This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is:

“A Night to Remember” (1958)

With James Cameron’s epic 1997 mega-production of “Titanic” due to rise again on April 4 in eye-popping 3D, Criterion is offering a timely, spiffed-up rerelease of the highly regarded and historically accurate British dramatization of the maritime disaster, “A Night to Remember” (due out on DVD Tuesday).

Drawn from the meticulously researched book of that title by Walter Lord and directed by acclaimed British director Roy Ward Baker (“Don’t Bother to Knock”), “A Night to Remember” was released in 1958, just five years after Hollywood’s romanticized and highly mythologized “Titanic,” which starred Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb.

Lord’s book hewed rigorously close to the truth and proved extremely popular among readers eager for an accurate picture of the 1912 disaster that claimed the lives of more than 1,500 of the huge ocean liner’s 2,200 passengers.

Baker’s film adaptation, told with almost documentary-like detail, offers a more even-handed yet still dramatic portrayal of the R.M.S. Titanic’s sinking from the viewpoint of 2nd Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller, the most senior ship’s officer to survive the disaster.

Although the film upholds one erroneous belief of the time – that the Titanic sank in one piece instead of breaking in half as its bow began to go down – its screenplay by suspense master Eric Ambler nonetheless corrected many popular misconceptions about the tragedy and accurately depicted many ironic facts of the monumental, industrial-age disaster – such as the woeful lack of sufficient lifeboats to serve the passengers and the noble ship’s band playing calming music to the last possible moment.

In tandem with the gussied-up version of Cameron’s soaring epic, Criterion’s DVD – loaded with extras, such as audio commentary by historians, an hour-long British TV documentary and British and U.S. theatrical trailers – should be a welcome addition to any history buff’s library.

“A Night to Remember” (1958) is not rated and runs 123 minutes on two discs. It’s being released by Criterion Collection.

- Dennis King

“Journey 2: The Mysterious Island” is a great PG-rated place to leave the kids while Mom and Dad sneak across the multiplex hallway to catch something more adult-friendly on

Dwayne Johnson, Josh Hutcherson,Michael Caine, Luis Guzman, Vanessa Hudgens.

another screen.

As long as your young’uns aren’t adversely affected by what the Motion Picture Association of America describes as a movie with “some adventure action and brief mild language,” they’ll thrill to sights such as giant carnivorous lizards and birds, and bees the size of ponies that people ride bareback — or bee-back if you prefer — when escape from the ravenous reptiles and famished feathered foes becomes necessary.

And all the eye-popping action jumps off the screen in “Fusion System” 3-D, the process developed by James Cameron and used to stunning effect in “Avatar,” making the wondrous vistas of “The Mysterious Island” come to vivid life in a photo-real environment of vertigo-inducing depth and breathtaking vastness.

Like the 2008 version of “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” the screenwriters — in this case Brian Gunn and Mark Gunn (MTV’s “2gether) — have recast one of Jules Verne’s 19th century science-fantasy classics in the present day, and Josh Hutcherson reprises the role of intrepid teen explorer Sean Anderson.

His latest adventure begins when he receives a coded distress signal from a mysterious island in an area of the South Pacific where no island is supposed to exist. Sean suspects the S.O.S. is from his explorer grandfather Alexander (Michael Caine), who’s been missing since he set out to prove that “The Mysterious Island” of Verne’s book is not fiction but fact.

Believability takes a beating when Sean’s new stepfather, Hank (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), agrees to accompany his stepson on a quest to find the island and save stranded grandpa. (What about school and work responsibilities, guys?) Hank is eager to bond with Sean, who’s been keeping his sullen distance, and apparently no measure is too drastic if family harmony can be achieved.

Along the way they hire a helicopter pilot (Luis Guzman) and his beautiful daughter (Vanessa Hudgens) as guides, and all end up crashing on a bizarre, uncharted island full of the weird wildlife previously mentioned, plus breathtakingly beautiful jungles, volcanoes and a mountain of gold. They also find grandpa living in a treehouse and the remains of a certain mythical city.

Problem is, the island is sinking, and the only means of escape is in a storied 19th century submarine — if it really exists and they can find it in time.

Adults may find Johnson’s muscle-headed characterization a bit cartoonish, especially when Hank tries to teach Sean how to “pec-pop” — make his pectoral muscles dance up down in rhythm — as a way of impressing Hudgens’ frosty female character. But kids will no doubt howl with laughter at The Rock’s antics, and those of Guzman, whose exaggerated reactions to each new peril are straight out of a bad Disney Channel sitcom. Caine is occasionally amusing as the adventurous geezer, but the only reason he took his walk-through role was so that his grandkids could finally see him in a movie that’s geared toward children.

Young director Brad Peyton’s background is in animated features and talking-animal comedies such as “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” and it shows. Still, “Journey 2” is an ideal baby-sitter movie, for parents who want to escape to their own private island for 90 minutes are so.

— Gene Triplett

MOVIE REVIEW

“Journey 2: The Mysterious Island”

PG  1:34   2 stars

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Michael Caine, Josh Hutcherson, Luis Guzman, Vanessa Hudgens.

(Some adventure action and brief mild language)

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – While neither Emily Blunt nor Matt Damon profess to be New Age-y advocates of either free will or fate, each star of the cosmic-romantic thriller “The Adjustment Bureau” can relate a personal story in which the hand of providence appears to have steered them on a path that profoundly shaped their current lives and careers.

Matt Damon, Emily Blunt

Amid much furrow-browed contemplation over the movie’s philosophical quandary – do we control our own destiny, or is our fate preordained in the Big Book of Life? – the two stars sat down recently for a Universal Pictures press conference at the sky-high Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

“The Adjustment Bureau,” inspired by an intriguing Philip K. Dick short story titled “Adjustment Team,” casts Damon as David Norris, a Kennedy-esque New York politician on the brink of winning a U.S. Senate seat. Blunt plays Elise Sellas, a free-spirited ballet dancer whose bohemian allure spells love at first sight for the straight-arrow politician. But their unconventional love affair threatens to upset the ledgers of destiny, and so the dour men of the Adjustment Bureau work behind the scenes to keep David and Elise apart.

The stars were asked if either had experienced the hand of fate intervening in their own lives.

“I remember I didn’t get into this very amazing school that my sister went to, and I wanted to be just like my sister,” said Blunt (“The Devil Wears Prada”). “It’s a school called Westminster in London and it’s fiercely competitive. She gets in because she’s a brainiac, and I don’t because I’m obviously not. I remember at 16 just being devastated. I felt so inferior that I hadn’t gotten in.

“So I went to my second-choice school, which had a good drama department,” she said. “I previously hadn’t considered acting, but I did a play through my school that went to the Edinburgh Festival. I got an agent; he’s still my agent. And now I’m here with you nice people. And if I’d gone to Westminster I wouldn’t be doing this job. Guaranteed. So that was weird. At the time it seemed devastating and so sad, but really it was meant to happen.”

Damon (most recently seen in “True Grit” and “Hereafter”) initially joked about the question.

“Well, clearly for me, passing up the chance to be in ‘Avatar’ to do ‘Green Zone’ was one of those moments,” he said. “Because ‘Avatar’ didn’t do well and the DVD for ‘Green Zone’ is going to go right through the roof.”

Then, he considered it more seriously. “I do end up thinking about jobs. There are so many roads not taken. There’s a Garth Brooks song, it’s called something like ‘Thank God for Unanswered Prayers,’ and I think of all those movies I auditioned for and jobs I was desperate to get that I didn’t get that really turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

“And looking back on my life and my career I feel like I tried to control as much as I could, but a lot of it is down to luck,” he said. “There was a Werner Herzog movie called ‘Rescue Dawn’ that Christian Bale did, and Werner and I were talking about that – this is eight years ago – about me possibly playing that role and I was really strongly considering it.

“But instead I met with the Farrelly brothers, and I remember talking to my mother and she said, ‘you know, you don’t always have to go into a jungle and lose a bunch of weight. You’re allowed to have a little fun,’” he recalled. “And I did the Farrelly brothers movie (conjoined twins comedy ‘Stuck on You’) and that was where I met my wife (Luciana). Four kids later, and I guess that was a pretty fateful decision.”

Passing on “Avatar?” Damon was asked if that was a dicey choice or a dire trick of fate.

“It wasn’t anything against ‘Avatar.’ I talked to (James) Cameron, I read the script, I knew the movie was going to be a very big hit, you could see,” he said with a sheepish grin. “And I really wanted to do ‘Avatar’ to work with Cameron and watch him direct, because I was going to learn a lot. It was just that we were finishing ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ and I couldn’t leave.

“I joke that I passed on ‘Avatar’ but really my schedule made it an impossibility for me,” he said. “But, in terms of ‘Green Zone,’ Paul (Greengrass), one of my best friends in the business and a director I love, wanted to make a movie about Iraq and about the original lie that got us in there. And so I really wanted to go do that. My decisions are usually based on the director.”

George Nolfi is the screenwriter who penned “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Oceans Twelve” and is making his directing debut in this film. In adapting Dick’s stripped-down short story he managed to graft a fairly elaborate love story onto the narrative that presented some challenges for the actors.

“To me that was the tricky part,” Blunt said. “The questions I had tonally of what the movie was. What are we doing? And George encouraged us and we just decided to submarine everything and be naturalistic and not that ‘Matrix’-esque flying around on wires doing crazy stuff. These are pretty accessible sci-fi characters.”

“Yeah, the tone stuff we weren’t in charge of. That was the director’s job,” Damon agreed. “But for us, we thought, well, this is a love story with this other whole (sci-fi) element in it. But what really has to work, what we can control, is the relationship between us. And so we just worked on the scenes to make them feel right.”

Blunt said an additional challenge, and thrill, in making the movie was working on location at several iconic sites around New York City.

“I was like a kid. It was so exciting to be able to shoot at the Statue of Liberty,” she said. “But then the down fall is you have 400 random strangers watching you do a very emotional scene, which is pretty embarrassing.”

“Yeah, we did that scene at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, and obviously you can’t shut down the Stature of Liberty,” Damon said. “So there were like 400 people going to see the Statue and they’re like, hey, a movie is getting filmed. And so they just sat there, and we’re yelling at each other ‘I love you!’ And they’d go ‘Cut’ and there’d be a pause and everyone would applaud.”

“There was one really bad moment where we’d managed to get it together,” Blunt recalled. “We’d been laughing because it was so mortifying, the whole thing – Matt managed to get it together, he was there, he was really in it, and then someone in the crowd goes (low, guttural voice) Matt Daaamon. And he looked at me and said, ‘this is the worst day of my life.’ But it was fun. Yankee Stadium was pretty cool.”

Both Blunt and Damon expressed admiration for the stories of the late science fiction writer
Philip K. Dick, whose work has served as source material for such films as “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall” “Minority Report” and more.

“George basically took just the central idea of Dick’s story, and the rest he really invented himself,” said Damon. “This whole love story, really the core of the movie, is an invention of George’s. This is the least kind of Philip K. Dick of all Philip K. Dick movies, in a way, with the whole love story and romance.”

Listed on wimgo Movies under Science fiction

Jeremy Renner in a scene from "The Hurt Locker."

BY DENNIS KING

Having earned a living for a couple of decades by babbling on about movies, it is perhaps impolitic to admit that I’m not very good at guessing Oscar winners. The average popcorn Joe predicting in the average Oscar office pool probably has as good a track record at picking winners as me.

It’s not a function of movie knowledge or keen insight or anything like that. It’s just that quirky tastes in movies often lead to quirky predictions when it comes Oscar time (I’d much rather vote the low-budget underdog than the fabulous front-runner). That, and the fact that reading the tea leaves on how 6,000 or so official Oscar voters will vote (they are indeed a fractious bunch) is sheer folly.

My favorite axiom on Oscar expertise is drawn from that grand screenwriter and two-time Oscar-winner William Goldman, who famously wrote, “In Hollywood, nobody knows anything.”

Early on in my tenure as a professional “film cricket” (Homer Simpson’s term), I concocted an admittedly goofy experiment in which I tacked lists of Oscar nominees on a dart board and let fly a dart at each of the Big Six categories (supporting actor, supporting actress, actor, actress, director and best movie). Then I compared my own furrow-browed prognostications with the whims of the dart.

And the dart’s random picks were more successful than mine. D’oh!

So anyway, after that long-winded prelude, here are my best guesses at statuette winners of the 82^nd Academy Awards to be presented Sunday evening in an overstuffed ceremony airing on ABC from Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre.

Best actress in a supporting role: Maggie Gyllenhaal, “Crazy Heart.” (The Academy’s actors’ branch is the largest and most politically fragmented voting body, and it’s often in supporting categories that upsets and surprises occur. But Gyllenhaal, so good in this gritty, naturalistic serio-comedy, is a popular candidate who’s compiled an impressive body of work. So it just feels like her time.)

Best actor in a supporting role: Woody Harrelson, “The Messenger.” (The movie, one of several fine meditations of late on the terrible toll of war, is perhaps too grim and little seen to attract voters. But the sometimes erratic Harrelson proves himself a serious acting force in this tightly contained yet volatile performance. It is indeed Oscar-worthy.)

Best actress in a leading role: Sandra Bullock, “The Blind Side.” (Another popular – and populist – actress who is finally nominated for a role weighty and inspirational enough to attract lots of sympathetic voters. It just feels like she’s due.)

Best actor in a leading role: Jeff Bridges, “Crazy Heart.” (Call it the Lebowski Effect, but Bridges inhabits broken-down, psychically damaged roles like Bad Blake as if he were born on a barstool in a bowling alley. He’s another actor whose body of superb work should win him loads of popular support among fellow actors, even in a shaggy-dog movie such as this.)

Best director: Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker.” (All indicators – previous awards ceremonies – point to a breakthrough Oscar for Bigelow. First woman ever to win and all that. Aside from the juicy satisfaction of seeing her beat out James “King of the World” Cameron, her ex-husband with his monumental ego, Bigelow simply deserves to win for a superior piece of film storytelling – rich in detail, complex human dimension and thrumming dramatic impact.)

Best picture. “The Hurt Locker.” (With all the hoopla about expanding the best picture category to 10 nominees, in the final run it seemed to narrow down to a two-picture race between “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar.” Low-budget indie grit versus big-budget special-effects razzle-dazzle. Gut-level storytelling versus high-tech eye-candy. Art versus commerce. Perhaps setting up this David-and-Goliath dynamic will succeed in drawing in more viewers to the Oscar telecast, but if Oscars are in truth about celebrating some mythic “best” in the year’s movies, then all 10 nominees are winners. But “The Hurt Locker” should be first among equals.)

Now that the 82^nd Academy Awards nominations have been announced, the silly season of movie punditry is in full swing.

Everywhere – from blogs such as this, to slick magazine layouts, to TV talk shows, water-cooler conversations, coffeehouse bull sessions and barroom arguments – movie “experts,” film buffs and popcorn junkies alike will fill up the days until the March 7 awards broadcast with nitpicky analyses of all things Oscar.

Already, we’ve seen floated these bits of Oscar arcana:

– Meryl Streep’s nomination for best actress for “Julie & Julia” is her 16^th, an all-time high. Following are Katharine Hepburn and Jack Nicholson with 12 each. Wow!

– Kathryn Bigelow, nominated as best director for “The Hurt Locker,” is only the fourth woman ever nominated for directing. And how can you miss the fact that she’s competing against her ex-husband James Cameron, who’s nominated for “Avatar?” Juicy!

– The field of 10 nominees for best picture is a first in decades for the staid old Academy and opens up a whole field of debate concerning the artistic merit of tasteful, low-budget art films and big-budget studio juggernauts. Hmm. Interesting.

– “Up” is only the second full-length animated feature nominated for best picture. The first was “Beauty and the Beast” in 1991. Zowie!

– And this really obscure bit of trivia: “The White Ribbon” (“Das Weisse Band”) from Germany is the ninth predominantly black-and-white film to be nominated for cinematography since 1967, when a separate category for black-and-white was eliminated. Woo-hoo!

It’s all in good fun and helps generate some interest, excitement and heat through the dankest weeks of winter. But it’s always worth noting at this time of year that all our deepest insights and brainiest prognostications are just so much babble. All that really counts is the voting tally of 6,000 (give or take) elite members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.

They’re a pampered gaggle of Hollywood insiders consisting of artists and professionals who work in the film industry. The Academy is made up of 15 branches representing a range of crafts vital to creating and marketing motion pictures.

Those branches and their membership numbers are: Actors (1,205), Art Directors (374), Cinematographers (200), Directors (366), Documentary (151), Executives (437), Film Editors (221), Makeup Artists & Hairstylists (118), Music (234), Producers (452), Public Relations (368), Short Films and Feature Animation (340), Sound (405), Visual Effects (279) and Writers (382).

In addition, there are various life and at-large members not assigned to specific branches, and all Oscar winners each year are automatically afforded Academy membership.

So, try as we might to read the tea leaves and divine some logic or pattern in the process, predicting Oscars is a futile exercise. Given a business that’s rife with political intrigue, boardroom wheeling and dealing, closely held loyalties, fierce grudges and fragile egos – not to mention an arcane voting process – it’s all about as precise and fair as voting for high-school prom queen.

But the Oscar babble goes on, and we’ll join in the blah-blah-blah occasionally from way out here in the cheap seats. So pass the popcorn, please.

– Dennis King