The over-the-hill mob is back for more mayhem.

Sylvester Stallone gambled that there was an audience for old action heroes doing their thing on the big screen and brought a handful of them together for “The Expendables” in 2010. That was also pretty much the plot of the film — a crew of aging mercenaries go on a mission. For insurance, Stallone brought along Jason Statham as chief sidekick and current box office attraction, but the drawing power was all in the cast of old dogs doing their thing again after all these years: Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, with assistance by Terry Crews and current B-movie regular Randy Couture and Steve Austin and cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For the obligatory sequel, Stallone hands off direction to Simon West and ups the ante with more old faces on a mission that has something to do with plutonium and black market arms and peasants forced into slave labor. Rourke is MIA this time, but Chuck Norris makes a special guest appearance and Jean-Claude Van Damme gets to go the bad-ass as a real nasty bad guy named Vilain (get it? It’s Villain without the extra l!) while young up-and-comer Chris Hemsworth (aka Thor) barely registers in the mix.

Not that much of anything registers beyond the schtick of old guys playing around with their legacies, especially with Willis and Schwarzenegger getting expanded roles this time around, swapping tag lines between rounds, and Norris swaggering into the action like a Texas Ranger on a field trip to Asia.

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Touch: The Complete First Season (Fox), created by Tim Kring of “Heroes,” stars Keifer Sutherland as Martin Bohm, a former investigative reporter reduced to blue collar jobs after losing his wife in the September 11 attacks and dedicating himself to caring for his possibly-autistic son.

Jake (David Mazouz) doesn’t speak (though he does narrate the show) and doesn’t like to be touched, but it becomes clear that he sees complex patterns in the world and communicates through numbers that connect seemingly unconnected events and people in a web of relationships and meanings. The scripts combine Martin’s efforts to reach his son through the trail of numbers with stories spread across the globe, all coming together by the end of each episode in unexpected, sometimes contrived, usually heartwarming ways. Sort of like “Lost” meets “Crash,” but with a real attempt at emotional sincerity.

It’s six degrees of separation collapsed into direct links in metaphysical short-circuits engineered by Jake, with the fiercely dedicated Martin almost as intense as Jack Bauer as he follows his son’s leads, reaches out to help people in crisis, and come that much closer to his isolated son. It makes the show a very curious (and actually kind of interesting) mix of metaphysics, secular mysticism, corporate conspiracy, and feel-good family drama, with a dash of Kabala tossed in toward the end of the season.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw co-stars as the social worker who joins forces with him to follow the clues and heal the universe, one crisis at a time and Maria Bello guest stars in the two-part season finale as a woman following a similar path destined to cross with Martin and Jake.

13 episodes on DVD, including an extended version of the pilot, plus two brief featurettes and deleted scenes.

More TV on Disc at Videodrone

The Avengers (Disney), the Marvel comics superhero all-star team, is the most impressive example of synergy in the comic book movie industry to date.

Unlike The X-Men, which arrived full formed in 2000, The Avengers is the comic book version of the supergroup, with stars in their own right coming together (not without some friction and ego-thumping) for a battle royale. So Marvel put together a long term plan, launching their stars in a series of solo films and building an entire universe of heroes and villains for the screen.

They teased audiences with brief cross-overs and then, after years of setting it all up, brought together the team: Robert Downey’s cheeky, cocky Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth’s warrior prince Thor, Chris Evans’ earnest Captain America, and Mark Ruffalo taking over as Bruce Banner and The Hulk (the third actor in as many films), giving the character a haunted, embittered edge. To round out the team, the film expands the role of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), a slinky superagent, from the second “Iron Man” film, and adds Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), an archer marksman briefly seen in “Thor.”  Samuel Jackson presides over it all as Nick Fury.

It could have been a disaster, with so many characters to juggle and personalities to respect while engaging  in a big, noisy, apocalyptic battle with no less than gods and aliens. And it was a measured gamble to bring in Joss Whedon, a man with well-earned fan credentials and an affinity for this kind of genre storytelling. No question that he brings smarts and style and self-aware wit to his productions (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on TV, “Serenity” on film) but his audiences have been, shall we say, small and passionate.

It was the perfect marriage of subject and sensibility. You wouldn’t accuse The Avengers of being good drama but the sprawling, splashy spectacle and its much-much-much-larger-than-life heroes makes for a genuine comic book epic for the big screen.

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The critical consensus is that Summer Interlude, the tenth feature from Ingmar Bergman, was a breakthrough for the filmmaker: his first film built around a strong, assertive, sure woman and the first shot extensively on location, where the natural world becomes a defining reflection of the lives of his characters.

Maj-Britt Nilsson and Birger Malmsten

This information comes courtesy of film historian and Bergman expert Peter Cowie, who has written extensively on Bergman and contributes the fine essay in the accompanying booklet to the Criterion release. I have much less experience with early Bergman, to be honest. It has been, in fact, the recent Criterion Blu-ray releases of classic Bergman films that has brought back to the director and introduced me to films I had never seen previously. It’s been a rewarding rediscovery of a director that I confess I have respected more than I’ve appreciated, in no small part thanks to the sheer beauty of the Criterion presentations. The cinematography of Gunnar Fischer has long been overshadowed by Bergman’s legendary collaborations with Sven Nykvist and the distinctive winter light of his images, but Criterion’s superbly remastered discs remind us of the beauty of his work, from the sunny, lush warmth of his summer interludes to the gray, foggy cloud of urban life and the cold desolation of fall and winter.

The blush of summer and the death of autumn are defining moods of Summer Interlude. Maj-Britt Nilsson, one of Bergman’s most overlooked actresses, plays Marie, an emotionally distant leading dancer in a Stockholm ballet company. An envelope containing a handwritten diary sends her mind reeling back thirteen years, to sunny days of young love and freedom and the first stirrings of desire on a summer vacation on the archipelago islands near Stockholm. She’s 15 and an aspiring ballerina, staying in vacation manor home of her Uncle Erland (Georg Funkquist), whose flirtations are more unsettlingly lustful than avuncular, and long-suffering Aunt Elisabeth (Renée Björling).

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Ely out of his shirt and in character

Ron Ely seem to be enjoying his retirement. Most famous for playing Tarzan in the first TV incarnation of the story, he also played another great pulp hero, Doc Savage, in a 1975 movie, starred in a short-lived revival of the TV series “Sea Hunt” and even took over hosting duties for The Miss American Pageant from Bert Parks for a brief time. Off screen, he published two private eye novels, “Night Shadows” and “East Beach. According to the IMDb, his last screen appearance was over a decade ago (in, appropriately enough, the jungle girl show “Sheena”).

The Warner Archive release of the first season of Tarzan, featuring a buff, tanned and toned Ely in a loin cloth and little else, reminds us that he played the role closer to the original Edgar Rice Burroughs conception, as an erudite man raised in the jungle, educated in Europe, and now living back in his jungle home out of preference. The actor, now 73 years old, is just as well spoken as his character and he talked to Videodrone by phone to discuss the show, the role that defined his career, and his affection for “Survivor.”

Videodrone’s review of “Tarzan: The First Season” is here.

What are you watching?

I watch every new show that comes out. It’s hard to name them all because they turn over so fast. Some I get attached to and then they disappear. Currently I like “The Good Wife,” “Smash,” “Awake,” I like some of the reality shows. I like a show I would have definitely done twenty years ago, “Survivor.” I would have loved to have done that.

They wouldn’t have stood a chance against you.

Well, now, I was an actor playing a guy that could survive in the wild. I was not a guy who could survive in the wild, I don’t think. I don’t know. It would have been a fun experience, it would have been delightful to test yourself against that kind of circumstance.

Have they sent you a copy of the “Tarzan” series yet?

They have indeed and it is magnificent. I have not been able to see all of them but I have run a couple, just kind of spot checked, and they look really sharp and good. They’ve done a fabulous job in mastering these shows.

How did you get the part of Tarzan?

Actually, it’s a short story. I came back from a trip to my mother’s home in Texas on a Sunday night. There were messages there to call my agent. I talked to them Monday morning and they said, “It’s about Tarzan.” Now I had discussed “Tarzan” earlier, in the movie version of it, which I wasn’t interested in, and they said, “This is a little different, at least go in for the meeting.” So that’s really what I was doing, I was going in for a meeting. I won’t say just as a courtesy, but it partially was that. So then at the meeting they said, “Can we put you on film?” I said, “Yes,” and they put me on film the next day, and then the day after that, which was Wednesday, I was told, “That’s it, you’re it,” and on Friday I was on a plane to Brazil. I was as surprised as anybody when I found myself on a plane, flying in to Rio de Janeiro, and I finally thought, “What am I doing? What am I here for?”

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Nine Oscars

You can tell it’s Oscar season when the studios pull past winners out of the vault for new home video editions. Leading the week’s debuts of Oscar winners on Blu-ray are The English Patient (Lionsgate), with nine Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), and Shakespeare in Love (Lionsgate), with seven wins (including Best Picture). These two films are testament to the ability of Harvey Weinstein to promote his classy fare into Oscar gold over the bigger-budgeted studio features and their better funded campaigns. Which is not to say it’s all about the race, mind you, just that industry politics have as much to do with votes as film quality.

The English Patient (1996) is a lushly romantic drama adapted from Michael Ondaatje’s novel by director Anthony Minghella. Set in the African desert for World War II and starring the intense Ralph Fienned, the elegant Kristin Scott Thomas and the angelic Juliette Binoche, it could be “Casablanca” for the nineties, delivering both romantic tragedy (the end of the old world of privilege) and rebirth (the beginning of a new egalitarian world) in an old fashioned/new-age romance with the most beautiful people and gorgeous costumes you ever saw survive a trek through the desert. Features two commentary tracks, the hour-long documentary “Black and White to Color: The Making of The English Patient,” interviews, deleted scenes and numerous production featurettes.

Shakespeare in Love (Lionsgate), John Madden’s love letter to the romance of art and the art of romance, is a fantasy of the Bard’s life as seen through the conventions of his own cross-dressing farces and refracted through a modern sensibility. Gwyneth Paltrow turns the role of her career into pure laughter and love (who would doubt this willowy goddess is Shakespeare’s muse?), Joseph Fiennes plays the young Shakespeare as a writer inspired by the rush of a secret affair, and Geoffrey Rush slurs the romantic mantra through his artistically rotted teeth: “Everything always works out in the end.” “How?” “I don’t know, it’s a mystery.” Features two commentary tracks (one by Madden, one by the cast and crew), deleted scenes and two featurettes.

More Blu-ray reviews at Videodrone

The Academy Award nominations are now out (see full list here). Now let the guessing games begin. Predictions and kibbitzing are all part of the fun (my annual accounting of contenders who missed the Oscar cut is here on MSN) and catching up on all the nominees before Oscar night is, for many, part of the ritual.

While many of the front-runners were released late in the year and are still playing in theaters — best picture nominees “The Descendants,” “War Horse,” ” Hugo,” “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” and ” The Artist” should all get a boost this weekend — just as many are already available for home viewing on DVD, Blu-ray, digital download and/or pay-per-view. Here’s a list of those you can see now on a small screen near you. Click on the titles to get to the DVD/Blu-ray reviews.

“Moneyball” (Sony), arguably the brainiest sports movie ever, came away with six nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Brad Pitt), Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill) and Adapted Screenplay. The Blu-ray and DVD editions offer a few peaks behind the production. Also On Demand.

“Midnight in Paris” (Sony), the grown-up romantic fantasy that unexpectedly became Woody Allen’s most financially successful film ever, earned four nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. On Blu-ray and DVD with minimal supplements, and On Demand.

“The Tree of Life” (Fox), Terrence Malick’s portrait of one boy’s education growing up in Texas set against nothing less than the origins of life in the universe, picked up nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography, and it is a stunning looking film on Blu-ray, which also features the supplements (there are none on the DVD). Also On Demand.

The rest of the available titles on Videodrone.

Mildred Pierce (HBO) is less a remake than a new run at adapting the James M. Cain novel.

Previously made into a Hollywood classic (which earned Joan Crawford her only Oscar), it’s been transformed into a five-hour mini-series by Todd Haynes, who casts Kate Winslet in the title role as the mother blindly devoted to her sneering, status-conscious daughter. There’s none of the murder mystery plot that Hollywood added to the depression-era melodrama.

This is a character study in maternal sacrifice, a skewed success story rooted in guilt and damaged self-esteem and powered by willful blindness of her daughter Veda’s (Evan Rachel Wood) evolution and her own compromises. She enables Veda’s class snobbery and helps create the cold, manipulative human monster she becomes.

With the luxury of time, this series fills out Mildred’s relationships to her husband (Brían F. O’Byrne), her husband’s partner with whom she has an affair (James LeGros) and Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce), her broke aristocrat of a lover. And Haynes looks to the sepia tones of seventies Hollywood period pieces for the period recreation depression-era Los Angeles.

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The 2011 Village Voice Film Poll is out and I once again was invited to participate.

The only disappointment for me is that I was unable  to see two of the films that made the Top Ten compilation list: Margaret (still hasn’t screened for Seattle critics and no Fox offered no DVD screeners) and A Separation (that did screen in Seattle, but only after the poll deadline).

On the bright side, my top four films all placed in the compilation Top Ten. Which ones are those? You’ll have to can see my list here.

Just for the record, and because it’s no surprise, The Tree of Life took the top spot, just as it did for the Indiewire survey and the MSN poll.

Audie Murphy: babyfaced tough guy

Don Siegel’s low-budget 1958 adventure The Gun Runners is not exactly a remake of To Have and Have Not but it is the third screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway novel. Audie Murphy takes the lead here as independent skipper Sam Martin, who rents his cabin cruiser to tourists looking to fish the waters of Key West. When his latest customer skips on the bill and he gambles himself into the hole attempting to win enough to make his payments, he ends up in debt to a gun runner (Eddie Albert), making illegal trips to Cuba under cover of night so Albert can make his deal with the Cuban revolutionaries. The politics of the situation aren’t even hinted at, but then Albert’s character is a businessman, not a patriot or an idealist.

It’s a stock thriller premise brought to life with clever screenwriting (by Daniel Mainwaring and Paul Monash, and reportedly an uncredited contribution from Ben Hecht), deftly turned characters, a terrific supporting cast and delightfully sexy rapport and physical intimacy between Murphy and Patricia Owens, who plays his wife. The bloom hasn’t worn off this romance and her playful flirtations in the dive of a waterfront bar, pretending to be a floozy seducing the married Sam from his “wife,” is one of the sexiest scenes I’ve between a married couple in a fifties feature.

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New Releases:
Tuesday is officially new release day for DVD and Blu-ray, but this week a pair of new releases have staked out the Friday usually reserved for “Harry Potter” films and other youth-skewed blockbusters: “The Smurfs” (Sony) and “Friends with Benefits” (Screen Gems) both released on Friday, December 2.

“The Smurfs,” featuring little blue CGI creatures scrambling and singing through live action New York City while a hygiene-challenged wizard pursues them, is a juvenile comedy for the kids and includes lots of supplements on the DVD and Blu-ray editions. Videodrone’s review is here. “Friends with Benefits” is an R-rated romantic comedy with Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake navigating the fine line between sex and love and it arrives on DVD and Blu-ray with commentary and deleted scenes. Reviewed here.

Even without those films, Tuesday is a huge week for New Releases, the biggest between now and January. “Our Idiot Brother” (Anchor Bay), starring Paul Rudd as a sweetly oblivious guy whose instinctive honesty and generosity tends to complicate the lives of his sisters, is my pick for the day, an easy-going comedy with a good cast (Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel and Emily Mortimer as the sisters) and a big heart. With commentary, deleted scenes and a featurette on DVD and Blu-ray. More here.

MSN film critic Glenn Kenny, on the other hand, is upbeat about “30 Minutes or Less” (Sony), a black comedy about a pizza delivery guy (Jesse Eisenberg) sent to rob a bank with dynamite strapped to his body. Kenny describes is as “punchy, nasty, laugh-out-loud-funny​ stuff that doesn’t flag or wear out its welcome.” The DVD features deleted scenes and a featurette and the Blu-ray adds commentary and more.

My indie pick this week is the horror comedy “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil” (Magnet), with Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk as good-natured idiot hicks in the woods attacked by smug college kids convinced the boys are horror movie hillbilly killers. Hilarious mayhem ensures. Videodrone’s review is here.

Werner Herzog’s documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” (MPI), an exploration of the ancient Chauvet Cave, home to the oldest human artwork known to exist, was originally released in 3D and is available on Blu-ray 3D as well as standard DVD and Blu-ray editions. Videodrone’s review is here. Also new on the non-fiction front: “Reel Injun” (Kino Lorber), a survey of how native Americans have been portrayed in the movies.

And they keep on coming: Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess star in the romantic drama “One Day” (Universal). Brit Marling co-writes and stars in “Another Earth” (Fox), an indie drama with a science fiction backdrop and breakthrough performance from Marling. The offbeat comedy “The Future” (Lionsgate) is the second feature from acclaimed performance artist Miranda July.

Plus: the coming-of-age film “The Art of Getting By” (Fox) with Freddie Highmore and Emma Roberts, the faith-based golf drama “Seven Days in Utopia” (Arc Entertainment) with Robert Duvall and Lucas Black, “5 Days of War” (Anchor Bay), Renny Harlan’s portrait of the brief but brutal attack on Georgia by Russia in 2008, and the foreign films “Kidnapped” (IFC) from Spain, “The Wave” (IFC) from Germany (but based on a true story from an American high school) and “Vampires” (IFC), a horror comedy from Belgium.

Browse the complete New Release Rack here

TV on DVD:
“Smallville,” the long-running WB youth superhero series about Superman before he donned the cape, ended last season after an impressive ten-season run. So while we get “Smallville: The Complete Tenth Season” (Warner) on both DVD and Blu-ray, we also get the deluxe “Smallville: The Complete Series” (Warner), on DVD only but an impressive collection of all 218 episodes and supplements, plus exclusive bonus supplements, on 62 discs in a box set of hefty digibook cases. Season Ten reviewed on Videodrone here, and the “Complete Series” is revisited on Videodrone here.

Another box set, “Friday Night Lights: The Complete Series,” also gets reviewed on Videodrone here.

Peter Graves returned to duty for “Mission: Impossible – The 1988 TV Season” (Paramount), the first of two seasons in the revival of the secret agent caper series. 19 episodes on five discs, no supplements. More on Videodrone here.

Adam Rifkin turned his video surveillance film into a Showtime series with “Look: Season 1” (Image). 11 half-hour episodes on two discs.  “Vietnam in HD” (A&E/History), a documentary series made for the History Channel with rare film footage shot by the soldiers themselves, arrives on DVD and Blu-ray a few weeks after its cable debut.

“30 Rock: Season 5” (Universal) features 22 episodes of the hit sitcom, which is set to begin its sixth season in January. The three-disc set includes both versions of the season live show, commentary tracks and other supplements. Also this week are “Hot in Cleveland: Season Two” (Paramount) and “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns: Season 3” (Lionsgate).

Flip through the TV on DVD Channel Guide here

Cool, Classic and Cult:
“Sabu! (Eclipse Series 30)” (Criterion) collects three Alexander Korda productions (all directed by his brother, Zoltan Korda) starring Selar Shaik, renamed Sabu when was elevated from boy elephant driver of a maharaja to star of the film “Elephant Boy” (1937). The set also features “The Drum” (1938), with Sabu as a young prince protected by the British colonial forces in India, and “Jungle Book” (1942), all carried by Sabu’s energy, sincerity and screen charisma. (A fourth Korda feature starring Sabu, “The Thief of Bagdad,” was previously release by Criterion.) Videodrone’s review is here.

“The Cycle” (Nima Pictures/Facets) is a 1978 drama from Iranian master Dariush Mehrjui, made during the reign of the Shah, whose regime banned it for its uncompromising portrait of poverty in the country. “Chillerama” (Image) is anthology film of four tongue-in-cheek horror shorts directed by Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Adam Rifkin and Tim Sullivan. “The Invisible Frame” (Icarus) is a rumination on the Berlin Wall from filmmaker Cynthia Beatt and actress Tilda Swinton.

All of the Cool, Classic and Cult here

Blu-ray Debuts:
“Horror Express” (Severin), the cult Spanish horror film with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing previously available in numerous DVD editions of dubious quality, gets the deluxe treatment and a new HD master for its Blu-ray debut in an edition that features new and archival interviews and a bonus DVD copy. Reviewed on Videodrone here.

Continue  reading at Videodrone for a complete listing of the week’s releases

The three colors are blue, white and red. They are the colors of the French flag, of course, and they are appropriated by director Krzysztof Kieslowski along with the themes of the motto they more or less represent: liberty, equality, fraternity. But the films Blue (1993), Red (1993) and Red (1994) are not hymns to patriotism or national identity and the Polish Kieslowski hasn’t any predisposition to making a statement at France. It’s better to think of this trilogy in similar terms as his The Decalogue, ten short films in which he reflects upon the Ten Commandments in terms more suggestive than literal. They are about morality in terms of life in Poland in 1989 and it is that vast collage of life experience in that time and place that is so powerful.

After Kieslowski completed The Decalogue, the Berlin Wall fell, Perestroika was introduced in the Soviet Union and communism collapsed in Eastern Europe. The Three Colors trilogy may begin in France but it reaches beyond national borders to Poland and Switzerland to become in part a portrait of the new Europe. And, I would say, a rumination on the mysteries behind the faces of his beautiful leading ladies: Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob.

Binoche stars in Blue as Julie Vignon, the sole survivor of a car wreck that kills her husband, a revered composer, and their young daughter. Initially bereft to the point of suicide, she’s unable to swallow the pills. It’s more a matter of gag reflex than second thoughts but she embraces the reflex as a way to deal with her grief: she simply rejects all emotional connection to her past and her present life, dropping out of contact with everyone she knew and systematically destroying all extant traces of her husband’s unfinished composition, which we learn she was intimately and creatively involved with. (The title of the composition, “Concerto for the Unification of Europe,” suggests the scope of Kieslowski’s trilogy while commenting on Julie’s aggressive isolation.)

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