On DVD, the big news is the release of the extended cut of "The Fellowship of the Ring" along with hours and hours of supplements exclusively produced for this edition exhaustively documenting the creation and production of "The Lord of the Rings". I doubt I'm ever going to get time to wade through everything in the damn set, but I did want to say that it's a shame they're not at least giving a limited theatrical release to the new cut because it goes a long way towards mitigating some of the problems I thought the theatrical release had. The more I see of this film, the more I'm staggered at Peter Jackson's enormous accomplishment in creating this world from scratch and giving it depth and texture. The one thing I did feel suffered in the film was the same thing a lot of films suffer from - studios are just hugely nervous when any scene goes on longer than a minute. You get a few lines of dialog and boom, you're off somewhere else. In the scheme of things, the thirty minutes Jackson adds back in doesn't really add to the overall time of the film, but the new scenes and scene extensions make a lot of the scenes feel less choppy and abrupt, and give the secondary characters more of a chance to show that they're important in the story as well. They're seamlessly blended back into the film - nobody who watches this film for the first time will ever know they were additions ( except for one awkward middle addition shot visibly darker than its bookends ) and make it clear that with another six to eight hours still to go, "The Lord of the Rings" is going to be one of the treasured masterworks of cinema.
Another DVD, this time most definitely not for the kiddies, is "E Tu Mama Tambien" - a very, and I mean very, sexually explicit coming of age film from Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron whose next film, in one of those odd career twists of fate, will be the next "Harry Potter" film. "Mama" is a simply shot film about two teenage boys who by circumstance, wind up taking a long road trip for a fabled beach with a cousin's hot wife. Along the way they smoke a lot of dope, argue, and both get screwed by the woman, as well as winding up screwing each other. If it had just stayed a high-spirited if pointless lark, I'd been happier with it, but Cuaron wants to make it social commentary as well so that it winds up a huge downer. It's a split call - it's worth seeing, but you're not going to miss anything if you don't.

People who are just now discovering Hideo Nakata from the (inferior) Americanized version of his 1999 terrorfest "The Ring" might want to check out a non-horror but just as intense psychological thriller, "Chaos", which is being remade as an American film with Robert DeNiro and Benico Del Toro. "Chaos" starts out simply enough as a crime thriller - a businessman and his wife are having lunch. The wife goes outside while her husband pays the bill, but when he goes outside, he finds his wife gone, and when he gets back to the office, he gets a phone call telling him his wife has been kidnapped.
Or has she? "Chaos" shifts back in forth through time, revealing the kidnapping to be a cover for a worse crime, and that the kidnapper soon finds himself a pawn in a darker game. Except for a puzzling ending that looks tacked on to end it as much as anything, this is a crackerjack thriller. See it now so you can compare it against the upcoming American version.
People who enjoyed "The Sixth Sense" will enjoy "The Eye", another Japanese film being refilmed for American audiences. "The Eye" has a blind girl who undergoes a cornea transplant and starts seeing strange visions. Her terror only increases when, in a great moment, she realizes that the woman she sees in the mirror isn't her, but the former owner of the corneas, a woman who had psychic visions and committed suicide. Not quite as unnerving as "The Ring" but still has some great scares and well worth watching.
000200000D26000006AF D20, A big "Swords Up" for a knockout action film currently making the film festival rounds - "Princess Blade". This cross between "Crouching Tiger" and "Blade Runner" is set in a future Japan which, closed to outsiders once again, has been waging a secret war against dissidents using a clan of sword-wielding assassins. The story begins when the youngest member of the clan, played by dinky Japanese pop star Yumiko Shaku, discovers that her mother, the former leader of the clan, was killed by the current leader for refusing his romantic advances and wanting to get the group out of doing the government's dirty work. Though tiny, Shaku is fearless and attacks the leader, barely escaping with her life, and finds an uneasy refuge with one of the rebels as she plots her attack against her former friends.
"Princess Blade" features stunning sword fighting sequences choreographed by action ace Donnie Yen ( "Iron Monkey" ) but the nice thing about PB is that it's not all action - director Shinsuki Sato frequently holds the action at moments to focus on a look or gesture whose impact is increased by the beautiful cinematography and music. I've been rerunning parts of this movie nightly since I got it a week ago and I'm still knocked out by it. The only bad thing about the movie is that the import DVD's English subtitles make no sense at all - the translation is so poor that I had to go online and read other reviews and comments to find out what the hell was going on. Supposedly, ADV Films, which has the North American rights to the film will be releasing a better translation of the film to theatres next year, but if you're curious about the film now, it's still worth watching now. "Princess Blade II" is also in the works.
All three films are available from a nuot;Princess Blade II" is also in the works.
All three films are available from a new site I've found, a fantastic site called AZN films ( www.aznfilms.com ). They're based in Northern California, have some things I've never seen anywhere else, and have some of the best descriptions and information about Asian films and DVD players that I've ever found. This is the kind of site where you can easily drop a couple of hundred dollars on DVD's without blinking. Check them out and tell 'em Midnight Graffiti sent you.

-Michael Stone