI humans,'' James Cameron says. ''The shots of [Stephen Lang] in an AMP suit, for instance -- those are completely CG. But there's a threshold of proximity to the camera that we didn't feel comfortable going beyond. We didn't get too close.''
Shortly after getting gut-shot, one of the characters in James Cameron's "Avatar" wisecracks: "This could ruin my whole day." I know the feeling. The line, like so many others, lands with a hollow thud.
To my eyes (and ears), "Avatar" is the first Cameron feature that's a near-total failure. Obviously, I'm not talking about ticket sales, since the movie just opened today, or the early reviews, most of which were ecstatic. I emphasize "my eyes" because: 1) the golden-saucer eyes of the lovely, elongated blue protagonists, the Na'vi, are their most entrancing features; 2) the movie is explicitly about the act of seeing ("I see you" is one of its catch phrases, and the title of the Celine Dion-ish end-credits theme song that goes on and on); 3) the central problem with the movie is not its less-than-impressive technology but the triteness of its artistic vision; and 4) the 3D process -- at least for me, with my particular prescription lenses behind those Polarized glasses -- is continually distracting. And yet, "Avatar" strikes my retinas as an achievement that amounts to something considerably less than meets the eye.
