ADV Bridges the Pacific with Anime (12: Unedited)

After I parked my car and walked up to the front door of ADV Films, I was greeted by Jack Glauser, a University of Houston alumnus and ADV’s Marketing Associate. He swiped a card to unlock the door, and had me sign-in to a log and wear a “guest” badge. The red and black, traditionally decorated office has a large plasma screen in its lobby, but the strict security guards something else; cartoons.

In 1992, the Land of the Rising Sun shone a new beam of entertainment on a Disney and Looney Toons saturated audience, called ADV Films. The Houston based anime provider now dominates the US market as its largest supplier of Japanese anime, a $4.3 billion industry, and is growing exponentially. It’s a strange gem in the diverse and rough bootleg-fashion area of Harwin Street.

With the popularization of DVDs and variety of subtitle, dubbed audio, and commentary options, Anime has steadily become much more accessible to American audiences. Aside from ease of playability and collectable value, it offers something that older American audiences were almost completely without. “Most of the American animation…has been for a younger audience. And the animation from Japan; yes it’s stylized a lot differently in character and design and stuff, But really, some of the stories are crazy, and you’ve got all sorts of adult themes. So if you like watching animation, but you’re not a child, you’re going to find anime,” said Anne Armogida, ADV’s Director of Marketing.

Anime is most often presented as a series, although many feature-length films are made. In Japan, a surprising number of television stations broadcast anime as regular programming, and the subject matter is as diverse as America’s dramas, comedies, sports, action and detective shows. Because these series are almost entirely unavailable to American audiences, ADV acquires the licensing distribution rights to take the series further than the North Pacific Ocean.

This process is a long and complicated one. ADV first contacts the Japanese producers of an anime after it has gained a certain degree of popularity in Japan. Another UH alumnus, Griffin Vance, and other members of ADV’s legal team acquire the rights to an English version of the anime. The Japanese production company then sends over the available materials, which range from a basic episode to multiple sound and video tracks, scripts, unused material, and extras.

If it’s not already translated, ADV utilizes its three in-house translators, but also contracts translators from all over the United States. “They translate the show, or any of the extras or booklets that we get with the DVDs,” said Jin Chung, one of ADV’s veteran producers, “That’s a big chunk of our period of waiting, because that takes a while to translate. In the best case scenario, we get the Japanese script, and the translators watch the show, and hear it, and also go off the script. Sometimes we don’t get the script, and the translators just have to go through it, just by listening to it, and that takes some time.”

The literal translation is rough and almost never matches the “flapping-” or movement of a character’s mouth. ADV hires screen writers to re-script the dialogue and rearrange sentence structure to make sense in English. This can be restrictive because the sync may not match up, and many of the Japanese cultural references are easy to lose.

A director then looks over the script, watches the anime several times, and casts voice actors for the English dubs. The actors are brought into ADV’s prized on-site recording studios with a director and an audio engineer. ADV Films is the only anime distributor in American with its own recording studio, and it helps them to save on costs and turn a product around that much more quickly.

I was invited to sit in on the recording session for an episode of the highly anticipated series, Air Gear. Kira Vincent, the voice actress behind character “Emily,” has an impressive resume in voice acting, and her wide range (she’s voiced male characters) can be heard in dozens of ADV titles. She has a fan base among “otaku”, the Japanese word for geeks, and sound engineer John Swaize appreciates her efficient adaptability.

The five recording studios are all state of the art. Swaize watches the video as Vincent speaks, and makes quick edits to the script as necessary, which feeds directly into the glass booth. Vincent can hear Swaize’s instructions and recommendations, and watches the anime to maintain correct pacing.

While the audio engineers are busy with sound, the art department recreates newly translated packaging. Hiroko Fukumori, the senior graphic designer, also creates advertisements and point-of-sale material.

The new vocal track is mixed, and sound effects and music are recorded if they weren’t separate on the original master. The production department brings everything together, designs the menus, adds whatever extras they can find and will fit, authors the discs, edits trailers for other upcoming products, and the whole product is sent back to Japan for approval.

The popularity of Anime and other Japanese entertainment media is growing quickly in the United States. Not only in DVD series and feature films, but also in manga, cosplay, videogames, Newtype USA magazine, and ADV’s newly created Anime Network television station. Our university was the launch pad for many of ADV’s employees, and the amount of work to share a nation’s cartoons with another is awe inspiring., especially in such a niche form of artistic expression.

My Morning Jacket, First Time's A Charm (11: Unedited)

Halloween is an interesting release day for music and DVDs and even more interesting for a group whose only other live album was, whether coincidentally or brilliantly marketed, recorded on Halloween a few years ago. My Morning Jacket’s Okonokos double-disc live album has been out for about a month now but their concert footage DVD release drops today. It is the visual companion to the live album that shares the same name, and the band’s first distributed concert footage and DVD.

To try and explain the name Okonokos is an impossible task; the title is a made-up representation of front-man and guitarist Jim James’ objective artistic concept. The title is really more of a question than anything, and stays definitely unanswered through the course of the film.

In a unique way, it is a film. The start of the DVD opens to an old Victorian-style home hosting a candle-lit party in the night. A horse drawn carriage pulls up and drops off a top-hatted and mustachioed guest, and he’s ignored and scorned as he tries to make his rounds greeting the other people at the party. For some reason, his voice is inaudible despite his efforts at speech, and he is later mesmerized by the appearance of a large white alpaca. The two are mostly ignored, so they leave to go walk in the foggy woods. They see a bright white light and hear sounds alien to the melancholy forest, then find themselves inside the concert hall as My Morning Jacket begins the first song from their newest studio album, Wordless Chorus.

The focus switches to a wide and slowly zooming shot of the theater; a huge concert hall that’s totally full, balconies included, and decked out with chandeliers and moody lighting. The wall behind the stage is painted with tall dark tree trunks, and vines weave down and across the stage from all angles. Owls perch on the amplifiers and keyboards, and the band starts to move about the stage with its new song.

It sounds incredible. The DVD boasts Dolby Digital 5.1 Sound, but even the basic stereo setting sounds like a studio album. Concert DVDs are infamous for drawing attention to a band’s inability to measure up to their recording studio talent but even the thick reverb the band is famous for sounds crystal clear. The mix was done by Michael Brauer (Bob Dylan, Coldplay) and perfectly accents the achievements of the concert’s visual clarity.

All too often, attendees of live recordings boast about the transcendence of quality of the live show versus its recorded presentation. Marketing also contributes to the notion that a live performance is better than DVD with devices like, “It’s as if you’re really there!” However, the dozen or so cameras that follow each band member (even the drummer), wide shots of the stage, audience perspective shots, and pans across the crowd take the viewer so much further than the concertgoer.

The changing lighting of cool colors and contrasted oranges washes each song a different way, and adds to the crashing echo of the band’s sound. When the energy is high and strobe lights are used smartly, the audience reciprocates the excitement and screams accordingly. The band’s more ethereal alt-country songs of lap steels and heavy reverb are treated with shifting purples and greens, while the rolling ankle-high smoke helps write the myth of Okonokos.

The ornate and eerie indoor location, the mood and sounds of the Kentucky natives, and the absence of a credited venue add another mystery to the Okonokos performance: where is it? A better question to ask is: does that matter?

Okonokos feels like a timeless performance. An impressive two hours of music is without band-to-audience banter, and the clothing the patrons are wearing mimics the transgenerational feel of the setting and its story. This adds to James’ continual emphasis on wanting to create a lasting performance, and it does exactly that. After (or while) watching it, the viewer doesn’t want to know the logistics of the performance, he or she wants to try and decide which song was done the best.

The performance is mostly new material, and by new I mean from their most recent album, Z. About half of the eighteen songs are tracks from their other three albums, The Tennesee Fire (1999), At Dawn (2001) and It Still Moves (2003). The song “O Is The One That Is Real” is from their 2002 split EP with the band Songs: Ohia (2005).

As with anything, the DVD does have its weak points. During “Mahgeetah” the band is beginning to wear down, and one of the most impressive guitar riffs seems to be over-simplified. That is, until someone working sound realized the guitar wasn’t plugged in and the problem is rectified near the end of the song. The show concludes nicely, though somewhat abruptly, with the general everybody-do-whatever-with-your-instruments-all-at-once ending, but the movie keeps going. We rejoin the sometimes mentioned party expatriate (named in the credits “A. Man”) and alpaca, and leave the concert hall to walk back to the Victorian mansion. A large bear, assumed to be a reference to It Still Moves’ and Acoustic Citsuoca’s (2004) cover art, attacks A. Man and dismembers him. Awkwardly, the party witnesses this from indoors, and somehow the concert audience sees it too.

Special features are mostly absent as well, save a silent and random photo gallery without narration. But, with a two-hour runtime for one performance, there probably wasn’t much space to fit too many extras. Instead, it’s worth watching the concert again and considering making the commute to their November shows in Austin and Dallas.

For more information, and to watch a one minute preview, visit www.mymorningjacket.com. $19.99.

Harry Potter Re-examined, Dear Reader (10: Unedited)

Most people that have seen the Wizard of Oz set to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon agree that it’s a pretty cool coincidence. Replacing the soundtrack to a movie can significantly change a viewer’s perception of the film, because audio almost always plays a large role in a film’s storytelling, mood and tone. Wizard People, Dear Reader manipulates that idea and hilariously re-envisions the 2001 adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by providing a full-length, alternate soundtrack of narration to the film.

“We were at a bar and there was a guy playing pool all by himself, and he had sunglasses on and this kind of big hat, and headphones on… just totally cut off from the world even though he was right there in the middle of it, playing pool. We were just kind of taking turns, as people do when you’re just sitting around just kind of throwing out jokes, about what he could possibly be listening to,” creator Brad Neely said. “I bet he’s listening to a book on tape of Harry Potter.”

From there, Neely adopted the enthusiastic and scruffy voice that such an overbearing narrator might have. Though unnamed, this narrator becomes another character in the film, and seems more in-tune with the characters’ inner-dialogue than factual information; Hermione becomes the ugly and obnoxious Harmony, Professor Snape is now a female, and Rubeus Hagrid is called “Hagar the Horrible.”

Although Wizard People started out as a popular live performance, much like Mister Sinus Theater (a sort of live version of Mystery Science Theater 3000), Austin-based cartoonist and musician Neely no longer performs it live because of legal issues. However, he has recorded and made available a downloadable two-disc set to sync and play along with the first Harry Potter film.

Neely made it easy, and free, to download this two-and-a-half hour recording, divided into two separate burnable files, from counter-copyright website www.illegal-art.org. Simply follow the syncing instructions on the website to watch the film with the new soundtrack, or pop the CDs in your car stereo and listen to the “book on tape” as if it were one.

Aside from just being incredibly funny, Wizard People uses heavy-handed metaphor and hyperbole to tell another story that may not be immediately apparent to fans of the film’s original version. The narrator makes frequent religious and existential references to Harry’s powers, situation and inner conflicts. One of the most interesting scenes in Neely’s interpretation takes place in the school’s attic in front of the Mirror of the Erised, between Harry Potter and “Ronnie the Bear.” Harry finds the mirror and sees it as a gateway to heaven, and the scene becomes a moment of conflicting value systems between the two friends.

“What’s funniest sometimes is the serious stuff in the world…it kind of gets tied up in the whole reason that the Christian Right doesn’t like Harry Potter; if you’re going to be a wizard you have to kind of not believe in heaven, but you can believe in all these other crazy magical awesome things. You know, like Dumbledore’s pitching being a wizard to Harry as an alternative to going to heaven. I just think that’s cool, and Ronnie the Bear’s already totally into that whole idea.”

Ironically, one of the most fertile topics for Wizard People is Harry’s obvious biblical references, “He’s prophesized, he’s the most powerful being whether he wants to or not, and in every movie he saves the world from Satan, or Voldemore. I just think it’s such a Christ story, and I like the idea of a reluctant Christ. So, I saw the potential to be able to get that across.”

Whether altering the soundtrack to a film is considered a new art form is up to the viewer’s interpretation, but Neely’s attention to time and tone deserve recognition. The narration syncs almost perfectly in chronology and visual action, and each time the DVD player’s screen moves to a new chapter, the narrator announces it and introduces what’s on screen. From there, the storytelling analyzes the scene, or spirals away on an absurd tangent concerning nothing on-screen.

Aside from straining his throat to maintain a bizarre voice for the entire length of a film, another obvious difficulty of the project was working within the time constraints of a given scene or chapter, “That was a challenge, but a fun one… it was also a way to keep variety from chapter to chapter, so it wasn’t just all the same tone. [I] could work on one specific chapter at a time and kind of, hopefully, make these little, different sections.”

Although the project started out a joke between a group of friends, Neely has received a huge amount of positive response from fans who have downloaded and synced the DVD and audio, “I still get emails pretty much daily where someone has watched it and enjoyed it. So, that’s gratifying.”

Brad Neely’s other projects can be found online at www.creasedcomics.com, including the popular George Washington music video. Future projects include a series of short cartoons for an internet TV station, and a fictional rough-draft to Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography, The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant.

Explore Mexican Cinema With Cuarón (9: Unedited)

Cinema is one of the highest celebrated forms of contemporary media, and it’s obvious that the United States, Italy and France lead the world’s market in moviemaking. It is also easy to list dozens of American or Italian directors and their filmographies, but what about Mexican directors and their films?

One of the most popular Mexican directors is Alfonso Cuarón, who first achieved international recognition in 1991 with Sólo Con Tu Pareja (Only With Your Partner). In 1998, he directed an American adaptation to Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, then returned to Mexico and wrote, with his brother, 2001’s controversial Y Tu Mamá, Tambien. However, he is most recently known for directing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004).

Sólo Con Tu Pareja is a social satire aimed at the promiscuous and macho middle-class “Don Juans” of Mexico City. The comedy’s main character, Tomás, frequents women as quickly as he rambles through potential slogans for a jalapeño company- his secondary occupation to hooking up in his bedroom.

However, when servicing two women at the same time, and switching between his apartment and his neighbors’ (who is also his doctor and best friend, and conveniently out of town), Tomás sees into a third neighbor’s window and is struck by her beauty and graceful movements as she practices a flight attendant’s safety routine. She becomes his newest conquest, and his ambition alienates the other women he’s having affairs with. As punishment, the two trick him into thinking he has AIDS, which drives him to attempt suicide in a myriad of failures.

The film is more than a silly story of a casual sex addict. It addresses the social expectations of Mexican culture in its treatment of women, the machismo of its men, and absurd actions of its upper-middle class.

Cuarón said in the included documentary, Making Sólo Con Tu Pareja, “I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, in the sense of going all the way not to use reality for your film, but to transform reality and transform everything through camera and through montage.”

Cuarón’s film is a comfortable match to the works of Mexico’s famous authors in the school of “magical realism,” though his techniques are not as expressive. Mexico City, however, does become a character in the film; its characters leave the earth in its planes, befriend the Japanese in its bars, and it provides the height of its skyscrapers as a potential jumping ground for two suicidal lovers.

The cover art for today’s Criterion release of Sólo Con Tu Pareja is a montage of items and symbols from the film. High contrast images of airplanes, skyscrapers, travel itineraries, and Tomás’s conical paper cups circle the scribbled black title. It is underlined with red arrows, and printed on a hospital mint-green; an intentional reference to the film’s dominating color palette.

Viewers may notice that almost every scene in the film has a green object somewhere in it, and oftentimes find that everything in the shot is green or tinted to match.

Although Alfonso’s co-writer and brother, Carlos Cuarón, accuses the director of whimsically going through a “green period,” Alfonso Cuarón insists the color’s utilization serves as a tool for the film. “We wanted to create a heightened reality,” Cuarón said. “It was a reaction to a couple of decades in Mexican cinema in which the sense of style is almost lost.”

The tinted green comes across beautifully in the Criterion version of the film. According the transfer details in the included 30 page booklet, the film’s original cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki oversaw a remastering of the film, in which “thousands of instances of dirt, debris, and scratches were removed using the MTI Digital Restoration System.”

The booklet also includes a very interesting essay that focuses on the similarities and running themes of Cuarón’s films, most specifically the links and contrasts of Sólo Con Tu Pareja and Y Tu Mamá, Tambien, respectively. After the essay is a fictional biography of the film’s protagonist, called Tomás Tomás, written by Carlos Cuarón to introduce the character to actor Daniel Giménez Cacho.

DVD extras include the aforementioned documentary, Making Sólo Con Tu Pareja, a pair of short films by each of the Cuarón brothers, the theatrical trailer for the film, and updated English subtitles.

More information is available at www.criterionco.com, $29.99.

Sub Pop's DVDs Showcase Lesser-known Artists (8: Unedited)

Ugly Casanova, The Album Leaf, Iron & Wine, The Thermals, Fruit Bats, and The Shins have more in common than being some of the most talented musicians currently recording; they’re all on the Seattle-based independent label Sub Pop Records.

In May of this year, Sub Pop released its second DVD compilation of music videos, Acquired Taste. The title features videos by the aforementioned bands, with an additional 15 other bands, cataloging a total of 25 music videos.

Chris Jacobs, the Senior Director of Special Projects at Sub Pop explains, “We have a bunch of music videos, most of which have not been seen by fans of the artists we work with. We should put these all together on one DVD and sell it cheaply,” and it is, considering the $9.99 price tag. He continues, “Perhaps that is a means to getting people to see these videos, as the folks who program music video channels seem so profoundly uninterested in playing them!”

His statement rings true when you turn the television onto MTV, VH1, or even BET. The videos on these networks are, essentially, commercials with huge budgets that showcase the wealth or look of an artist or band. Lesser known artists, especially those on smaller, independent labels, get almost no airplay. It’s a lot like the radio.

Jacobs disagrees with the use of music videos only as another form of advertising, “While, there have been concessions made to avoid preventing videos from the possibility of being aired on TV, I don’t think that any of them are especially effective advertisements.”

When watching videos by Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, Spike Jones, or anyone else in the myriad of talented directors, some may consider the music video another medium of art. Theoretically, a video is an artistic interpretation of a musician’s message or ideas. A director is trusted to create something new, with foundations supplied by the soundtrack of a song. Jacobs agrees that videos deserve a higher status than commercials, but says, “Whether any of them might be considered art is subjective, but in every case the idea was to make something interesting.”

And most of the videos on Acquired Taste are interesting. With the exception of Ugly Casanova’s graphic Things I Don’t Remember, the videos are mostly narrative and completely devoid of women taking their clothes off, gold teeth, and a performer repeating their name over and over.

When you consider what it means, Acquired Taste seems like a strange title, “We picked the name because we thought it was funny. Things that people describe as an acquired taste typically taste kind of shitty. In choosing that as the title, we are, effectively, letting the consumer know that they probably won’t like what we’re offering.” The irony, of course, is that the videos and music are almost always superior to the viewer’s expectations.

Aside from this collection, Sub Pop has tapped into the quickly expanding market of music DVDs that focus entirely on one band. Almost any video, music, or book store stocks a collection (although sometimes very small) of live concerts, tour diaries, video collections, or biographies of any particular band. When I spoke with Band of Horses lead Ben Bridwell in June of this year, he praised Sub Pop’s willingness to work with his group in making their album and its contents in both parties’ best interests.

Jacobs reflects the same ideology when deciding what video or DVD releases the label should pursue, “[It’s] the sort of decision (like much of what we do) that we’d make with the artist. If they were super into the idea, we’d try to find a way to make it work. If they have a bunch of video content, stuff that they want to get out, then we’d likely suggest trying to find a way to do that.”

It’s worth mentioning that Sub Pop doesn’t focus completely on musicians. Comedian David Cross, largely known for co-starring in Mr. Show and as the character Tobias in Arrested Development, has two full-length albums and a DVD tour diary- something that is uncommon for a comedian. Stand-up comics usually have DVD releases of recorded performances, whereas Cross’s video follows the comedian around the country with heavy focus on his interactions during the tour itself. Along with some standard performance footage, the disc also has about five hidden “easter eggs”- or hidden special content.

The use of DVD media to deliver music and interpretative videos is becoming a more widespread practice. It’s easy to measure this growth by simply walking into a store and noticing what bands or artists have a new DVD, or to look at the music magazines that are shrink-wrapped with a small compilation of exclusive footage or musician interviews. Just like in the music industry, Sub Pop, among other independent labels, holds ground for the lesser-known artist trying to get his voice heard, or seen.

TAL's Book and DVD Mix Radio and Art (7: Unedited)

Usually, the term “mixed-media” brings to mind a mediocre artist who hot-glues stuff to his painting. “Mixed-mass media” doesn’t make our artist obese, but instead implies a fusion between the published art forms of print, video, and audio.

This American Life is a radio program produced by Ira Glass at WBEZ Chicago, and distributed by Public Radio International. TAL is not a typical radio show, as their website claims, “We're not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show... Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations where things happen to them.” So, essentially, they talk about the happenings of ordinary Americans, most often subject to unordinary circumstances.

In 2004, Ira Glass and comic artist and writer Chris Ware collaborated to produce a slideshow called Lost Buildings. Glass composed the interviews and stories, and Ware drew relevant artwork for the corresponding slideshow.

Lost Buildings is the story of Tim Samuelson’s fascination, as a young man in the 1960s and 70s, with Chicago’s buildings that were designed by famed architect Louis Sullivan. As modern architecture gained popularity in the public and private eyes of America, the multiple Sullivan buildings that characterized Chicago began to disappear.

In its original presentation, Lost Buildings was recorded live in front of a theatrical audience, and the images were projected onto a large screen. For the public that was not in attendance, TAL sells a DVD of the audio and slideshow, coupled with an extensive book of the notes and photographs from Samuelson.

The show is first introduced with an explanation of its original presentation and audience, and asks forgiveness in an attempt to put its current viewer in the seat of one of the slideshow’s original patrons. What follows is an incredible amalgamation of radio and printed art, presented on DVD for home viewing. Three mediums are utilized to tell the story about a young man’s obsessions with buildings.

Lost Building’s menu is typical of Ware’s printed work, which in this case, mimics that of its subject. A complex array of bending lines weave across the screen and are superimposed with the emergence of an ornate staircase decoration, and are then overlaid by a simple map of Sullivan buildings in Chicago. These stylistic themes become a point of reference in the show, in both its subject and style.

The slideshow starts with a black screen and the familiar radio voice of Ira Glass, as he begins an anecdote about Samuelson’s boyhood obsession. Samuelson frequently chimes in with answers to Glass’s questions, and the audio track becomes both documentary and interview, accompanied by an appropriate mixture of contemporary and classical music. As the show continues, the viewer finds himself studying Ware’s renditions of the famed buildings with growing sympathy towards Samuelson and their destruction, and the futility of its prevention.

The show becomes a study of two major themes: Samuelson and his mentor, Richard Nickel, find their friendship built by the destruction of Sullivan’s buildings. The second theme looks through a larger scope to observe America’s starvation for capitalistic newness and how it destroys beautiful work, despite men’s passions and efforts to stop it. Houston’s supporters of the River Oaks Theater can easily relate to the latter.

The special features of the disc include unused audio of Samuelson and Glass, which are significant in the feature's short run time. There is also a “frame enlargement” option to make easier the appreciation of Ware’s drawings. Also, when put into a computer and opened as a volume drive, the disc contains a high-resolution Quicktime version of the slideshow in its entirety.

The hardcover book could stand on its own with its comprehensive content and information. Following two pages of explanation and introduction from Chris Ware, there are about 90 pages of notes, reproduced letters, detailed and candid photographs, and interpretations by Samuelson and Nickel that submerge the reader into a deeper study of Sullivan’s master work. Most of the book concentrates on the famous Garrick Theater, relived in the detailed photographs and floor plans of the building. The book becomes a dissection of his architecture and complicated art form, found in the pages, on the DVD’s surface, and as the endpapers and covers of the book.

The book and DVD set is available from This American Life at thislife.org for $22, shipping included. For the wary, the website has a short Quicktime preview of the slideshow. Proceeds benefit the nonprofit radio show, which can be heard on the website and in Houston on 88.7 KUHF on Sundays at 11am, and 90.1 KPFT on Mondays at 2 pm.

Further Your Obsession With The Internet! (6: Unedited)

If you care to think about it, the complex intricacies of the internet can be summed up in one word: awesome. Luckily for everyone, this all-consuming adjective also applies to the hobby of collecting and watching DVDs. This week’s Disc-ussion will focus on a few websites that the collector or mild-enthusiast may find useful in their expensive and unhealthily obsessive hobby.

A new, though vindictively exclusive, program called Delicious Library recently became available for Mac OSX users to catalog their collections of DVDs, CDs, games, and most surprisingly, books. The program’s interface is remarkably familiar to users of iTunes, and uses the Apple iSight personal web-camera to take a picture of the barcode. Then the program magically reads this barcode and pulls up all available information on the product from Amazon.com’s database. Instantly, the cover or album art appears on a small shelf in the middle of the operating window, and the product is recorded into your user database.

The program also has a small feature in the bottom left-hand corner that allows the user to create “borrower” profiles (friends, relatives, coworkers, etc.) that can be tagged with movies they’ve borrowed from you. Delicious Library keeps track of which titles the person has, how long they’ve had it, and when it thinks too much time has passed since they borrowed your only copy of Happiness.

A free, though limited, demo of Delicious Library is available from http://delicious-monster.com, and a license for full use costs a cool $40.

For the poorer of us, or the PC users, a free web-based cataloging service is DVD Aficionado, available at http://dvdaficionado.com/. Despite its ugly interface, the website is useful for keeping track of what users own, and gives them the ability to create wish lists and show off what they already have. It also finds cover art and product information automatically.

An interesting tool attached to the “wish list” function of the site is the “Price Search Engine,” which compares the sale cost of a particular title against four of five retailers. Users also have the ability to alter their purchases, without going to the retailers’ websites, to save time and multiple shipping costs. DVD Aficionado claims their “price search engine can save [an active user] hundreds of dollars over just a few months.”

Although not specifically focused on the DVD market, the very popular Internet Movie Database has earned itself a reputation as the most comprehensive movie catalog on the internet. A simple visit to http://imdb.com/ can quickly turn into a link-clicking festival, as users dive further and further into the abyss of trivial movie (and television) minutia.

The website serves a useful research function, and can rapidly confirm discrepancies in the bitter after-movie arguments we all have with our loved ones. Visitors to the site can find out almost anything they need to know about a certain title, including its original theatrical release, and any subsequent home-theater releases the title may have enjoyed.

Registered users have the ability to post incredibly useless and frustrating comments about movies, including whatever accidental blunders a cast member may have made. To be fair, these discussion forums can be useful if one is interested in finding movies or television shows similar to one they already enjoy.

As a former member, until the cash got tight, of http://netflix.com, I can somewhat vouch a first hand account of the usefulness of the online rental service. The popular three-DVDs-at-a-time for $17.99 is a good value, and usually the limit a single person can watch in their dorm-room at one time. A variety of deals are available, ranging from one to five, with unlimited rentals per month. However, the term “unlimited” should be taken with a grain of salt. Netflix hides mention of its alleged “throttling” practice, wherein users’ rentals are held an extra day or three so that the company doesn’t lose money in its free shipping policy.

Googling the acronym DVD turns up too many useless results that require more effort than their worth to find anything useful, so hopefully these few recommendations can save you some trouble and get you to the good stuff. Don’t forget to search for my catalog on DVD Aficionado, I’m somewhere in the “borderline fanatical” category.