Reading Room Bookshop Blog

Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers

2011-12-04T16:30:00.001-05:00

Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

Publishers are putting more thought into books' aesthetics

Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions — deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.
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Sims Social, A Game To Make Zynga Nervous

2011-10-08T12:04:00.000-04:00

The Sims Social looks poised to knock off CityVille as Facebook's top application.

Over the last month 66,560,159 people have played the Sims Social on Facebook.

That is more than double the audience who tuned in for Ashton Kutcher’s recent debut on the hit sitcom “Two and a Half Men.” It is roughly twice the number of copies of “The Catcher in the Rye” sold during the last 60 years. And it is about 20 million more people than have ever purchased Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
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Ziggy Creator Passes At Age 80

2011-09-21T15:52:00.000-04:00

Tom Wilson Sr. and Tom Wilson Jr.

Tom Wilson Sr., creator of Ziggy, passed away on Sept. 16 after a long illness. He was 80 years old.

The Ziggy cartoon, which celebrates it's 40th year in syndication this year, will continue to be produced by Wilson's son, Tom Wilson Jr., who has handled day-to-day operations since 1987.
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Activision and ABC to Release Wipeout 2 Video Game

2011-08-22T11:27:00.002-04:00

Wipeout 2, a video game based on the ABC TV show is in the works to be released in stores for the holiday shopping season.
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Moshi Monsters Game Release For Nintendo DS

2011-08-20T17:43:00.002-04:00

Moshi Monsters: Moshling Zoo

Activision Publishing and Mind Candy are set to bring Moshi Monsters to the Nintendo DS platform this fall with the upcoming release of Moshi Monsters: Moshling Zoo.

The game features new locations and an exclusive new character.
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Movie Review Conan the Barbarian (2011)

2011-08-19T10:36:00.000-04:00

Simon Varsano/Lionsgate

Jason Momoa as Conan in "Conan The Barbarian."

Keep Hold of Your Head, Lest He Lop It Off With the Others

A heavy-metal fantasia scrawled in red, “Conan the Barbarian” now comes with 75 percent more gore. That’s only an estimate, though to judge by the gruesome opener that features the title character as a boy gouging enemy flesh and lopping off heads, it’s a fair guess. Having entered a forest for a newbie warrior rite of passage, baby Conan (Leo Howard) has returned to his village and its leader, his brawny, bushy father (Ron Perlman, surprise), splattered in blood and dangling several severed heads from his wee mitts. They look like grotesque puppets or maybe yo-yos, but, really, they’re just playthings for a growing barbarian.
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Charlie Sheen to return in new sitcom "Anger Management"

2011-07-18T14:32:00.000-04:00

Charlie Sheen, who was fired from "Two and a Half Men" in March, aims to launch another hit sitcom - this time, on his own terms.

The tempestuous star is planning to return to series television in the aptly titled "Anger Management," based on the 2003 film of the same name.
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J K Rowling to sell Harry Potter e-books from Pottermore website

2011-06-23T08:33:00.000-04:00

J K Rowling has confirmed that she will release paid-for e-book versions of her incredibly successful Harry Potter books from her new website Pottermore "in partnership with J K Rowling’s publishers worldwide". The news was unveiled via YouTube and at a press conference held today (23rd June).
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Video Game 'Duke Nukem Forever' finally launches

2011-06-13T07:40:00.000-04:00

It may have seemed like forever, but "Duke Nukem Forever," the shooter game first announced in 1997, has finally arrived.

Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., which publishes the game, launched in Europe and Australia on Friday. The game debuts on Tuesday in the U.S., Canada and Mexico for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PCs.
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"Disney Universe" Video Game Slated For Fall Release

2011-05-27T09:45:00.000-04:00

Disney Universe, a multiplayer action adventure game, for PlayStation3, Xbox 360, Wii and Windows PC/MAC from developer Disney Interactive Studios is slated to be realeased this fall.
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Charlaine Harris Joins Kindle Million Club

2011-05-12T10:18:00.000-04:00

Amazon's Kindle

Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels, has become the latest writer to sell more than one million Kindle e-books through Amazon.
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Jewel to Release Album with Fisher-Price

2011-05-06T09:45:00.000-04:00

East Aurora, NY - Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Jewel is set to release "The Merry Goes 'Round" in partnership with Fisher-Price and Somerset Entertainment.
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Video Game Review | Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters

2011-04-06T09:59:00.000-04:00

A scene from the game Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters, by Electronic Arts for the Xbox 360, Wii and PlayStation 3.

The Course Is the Star of a Celebrity’s Game

As a multiracial American who likes golf, I once revered Tiger Woods from afar. Then, after meeting him and learning that he could talk about video games the way a normal dude does, I thought I actually liked him as a person. So when he humiliated his wife and family (not to mention himself) in front of the entire planet with his spectacular sexual self-immolation, I was as disgusted and disillusioned as any fan could be. Heading into this week’s Masters tournament, I am not rooting against him. But for whatever trouble he is having getting his game and his life back together, I, like millions of others, have zero sympathy.
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Activision and Marvel Announce New Spider-Man Video Game

2011-04-01T10:38:00.000-04:00

Activision Publishing and Marvel Entertainment announced Spider-Man: Edge of Time, the new Spider-Man video game. The game will hit stores this fall.
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EA Sports Launches Madden NFL Football in 3D

2011-03-24T14:46:00.002-04:00

Electronic Arts announced today that Madden NFL Football, the first EA Sports title available for Nintendo in 3D, hits retail stores throughout North America Sunday.
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Animal Planet series “River Monsters” Books

2011-03-23T15:06:00.000-04:00

Discovery Communications announced it will publish two books based on the Animal Planet series “River Monsters” this year.
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CBS Adds Online CSI Casino Games

2011-03-05T10:52:00.000-05:00

CBS Consumer Products has signed a multi-year licensing agreement with GTech G2 to develop online casino games based on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” “CSI: Miami” and “CSI: New York.” The first CSI casino game will become available to GTech G2 licensees by the end of the year.
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Book buyers expect to pay less for e-books

2011-03-03T10:05:00.000-05:00

Half of all book buyers expect to pay less for e-books, according to new research by Mintel, but those book readers who already own e-book devices have marginally more realistic expectations over price, suggesting that the transition of the big publishers to agency terms is helping to shift consumers' attitudes—albeit slowly.
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NBC's "The Celebrity Apprentice" Season 11, Premieres March 6, 2011

2011-02-27T12:54:00.000-05:00

Season 11 of NBC's reality series "The Celebrity Apprentice" premieres on Sunday, March 6 at 9 p.m. EST. The show features a cast of celebrities who battle it out for their favorite charities and ultimately compete to become the next celebrity apprentice.

NBC announced the cast of "celebrities" set to compete.
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Music Exec Blasts Academy's Grammy Choices

2011-02-22T07:48:00.000-05:00

U.S. music executive Steve Stoute took out a full-page advertisement in Sunday's New York Times blasting Grammy Awards voters for their choices this year.

The prizes honoring the previous year's best in music were handed out Feb. 13 in Los Angeles by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
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Grammys, Lady A Wins Record & Song Of Year

2011-02-14T06:31:00.000-05:00

"Lady Antebellum"

LOS ANGELES - Lady Antebellum was the big winner at the Grammys with five awards, including record and song of the year for the band's yearning crossover ballad "Need You Now," but rockers Arcade Fire won Sunday's biggest prize, album of the year, for their highly acclaimed "The Suburbs."
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Paramount To Create Online Rango Game

2011-02-11T20:10:00.000-05:00

Paramount Digital Entertainment announced a partnership with Funtactix to create an online multiplayer game based on the animated film Rango, a Paramount Pictures/Nickelodeon Movies joint release. The “Rango: The World” game will make its debut alongside the film on March 4.
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National Geographic and Colorbök to Make Kids' Arts and Crafts

2011-02-07T18:20:00.000-05:00

National Geographic and Colorbök have announced a partnership to develop a line of kids’ arts and crafts activities. Products will be available later this year.
Designed for boys and girls aged 6 to 11, the line will offer activities ranging from wildlife and nature to world culture and exploration, with an educational bonus of National Geographic Fun Facts.

“While focusing on topics kids love, including amazing animals, the wonders of nature, cultural connections and world exploration, this new program supercharges children’s imaginations and natural curiosity with hands-on crafts that educate through play,” says Krista Newberry, vice president of licensing for National Geographic. “As a leader in kids’ crafts, Colorbök is a natural fit for this new initiative.”

National Geographic’s net proceeds from the sale of the new line will support exploration, conservation, research and education programs.

From Licensemag.com

CBS Launches CSI Facebook Promotion

2011-02-03T10:51:00.000-05:00

Ubisoft and CBS Consumer Products will launch an innovative watch-and-win cross-promotion for its television drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” using the Facebook social game “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Crime City.”

The Facebook game boasts more than 2 million active monthly users. Starting today, players will be able to watch episodes and obtain clues that will unlock special bonuses in the game. The sweeps-month cross-promotion represents the first collaboration between a primetime series and a social game developer.

From Licensemag.com

Stephen King's "The Stand" heading to big screen

2011-02-01T12:50:00.000-05:00

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Stephen King's grand opus "The Stand" is finally getting the big-screen treatment.

Warner Bros. and CBS Films are teaming to adapt the novel, which in many ways set the bar for a generation of post-apocalyptic stories.

One of the biggest books of all time, "The Stand" is a story of good vs. evil after a virus wipes out most of the American population. While it features dozens of characters (such as the Trashcan Man and Mother Abigail) and overlapping story lines running over many years, the struggle boils down to a group of survivors fighting the Antichrist-like Randall Flagg.

The novel was originally published in 1978, but by the time it was re-released in 1990 with King adding and revising portions of the story, it had achieved cult-like status.

Horror director George Romero and Warners separately tried in vain to launch a movie adaptation in the 1980s, and a toned-downed version was produced as a six-hour miniseries by ABC in 1994. In recent years, Marvel Comics has been adapting the story to great acclaim.

King's stories made for popular Hollywood adaptations in the 1980s and '90s, but that love seemed to lose steam in the past decade. But with Universal mounting an ambitious take on "The Dark Tower," and now "The Stand," King may be getting ready to return to the throne as the novelist the town loves the most.

The studios and producers will sit down with writers and directors in the coming weeks in an attempt to find the right take on the material. One thing to be determined is whether to attempt the adaptation in one or multiple movies. King will be involved in some capacity.

CBS has held the rights for many years but recently realized the best way to undertake the project was with a partner. Warners beat out Fox and Sony in a tight bidding war for the gig, and will handle worldwide marketing and distribution.

CBS, meanwhile, gets a chance to be involved in an ambitious big-budget tentpole with little downside. The company just released its fourth movie, "The Mechanic," which performed better than expected this weekend with an opening of $11.4 million.

From Reuters.com

Video Game Review | LittleBigPlanet 2

2011-01-30T11:16:00.001-05:00

A scene from LittleBigPlanet 2, a whimsical game from Sony, which allows users to create their adventures.

Allowing Players to Assume the Ultimate Role: Game Creators

There’s someone out there on Sony’s PlayStation Network who goes by the name Urbandevill. I’ve never met him. (I assume it’s a he because the online avatar sports yellow eyes, green skin and a long, green beard). I don’t know what country he lives in. In fact, I don’t know anything about him.

All I know is that someone in the video game industry should offer this guy a job. Why? Because I have played his truly wondrous creations in LittleBigPlanet 2, Sony’s stunning new entertainment ecosystem for the PlayStation 3.
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New York Times to publish e-book on WikiLeaks

2011-01-27T07:52:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK - The New York Times is experimenting with another source of revenue: digital books.

The newspaper said Wednesday it will publish its first e-book on Monday.

"Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy" will chronicle the story of last year's WikiLeaks saga, in which the anti-secrecy group released U.S. State Department cables and other sensitive documents. The Times was among five publications that reviewed the material with WikiLeaks before their release.

The Times' new e-book will sell for $5.99 through Amazon.com Inc., Barnes & Noble Inc., Google Inc.'s eBook store and Apple Inc.'s iBookstore.

The Times, owned by The New York Times Co., has been looking to grow revenue in digital businesses to offset declines in print advertising. It will soon charge readers who go over a certain monthly limit of free articles at its website.

Executive Editor Bill Keller will write an essay on how the Times got involved with WikiLeaks and why it decided to publish the documents. The e-book will contain essays from Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd. It will also include the full text of the documents that the Times has published on its website, along with 27 additional cables selected for the e-book.

By Associated Press/AP Online

Read On

2011-01-26T08:27:00.000-05:00

News that Borders, the nation’s second-largest book chain after Barnes & Noble, is teetering on the brink of a bankruptcy filing has made book publishers even more nervous about their online future.

The recording industry, which preceded books’ move online by about a decade, sold $7.7 billion worth of music in 2009, down from $14.3 billion in 2000. Electronic books are much easier to pirate than songs and movies — a fact made clear when Dan Brown’s blockbuster “The Lost Symbol” was downloaded illicitly more than 100,000 times within days of hitting stores in 2009.

Despite all that, we are happy to say that it’s far too early to kiss book publishing goodbye. E-book sales more than doubled in the first 11 months of last year — to about 8 percent of total sales. E-readers are flying off the shelves, and overall book sales are holding up as the paper-based industry transitions to the digital age, increasing 3.5 percent in the first 11 months of 2010.

The resilience of the book business may be because of demographics. Like jazz, which is less prone to illicit downloads than hip-hop, books cater to older, less Internet-savvy customers. Publishers also avoided the recording industry’s mistake of wasting precious time suing customers and have rightly focused on promoting cheap and easy ways for them to download books legally.

Books, as a cultural product, face important pressures. The pursuit of blockbusters by big publishers and retailers means that potential readers are exposed to a narrower set of titles. Americans have more choices on how to spend their spare time. Some argue that the short texts usually found on the Internet are changing readers’ habits, perhaps reducing our attention spans.

Yet for all the fear of reading’s demise, books have survived similar challenges before. Over the last 50 years, books have had to contend with television, then cable, VCRs, DVDs, PCs, laptops, iPods, iPhones and iPads. Despite all these diversions, Americans spend a larger share of their budgets on books today than they did in 1960. Though book sales have declined slightly in the last 10 years as a share of consumer spending, they have still grown more than 15 percent over the period, after accounting for inflation. And Nooks, Kindles and the like might actually help books gain a wider following by taking the bookstore to the customer.

NY Times

Nintendo Introduces 3D Glasses-Free Portable Gaming System

2011-01-20T12:02:00.000-05:00

Nintendo will release its 3DS portable gaming system to stores this March. The system does not require glasses and will retail for $249.99 in the U.S.

The Nintendo 3DS system includes two screens: the bottom touch screen makes use of a telescoping stylus stored in the unit; and the top screen displays 3D visuals to the naked eye. The system also has a 3D depth slider that lets players adjust the level of 3D they enjoy the most.

"Nintendo 3DS is a category of one - the experience simply doesn't exist anywhere else," says Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America. "You have to see Nintendo 3DS to believe it. And it's like nothing you've ever seen before."

From License! Global

New James Bond novel "Carte Blanche" to be written by Jeffery Deaver

2011-01-17T09:52:00.000-05:00

The first James Bond novel to be written by Jeffery Deaver is to be titled Carte Blanche, with a release date of 26th May 2011.

The Hodder title was revealed today [17th January] at a launch event in Dubai, where part of the novel is set. The jacket was also unveiled, and shows smoke rising on a white backdrop.

Deaver said: "In the world of espionage, giving an agent carte blanche on a mission comes with an enormous amount of trust and constantly tests both personal and professional judgement. Part of the nonstop suspense in the novel is the looming question of what is acceptable in matters of national and international security.

"Are there lines that even James Bond should not cross?"

Carte Blanche will be set in the present day, including an updated version of Fleming's favourite car, a Bentley Continental GT.

By Katie Allen - TheBookseller.com

Anthony Horowitz To Write New Sherlock Holmes Novel

2011-01-17T09:30:00.000-05:00

Orion is to publish a new full-length Sherlock Holmes novel, written by Alex Rider author Anthony Horowitz, after he was selected by the Conan Doyle Estate.

Jon Wood, deputy group publisher, acquired world rights to the as-yet-unnamed title through Robert Kirby of United Agents.

Further details about the title, to be published in September, are still to be revealed, though it will be "a brilliant mystery novel, stripped back to the original style of Conan Doyle", according to the
publisher.

Wood said: "We are incredibly excited by what an author of Anthony's quality and Sherlock-ian expertise can bring to the greatest of all British detectives. The combination of his passion for Holmes and his consummate narrative trickery will ensure that this new story will not only blow away Conan Doyle aficionados but also bring the sleuth to a whole new audience."

It is the first time the Conan Doyle Estate has given its approval for a new Holmes novel. Kirby said: "When I discussed with the surviving relatives of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who we felt Sir Arthur would choose to write an authorised new Sherlock Holmes novel we came up with a shortlist of only one name, Anthony Horowitz.

"We're thrilled Anthony has agreed and look forward to this must-read global publishing event this autumn."

Horowitz said: "I fell in love with the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was 16 and I've read them many times since. I simply couldn't resist this opportunity to write a brand new adventure for this iconic figure and my aim is to produce a first rate mystery for a modern audience while remaining
absolutely true to the spirit of the original."

By Charlotte Williams - TheBookseller.com

New Video Game Release | "Lego Battles: Ninjago" for Nintendo DS

2011-01-16T10:19:00.000-05:00

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and TT Games will release "Lego Battles: Ninjago" for Nintendo DS, the follow-up title to the original Lego Battles videogame. The game will hit stores in Spring 2011.

"'Lego Battles: Ninjago' offers players a humorous way to immerse themselves further in the Lego Ninjago toy line with action packed battles," says Tom Stone, managing director of TT Games Publishing. "It is great to build upon the success of the first Lego Battles game and expand the Lego Ninjago world with new and classic Lego characters."

By License! Global

Pokémon Launches National Mall Tour

2011-01-12T13:02:00.000-05:00

Pokémon Company International announced the launch of a multi-city national mall tour starting Feb. 5 to support the release of Pokémon Black Version and Pokémon White Version video games for the Nintendo DS.

The 14-city tour will showcase all-new Pokémon and gives fans a chance to play the brand-new game and attend a free screening of the new Pokémon feature-length film, Pokémon-Zoroark: Master of Illusions. The tour also features Pokémon character meet-and-greets with brand-new starter Pokémon Snivy, Tepig and Oshawott; a mall-wide scavenger hunt; a special Celebi character distribution at GameStop stores and more. A Pokémon Center store offering merchandise will also be on-site.

"The anticipation for Pokémon Black Version and Pokémon White Version has been palpable, and we are eager to introduce these fantastic new games to America," says J.C. Smith, director of marketing for The Pokémon Company International's. "We cannot wait to hit the road and give Pokémon fans an up-close and personal look at an all-new world of Pokémon in a fun, totally immersive environment."

The Pokémon Black Version and White Version Tour will run every weekend through March 20 in the following cities: Seattle, WA; Cleveland, OH; San Jose, CA; Memphis, TN; Los Angeles, CA; Indianapolis, IN; Feb. 26-27: Denver, CO; Philadelphia, PA; Minneapolis, MN; New York, NY; Dallas, TX; Atlanta, GA and Phoenix, AZ.

From Licensemag.com

A Sequel to J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Banned in US & Canada

2011-01-12T10:03:00.000-05:00

An unauthorised sequel to J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has been blocked from US release after months of legal wrangling, although international publication can still go ahead.

Swedish author Fredrick Colting’s 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye was banned from US publication in July 2009, but in May 2010 an appeal was given the go-ahead.

A settlement agreement was signed in early December, states that Colting has agreed not to publish or otherwise distribute the book, e-book or any other editions, in the US or Canada.

However, according to Publishers Weekly, the agreement does not prevent Colting from selling the title in other international territories.

Colting told PW: "We've come to an agreement with the Salinger trust but I'm afraid I can't go into any specifics. Let's just say that the book will be published in a number of countries this year and I'm very pleased with that."

The title was published in the UK by Windupbird Publishing and self-published in Sweden. Colting, who wrote under, the pseudonym John David California, was sued by the famously reclusive Salinger and his estate for copyright infringment, but claimed that the title was a legally permissable commentary and parody of The Catcher in the Rye.

Salinger died in January 2010.

From TheBookseller.com

Penguin Children’s Books to Publish Royal Wedding Titles

2011-01-05T09:24:00.000-05:00

Penguin Children’s Books will publish souvenir editions to commemorate the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. William and Kate: The Royal Wedding will be a full color picture book published by Ladybird, which has a long tradition of royal publishing that includes editions for the weddings of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. The title, which will be available in February, will celebrate the relationship of William and Kate, from when they first met to how they went on to become one of the most famous couples in the world.

The second title, Will and Kate’s Dress-up Dolly Book, is a cut out and keep paper doll book published by Penguin Children’s imprint, Sunbird. Available in March, this title will feature illustrated paper dolls of William and Kate with paper outfits appropriate for the couple’s social calendar. From ceremonial duties to leisure time, the dolls clothes will be based on William and Kate’s actual wardrobes and the outfits they have been famously photographed in including Kate’s blue engagement dress.

By License! Global

Is 2011 the Year of the Blockbuster Tech I.P.O.?

2010-12-31T11:01:00.000-05:00

FarmVille, Zynga’s online game.

For technology start-ups, the initial public offering has long lost the sheen of the dot-com era, when it seemed like anyone with an idea could go public. At the peak of the bubble, the Silicon Valley factory was in overdrive, pumping out hundreds of I.P.O.’s. a year.

In the wake of the financial crisis, there were just 45 offerings of tech companies in 2010, according to investment firm Renaissance Capital. The year before, only 16 debuted.

Now, Silicon Valley could see a modest return to the prerecession days — and even a hot brand-name initial offering from the likes of Groupon, Facebook or Zynga analysts say.

“If the equity markets remain stable, I expect a solid I.P.O. market,” said Peter Falvey, co-head of technology investment banking for Morgan Keegan. “We could see 20 percent more deals by value and by number.” Mr. Falvey and others also see increasing odds for a “Death Star explosion” — a blockbuster, multibillion dollar offering from a major Internet company. That theory gained credence on Thursday, when DealBook reported that that social-buying site Groupon is preparing for to I.P.O. at the end of 2011.

Silicon Valley is waking from a deep slumber.

The credit crisis paralyzed the technology I.P.O. market, as investors shunned unproven ventures. Only 20 companies went public from 2008 to the end of 2009, according to data from Renaissance Capital.

Meanwhile, initial offerings have become less attractive to young entrepreneurs who do not want to be burdened with the costly bureaucratic challenges of going public, including increased regulatory scrutiny, constant filings and high investment banking fees.

Instead, more founders are delaying initial offerings in favor of additional venture capital. Facebook raised more than half a billion dollars from the Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies. As DealBook noted, Groupon is negotiating with Fidelity, T. Rowe Price and Morgan Stanley for another round of financing that could be as large as $950 million.

Still, several analysts say I.P.O.’s may be regaining favor again, thanks to the improving stock market and a better economic environment.

“We may be nearing an inflection point,” said Paul Bard, a vice president at Renaissance Capital. “Companies are feeling good about their businesses, the buy side is more interested in growth and new money is coming into the market. When you have those three things happening in concert, that creates the potential for a very vibrant market for tech I.P.O.’s.”

The market may also be supported by the steady flow of Chinese companies, looking to go public on American exchanges. Eleven technology companies based in China had initial public offerings in the United States this year, including DangDang, an online retailer that experienced higher-than-expected demand in its debut, raising $272 million.

After a sluggish start, I.P.O. performance and pricing has picked up in the second half of this year. The shares of technology companies that have recently gone public are up 50.3 percent from their initial offer price, according to Morgan Keegan.

Although there are a few well-known names in this group, including the electric-car marker Tesla, the vast majority are little known, small-cap stocks. And some have done very well.

Shares of the software maker RealPage, which began trading in August, have roughly doubled. RealD, the 3-D technology company that went public in July, is up 60 percent.

The average first-day increase in share price was 18 percent, said Mr. Bard, adding that the recent rally would encourage small and midsize tech start-ups to take the plunge next year. He says he expects 2011 I.P.O. activity for technology stocks to match the levels of the years preceding the recession. In those years, the market averaged 53 public offerings a year with a value of $9.6 billion, according to Renaissance Capital.

There are 22 companies in the tech I.P.O. pipeline, including the Web chat service Skype, which many predict will be a billion-dollar offering.

The latest parlor game, however, is placing bets on whether Internet companies like Groupon or Facebook, which already have multibillion-dollar valuations, will join the fray. There has been significant demand for these Web darlings in the secondary markets, private exchanges that match buyers and sellers, including former employees looking to sell their stock. Facebook, at the center of the frenzy, is trading at an implied valuation of $42.4 billion, according to SharesPost.

Although the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has said that he is in no rush to go public, the company may face increased pressure in the near term. As more investors pile into Facebook shares, often through special investment pools, the company could soon surpass 500 shareholders. That milestone would subject the company to a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that would require Facebook to register with the S.E.C. and submit financial results.

As DealBookreported, the S.E.C. has started to ask for information about secondary-market trading in the shares of Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and LinkedIn.

If Groupon or Facebook, or one of their peers, do go public in 2011, Mr. Falvey said it would be a game changer for the industry.

“There’s a chance that you get that Death Star I.P.O. in the tech market that draws huge attention to I.P.O.’s,,” he said, “the kind of attention we haven’t seen since the tech bubble burst in 2000.”

By Evelyn M. Rusli - Deal Book NY Times

New Children Books Hitting Shelves in January from Random House

2010-12-23T11:53:00.000-05:00

Random House has revealed its upcoming line-up of kids’ licensed books, including titles from Disney, Mattel and others.

Books hitting shelves in January include the following properties:

1. The Cat in the Hat Know A Lot About That!

2. Disney’s Gnomeo & Juliet, Toy Story 3, Tangled, Cars, Fairies and Princesses

3. Mattel’s Barbie

4. HIT Entertainment’s Thomas and Friends

5. Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer

6. DC Comics’ DC Super Friends

7. Marvel’s Iron Man

Movie Review | 'Little Fockers'

2010-12-22T12:19:00.000-05:00

Robert De Niro, left, and Ben Stiller in “Little Fockers,” the third in the “Fockers” franchise.

Patriarch Faces Future: Who to Lead Nutty Clan When He Is Gone?

Apparently, because all the good jokes were used up in the first two “Fockers” movies, the wisenheimers behind the latest installment in this unnecessary trilogy decided to bring in some spew, opening a sick toddler’s mouth like a fire hydrant and letting it rip.

The mortification of the body has always played a part in the “Fockers” franchise, which hinges on the uneasy, at times violently contentious relationship between a male nurse, Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) and his father-in-law, Jack (Robert De Niro), a former C.I.A. operative. But at their best and funniest, those mortifications were intrinsic to the story’s meaning.

Part of what made the first movies work as well as they did — “Meet the Parents” hit in 2000, and its sequel, “Meet the Fockers,” followed four years later — was the cultural clash that dare not fully speak its name. Initially, the series only broadly winked at the reasons for Jack’s slow-burning tsuris. Was that a bagel in Greg’s pocket, or was he just glad to see his shiksa girlfriend and then wife, Pam (Teri Polo)? But when the second movie brought in Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman to play Greg’s parents, any residual anxiety about the characters’ nominal cultural differences gave way to the spectacle of two legends playfully batting around the Jewish stereotypes that the stars themselves struggled against and transcended.

How do you top Ms. Streisand and Mr. Hoffman playing at being the happy, sexy hippie couple for easy jokes? You don’t. Apparently, you don’t even try, as is evident from the new movie’s lack of wit and surplus of lazy scenes.

Directed by Paul Weitz (Jay Roach did better with the first two), “Little Fockers” reunites all the principal actors, this time to greatly diminished returns in a story that turns on Jack’s decision to anoint Greg the family patriarch. Time is passing, if not quickly enough in this movie, and fears of mortality are nipping at Jack’s heels and clutching at his heart. The ensuing tension — or rather, slackly stitched-together chain of misunderstandings — centers on whether Greg is worthy of this honor.

Are we there yet? No, because first Jessica Alba has to show up and throw off her clothes and then her body at Mr. Stiller, a story line that has everything to do with his star muscle and nothing to do with Greg. This leads to some matrimonial static that draws the series closer to the kind of deadly dull domestic comedy that the “Fockers” franchise previously managed to avoid becoming.

Exhaustion partly explains why, though it also seems clear that Mr. Stiller, who in the 10 years since the first “Fockers” has become a Hollywood powerhouse, isn’t interested in being the butt of anyone’s joke. Mr. De Niro might not mind making mincemeat of his own legacy, as a painful bit with a grinning Harvey Keitel suggests. (Somewhere, Martin Scorsese is lighting a votive candle.) But Mr. Stiller is no longer in a laughing mood.

“Little Fockers” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The usual bodily liquids and penis jokes.

View Trailer of LITTLE FOCKERS

Opens on Wednesday nationwide.

Directed by Paul Weitz; written by John Hamburg and Larry Stuckey; director of photography, Remi Adefarasin; edited by Greg Hayden, Leslie Jones and Myron Kerstein; music by Stephen Trask; production design by William Arnold; costumes by Molly Maginnis; produced by Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro, Jay Roach and Mr. Hamburg; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.

WITH: Robert De Niro (Jack Byrnes), Ben Stiller (Greg Focker), Owen Wilson (Kevin Rawley), Blythe Danner (Dina Byrnes), Teri Polo (Pam Focker), Jessica Alba (Andi Garcia), Laura Dern (Prudence), Colin Baiocchi (Henry Focker), Daisy Tahan (Samantha Focker), Dustin Hoffman (Bernie Focker) and Barbra Streisand (Roz Focker).

By Manohla Dargis - NY Times

Video Game Review | Disney Epic Mickey

2010-12-14T11:10:00.000-05:00

A scene from the game, which charts a journey to a dystopian version of the Magic Kingdom.

Mickey Moves to Another Screen

I have a serious question for Robert A. Iger, the president and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company: Did you get both hands on a Nintendo Wii controller and personally play through several hours of Disney Epic Mickey?

If so, perhaps you think that everyday game players have a lot more patience and a much higher tolerance for frustration than they do. And that is because Disney Epic Mickey is one of those enticing yet deeply flawed games that is a lot more fun to watch than to play.

In its storytelling and overall design, Epic Mickey is an ambitious and often impressive re-imagination of the world’s first true animated star, Mickey Mouse. But as an entertainment experience for the person who has to control all of the jumping and running and spinning involved, it breaks down and fails in bafflingly basic ways. I suspect that many families are going to buy this game, get through a fraction of what ought to be a roughly 15-hour story and put it down forever in frustration at their inability to make Mickey survive.

In other words, Disney Epic Mickey is a brilliant and sophisticated concept that isn’t very fun to play.

Disney Epic Mickey is a platforming game: if you miss the jumps to the platforms, bad things happen, like having to start over. This may sound mundane, but it seems obvious that if you can’t see where you’re going in a game like this, nothing else matters. Not the clever characters. Not the endearing soundtrack. Not even the intriguing plot lines. Nope. If you fall into pits and die dozens and dozens of times simply because the game won’t properly maneuver the player’s eye-in-the-sky perspective, the fun disappears.

This is basic technical and mechanical stuff that most of the game industry seemed to figure out a decade ago, but Disney hasn’t with Epic Mickey.

How this could happen reveals a lot about why big international media companies like Disney generally continue to struggle to make great games. I believe it comes down to the fact that senior executive leadership at these companies generally has not had the inclination or the ability to engage with the creative reality of the product — actually to play the games. And that means they can’t make the final call on big-budget games with the same confidence they show in traditional media.

Mickey Mouse, after all, is the embodiment of Disney. And yet here is a corporate symbol that has mostly been absent from popular entertainment for several decades. Epic Mickey, with such a grandiloquent name and its high profile on today’s most popular console, the Wii, is supposed to be part of Mickey’s reintroduction to a new generation of fans.

So if this game were a major Disney film or a big new series on the company’s ABC network, can you imagine how personally involved Mr. Iger and the rest of the Disney brass would be? How many screeners and rough cuts they would have watched? How much guidance would they have felt not only justified but also obligated to deliver? Perhaps Mr. Iger would even have solicited the personal reactions of the members of the company’s board of directors.

That’s their job. At the end of the day, the top executive of a major media company is responsible for watching the movie or television pilot or listening to the album or reading the book and making the final call on whether it’s good enough. Not with every single product, of course, but certainly when the brand involved (Mickey Mouse) is synonymous with the entire company and when the game represents the company’s most important investment in that brand in one of the world’s most important forms of new media (video games).

To make Epic Mickey, Disney acquired the services — and the entire development studio — of one of gaming’s most respected designers, Warren Spector. Personally, I’m a huge fan. Mr. Spector’s System Shock and Thief games essentially defined the early generation of first-person stealth shooters. (System Shock and its sequel are science-fiction horror classics that are among the scariest games ever made.) Deus Ex, another Spector game, is one of the best cyberpunk games yet.

What do these games have in common? They are all set in the first person. (You’re looking out from your character’s perspective.) In tone, they are all distinctly aimed at adults. And they were all originally made for PCs and mouse-and-keyboard controls.

Now let’s look at Disney Epic Mickey. It is set almost entirely in the third person, with you looking down at your character. It has to appeal directly to children. (It is rated E for Everyone.) And it is made exclusively for a living-room console with limited silicon horsepower and a unique control system, the Wii. Moreover, the game revolves around a long-established system, platforming, that hardly appeared in Mr. Spector’s previous games.

How could this possibly go wrong?

The sad part is that Disney Epic Mickey gets all of the high-concept stuff right. The story involves Mickey’s journey to a dystopian version of the Magic Kingdom, where forgotten Disney creations of the past, led by Walt Disney’s original Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, languish in obscurity. Oswald is jealous of Mickey’s rise to fame, but the two eventually make common cause against the evil Shadow Blot. Mr. Spector’s storytelling influence is seen clearly in the fact that seemingly minor choices made early in the game can have vast, unexpected consequences later.

Befitting a cartoon empire, your main weapons here are paint and thinner, which you can use to fill in and erase parts of the world around you. When everything is working properly, the game feels like the innovative smash hit it should have been.

But along the way, I found myself becoming more irritated, not less, with the sloppy controls and camera. I came to feel as if I were fighting the game instead of enjoying the experience.

If Mr. Iger actually played Disney Epic Mickey, he obviously didn’t make Mr. Spector’s team fix its glaring interface problems. If he didn’t actually play, that should tell you something about why Disney doesn’t make great games, and why Epic Mickey isn’t more, well, epic.

By SETH SCHIESEL - NY Times

THIS DAY IN HISTORY | NOV 29, 1981: ACTRESS NATALIE WOOD DROWNS

2010-11-29T08:58:00.000-05:00

On this day in 1981, the actress Natalie Wood, who starred in such movies as Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, drowns in a boating accident near California’s Catalina Island. She was 43 years old.

Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, California, Wood began her acting career as a child. She gained acclaim for her role as Susan Walker, the little girl who doubts the existence of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). As a teenager, Wood went on to play James Dean’s girlfriend in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. She also earned Best Actress Academy Award nominations for her performances in Splendor in the Grass (1961) with Warren Beatty and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) with Steve McQueen. Wood’s film credits also include West Side Story (1961), winner of 10 Oscars, in which she played the lead role of Maria; Gypsy (1962), which was based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name and co-starred Rosalind Russell and Karl Malden; The Great Race (1965), with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis; Inside Daisy Clover (1966), with Christopher Plummer and Robert Redford; and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) with Robert Culp, Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon.

Wood was twice married to the actor Robert Wagner (Hart to Hart, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery), from 1957 to 1962 and from 1974 to the time of her death. On the night of November 29, 1981, the dark-haired beauty was with her husband on their yacht “The Splendor,” which was moored off Santa Catalina, near Los Angeles. Also on the yacht was the actor Christopher Walken, who at the time was making the movie Brainstorm with Wood. Neither Wagner nor Walken saw what happened to Wood that night, but it was believed she somehow slipped overboard while untying a dinghy attached to the boat. Her body was found in the early hours of the following morning. Brainstorm, Wood’s final film, was released in theaters in 1983.

History.com

Mark Twain’s Autobiography Flying Off the Shelves

2010-11-20T07:39:00.001-05:00

MARK TWAIN
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

When editors at the University of California Press pondered the possible demand for “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” a $35, four-pound, 500,000-word doorstopper of a memoir, they kept their expectations modest with a planned print run of 7,500 copies.

Now it is a smash hit across the country, landing on best-seller lists and going back to press six times, for a total print run — so far — of 275,000. The publisher cannot print copies quickly enough, leaving some bookstores and online retailers stranded without copies just as the holiday shopping season begins.

“It sold right out,” said Kris Kleindienst, an owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, which first ordered 50 copies and has a dozen people on a waiting list. “You would think only completists and scholars would want a book like this. But there’s an enduring love affair with Mark Twain, especially around here. Anybody within a stone’s throw of the Mississippi River has a Twain attachment.”

Farther upriver, at the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, Paul Ingram, the book buyer, said he initially ordered 10 copies, but they disappeared almost immediately.

“We are dearly hoping we’ll get more copies in a couple of weeks,” Mr. Ingram said. “I’m sure every bookseller in the world is saying, ‘I should have been sharper, I should have thought this one through more carefully.’ ”

Earlier this week, the book was out of stock at a handful of Barnes & Noble stores in Chicago, Boston and Austin, Tex. On Borders.com, it is back-ordered for at least two to four weeks. Some independent booksellers said they had been told, much to their despair, that they would not receive reorders until mid-December or even January.

“It’s frustrating,” said Rona Brinlee, the owner of the BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla. “In this age of instant books, why does it take so long to reprint it?”

Those who have been lining up to buy it seem to be a mix of Twain aficionados, history buffs and early Christmas shoppers who gravitate toward big, heavy classic biographies as gifts.

“It’s totally the Dad book of the year,” said Rebecca Fitting, an owner of the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “It’s that autobiography, biography, history category, a certain kind of guy gift book.”

Many booksellers said the memoir has a perfect holiday-gift quality: a widely adored author, a weighty feel, and a unique story behind its publication. (Twain ordered that the book be published a century after his death.)

Most of the content was dictated to Twain’s stenographer in the four years before he died, at 74 in 1910. It is more political than his previous works, by turns frank, funny, angry and full of recollections from his childhood, which deeply influenced books like “Huckleberry Finn.”

A younger generation of readers is discovering Twain for his political writings, Ms. Fitting said.

“He’s surprisingly relevant right now,” she added. “When you look at how much he wrote and the breadth of the subjects he wrote about, you know that if he were alive today, he would totally be a blogger.”

Steve Kettmann, an American writer living in Berlin, said that he tried to buy a copy during a visit to a Borders in Orlando, Fla., but was told that they were sold out and would not receive more copies for four to six weeks. (He went to another Borders nearby, found two copies, and bought them both.)

“I just think that there’s a feeling out there by a lot of people that Mark Twain is one of our greatest writers, and there’s something particularly American about his combination of wit and insight,” Mr. Kettmann said. “He was a wonderful showman. And he was cool, let’s face it. That’s part of it.”

Alex Dahne, a spokeswoman for the University of California Press, said the book was the biggest success the publisher has had in 60 years.

The first print run of “Autobiography” was for 50,000 copies. Thomson-Shore, a small printer in Michigan that is producing the books, has been working overtime and is now producing 30,000 copies a week. To speed up delivery, the printer found bigger-than-usual trucks to carry books to warehouses in Richmond, Calif., and Ewing, N.J. — the trucks carry 10,000 copies instead of the usual 7,000.

The book will reach the No. 7 spot on The New York Times’s hardcover nonfiction best-seller list to be published on Nov. 28, its fourth week on the list. On Friday afternoon it was No. 4 on the BN.com best-seller list, behind “Decision Points,” former President George W. Bush’s memoir; the latest “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” an illustrated children’s novel by Jeff Kinney; and “Unbroken,” a prisoner-of-war’s story by Laura Hillenbrand.

Autobiography of Mark Twain” received a huge lift from excerpts in Granta, Newsweek, Playboy and Harper’s Magazine, and a burst of early media coverage this summer, well in advance of the official Nov. 15 publication date. The publisher created an eye-catching Web site, thisismarktwain.com, complete with audio, black-and-white photos and a timeline of Twain’s life. (Two more 600-page volumes are planned.)

Edward Ash-Milby, a buyer for Barnes & Noble, said the book had already emerged as one of the hottest of the holiday season.

“I believe it has a certain cachet, a gift of quality that says a lot about the giver as well as the recipient,” Mr. Ash-Milby said in an e-mail. “It’s literary, but not too tough to read. The content, itself, is immensely readable, although nonlinear. It can be easily picked up and read in spots without the worry of plot lines or continuity.”

Booksellers seemed to agree that the memoir, which has letters, diary entries, pictures and nearly 200 pages of “explanatory notes,” is a book to be read in small bites.

“I’ve barely had a chance to look at it, but from what I did see, it looked like the kind of book you would never finish, and you would never even think of reading start to finish,” said Mr. Ingram of Prairie Lights. “But it’s the kind of book you would read a little bit of every day of your life.”

While many booksellers were caught flat-footed by the intense interest in the book, others said they saw it coming. The book is currently available at Amazon.com and BN.com. At BookCourt, an independent store in Brooklyn, booksellers initially ordered 100 copies, the general manager, Zack Zook, said.

“We felt from the beginning that it was a title which our neighborhood would gravitate heavily toward,” Mr. Zook said. “There’s genuine interest there. It’s been on our best-seller list now for weeks.”

Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., ordered 600 copies and has already sold 500. Six hundred more books are on the way.

Ms. Dahne of the University of California Press said the publisher was rushing to get copies to bookstores and promised that they would be there in time for the holidays.

“We feel like, wow, America’s kind of excited about a literary icon,” she said. “There’s something very sweet about the fact that people are interested in a 736-page scholarly tome about Mark Twain.”

By Julie Bosman - NY Times

LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean Game in the Works

2010-11-19T10:54:00.000-05:00

Disney Interactive Studios and TT Games have partnered with LEGO to produce a Pirates of the Caribbean video game. The title will hit retail in May 2011, coinciding with the film release of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game will feature the storylines, location and characters from the film franchise, and will incorporate LEGO mini figures and worlds built from LEGO bricks. It will be available for Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable and Windows.

"Pirates of the Caribbean is a globally successful franchise based in action, adventure and humor perfectly suited for a LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game adaptation," says Graham Hopper, executive vice president and general manager of Disney Interactive Studios. "Combining the excitement of playing as Jack Sparrow and other recognizable characters from the franchise will make the game fun for players of all ages throughout the world."

By License! Global

Electronic Arts, Paramount Round Up Video Game for Rango

2010-11-14T12:11:00.000-05:00

In anticipation of the upcoming release of Rango, Electronic Arts and Paramount Digital Entertainment are developing a video game based on the feature film.

Rango The Video Game will hit stores in March 2011 to coincide with the release of the film. The game, set in the old West town of Dirt, will allow players to go on wild rides and participate in shootouts. It is being developed for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii and Nintendo DS.

The animated film Rango stars the voice of Johnny Depp.

By License! Global

Scholastic Media Introduces Two New Nintendo DS Games

2010-11-14T11:53:00.000-05:00

My Amusement Park and Digging for Dinosaurs, the latest video game titles from Scholastic Media, will be available later this month for Nintendo DS.

My Amusement Park features eight logic games and puzzles to help players earn money to build and expand a theme park. Digging for Dinosaurs offers a variety of mini games from simulated paleontological digs to dinosaur battles, while providing interesting facts about 21 different dinosaur species. The games are targeted to kids ages 5 to 8 and will retail for $19.99 each.

"Scholastic Media is delighted to introduce the Smart Games For Kids line on Nintendo DS," says Deborah Forte, president of Scholastic Media and executive vice President of Scholastic Inc. "Parents trust Scholastic to provide high-quality, safe entertainment for their kids and this line truly delivers that experience for the younger gamers in the family."

By License! Global

Video Game Review | Call of Duty: Black Ops

2010-11-13T09:24:00.000-05:00

A screen shot from Call of Duty: Black Ops from Activision, in which players fight around the world in the cold war. The game shattered the industry’s one-day sales record when it was released on Tuesday.

View The Trailer: Call of Duty: Black Ops

Suddenly the Cold War Is a Cool Event

I never play games twice. But Call of Duty: Black Ops has made a very happy liar out of me.

As soon as I finished Black Ops the other night on my PC, I got up, walked out of my computer den, went into the living room, fired up my Xbox 360, plopped down in my big, overstuffed chair and started all over again.

I wanted to try to assassinate Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion again. And break out of a Soviet prison camp in the Arctic again. And pilot a gunboat through the Mekong Delta again, shooting up sampans while listening to “Sympathy for the Devil.” Black Ops glistens with such moments. The cold war was never so much fun.

Exciting, intense and engrossing, Black Ops has immediately become the definitive contemporary first-person shooter (although if you want to shoot aliens rather than Russians, Halo: Reach is your game). Black Ops, published by Activision, does not really innovate, but it doesn’t have to. Rather, it reflects a keen intelligence and a rigorous, disciplined understanding of each individual element of modern game design and production. Just as important, it then executes and delivers on each of those elements in a way that demonstrates how well oiled a game-making machine Robert A. Kotick, Activision’s chief executive, has created.

When you compare how Activision has managed and built the Call of Duty franchise with how its main rival, Electronic Arts, failed to compete with its recent shooter Medal of Honor, it becomes clear why Activision is the top publisher in gaming today.

A little background: the Call of Duty franchise was created for Activision by a development studio called Infinity Ward and was originally set during World War II. The series was quite successful in its first incarnation but took a leap forward in both setting and popularity with the introduction of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007. On the strength of Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2, Infinity Ward became a very hot property. Meanwhile, Treyarch came to be known as the Call of Duty “backup” studio, working on less ambitious titles in the series like Call of Duty: World at War.

This stew of money, ego and creative control finally boiled over with some of the main people from Infinity Ward ending up in a legal battle with Activision. The upshot was that Infinity Ward’s key people left (and struck a publishing deal with Activision’s competitor Electronic Arts), and the Call of Duty franchise remained in Activision’s control, with Treyarch at its helm.

So the question was whether Treyarch could truly step up and deliver a Call of Duty game as finely honed as Modern Warfare 2. If not, Mr. Kotick would have been seen to have made a colossal mistake by alienating the original team at Infinity Ward.

But for now, Mr. Kotick’s haters (including the Cuban news media, upset over depictions of assassination attempts on Mr. Castro) will have to wait for another day to enjoy his comeuppance. That is because Black Ops, which shattered the gaming industry’s one-day sales record when it was released on Tuesday, makes almost no mistakes. The action is taut and compelling. The overall tone of storytelling is both witty and mature. The fighting comes first, but Black Ops is populated by one of the most interesting casts of characters you’ll see in a running-and-gunning game. (In short, an American special forces killer and what you think is a Soviet dissident soldier appear to make common cause against their venal leaders on both sides; plot twists ensue.)

The game’s core-level design and artificial intelligence scripting are seamless. Some players have complained that the PC multiplayer version suffers from programming faults that make the game’s frame rate stutter, but I did not have any of those problems. Meanwhile, playing Black Ops in 3-D on a suitable television is a revelation. (In a gesture of intercompany detente, I played in 3-D on an Xbox 360 and a glorious Sony television; the combination worked flawlessly.)

Black Ops is what happens when a creative company is at the top of its game. I may even play it a third time.

By Seth Schiesel - NY Times

Dino De Laurentiis, Prolific Film Producer of Hundreds of Movies Including "Serpico" and "Three Days of the Condor” Dies at 91

2010-11-12T17:07:00.000-05:00

Mr. De Laurentiis in 2001, when he was given the Thalberg Award at the Academy Awards.

Mr. De Laurentiis produced hundreds of movies in his career, including “Serpico” and “Three Days of the Condor.”

Dino De Laurentiis, the high-flying Italian film producer and entrepreneur whose movies ranged from some of Federico Fellini’s earliest works to “Serpico,” “Death Wish” and the 1976 remake of “King Kong,” died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Raffaella.

Mr. De Laurentiis’s career dated to prewar Italy, and the hundreds of films he produced covered a wide range of styles and genres. His filmography includes major titles of the early Italian New Wave, including the international success “Bitter Rice” (1949), whose star, Silvana Mangano, became his first wife; two important films by Fellini, “La Strada” (1954) and “Nights of Cabiria” (1957), which both won Academy Awards; and the film that many critics regard as David Lynch’s best work, “Blue Velvet” (1986). In 2001, Mr. De Laurentiis himself was given the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement.

But Mr. De Laurentiis never turned his nose up at unabashed popular entertainments like Sergio Corbucci’s “Goliath and the Vampires” (1961), Roger Vadim’s “Barbarella” (1968) and Richard Fleischer’s “Mandingo” (1975) — several of which hold up better today than some of Mr. De Laurentiis’s more respectable productions.

“A producer is not just a bookkeeper, or a banker, or a background. He makes the picture,” Mr. De Laurentiis told Cue magazine in 1962. “If the film is a failure, I am responsible. If it is a success, then it is the joint contribution of the actors, director, writers, set designers, musicians and script girl — everybody except the producer. This is a fact of life; I do not complain.”

Mr. De Laurentiis was among the first European producers to realize the potential of the international co-production. In the early 1950s, when the vertically integrated Hollywood studios were breaking up because of a Justice Department antimonopoly decree, studio-groomed stars were turning into freelance agents and back lots were beginning to be sold off in favor of using location photography, the studios started to turn to outside suppliers to keep a steady stream of product coming in for their distribution apparatus.

Mr. De Laurentiis lured Anthony Quinn to Rome for “La Strada,” and shortly after that cast Kirk Douglas in the title role of “Ulysses,” a spectacular that was directed by the Italian film veteran Mario Camerini (with an uncredited assist from the director and cinematographer Mario Bava) and that Mr. De Laurentiis sold to Paramount. The formula proved to be a profitable one, allowing Mr. De Laurentiis to pay grandiose salaries to his imported stars while cutting costs by using local technicians.

Actors like Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda (“War and Peace,” 1956), Anthony Perkins (“This Angry Age,” 1958), Vera Miles and Van Heflin (“5 Branded Women,” 1960) and Charles Laughton (“Under Ten Flags,” 1960) made their way to Italy, where they often performed with other international stars. The results, filmed in a Babel of tongues, were dubbed into different languages for different markets.

At the same time, Mr. De Laurentiis continued making films for the home market. He had a close relationship with the legendary Italian clown Totò (for whom he produced the 1952 “Totò a Colori,” one of the first Italian feature films shot entirely in color) and Alberto Sordi, a rotund comic whose portrayals of middle-class Romans struggling to stay ahead of the game became a projection of the national identity. His success, aided by the government subsidies that had been put in place to encourage postwar production in Italy, eventually allowed him to build his own studio, which he named Dinocittà.

Mr. De Laurentiis’s empire began to crumble in 1965, when Italy’s Socialist government passed new regulations that put severe restrictions on what could be called an Italian movie.

With his subsidies in doubt, his contract with Mr. Sordi coming to an end and a continuing legal battle with Fellini over unmade projects, Mr. De Laurentiis closed Dinocittà in 1972 and the next year moved to New York, where he opened an office in what was then the Gulf & Western building on Columbus Circle.

In New York, Mr. De Laurentiis initiated a series of well-known productions, including “Serpico” (1973), “Death Wish” (1974), “Three Days of the Condor” (1975), John Wayne’s final film, “The Shootist” (1976), and John Guillermin’s big-budget remake of “King Kong” (1976).

But the successes alternated with failures, like “King of the Gypsies” (1978) and “Hurricane” (1979), and soon Mr. De Laurentiis was founding and closing production companies with dizzying speed, often selling the rights to his old films to secure the financing for his new ones.

Expensive follies, like a hotel opened on Bora Bora (the location of “Hurricane”), an upscale delicatessen on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a studio complex in North Carolina, strained Mr. De Laurentiis’s bottom line, and in later years he was forced to sell many of his properties and rein in his activities.

Still, he persisted through the 1980s and ’90s, thanks chiefly to a relationship with Stephen King, many of whose books were filmed by Mr. De Laurentiis, and his ownership of Thomas Harris’s first novel in the Hannibal Lecter series, “Red Dragon.” Mr. De Laurentiis filmed the Harris novel twice: first in 1986 as “Manhunter,” with Brian Cox in the role of the cannibalistic serial killer, and then under the novel’s original title in 2002, with Anthony Hopkins back for another turn in the role after becoming a star playing Lecter in the non-De Laurentiis “Silence of the Lambs.”

Agostino De Laurentiis was born in Torre Annunziata, a town in the province of Naples, on Aug. 8, 1919, the third in a family of seven brothers and sisters.

He had four children with Ms. Mangano: Veronica, Raffaella (who eventually joined her father in business), Federico and Francesca. Federico De Laurentiis died in an airplane crash in 1981. After Ms. Mangano’s death in 1989, Mr. De Laurentiis married the American-born producer Martha Schumacher, with whom he had two daughters, Carolyna and Dina.

In addition to his wife and daughters, he is survived by three sisters, Rose Balsamo, Raffaella Cimino and Anna De Laurentiis; five grandchildren, including the chef and Food Network host Giada De Laurentiis; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. De Laurentiis’s second wife, as Martha De Laurentiis, continued to work with him as a co-producer. Their most recent projects included “Hannibal Rising” (2007), a prequel to the Lecter saga starring the young French actor Gaspard Ulliel as the apprentice flesh eater.

A master at publicizing his movies and himself, Mr. De Laurentiis made a lot of proclamations that were hard to take seriously. (He referred to his “King Kong” remake as “the greatest love story of all time.”) He could also be wryly self-deprecating, as in this explanation of how he became a producer:

“I see my face in the mirror, and I said, ‘No, my ambition is not to be an actor.’ ”

By Dave Kehr - NY Times

For Sale: A $160,000 Apple Computer

2010-11-12T16:26:00.000-05:00

Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple, stands in front of a photograph of himself and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

An Apple computer from 1976 is up for auction at Christie's, alongside rare manuscripts and books.

True computer nerds, do I have a deal for you!

Christie’s, the tony auctioneer, is hawking a snazzy computer that it hopes will sell for between $159,800 and $239,700. You’re probably wondering what kind of computer is worth close to a quarter million dollars? Let me tell you about its specs first.

This machine is loaded with only the best: It’s got three capacitors (yes that’s right, three), a whopping 8 kilobytes of random access memory, a printed circuit board with 4 rows A-D, whatever that means, and an Apple-1 motherboard.

So why would something that could barely power a game of Pong be worth so much? Well, this is one of the very first computers ever made by Apple and is considered the first personal computer. What separated this computer from others was the fact that the motherboard came pre-assembled, whereas home computer owners of the past had to fit and solder the parts together themselves.

The Apple-1 computer was built and sold by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founders, in 1976 for $666.66 — the strange price was put into effect because Mr. Wozniak liked repetitive numbers. (An inflation calculator determines that price is equivalent to $2,560 in today’s dollars.) It’s estimated that only 200 of these computers were produced and sold before Apple moved onto the next model, the Apple II.

According to the auction Web site, this version of the Apple computer is number 82 of those made, was hand built by Steve Wozniak and then “despatched from the garage of Steve Jobs’ parents’ house – the return address on the original packaging present here.” (The Christie’s catalog uses a British spelling of dispatched.)

The version for sale through Christie’s includes “the original packaging, manuals, cassette interface and basic tape, early documentation and provenance, and a commercially rare letter from Steve Jobs.”

The computer is part of a Nov. 23 auction in London of rare books and manuscripts that will quicken the heart of any rich geek. It includes a book by Charles Babbage, a collection of Alan Turing’s published papers, an Enigma cypher machine and the patent specifications for an ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer.

By Nick Bilton - NY Times

Music | Taylor Swift's New Album "Speak Now"

2010-11-04T10:28:00.001-04:00

Taylor Swift performing last week at a terminal at Kennedy International Airport in New York. She also appeared on TV to promote her new album.

Taylor Swift Album Is a Sales Triumph

In the diminished world of the music business, where album sales have plunged by more than 50 percent in the last decade, genuine blockbusters are an endangered species. But this week the recording industry got a rare bit of good news with the unmitigated triumph of Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now.”

The album, the third and latest by Ms. Swift — still a month shy of her 21st birthday — sold 1,047,000 copies in the United States in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, making it the fastest-selling new record in five years. It is also the first to get opening-week sales of a million since Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III,” which squeezed over the line in 2008 with 1,006,000.

On Wednesday, after several days of uncharacteristic silence on her Twitter feed, Ms. Swift wrote to her 4.5 million followers: “I ...Can’t... Believe ... This ... You guys have absolutely lit up my world. Thank you.”

Selling a million records in one week has always been big news; according to Billboard it has happened only 16 times since 1991. But Ms. Swift’s tally was orders of magnitude greater than anything else now in stores. Last week “Speak Now” sold more than the next 61 titles on the chart combined, and almost 11 times more than its nearest competitor, Sugarland’s “Incredible Machine” (Mercury Nashville), which had 89,000. “Speak Now” accounted for 18 percent of all album sales last week, and individual tracks from it have been downloaded 2.5 million times.

Ms. Taylor’s success has capped a notable year for country music, with a streak of recent No. 1’s on the Billboard album chart and Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now” the second-best seller of the year so far. But as many in the music industry see it, “Speak Now” proves that Ms. Swift has transcended the limitations of genre and become a pop megastar, period, with even apparent setbacks — like Kanye West’s outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards last year — ultimately working to expand her celebrity.

“Her songwriting appeals to the broadest demo of music buyers right now: teens,” said Ken Ehrlich, the longtime producer of the Grammy Awards. “And she’s incredibly positive and nonthreatening. Having Kanye confront her added millions of people on her side, even people who didn’t see the incident on MTV but saw it repeated endlessly after the show.”

Ms. Swift deserves most of the credit for her success of course. This year she won four Grammys, including album of the year, and critics have mostly praised her new album, calling it canny, catchy country-pop about growing up in public. A master blogger and Twitterer, she has established herself as a prime star for the social media age.

“She’s writing her life story with a series of songs, carrying us from her teenage years into her 20s,” said Jim Donio, president of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, which represents music retailers. “She has made herself accessible, utilizing all the tools of the modern marketplace. It’s an interesting creative story and an interesting marketing story.”

To promote the album Ms. Swift’s label, Big Machine, had an extensive and high-profile marketing campaign, parts of which were in the works for as long as two years, said Scott Borchetta, the label’s president. Target offered a deluxe version of the album at its stores, supporting it with television commercials, and she held a literacy event that was broadcast to 25,000 classrooms. Last week Ms. Swift blitzed through the network TV talk shows, gave a private performance for contest winners that was broadcast online, and even played a semiprivate show at a JetBlue terminal at Kennedy International Airport in New York.

In an interview on Tuesday, as news of the album’s sales spread through the industry, Mr. Borchetta praised both his marketing plan and his artist. “It’s one thing to have a plan,” he said. “But we have the artist and the music to back it up.”

Perhaps the clearest sign that the music industry as a whole — and Nashville in particular — has embraced Ms. Swift as a new force to be reckoned with is that competing record labels have scheduled a wave of high-profile country releases for the last few months of the year, hoping that some of the popularity of “Speak Now” will rub off.

This week Brad Paisley released a hits collection, next week comes a new one from Reba McEntire, and the week after brings two more big country names, Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts (also on Big Machine). In recent weeks, much-awaited titles by Sugarland, the Zac Brown Band and Toby Keith have also come out.

“The reality is, when you have a hit album, it brings people into the stores,” said David Ross, editor and publisher of the country trade magazine Music Row. “When the traffic is going to grow, you want to be there.”

How long Ms. Swift can dominate the chart, though, is unclear. Healthy numbers are predicted for the new Susan Boyle album, out on Tuesday, and on Nov. 22 there are great expectations for Ms. Swift’s old nemesis: Kanye West.

By Ben Sisario - NY Times

VIDEO GAME REVIEW | "BUSY SCISSORS"

2010-11-02T20:54:00.000-04:00

In Busy Scissors, a video game created by Redken, the salon hairstyling products maker, and Little Orbit, the game publisher, players gain points by using proper techniques for shampooing, cutting, and other hair care procedures.

Redken Video Game Beckons Girls to Hair Salons

HIP, black-clad hairstylists are no strangers to intimidation, wielding scissors and blow-dryers simultaneously while saying things like, “You need a transformation,” and generally acting as if they understand your hairdo better than you do.

So what teenage girl wouldn’t want to be one?

Redken, a hairstyling products brand that is owned by L’Oréal and sold only in salons, is hoping that they will. As professional stylists take a larger role in pop culture with reality shows like Bravo’s “Shear Genius,” the beauty company has joined the video game publisher Little Orbit to create Busy Scissors, a hairstyling and simulation game for the Nintendo Wii and DS. The game is in stores Tuesday, for $19.99.

Little Orbit was “looking to add an element of reality into the game,” said Rachel Weiss, Redken’s senior director of interactive marketing. “We were able to integrate our techniques and products in a way that they would really be used in a salon. From blow-drying hair to sectioning it, there’s a Redken way to do it.”

Busy Scissors is a role-playing game that allows players to pretend they own a Hollywood salon and cater to what Redken calls “a glamorous and eccentric clientele.” Points are earned for giving customers a good hair day (with a choice of 25 styles), by executing proper techniques for cutting, coloring and even shampooing.

Ms. Weiss said Redken was aiming at girls ages 8 to 16, Nintendo’s biggest users of life simulation games like Charm Girls Club Pajama Party, which lets players have virtual sleepovers, or the Littlest Pet Shop, where players can raise their own dogs without ever having to take them outside on a walk.

“You got to be a rock star in games like Rock Band,” Ms. Weiss said. “Now you get to be a hairstylist. It’s psychologically the same concept. You can play the drums and now you can cut and color hair.”

No other salon brand has sponsored a console game, although Nintendo has similar hairstyling games like Picture Perfect Hair Salon, which integrates a user’s picture, and Sally’s Salon. By getting in the game, Redken hopes to make women want to go to the salon again instead of grabbing boxes of hair color for home use when they’re struck by the urge to go blond.

Ms. Weiss said salon services and products had been devalued as mass-market hair care — sold mainly in drugstores and grocery stores — had been advertised as capable of giving the same results.

“Customers are substituting home products for the salon experience,” she said. “We want to drive a new younger demographic to the salon and hook them on the experience.”

Redken is sold in more than 110,000 salons globally, and the brand trains more than 200,000 stylists a year. Ian Schafer, chief executive of the interactive marketing agency Deep Focus in New York, characterizes this project as being more like an ad campaign than a long-lasting product for Redken.

“Gaming is a very hit-driven business,” he said. “There’s a rapid influx of players at the beginning and the mark of success is to hold them. The hits only have a certain length of legs, like in the movie business. They have to take all they can get in the opening week. With games you hope to be around in a year.”

Redken, whose products are displayed prominently throughout the game — on stylists’ counters, at the shampoo bowl — declined to give the cost of the sponsorship, but said it was “minimal.” Industry insiders couldn’t estimate the fee a brand would have to pay to be part of a game, but said it could have been nominal. Redken will be promoting the game in its salons by giving customers the chance to play while they wait for appointments. The company also is raffling off Wiis and Busy Scissors to customers and salons.

“If you were going to run a salon, wouldn’t you rather be using real products than fake products you have to learn about?” Mr. Schafer said. “When people see real brands in games, that validates the experience. As a gamer myself, I’d rather see real brands.”

Aaron Shapiro, a Brooklyn-based partner at the digital strategy company Huge, said that Redken’s main hurdle would be getting girls to play, a task made harder by the fact that Busy Scissors was a console game instead of one that was played online. It also doesn’t have a social networking component, which can help girls recruit their friends to be stylists, too.

“When you bring it down to the teenage girl, no one can pin down what will make her play it,” he said. “A hit is like winning the lottery or creating a viral video.”

If they do pick up the virtual scissors, however, the beauty shop could be their next stop.

“I do think that if people play it, the game can drive teenage girl interest in going to a salon,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It has the potential to make the salon experience interesting and something they’d want to try themselves, since the game gives the girls ideas for different styles and looks.”

For those actual black-clad professional hairstylists, however, that knowledge has its pitfalls.

“It could be really helpful, like WebMD helps patients to talk to doctors,” said Emily Kate Warren, a New York makeup and hair artist. “Though of course, just like at the doctor’s office upon mentioning you went researching on your own to diagnose your problem, you may have a stylist who rolls their eyes a little.”

By Kayleen Schaefer - NY Times

Video Game Review | Rock Band 3

2010-10-30T11:49:00.000-04:00

Rock Band 3, new from Harmonix and MTV Games, can teach keyboards as well as bass and guitar.

Is It Virtual, or Is It Rock? A Border-Tweaking Experience

And here I thought the music-game genre was dead.

With the invigorating arrival of the innovative Rock Band 3 from Harmonix and MTV Games, the basic idea of allowing everyday people to make rock music in their living rooms is closer to reality than ever.

Music video games, which took off with the emergence of Guitar Hero five years ago, have remained a virtual experience. There has been no pretense that pressing five colored buttons in various combinations and rhythms on a plastic guitar-shaped device has anything to do with playing a real electric bass or guitar. And since the genre exploded on the game scene, it has declined in sales and overall popularity.

But now Harmonix has brilliantly torn down the wall between music games and real music. If you’re willing to put in a reasonable amount of practice — like the couple dozen hours I did — Rock Band 3 can actually begin to teach you to play guitar, bass and keyboards. Just as important, Rock Band 3 emerges as the definitive modern music game even for those who just want to play around with family and friends once in a while.

In a genre in which the physical, tactile interface (i.e., what you put your hands on) is everything, the keys to Rock Band 3 are two extremely well-designed new controllers. First, Harmonix has designed an optional two-octave wireless keyboard (for $79.99 in addition to the game software) that sits flat on a lap or tabletop or can be strung with a strap and played while standing up, as a “keytar.”

The keyboard dramatically expands the rock repertory of Rock Band 3; otherwise you’d never be able to play songs like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Break On Through (to the Other Side)” by the Doors (not to mention “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake).

In the game’s traditional mode, you need only use five white keys, which can be challenging enough. But switch to Pro Keys mode, and all 25 black and white keys begin to come into play. By the time you reach the Pro Expert level, you are playing what are meant to be note-for-note re-creations of the actual keyboard parts, if any, in the game’s 83 songs. (There are also around 2,000 more songs available for download.) The keyboard also includes a MIDI output for connection to computer music software like Apple’s Pro Tools.

But as impressive as the keyboard is, Rock Band 3 truly shines because of its new guitar. Sure, you can play Rock Band 3 with any older Rock Band peripheral (and most Guitar Hero devices), but this re-creation of the classic Fender Mustang costs $149.99. Coupled with the Rock Band 3 software, it could be the gateway to real guitar-playing for many people.

This device has six physical strings down where you strum, but the neck is covered with 102 thin horizontal buttons corresponding to 17 frets (multiplied by six strings) on a real guitar. And so with this guitar you unlock Rock Band 3’s Pro Guitar and Pro Bass modes.

The game includes an excellent tutorial to introduce the player to the six strings and the fret positions. Because the device knows where you are placing your hand on the frets, it can correct you and show you how to form chords. Then once you jump into a song, the easiest Pro level generally requires just single notes (which is one reason I prefer bass) before introducing more complex and realistic chords and techniques that are drawn directly from actual songs, say “China Grove” by the Doobie Brothers or Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.”

Combined with the drum kit (now augmented in Rock Band 3 by three cymbals), which as usual is a direct replication of real drumming, and a vocal system that lets people sing along while scoring for pitch, the new keyboard and guitar complete the illusion that you and your buddies or family are actually on stage shredding “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones, “Fly Like an Eagle” by the Steve Miller Band or even Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” It is as close as I have ever come to feeling like a real musician. (I played Rock Band 3 on the Xbox 360, but it is also available for the PlayStation 3 and Wii.)

But another new music game, Power Gig: Rise of the Six String (from Seven45 Studios), only made me feel like a real musician in one sense: it made my whole arm cramp up. That is because Power Gig’s controller is actually a real electric guitar, wired with electric frets that can determine where you are holding the strings down. Power Gig’s software basically apes the well-established Guitar Hero and Rock Band system of having you strum along with the beat. But unlike Rock Band 3, which gradually introduces the user to playing guitar riffs and melodies, Power Gig’s expert mode requires only that you play certain basic “power chords” in time with the music. Outrageously, Power Gig does not even come with a full guitar-playing tutorial.

It is incredibly frustrating that you can plug the Power Gig guitar into a real amplifier (where it works as a very cheap electric guitar, according to my guitar-playing friends), but you cannot simply play it as a real instrument through your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. For $179.99, consumers deserve a more fully hatched product.

So if you’re looking for a starter electric guitar for the kids and wouldn’t mind getting an ersatz version of a more polished music game, by all means buy Power Gig. But if you want the apex of the modern electronic home-music experience, Rock Band 3 is the only choice.

Trailer: Rock Band 3

By Seth Schiesel - NY Times

Holy Card! Nuns Auctioning Rare Honus Wagner Baseball Card

2010-10-27T11:33:00.000-04:00

BALTIMORE -- Sister Virginia Muller had never heard of shortstop Honus Wagner.

But she quickly learned the baseball great is a revered figure among collectors, and the most sought-after baseball card in history. And thanks to an unexpected donation, one of the century-old cards belongs to Muller and her order, the Baltimore-based School Sisters of Notre Dame.

The sisters are auctioning off the card, which despite its poor condition is expected to fetch between $150,000 and $200,000. The proceeds will go to their ministries in 35 countries around the world.

The card is part of the T206 series, produced between 1909 and 1911. About 60 Wagner cards are known to exist.

A near-mint-condition T206 Wagner card sold in 2007 for $2.8 million, the highest price ever for a baseball card. Muller remains aghast that the 1 1/4-inch-by-2 1/2-inch piece of cardboard could sell for even a fraction of that.

"It just boggles your mind," Muller told The Associated Press. "I can't remember a time when we have received anything like this."

The brother of a nun who died in 1999 left all his possessions to the order when he died earlier this year. The man's lawyer told Muller he had a Honus Wagner card in a safe-deposit box.

When they opened the box, they found the card, with a typewritten note: "Although damaged, the value of this baseball card should increase exponentially throughout the 21st century!"

The card was unknown to the sports-memorabilia marketplace because the nuns' benefactor had owned it since 1936.

It has a big crease in the upper right-hand corner, and three of the white borders have been cut off. It has also been laminated. But even in poor condition, a T206 Wagner card is prized by collectors, said Chris Ivy, director of sports auctions at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, which is auctioning the card.

"The T206 set is known as 'The Monster' among collectors. It's just really tough to complete the entire set," Ivy said. The Wagner card is "one of those that's always sought-after, always desirable, and there's not a big population of them. Even in a lower grade, they do have quite a bit of demand and command a strong price."

Wagner, nicknamed "The Flying Dutchman," played for 21 seasons, 18 of them with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He compiled a .328 career batting average and was one of the five original inductees into baseball's Hall of Fame.

The card was printed during the prime of Wagner's career, but the American Tobacco Company ended production soon after it began. Some say Wagner didn't want to promote tobacco products to children. Others believe it was a dispute over money that led to the card being pulled.On the card, Wagner appears stocky and pale, with his hair parted down the middle and the city on his jersey misspelled: "Pittsburg."

The auction ends Nov. 4, and the highest bid was $60,000 as of Wednesday morning.

Muller is making frequent checks to the Heritage Auction Galleries website -- an unusual practice for someone who's taken a vow of poverty. But potential bidders should know that the sale of the card will help people worldwide.

"The money that we receive from this card will be used for the many School Sisters of Notre Dame who are around the world, who need support for their ministries for the poor," Muller said.

By Associated Press

View More Information About: T206 Honus Wagner Baseball Card

Disney Rolls Out All Star Game for Wii

2010-10-27T10:54:00.000-04:00

Disney Interactive Studios' Disney Channel All Star Party video game is hitting stores exclusively for Wii. The title features a slew of stars from shows and TV movies on Disney Channel.

Disney Channel All Star Party includes locations and characters from "Wizards of Waverly Place," "The Suite Life On Deck," "Hannah Montana," "Sonny With A Chance," "Jonas LA," "Phineas and Ferb" and "Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam." The game, which retails for $49.99, features more than 30 games, as well as the ability to unlock additional mini games.

"With Disney Channel All Star Party, we wanted to create a uniquely social interactive experience," says Craig Relyea, senior vice president of global marketing at Disney Interactive Studios. "The gameplay allows players to deepen their engagement with Disney Channel favorites for hours of lighthearted fun."

By License! Global

Breast Cancer Tales: The Inspirational vs. the Actual

2010-10-26T15:04:00.000-04:00

"Pink Ribbon Blues" by Gayle A. Sulik

"Promise Me" by Nancy G. Brinker with Joni Rodgers

Before penicillin came along, syphilis was known in medical circles as “the great mimicker,” a stealthy disease able to mangle the human body in virtually all known ways. “Know syphilis and you know medicine,” professors would tell their students.

Exactly the same thing might be said of breast cancer these days — but not in the same circles. Rather, it is the social scientists who get to contemplate the full panorama of human reaction to disease by studying the fallout from a single one: all the shades of anguish and anger, the posturing, the politics and the cartloads of wishful thinking, all wrapped up in a big pink ribbon.

Less than 50 years ago, breast cancer was hardly discussed in polite company. Now it is the most visible disease around, especially in October, when beribboned pink products flood the market in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month (now in its 25th year).

Millions suit up in pink and run or walk for the cause. Others find the display repellent: After her own breast cancer diagnosis, the social critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a widely applauded article for Harper’s in 2001 rejecting all the pink symbolism as infantilizing and saccharine, the badge of a forced sisterhood created for purely commercial ends.

In “Pink Ribbon Blues,” Gayle A. Sulik, a sociologist and an expert in women’s studies, now makes similar points in a critique that is far more comprehensive than Ms. Ehrenreich’s, if somewhat less engaging. Her book treads an interesting middle ground between the academic and the journalistic as she analyzes giant hunks of information and opinion, and also interviews patients to illustrate her points.

Like Ms. Ehrenreich, Ms. Sulik takes issue with the “she-ro” of the breast cancer movement — an idealized patient who is assertive and boundlessly optimistic, and remains feminine and sexy despite the depredations of disease and treatment. This paragon often uses a diagnosis of breast cancer as a catalyst for a personal transformation; she begins to “take time for me,” discovers “what’s important in life” and comes out of the experience a changed and better person.

The movement has turned “the shoulds and should nots of survivorship” into a tyranny, Ms. Sulik argues, leaving many women with breast cancer as depressed by their failure to be uplifted and transformed as by any other facet of the experience. “This is not the breast cancer story people want to hear,” one said sadly, after telling her own.

Meanwhile, the multiplying scientific uncertainties of the disease are often at odds with the consumer movement’s talking points. Mammograms early and often? In truth, mammography is a mediocre screening tool, while the best treatment for the early-stage disease it often uncovers remains extremely controversial. For all the money raised by pink projects, improvement in breast cancer survival rates has been relatively modest.

Further, the disease now constitutes such a huge profit center for so many industries that the conspiracy-minded are beginning to conclude there is an actual cabal against finding a cure.

Throughout Ms. Sulik’s comprehensive summary of the giant “cancer marketplace,” the names that recur are Susan G. Komen and Nancy G. Brinker, the sisters who made the pink ribbon what it is today. Shortly after Ms. Komen died of breast cancer in 1980, Ms. Brinker began a fund-raising effort that has grown into a multimillion-dollar operation, encompassing races all over the world, hundreds of corporate sponsorships and that inevitable pink ribbon.

Or, actually, two ribbons. The first, modeled on the red ribbon that denotes AIDS, remains in the public domain, but in 2007 Ms. Brinker introduced ribbon No. 2, this one copyrighted, presumably to cement her market share.

It is no surprise that this consummate strategist has herself produced a memoir of her career in the breast cancer biz. The surprise is that her book is almost impossible to put down. The woman is clearly breathtakingly good at public relations, both in deed and, with some help from a co-author, in word.

Two pretty little girls, Suzy and Nanny, live happily in 1950s Illinois with Mommy and Daddy (now in her 60s, Ms. Brinker refers to her parents in just this way). Were they really the iconic postwar American family, or is Ms. Brinker just blowing stardust in our eyes? After a while, immersed in the story, you don’t really care. Suzy Komen is painted in sure, fond strokes as one of those magnetic young women who own every room they enter. At age 34 she finds a breast lump. A surgeon removes it, sews her up, assures her he “got it all.” Three years later she’s dead.

Ms. Brinker details every step she has taken in the intervening years to fulfill her promise to the dying Suzy to “make things better.” The book wanders through personal setbacks (like her own mastectomy for early-stage cancer) and corporate triumphs (like “Pinking the Pyramids” with Egypt’s first breast cancer race). She also tells the stories of many breast cancer she-ros, most of them young and very heroic.

At the end comes a scene of cinematic impact: Ms. Brinker takes Ms. Komen’s two young granddaughters to tea at (where else?) the American Girl store in Manhattan, and tells Suzy’s little namesake to “take care of your sister.”

There isn’t a dry eye in the house. This is surely how illness should read: triumphant, assertive, can-do. Ms. Sulik’s complicated uncertainties are a real downer by comparison. The inspirational and the actual, the wish-it-were and the how-it-is: don’t read one of these books without the other.

By Abigail Zuger, M.D

New Facebook Game | "FameTown"

2010-10-19T12:11:00.000-04:00

A screenshot from the Facebook game “Fametown.”

At Facebook, Hollywood Stardom as a Game

If being a virtual farmer or make-believe mobster is not for you, Michael D. Eisner hopes that playing the role of a movie star in a digital version of Hollywood will have its appeal.

On Monday, Mr. Eisner, the former chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, will announced a new Facebook game called FameTown in which players will be virtual aspiring actors trying to make it big.

FameTown, which is modeled after popular Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, is the latest effort by Hollywood to capitalize on the soaring popularity of social games. Those efforts include Disney’s acquisition of Playdom, the third-largest maker of social games, for as much as $763 million in July.

“We think there is an exciting business here,” Mr. Eisner said in an interview.

FameTown, which will be released on Nov. 1, is being introduced in an increasingly crowded and competitive field, with hundreds of social games vying for the attention of Facebook users.

The goal of FameTown is for virtual actors to move from the D-List to the A-List. Players can pick which make-believe movie star they want to be and then earn points by completing tasks like meeting the cast and director. They can also improve their social standing by attending the right parties or charity events, and they can hire assistants, agents or publicists to help their virtual careers.

Like many social games, FameTown will make money through the sale of virtual goods; most of what can be earned by playing the game can also be bought with real cash.

Mr. Eisner said the social dynamics of FameTown were not far off from those of Hollywood.

“Half the people who work in the movies worked in the mail room or as waiters,” he said.

FameTown was created by a start-up in Los Angeles called Diversion. Mr. Eisner, through his investment firm, the Tornante Company, is the sole investor in Diversion. He declined to comment on the size of the investment.

The project was brought to him by Shawn Fanning, the founder of the music-sharing company Napster, who became friends with some of the founders of Diversion by playing online games. Mr. Fanning is an adviser and shareholder of Diversion.

Mr. Eisner is not the only Hollywood mogul paying attention to the popularity of social games. During a recent conference, Jeffrey R. Katzenberg, the head of DreamWorks Animation, said that if he were starting his career all over, he would want to be Mark Pincus, who is chief executive of Zynga, the maker of FarmVille, Mafia Wars and other social games. It is the industry’s leader with nearly 220 million people playing its games.

By Miguel Helft - NY Times

Book Review | 'It’s a Book'

2010-10-17T21:06:00.000-04:00

From “It’s a Book”

CHILDREN"S BOOKS

iRead

In Lane Smith’s new book, called, simply, “It’s a Book,” a mouse, a jackass and a monkey — all drawn with the kind of early-’60s geometric-minded stylization that requires a gentle reminder of which animal is which on the title page — discover a new thing. Flat and rectangular, with a hard cover and a soft, yielding inside, it baffles the jackass, while the behatted monkey tries patiently to explain its curious technology. “Do you blog with it?” the jackass says. “No, it’s a book,” the monkey explains. This only makes the donkey’s exasperation keener: Where’s the mouse? Does it need a password? Can you make the characters fight? Can it text, tweet, toot? No, none of that, the monkey explains, and then Monkey hands the book to Jackass, who takes it worriedly, like a nut too hard to crack.

The book, it turns out, is “Treasure Island,” though, wisely, this isn’t explicitly announced to the reader, but must be inferred from a quotation. (In the book’s single finest comic moment, the anxious jackass offers a reduced text-message version of the famous sequence he has just read: “LJS: rrr! K? lol!

JIM: : ( ! : )”

Then, in a memorable two-page spread, sure to be especially cherished by parents, the jackass reads the thing. A clock runs above him, counting out the hours, and his ears and eyes, with wonderful caricatural economy, express first puzzlement, then absorption and at last the special quality of readerly happiness: a mind lost in a story.

Those of us for whom books are a faith in themselves — who find the notion that pixels, however ordered, could be any kind of substitute for the experience of reading in a chair with the strange thing spread open on our lap — will love this book. Though it will surely draw a laugh from kids, it will give even more pleasure to parents who have been trying to make loudly the point that Smith’s book makes softly: that the virtues of a book are independent of any bells, whistles or animation it might be made to contain. That two-page spread of the jackass simply reading is the key moment in the story, and one of the nicest sequences in recent picture books.

For in trying to make the case for books to our kids, exactly the case we want to make is not that they can compete with the virtues of computer or screens, but that they do something else: that they allow for a soulfulness the screens, with their jumpy impersonality, cannot duplicate —any more than the movies can duplicate the intimate intensity of theater, or than the computer can reproduce the shared-hearth-in-living-room experience of television that we now, ironically, recall nostalgically. (“Would you please get off your computer and come and watch television with the rest of the family,” I’ve found myself calling out to my own plugged-in children.)

The moral of Smith’s book is the right one: not that screens are bad and books are good, but that what books do depends on the totality of what they are — their turning pages, their sturdy self-sufficiency, above all the way they invite a child to withdraw from this world into a world alongside ours in an activity at once mentally strenuous and physically still.

The only flaw this gentle and pointed book contains, in truth, is a too-easy joke on the last page at the expense of the converted burro. But one can glide by the false note, or at least talk it over as it’s read — after all, it’s a book.

By Adam Gopnik - The New Yorker

Barbara Billingsley, Beaver Cleaver's TV Mom, Dies At 94

2010-10-17T02:46:00.000-04:00

In this Sept. 22, 1986 file photo, actress Barbara Billingsley poses next to a portrait of her television family, Hugh Beaumont, Tony Dow, Jerry Mathers and herself as the Cleaver family from "Leave It To Beaver."

LOS ANGELES - Even decades after the show ended, Barbara Billingsley expressed surprise at the lasting affection people had for "Leave it to Beaver" and her role as the warm, supportive mother of a pair of precocious boys.

The actress, who gained supermom status for her gentle portrayal of June Cleaver in the 1950s television series, died Saturday after a long illness. She was 94.

"We knew we were making a good show, because it was so well written," Billingsley said in 1994. "But we had no idea what was ahead. People still talk about it and write letters, telling how much they watch it today with their children and grandchildren."

Billingsley, who had suffered from a rheumatoid disease, died at her home in Santa Monica, said family spokeswoman Judy Twersky.

When the show debuted in 1957, Jerry Mathers, who played Beaver, was 9, and Tony Dow, who portrayed Wally, was 12. Billingsley's character, the perfect stay-at-home 1950s mom, was always there to gently but firmly nurture both through the ups and downs of childhood.

Beaver, meanwhile, was a typical boy whose adventures landed him in one comical crisis after another.

Billingsley's own two sons said she was pretty much the image of June Cleaver in real life, although the actress disagreed.

"She was every bit as nurturing, classy, and lovely as 'June Cleaver,' and we were so proud to share her with the world," her son Glenn Billingsley said Saturday.

She did acknowledge that she may have become more like June as the series progressed.

"I think what happens is that the writers start writing about you as well as the character they created," she once said. "So you become sort of all mixed up, I think."

A wholesome beauty with a lithe figure, Billingsley began acting in her elementary school's plays and soon discovered she wanted to do nothing else.

Although her beauty and figure won her numerous roles in movies from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she failed to obtain star status until "Leave it to Beaver," a show that she almost passed on.

"I was going to do another series with Buddy Ebsen for the same producers, but somehow it didn't materialize," she told The Associated Press in 1994. "A couple of months later I got a call to go to the studio to do this pilot show. And it was 'Beaver.'"

After "Leave it to Beaver" left the air in 1963 Billingsley largely disappeared from public view for several years.

She resurfaced in 1980 in a hilarious cameo in "Airplane!" playing a demur elderly passenger not unlike June Cleaver.

When flight attendants were unable to communicate with a pair of jive-talking hipsters, Billingsley's character volunteered to translate, saying "I speak jive." The three then engage in a raucous street-slang conversation.

"No chance they would have cast me for that if I hadn't been June Cleaver," she once said.

She returned as June Cleaver in a 1983 TV movie, "Still the Beaver," that costarred Mathers and Dow and portrayed a much darker side of Beaver's life.

In his mid-30s, Beaver was unemployed, unable to communicate with his own sons and going through a divorce. Wally, a successful lawyer, was handling the divorce, and June was at a loss to help her son through the transition.

"Ward, what would you do?" she asked at the site of her husband's grave. (Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward Cleaver, had died in 1982.)

The movie revived interest in the Cleaver family, and the Disney Channel launched "The New Leave It to Beaver" in 1985.

The series took a more hopeful view of the Cleavers, with Beaver winning custody of his two sons and all three moving in with June.

In 1997 Universal made a "Leave it to Beaver" theatrical film with a new generation of actors. Billingsley returned for a cameo, however, as Aunt Martha.

"America's favorite mother is now gone," Dow said in a statement Saturday. "I feel very fortunate to have been her "son" for 11 years. We were wonderful friends and I will miss her very much."

In later years she appeared from time to time in such TV series as "Murphy Brown," "Empty Nest" and "Baby Boom" and had a memorable comic turn opposite fellow TV moms June Lockhart of "Lassie" and Isabel Sanford of "The Jeffersons" on the "Roseanne" show.

"Now some people, they just associate you with that one role (June Cleaver), and it makes it hard to do other things," she once said. "But as far as I'm concerned, it's been an honor."

In real life, fate was not as gentle to Billingsley as it had been to June and her family.

Born Barbara Lillian Combes in Los Angeles on Dec. 22, 1915, she was raised by her mother after her parents divorced. She and her first husband, Glenn Billingsley, divorced when her sons were just 2 and 4.

Her second husband, director Roy Kellino, died of a heart attack after three years of marriage and just months before she landed the "Leave it to Beaver" role.

She married physician Bill Mortenson in 1959 and they remained wed until his death in 1981.

Twersky said Billingsley's survivors include her sons, a stepson and numerous grandchildren.

By Christopher Weber - Associated Press/AP Online

The Bing-Facebook Alliance: Six Things You (and Google) Should Know

2010-10-14T09:13:00.000-04:00

Bing and Facebook just made search social. Will your online life ever be the same again?

It’s not too audacious to say that the new Bing search features that Microsoft and Facebook unveiled today are going to upend the search business.

Until now, search algorithms have used machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict which of the billions of pages out on the Internet might be most salient to your search. Now, at least on Bing, they’re going to have access to something even more precious: the knowledge of who your friends are and what they like.

Among the features Bing is rolling out to users in the coming days is a module called “Liked Results” to its search results. Looking for information on that new Tom Cruise movie? On Google, your search engine would serve up the relevant pages it has calculated are the most popular. On Bing, as of now, it serves up the regular Google-style results and a module that shows you pages your friends have liked -- including, for example, movie reviews. You no longer have to do the work of trolling through search results to figure out which of the pages might tell you whether the movie’s a hit or a bomb. Trust your friend Sara’s taste? Click on the page she Liked.

So what does this all mean? Here are a few takeaways:

1. Search just reached an inflection point. Google’s great innovation was to figure out how to deliver the most relevant search results, based on the assumption that a webpage that had a large number of other pages linking to it would be more interesting than one with fewer links. Google has built its search algorithms by continuing to troll large sets of data for other attributes that indicate relevance. Now, however, Bing can deliver results based on what your trusted sources of information—your friends and acquaintances—think. This is a giant leap forward. Among other things, it means that…

2. Companies have to focus on creating great customer experiences. Because when their customers go searching online—for a movie, a camera, a travel destination—their friends’ recommendations are going to be front and center. Launched a store that no one "Liked?" you’re not going to show up in the search results.

3. Search is going to look a lot different. Forget the list of blue links. As Qi Lu, the engineering lead for the new changes (and president of Microfsoft’s Online Services Group), said, once you introduce a social dimension to search results, you could actually start representing search results—visually—in new ways. He didn’t say what those might look like, but be prepared to see them soon, because…

4. We’re going to be seeing even more social elements introduced into Bing’s search results. And soon. Both Microsoft and Facebook said that today’s new features were just the beginning. It only took them two months to gin up the ones they released today. Which means more are going to be coming down the pike in the months to come. Which means...

5. Google may have to go back to the drawing board. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't say they were shutting the search giant out. In fact, he said that, ultimately, the company would like to work with all players in search. But for now, it appears he's working solely with Microsoft.

6. You must master your Facebook privacy settings. Mindful of earlier criticism of Facebook’s handling of privacy issues, both Microsoft and Facebook went out of their way today to stress that users will retain control over what Facebook shares with Bing. The flip side is that users actually have to exercise the control that Bing and Facebook give them. Don’t want your friends’s friends to know you Liked Justin Beiber’s fan page? Better check those privacy settings now.

By E.B. Boyd - Fast Company

The Andy Griffith Show Gets NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Car for 50th Anniversary.

2010-10-13T10:45:00.001-04:00

Picture showing what the No. 37 Ford Fusion will look like at Charlotte Motor Speedway this weekend.

The No.37 Ford Fusion driven by Eighteen-year NASCAR veteran Dave Blaney will feature quite the paint scheme for this weekend's race at Charlotte Motor Speedway. It's all in the name of The Andy Griffith Show.

Fifty years have passed since the show and its setting of Mayberry, N.C. was first introduced to the TV watching world.

To celebrate, the Ford Fusion will be painted to resemble a patrol car, highlighted with the likenesses of the TV show's main characters.

Tune in Saturday @ 7 p.m. ET on ABC. to watch this week's race the 'Bank of America 500' and see Dave Blaney's No. 37 car in action.

VIDEO GAME REVIEW | SID MEIER'S PIRATES

2010-10-12T09:08:00.000-04:00

A scene from the waterworld of Sid Meier’s Pirates! for Wii.

Down to the Seas Again, With Remote in Hand

The one knock you can lay on Sid Meier, one of the legends of video game design, is that he hasn’t seemed to have had a big new idea in a long time.

But perhaps you don’t need any when you’ve created great franchises like Civilization and Pirates! Civilization, the classic turn-based strategy game, was recently released in its fifth iteration, and a week later 2K Games, which controls Mr. Meier’s company, Firaxis, released a new version of Sid Meier’s Pirates! for the Wii.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Civilization over the years, I must admit that Pirates! may reside in an even softer spot in my gaming heart. After the original version was released for the Commodore 64 in 1987, I probably played it for at least 100 hours. The concept was stunningly original. Almost all other games at the time consisted of discrete virtual levels and rigidly defined play structures; it would be 14 years before Grand Theft Auto III defined the modern “open world” game.

But Pirates! gave you the entire 17th-century Caribbean to explore at your whim. As England, France, Holland and Spain alternately warred and wooed one another in a diplomatic cotillion, you could choose to privateer with an official letter of marque or simply attack everything that sailed.

The new Wii version, which is largely based on the game’s 2004 remake, captures the sense of opportunity that made the original so magical. There are lost treasures to uncover, evil aristocrats to defeat, kidnapped family members to rescue, governor’s daughters to seduce, rich cities to plunder and legendary pirate rivals like Blackbeard and Henry Morgan to hunt down — all on a map stretching from St. Augustine (in what is now Florida) in the north, to Vera Cruz in Mexico to the west, to Trinidad in the southeast.

Of course pirate games, like pirate movies, almost always present a sanitized and romanticized version of the past. Pirates! is no different. There is no slavery here (in fact, I couldn’t locate a black person at all) and no rape. You can win the charms of a governor’s daughter through a regrettably repetitive mini-game, but you can’t simply attack the town and carry her off. The little violence in the game is practically cartoonish, as you would expect of a title rated for players 10 and older.

Still, the overall historical impression of Pirates! seems accurate. You can begin play near the beginning of the 17th century, when Spain was still the dominant power in the region, and the English, French and Dutch were mere upstarts; in the midcentury “golden age of piracy”; or, toward the end, as national navies began to put most pirates out of business.

The geography also feels realistic. Prevailing winds almost always blow from east to west, making a voyage from, say, Barbados to Cartagena (in what is now Colombia) much faster and more convenient than a trip from La Habana (Havana) to Antigua. There are worse ways to teach geography.

And so the big picture of what has always made Pirates! so captivating is intact. The problem, and it’s a big one, is that the mini-games under the surface are infuriatingly repetitive and can become boring. You can sail where you want and attack whom you wish, but no matter where you go, you end up doing the same little tasks over and over.

So the heart of a pirate game should be sword-fighting, right? On what is supposed to be a standard, middle-of-the-road difficulty setting, I found myself able to swing the Wii remote around randomly without losing a single duel.

The examples go on. To succeed in this game, you pretty much have to win the confidence of governors’ daughters because they hold special items and regional intelligence. The only way to do that is through a dancing mini-game that involves swinging the Wii remote in time to period music and your partner’s motions. But how many thousands of times can a reasonable person be expected to swing up, down, right and left before beginning to dread every time a daughter asks for a dance? And then, when you are attacking cities, you must endure the same procedure of firing your cannons at enemy cannoneers who seem to be in the exact same spots every time.

The only parts of the actual gameplay that seem reliably interesting and varied are the ship-to-ship battles, where you have to deal with the wind, can set your sails in two fashions and can choose different ammunition to attack the enemy’s sails, crew members or hull. That huge galleon might seem like fun because of how many guns it carries, but the first time you try to catch a nimble sloop, you’re going to regret it.

As a game for intelligent children, Pirates! offers a beautiful design. But this version simply does not include enough depth in its play mechanisms to keep adults interested for long. For that, they can turn to Civilization or (hopefully) wait for Mr. Meier’s next big idea.

By Seth Schiesel - NY Times

BOOK REVIEW | "DJIBOUTI"

2010-10-11T09:44:00.000-04:00

Elmore Leonard

As Pirates Swash Their Buckles

Monday is Elmore Leonard’s 85th birthday. It is also Columbus Day 2010, a national holiday. Coincidence? Perhaps. But this is as good a time as any to acknowledge America’s hippest, best-loved, most widely imitated crime writer as a national treasure.

In honor of the occasion Mr. Leonard seems to have given himself a couple of birthday presents. First of all, he calls his 44th and latest novel “Djibouti” just because he loves the sound of that name. Second, he gives “Djibouti” Xavier LeBo, a studly 6-foot-6-inch black leading man who, at 72, has lost none of his appeal to pretty young women. And he puts Xavier on a small boat with a smart, tough and alluring younger woman, a pale-skinned blonde who also happens to be a prizewinning filmmaker.

Mr. Leonard was very taken with Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) when he met her years ago and took care to send her an early copy of this novel. “Djibouti” follows a very Bigelow-like director named Dara Barr as she heads for East Africa to make a film about pirates. Dara specializes in documentaries about tough subjects, so she has made films about Bosnian women, neo-Nazis and Hurricane Katrina. (“Dara, you nailed that hurricane,” somebody tells her.) Now she wants to find out about the very dangerous Republic of Djibouti, whose port is conveniently located near both the Gulf of Aden and the home turf of Somali pirates. Dara thinks real pirates might be great on camera.

Neither Dara, Xavier nor, apparently, Mr. Leonard is exactly sure what opportunities Djibouti will provide. In a book without a powerhouse plot but with plenty of the old familiar crackle, Mr. Leonard simply flies his principals to this exotic spot and then imagines which other opportunists might be drawn to the place. He hits pay dirt with a noisily ostentatious Texan named Billy Wynn, who can count a big boat, an elephant gun and a model named Helene among his favorite possessions. Helene, this book’s funniest character, is willing to sail around the world with Billy on the off chance that he will marry her and write her into his will.

The pirates’ paradise of this novel turns out to be a lot more civilized than it sounds. For one thing, the pirate kingpins are a gentlemanly lot, what with their European pretensions and large sums of discretionary income. Dara has the gift of charming these people while filming them covertly for possible use in her magnum opus. She gets to know the courtly Idris, whose day job as a pirate leader does nothing to diminish his skills as a debonair party host, and Ari Ahmed Sheikh Bakar, a Saudi diplomat who has done his best to anglicize his name into “Harry.” Then Dara goes back to the boat that she and Xavier have rented and tries to figure out what she has captured on camera and what, exactly, is going on.

“Xavier LeBo believed was he 10 years younger, they’d be letting good times roll all over this boat,” Mr. Leonard writes of the book’s never-say-die hero. But Xavier’s dealings with Dara are professional, at least until he goes and purchases something called horny goat weed from a local merchant. Mostly, the two engage in a nonstop debate as to what kind of film Dara ought to make. What soon becomes clear to both of them is that the idea of Somali pirates as misunderstood underdogs is not going to fly. The hijacking of a tanker filled with liquid natural gas is one good reason to think that this region is getting ready to explode.

Mr. Leonard is on familiar turf when it comes to the pirates’ punk aspirations to live large. (Xavier’s explanation of what the pirates do: “They on the sauce gettin millions for their ransom notes.”) And he’s great with eccentricities, particularly Billy’s, once Billy starts reminding Helene of the Sterling Hayden character in “Dr. Strangelove.” But “Djibouti” has links to serious business that the book can’t just take lightly. Real events, like the 2009 attack by Somali pirates on the Maersk Alabama and rescue of Captain Richard Phillips by United States Navy Seals, are used to lend gravitas to the novel’s exotic setting.

Mr. Leonard also allows the shadow of terrorism to loom. He creates a character who has an Arab’s name, Jama Raisuli, but an American’s rap sheet and criminal record. And he derives most of his suspense this time from the question of how dangerous Jama will be. In a novel not otherwise overly concerned with plot, there is drama attached to whether Jama’s real name can be found. If he turns out to be a real American-born jihadi, he may be worth serious reward money from the American government. But characters in “Djibouti” who get too inquisitive about Jama’s identity have a way of winding up dead.

How does Dara’s filmmaking figure in all this? Perhaps autobiographically, since it lets Mr. Leonard regularly step back to contemplate the storytelling process. We watch Dara and Xavier talk over the material they’ve collected and the different ways they might put it together. Are they making a documentary? Should they turn it into a drama? Are there scenes they need to boost artificially or does the truth speak for itself? The 85-year-old birthday boy already has the how-to manual “10 Rules of Writing” to his credit, but he delivers a little more literary advice here by demonstrating how these filmmakers work. It’s simple: Ask the right questions. Then come up with the right answers.

By Janet Maslin - NY Times

Marvel's Captain America to Star in WWII Video Game

2010-10-07T10:02:00.000-04:00

Sega of America and Sega Europe have teamed up with Marvel Entertainment to produce a WWII adventure game called Captain America: Super Soldier for release in 2011.

Captain America: Super Soldier will be available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Wii and Nintendo DS. The game's storyline is being written by Christos Gage, the primary writer for Marvel's "Avengers: The Initiative" series of comics.

"Captain America: Super Soldier puts players in the boots of the ultimate super soldier, wielding Captain America's legendary shield," says Gary Knight, senior vice president of marketing at Sega Europe and Sega America. "Working closely with Marvel ensures we're delivering the caliber product that gamers and comic fans deserve and it's a partnership we're proud of here at Sega."

By Licensemag.com

Actor Tony Curtis dies at Las Vegas-area home

2010-09-30T09:39:00.000-04:00

Actor Tony Curtis is shown in this 1965 file photo. Curtis, whose real name was Bernard Schwartz, was perhaps most known for his comedic turn in Billy Wilder's 'Some Like It Hot' with co-stars Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon has died at 85 according to the Clark County, Nev. coroner. (AP Photo, File)

LAS VEGAS - Tony Curtis, the Bronx tailor's son who became a 1950s movie heartthrob and then a respected actor with such films as "Sweet Smell of Success," "The Defiant Ones" and "Some Like It Hot," has died. He was 85.

The actor died about 9:25 p.m. PDT Wednesday at his Las Vegas area home of a cardiac arrest, Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy said Thursday.

After a series of frivolous movies that exploited his handsome physique and appealing personality, Curtis moved to more substantial roles, starting in 1957 in the harrowing show business tale "Sweet Smell of Success."

In 1958, "The Defiant Ones" brought him an Academy Award nomination as best actor for his portrayal of a white racist escaped convict handcuffed to a black escapee, Sidney Poitier. The following year, he donned women's clothing and sparred with Marilyn Monroe in one of the most acclaimed film comedies ever, Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot."

His first wife was actress Janet Leigh of "Psycho" fame; actress Jamie Leigh Curtis is their daughter.

In later years, he returned to film and television as a character actor after battling drug and alcohol abuse. His brash optimism returned, and he allowed his once-shiny black hair to turn silver.

"I'm not ready to settle down like an elderly Jewish gentleman, sitting on a bench and leaning on a cane," he said at 60. "I've got a helluva lot of living to do."

He also became a painter whose canvasses sold for as much as $20,000.

"He was a fine actor ... I shall miss him," said British actor Roger Moore, who starred alongside Curtis in TV's "The Persuaders."

"He was great fun to work with, a great sense of humour and wonderful ad libs," Moore told Sky News. "We had the best of times."

Curtis perfected his craft in forgettable films such as "Francis," "I Was a Shoplifter," "No Room for the Groom" and "Son of Ali Baba."

He first attracted critical notice as Sidney Falco, the press agent seeking favor with a sadistic columnist, played by Burt Lancaster, in the 1957 classic "Sweet Smell of Success."

In her book "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," Pauline Kael wrote that in the film, "Curtis grew up into an actor and gave the best performance of his career."

Other prestigious films followed: Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus," "Captain Newman, M.D.," "The Vikings," "Kings Go Forth," "Operation Petticoat" and "Some Like It Hot." He also found time to do a voice acting gig as his prehistoric lookalike, Stony Curtis, in an episode of "The Flintstones."

"The Defiant Ones" remained his only Oscar-nominated role.

"I think it has nothing to do with good performances or bad performances," he told The Washington Post in 2002. "After the number of movies I made where I thought there should be some acknowledgment, there was nothing from the Academy."

"My happiness and privilege is that my audience around the world is supportive of me, so I don't need the Academy."

In 2000, an American Film Institute survey of the funniest films in history ranked "Some Like It Hot" at No. 1. Curtis - famously imitating Cary Grant's accent - and Jack Lemmon play jazz musicians who dress up as women to escape retribution after witnessing a gangland massacre.

Monroe was their co-star, and he and Lemmon were repeatedly kept waiting as Monroe lingered in her dressing room out of fear and insecurity. Curtis fumed over her unprofessionalism. When someone remarked that it must be thrilling to kiss Monroe in the film's love scenes, the actor snapped, "It's like kissing Hitler." In later years, his opinion of Monroe softened, and in interviews he praised her unique talent.

In 2002, Curtis toured in "Some Like It Hot" - a revised and retitled version of the 1972 Broadway musical "Sugar," which was based on the film. In the touring show, the actor graduated to the role of Osgood Fielding III, the part played in the movie by Joe E. Brown.

After his star faded in the late 1960s, Curtis shifted to lesser roles. With jobs harder to find, he fell into drug and alcohol addiction.

"From 22 to about 37, I was lucky," Curtis told Interview magazine in the 1980s, "but by the middle '60s, I wasn't getting the kind of parts I wanted, and it kind of soured me. ... But I had to go through the drug inundation before I was able to come to grips with it and realize that it had nothing to do with me, that people weren't picking on me."

He recovered in the early '80s after a 30-day treatment at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage.

"Mine was a textbook case," he said in a 1985 interview. "My life had become unmanageable because of booze and dope. Work became a strain and a struggle. Because I didn't want to face the challenge, I simply made myself unavailable."

One role during that era of struggle did bring him an Emmy nomination: his portrayal of David O. Selznick in the TV movie "The Scarlett O'Hara War," in 1980.

His health remained vigorous, though he did get heart bypass surgery in 1994.

Curtis took a fatherly pride in daughter Jamie Leigh's success. They were estranged for a long period, then reconciled. "I understand him better now," she said, "perhaps not as a father but as a man."

He also had five other children. Daughters Kelly, also with Leigh, and Allegra, with second wife Christine Kaufmann, also became actresses. His other wives were Leslie Allen, Lisa Deutsch and Jill VandenBerg, whom he married in 1998.

He had married Janet Leigh in 1951, when they were both rising young stars; they divorced in 1963.

"Tony and I had a wonderful time together; it was an exciting, glamorous period in Hollywood," Leigh, who died in 2004, once said. "A lot of great things happened, most of all, two beautiful children."

Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx in 1925, the son of Hungarian Jews who had emigrated to the United States after World War I. His father, Manny Schwartz, had yearned to be an actor, but work was hard to find with his heavy accent. He settled for tailoring jobs, moving the family repeatedly as he sought work.

"I was always the new kid on the block, so I got beat up by the other kids," Curtis recalled in 1959. "I had to figure a way to avoid getting my nose broken. So I became the crazy new kid on the block."

His sidewalk histrionics helped avoid beatings and led to acting in plays at a settlement house. He also grew to love movies. "My whole culture as a boy was movies," he said. "For 11 cents, you could sit in the front row of a theater for 10 hours, which I did constantly."

After serving in the Pacific during World War II and being wounded at Guam, he returned to New York and studied acting under the G.I. Bill. He appeared in summer stock theater and on the Borscht Circuit in the Catskills. Then an agent lined up an audition with a Universal-International talent scout. In 1948, at 23, he signed a seven-year contract with the studio, starting at $100 a week.

Bernie Schwartz sounded too Jewish for a movie actor, so the studio gave him a new name: Anthony Curtis, taken from his favorite novel, "Anthony Adverse," and the Anglicized name of a favorite uncle. After his eighth film, he became Tony Curtis.

The studio helped smooth the rough edges off the ambitious young actor. The last to go was his street-tinged Bronx accent. His diction became a Hollywood joke, as when he uttered to Piper Laurie in a medieval potboiler "The Prince Who Was a Thief": "Yonder lies the castle of my fodder."

Curtis pursued another career as an artist, creating Matisse-like still lifes with astonishing speed. "I'm a recovering alcoholic," he said in 1990 as he concluded a painting in 40 minutes in the garden of the Bel-Air Hotel. "Painting has given me such a great pleasure in life, helped me to recover."

He also turned to writing, producing a 1977 novel, "Kid Cody and Julie Sparrow." In 1993, he wrote "Tony Curtis: The Autobiography."

By Ken Ritter, Bob Thomas - Associated Press/AP Online

In Study, Children Cite Appeal of Digital Reading

2010-09-29T08:57:00.000-04:00

Many children want to read books on digital devices, while parents worry that technology will distract young bookworms, according to a survey by the publisher Scholastic.

Many children want to read books on digital devices and would read for fun more frequently if they could obtain e-books. But even if they had that access, two-thirds of them would not want to give up their traditional print books.

These are a few of the findings in a study being released on Wednesday by Scholastic, the American publisher of the Harry Potter books and the “Hunger Games” trilogy.

The report set out to explore the attitudes and behaviors of parents and children toward reading books for fun in a digital age. Scholastic surveyed more than 2,000 children ages 6 to 17, and their parents, in the spring.

Parents and educators have long worried that digital diversions like video games and cellphones cut into time that children spend reading. However, they see the potential for using technology to their advantage, introducing books to digitally savvy children through e-readers, computers and mobile devices.

About 25 percent of the children surveyed said they had already read a book on a digital device, including computers and e-readers. Fifty-seven percent between ages 9 and 17 said they were interested in doing so.

Only 6 percent of parents surveyed owned an e-reader, but 16 percent said they planned to buy one in the next year. Eighty-three percent of those parents said they would allow or encourage their children to use the e-readers.

Francie Alexander, the chief academic officer at Scholastic, called the report “a call to action.”

“I didn’t realize how quickly kids had embraced this technology,” Ms. Alexander said, referring to computers and e-readers or other portable devices that can download books. “Clearly they see them as tools for reading — not just gaming, not just texting. They see them as an opportunity to read.”

Milton Chen, a senior fellow at the George Lucas Educational Foundation, said the report made the case that children want to read on new digital platforms.

“The very same device that is used for socializing and texting and staying in touch with their friends can also be turned for another purpose,” Mr. Chen said. “That’s the hope.”

But many parents surveyed also expressed deep concerns about the distractions of video games, cellphones and television in their children’s lives. They also wondered if the modern multi-tasking adolescent had the patience to become engrossed in a long novel.

“My daughter can’t stop texting long enough to concentrate on a book,” said one parent surveyed, the mother of a 15-year-old in Texas.

Another survey participant, the mother of a 7-year-old Michigan boy, said, “I am afraid my son’s attention span will only include fast-moving ideas, and book reading will become boring to him.”

More than half the parents surveyed said they were concerned that as their children spent more time using digital devices, they would be less interested in recreational reading. The study did not try to measure whether the digital devices actually did detract from time spent reading.

The study also examined the effect of parents and teachers on children’s reading habits. Children ages 9 to 11 are more likely to be frequent readers if their parents provide interesting books to read at home and set limits on time spent using technology like video games, the report said.

The report also suggested that many children displayed an alarmingly high level of trust in information available on the Internet: 39 percent of children ages 9 to 17 said the information they found online was “always correct.”

By Julie Bosman - NY Times

TELEVISION REVIEW | 'NO ORDINARY FAMILY'

2010-09-28T11:44:00.000-04:00

From left, Julie Benz, Kay Panabaker, Jimmy Bennett and Michael Chiklis in “No Ordinary Family,” a comic-book-inspired series that begins Tuesday Sept. 28, 2010 on ABC.

Paranormal Skills on the Home Front

“Heroes,” the NBC series about young people who use their superpowers to save the planet, echoed the worst fears of Generation Y: baby boomers are leaving them a world choking on war, debt and global warming.

“No Ordinary Family,” beginning on Tuesday on ABC, is in a way the parental response, offering a calmer, more restrained fantasy about paranormal prowess. Superpowers can be marshaled to fight crime and injustice, of course, but are best used to reconnect estranged family members and repair frayed marriages.

Like “Heroes,” which was canceled this year, this series is inspired by comic books, but the model is less “Spider-Man” than “Fantastic Four,” a Marvel comic that featured a family of superheroes. It has been likened to “Lost,” because “No Ordinary Family” also starts with a plane crash, but it doesn’t have that sci-fi drama’s twisted, conspiratorial ethos. This is more of a Disney adventure tale along the lines of “The Swiss Family Robinson” or “The Incredibles.”

Michael Chiklis is perhaps best known for playing a corrupt cop on “The Shield,” but he also has experience as a superhero, notably as Ben Grimm, a k a The Thing, in the 2005 movie “Fantastic Four” and its sequel. Here he is Jim Powell, a husband and father and a failed painter battling a midlife crisis. Jim makes his living as a police sketch artist and feels adrift from his busy, successful scientist wife, Stephanie (Julie Benz), and their teenage kids, Daphne (Kay Panabaker) and J J (Jimmy Bennett).

When Stephanie has to do research in Brazil, Jim insists that the whole family go along and try some togetherness. They commune the hard way, flying through a storm in a small plane that crashes in the Amazon River. That near-death experience brings them closer for a while, but when back home in Los Angeles, the Powells resume their customary blinkered lives.

Until, that is, they discover that the crash left each of them with a paranormal ability.

Each superpower compensates for its owner’s sense of inadequacy. That’s not the same as wish fulfillment, however; otherwise Jim would have his own art gallery, and Stephanie would have a housekeeper.

Jim, who feels weak and powerless, discovers that he can catch bullets with his bare hands and leap tall buildings in a single bound. Stephanie, who can’t keep up with the stress of career and family obligations, can suddenly move at the speed of light, or faster, and is close to being able to be in two places at the same time. Daphne, who is immersed in the nightmarish puzzle that is high school, develops the ability to know what people are thinking. And J J, who struggles in school and is considered to have learning disabilities, is suddenly a near genius.

The first episode is almost all about their transformation from an ordinary family, with the classic frictions, disappointments and privileges that come with middle-class life, to superhero exceptionalism. They each have a glorious, fearsome secret, and can truly confide only in one another.

But it’s not clear whether this series — a hybrid of family drama and graphic novel — can sustain interest once the premise is fully established.

Tim Kring, the creator of “Heroes,” set his show in the modern world but used the stylized aesthetic and imaginative sweep of graphic novels to create his own universe. “No Ordinary Family” tries to insert comic-book characters and predicaments into everyday Los Angeles. Yet its social structure is closer to Batman’s Gotham: the bad guys are not insurance executives or pension fund managers; they are fiendish supervillains who use their paranormal gifts to rob banks and kill people.

Crime fighters are fine, of course, but these are times that may call for more ambitious fantasy: superheroes who can improve public schools, decrease the federal deficit and repair the ozone layer.

Click To View Clips Of No Ordinary Family

ABC, Tuesday nights at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Created by Greg Berlanti and Jon Har- mon Feldman. Mr. Berlanti, Mr. Feldman, David Semel and Morgan Wandell, execu- tive producers. Produced by ABC Stu- dios.WITH: Michael Chiklis (Jim Powell), Ju- lie Benz (Stephanie Powell), Romany Malco (George St. Cloud), Autumn Rees- er (Katie Andrews), Kay Panabaker (Daphne Powell), Jimmy Bennett (J J Powell) and Stephen Collins (Dr. Dayton King).

By Alessandra Stanley - NY Times

In Bing Crosby’s Wine Cellar, Vintage Baseball

2010-09-24T14:55:00.000-04:00

Bing Crosby, center, with two of his fellow team owners, John W. Galbreath, left, and Frank McKinney, at the Pittsburgh Pirates’ season opener at Wrigley Field in Chicago in 1947.

How a near pristine black-and-white reel of the entire television broadcast of the deciding game of the 1960 World Series — long believed to be lost forever — came to rest in the dry and cool wine cellar of Bing Crosby’s home near San Francisco is not a mystery to those who knew him.

Crosby loved baseball, but as a part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates he was too nervous to watch the Series against the Yankees, so he and his wife went to Paris, where they listened by radio.

“He said, ‘I can’t stay in the country,’ ” his widow, Kathryn Crosby, said. “ ‘I’ll jinx everybody.’ ”

He knew he would want to watch the game later — if his Pirates won — so he hired a company to record Game 7 by kinescope, an early relative of the DVR, filming off a television monitor. The five-reel set, found in December in Crosby’s home, is the only known complete copy of the game, in which Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit a game-ending home run to beat the Yankees, 10-9. It is considered one of the greatest games ever played.

Crosby, the singer and movie, radio and TV star, had more foresight than the television networks and stations, which erased or discarded nearly all of the Major League Baseball games they carried until the 1970s.

A canny preservationist of his own legacy, Crosby, who died in 1977, kept a half-century’s worth of records, tapes and films in the wine cellar turned vault in his Hillsborough, Calif., home.

“Bing Crosby was way ahead of his time,” said Nick Trotta, senior library and licensing manager for Major League Baseball Productions, the sport’s archivist.

Three years ago, Major League Baseball acquired the rights to Yankees pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series — leaving the finale of the 1960 World Series high on its wish list. The hunt for old games — this one unseen on TV since its original broadcast — is constant, subject to serendipity and often futile. Great games like Game 7 in 1960 are often recalled with just a few newsreel clips.

Crosby was so superstitious about hexing his Pirates that he and Kathryn listened to the game with their friends Charles and Nonie de Limur in Paris.

“We were in this beautiful apartment, listening on shortwave, and when it got close Bing opened a bottle of Scotch and was tapping it against the mantel,” Kathryn Crosby said. “When Mazeroski hit the home run, he tapped it hard; the Scotch flew into the fireplace and started a conflagration. I was screaming and Nonie said, ‘It’s very nice to celebrate things, but couldn’t we be more restrained?’ ”

After Crosby viewed the 2-hour-36-minute game, probably in a screening room in the house, the films took their place in the vault, said Robert Bader, vice president for marketing and production for Bing Crosby Enterprises.

They remained there undisturbed until December, when Bader was culling videotapes of Crosby’s TV specials for a DVD release — part of the estate’s goal of resurrecting his body of work.

He spotted two reels lying horizontally in gray canisters labeled “1960 World Series.” They were stacked close to the ceiling with home movies and sports instructional films. An hour or so later, he found three others on other shelves. Intrigued, he screened the 16-millimeter film on a projector. It was Game 7, called by the Yankees’ Mel Allen and the Pirates’ Bob Prince — the complete NBC broadcast. The film had not degraded and has been transferred to DVD.

“I had to be the only person to have seen it in 50 years,” Bader said. “It was just pure luck.”

Bader’s call to M.L.B. officials last spring initiated months of talks that have led to an agreement allowing the MLB Network to televise the game in December, and to wrap interviews and other programming around it, with Bob Costas as the host. M.L.B. also plans to sell DVDs of the game.

“It’s a time capsule,” Trotta said.

Hearing of the broadcast’s discovery, Jim Reisler, a historian born in Pittsburgh, sounded stunned.

“Wow,” he said. His book about the game — “The Best Game Ever” — would have benefited from seeing the NBC production, he said; he relied on the radio call. “It would have given me a greater sense of the tremendous ebb and flow of the game,” he said.

Dick Groat, the Pirates’ shortstop, said: “It was such a unique game to begin with. It was back and forth, back and forth. It was unbelievable.”

The production is simple by today’s standards. NBC appeared to use about five cameras. The graphics were simple (the players’ names and little else) and rarely used. There were no instant replays, no isolated cameras, no analysis, no dugout reporters and no sponsored trivia quizzes.

Viewers looked at the hand-operated Forbes Field scoreboard, which on that day (of 19 runs and 24 hits) got a vigorous workout. Occasionally they saw newsreel cameras atop the ballpark roof.

Prince and Allen rarely interacted, with Prince calling the first half and Allen the second. That put Allen on the air for Yogi Berra’s three-run homer in the sixth inning (Allen first called it foul); Pirates catcher Hal Smith’s eighth-inning homer to put Pittsburgh on top, 9-7 (“That base hit will long be remembered,” Allen said as the film showed Roberto Clemente — Allen called him Bob — bounding around the bases with joy); and Mazeroski’s winning drive to left field (“And the fans go wild,” Allen said).

The game included the play on which a ground ball hit by Bill Virdon to Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek kicked off the dirt and hit him in the Adam’s apple. Kubek fell on his back, sat up within a minute looking dazed, stood up, then lobbied Manager Casey Stengel unsuccessfully to stay in.

It also included remarkable base running by Mickey Mantle with one out in the top of the ninth. The Yankees were trailing, 9-8, with Mantle on first and Gil McDougald on third. Berra hit a sharp grounder that was grabbed by first baseman Rocky Nelson, who quickly stepped on the bag for the second out. For a split second, Nelson seemed ready to throw home in time for a tag play on McDougald for the final out of the World Series.

But Nelson immediately became distracted by Mantle, who never took off for second when Berra hit the ball and was now standing just a few feet away. Nelson reached to tag Mantle, but Mantle made a feint and dived back safely into first. McDougald scored, and the score was tied, 9-9.

“How about that?” Allen said after Mantle’s play. But just minutes later, Mazeroski stepped to the plate. NBC’s sound was good enough to hear a fan shout, “Just get on, Billy, get on!” Mazeroski did more than that. After his home run, fans poured onto the field and danced on the Pittsburgh dugout.

Only later did Bing Crosby witness the joy and jubilation recorded just for him.

“I can still see Bing hitting the mantel with the Scotch,” Kathryn Crosby said.

By Richard Sandomir - NY Times

Visit: www.bingcrosby.com

TELEVISION REVIEW | 'UNDERCOVERS'

2010-09-22T10:17:00.000-04:00

Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Boris Kodjoe in “Undercovers.”

Covert Affairs: Capers Paired With Canapés

It would be hard to single out the showiest meet cute in all of entertainment, but it seems certain that “Undercovers,” a new series beginning on Wednesday on NBC, delivers the most egregious marriage cute of the past 100 years. And I say this as someone who has wasted plenty of time watching “Hart to Hart.”

The term undercovers alludes here both to the occupation of Steven and Samantha Bloom and the activity to which they acquit themselves so ambitiously when the numerous blockades of the day have been conquered. The Blooms are spies, but more than that, they exist at the far-end antithesis of companionate marriage in all of its polite negotiation over who will manage the laundry and who will handle the recycling on Tuesdays. The Blooms are too busy emanating cheerful heat for each other ever to discuss who ought to run to the store to pick up a jug of Tide, making “Undercovers” so fantastical it feels like a “Harry Potter” for bored, involuntary celibates in midlife.

The series comes to us in part from J. J. Abrams, the co-creator of “Lost,” and it is distinguished as well for having cast black actors in the leading roles: Steven Bloom is played by the former model Boris Kodjoe, and Samantha by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who starred in last year’s acclaimed Donmar Warehouse production of “Hamlet,” opposite Jude Law, in the West End and on Broadway. You can’t help suspecting that her talents aren’t being maximized here. Perhaps even more remarkable, though, given the complexion of contemporary television, is that the actors were chosen for a series in which matters of race are irrelevant.

“Undercovers” is a caper in the mold of much of what appears on the USA Network. Actually, that requires some amendment, because the series is a caper in the era of “Top Chef.” The Blooms aren’t just excellent at espionage; they are also caterers, who, having retired from the C.I.A when they got together, are easily talked into working as freelancers as long as they don’t have to relinquish marinating fillets. (You need us in Peshawar? Really? I’m sorry, we have the Weintraub bar mitzvah on Saturday.)

In truth their bosses seem to confine their activities to prestigious European capitals anyway. The premiere has them bungee jumping all over the continent in search of a former colleague who has vanished in pursuit of a Russian arms dealer. (The embedded fairy tale is not merely that married working women wear black lace negligees but also that the most pernicious threats to our national security have names like Slotsky.) Still, wherever the Blooms go, they manage to find a good spread. Posing as a wedding guest during the initial mission, Samantha is taken with the caviar. “Steven, seriously,” she says into her hidden microphone, “the catering budget for this wedding is insane; I’ve already seen eight passed hors d’oeuvres.”

The banter between the Blooms is so full of cloying sugar substitutes and so devoid of any real tension that there is no voyeuristic thrill to be had even from their — I’m just going to say it, because the show does —“sexpionage.” The gazes they exchange are part soft pornography, part Lifetime television. Someone just give these people a cooking show.

View a Clip of Undercovers

NBC, Wednesday nights at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Created by J. J. Abrams and Josh Reims; pilot directed by Mr. Abrams; pilot written by Mr. Abrams and Mr. Reims; Mr. Abrams, Mr. Reims and Bryan Burk, executive producers; Stephen Williams, Mike Foley, Philip Klemmer and Elwood Reid, co-executive producers; Karen Gist, supervising producer; Kathy Lingg, producer; Anthony Sparks, co-producer; Robert M. Williams Jr., line producer. Produced by Warner Brothers, Bad Robot and Bonanza Productions.

WITH: Boris Kodjoe (Steven Bloom),Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Samantha Bloom),Mekia Cox (Lizzy Gilliam), Ben Schwartz(Bill Hoyt), Carter MacIntyre (Leo Nash)and Gerald McRaney (Carlton Shaw).

By Ginia Bellafante - NY Times

TELEVISION REVIEW | “MIKE & MOLLY”

2010-09-20T08:27:00.000-04:00

"Mike and Molly”: Melissa McCarthy portrays a schoolteacher and Billy Gardell a cop who find each other on this new CBS series, Monday nights at 9:30.

A Sitcom With More Than Empty Calories

Statistics from The Journal of the American Medical Association tell us that two-thirds of men and women in this country are overweight or obese, and this figure doesn’t even account for the legions of perpetual dieters who merely consider themselves too big. Much of television, by design or effect, strips away at the confidence of the very heavy — what is left of it after the world has had its way. Series like “Desperate Housewives” or “Cougar Town” flaunt the radical thinness of middle-age women; competitive reality spectacles like “The Biggest Loser” perceive obesity as laziness, suggesting that it can be combated and self-esteem improved by the simple application of free-market principles.

It is against this perverse tableau of size fixation that the sane and well-meaning series “Mike and Molly” (executive produced by Chuck Lorre, a creator of “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory”) begins on CBS on Monday. A comedy about life lived not in the low triple digits of the bathroom scale, this is network television of the old school: a half-hour of laugh track, bright lighting and a living room that could not be mistaken for one in Architectural Digest. “Mike and Molly” is part love story, part self-help session, and it is not for everyone, meaning it is surely for no one who can quote whole chunks of dialogue from “30 Rock.”

The characters of the title fall for each other at a meeting of Overeaters Anonymous. A tractor of a guy, Mike (Billy Gardell) has spent his life swooping up every hot dog in Chicago until he discovers a diet, in the pages of Modern Bride. Somewhere north of a size 16, Molly (Melissa McCarthy) is a schoolteacher tormented by a sister who mainlines chocolate frosting without consequence. As a cop, Mike, too, is saddled with a requisite scrawny sidekick: a partner who doesn’t mete out sass in tablespoons so much as shoot it from a Russian tank.

Much is made in the initial episode of Mike and Molly’s occupations, and CBS’s Web site makes a point of telling us that Mike and Molly are “a working-class couple.” This seems meant to assuage the fears of unsuspecting viewers who might think they would be looking at fat people with money, the presence of which, on television, would feel like science fiction.

And yet despite its disappointments, “Mike and Molly” is significant as the second fictional series in recent months to take weight not as a sideshow but rather as a central, animating subject, surpassing even the efforts made by “Roseanne” in the 1980s and ’90s. “Huge,” a drama about teenagers at a fat camp, which appeared this summer on ABC Family, displayed a similar sensitivity, a tone aimed at correcting for the reflexive cultural judgments levied against the overweight at a time when obesity has been cast as one of the greatest blights of our age.

Both series indicate the extent to which the countervailing sentiment, the fat-acceptance movement, begun in the 1960s, has gained traction in the mainstream as a rebuttal to political and social forces seeking to tax Mountain Dew and convince you that every time you have a second slice of pizza the devil grows an extra pair of horns. “Mike and Molly” is a mushy and human exploration of the struggle to find pleasure away from the bakery aisle, and the fight fat people wage against objectification.

What Molly would love, she explains in an Overeaters Anonymous meeting, is “to be able to walk into a nightclub without having every queen in the room leaping on me like I’m a gay-pride float.” Or, she might have added, without every size 4 looking at her as if she were a safari attraction.

MIKE and MOLLY

CBS, Monday nights at 9:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 8:30, Central time.

VIEW VIDEOS OF "MIKE AND MOLLY"

Created and written by Mark Roberts; directed by James Burrows; Chuck Lorre and Mr. Roberts, executive producers; Mike Collier and Peter Chakos, producers; Toti Levine, associate producer; Mona Garcea, coordinating producer. Produced by Bonanza Productions in association with Chuck Lorre Productions and Warner Brothers Television.

WITH: Billy Gardell (Officer Mike Biggs), Melissa McCarthy (Molly Flynn), Reno Wilson (Officer Carl McMillan), Katy Mixon (Victoria Flynn), Nyambi Nyambi (Samuel) and Swoosie Kurtz (Joyce Flynn).

By Ginia Bellafante - NY Times

Music Review | ZZ Top

2010-09-14T11:27:00.000-04:00

Billy Gibbons, left, and Dusty Hill of ZZ Top, still bearded and still with the drummer Frank Beard, were at the Beacon Theater on Sunday, playing the same sort of blues they have been playing since 1969.

Sure, Those Beards Remain, But Their Music Has Legs, Too

ZZ Top’s show at the Beacon Theater on Sunday was all base line. Not bass lines — there were those, too, and very steady — but an unbroken rumble of authority, an adherence to rules and a celebration of them. If you are the kind of person who likes to use a suspect and imprecise and maybe impossible term about music, then go ahead, because this was, more or less, a perfect concert.

What does that mean? It means that not one false note was played. The gig was calm and loud and loose. It had no compulsion or anxiety. It was short, and yet it made a tacit mockery of passing time.

The show, the first of a two-night run here, lasted almost exactly 90 minutes, with only three people onstage: the guitarist Billy Gibbons, the bassist Dusty Hill and the drummer Frank Beard. (That’s not strictly true: an imposing woman in a cocktail dress, whom Mr. Gibbons referred to as his “blues technician,” walked onstage once to hand him a cowboy hat with no crease. And a guitar technician made a few brief appearances, once to give Mr. Gibbons what appeared to be a joint — which was brandished but unsmoked — and a few more times to swap instruments.) The most recent song in the set was 16 years old: “Pincushion.”

But with this band, newness is barely an issue. ZZ Top has been playing the same sort of blues language since it was formed in Houston in 1969, with roadhouse shuffles or click-track rhythms. Even in a three-minute song, the band members find a groove that could tunnel into eternity. They’ve got it licked.

Mr. Gibbons, who is one of the finest living guitar players — say his name, fold your arms and stand your ground next time you are faced with an Eric Clapton idolater — never tuned between songs, and for the most part played only one instrument: a black GretschBilly-Bo Jupiter Thunderbird, which he designed with Bo Diddley. He used a plastic pick — not a coin, as he has done in the past with his 1959 Gibson Les Paul — but his picking, expressed through a warm, overdriven tone, still sounded heavy and metallic, lumbering and lovely.

He stayed in the lower and middle pitch areas of his instrument, played chords with open strings and let single notes ring; he performed one song (“Just Got Paid”) unostentatiously, with a slide; he played most of another (“My Head’s in Mississippi”) without any pick, and without bass and drums; and he referred to his old friend Jimi Hendrix, in “Hey Joe,” by playing Hendrix licks without impersonating their character.

The two men are still using their stagecraft from the ’80s — the period of the albums “Eliminator,” “Afterburner” and “Recycler, ” with the Devo-like metronomic rhythms and the ironic-sexy music videos. Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Hill still wear long beards, and still do a lot of slow, ceremonial grinning and pointing: to each other, to Mr. Beard, to whatever was on the screen behind them (often functional hardware: hubcaps, wrenches, amplifier cases.) But it’s a matter of efficacy, gestures so simple that they don’t seem grasping.

That the band has started to work on a new record produced by Rick Rubin, who likes to bring aging bands back to their eureka moments, is a philosophical puzzle. Does ZZ Top even need new songs? Does it need to figure out what once made it great? Is anything broken here?

The United States tour runs through Sept. 26.

www.zztop.com

By Ben Ratliff - NY Times

Boxers, Briefs and Books

2010-09-06T17:47:00.000-04:00

I WASN’T always a lawyer or a novelist, and I’ve had my share of hard, dead-end jobs. I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour. I was in my early teens, but the man who owned the nursery saw potential, and he promoted me to his fence crew. For $1.50 an hour, I labored like a grown man as we laid mile after mile of chain-link fence. There was no future in this, and I shall never mention it again in writing.

Then, during the summer of my 16th year, I found a job with a plumbing contractor. I crawled under houses, into the cramped darkness, with a shovel, to somehow find the buried pipes, to dig until I found the problem, then crawl back out and report what I had found. I vowed to get a desk job. I’ve never drawn inspiration from that miserable work, and I shall never mention it again in writing, either.

But a desk wasn’t in my immediate future. My father worked with heavy construction equipment, and through a friend of a friend of his, I got a job the next summer on a highway asphalt crew. This was July, when Mississippi is like a sauna. Add another 100 degrees for the fresh asphalt. I got a break when the operator of a Caterpillar bulldozer was fired; shown the finer points of handling this rather large machine, I contemplated a future in the cab, tons of growling machinery at my command, with the power to plow over anything. Then the operator was back, sober, repentant. I returned to the asphalt crew.

I was 17 years old that summer, and I learned a lot, most of which cannot be repeated in polite company. One Friday night I accompanied my new friends on the asphalt crew to a honky-tonk to celebrate the end of a hard week. When a fight broke out and I heard gunfire, I ran to the restroom, locked the door and crawled out a window. I stayed in the woods for an hour while the police hauled away rednecks. As I hitchhiked home, I realized I was not cut out for construction and got serious about college.

My career sputtered along until retail caught my attention; it was indoors, clean and air-conditioned. I applied for a job at a Sears store in a mall. The only opening was in men’s underwear. It was humiliating. I tried to quit, but I was given a raise. Evidently, the position was difficult to fill. I asked to be transferred to toys, then to appliances. My bosses said no and gave me another raise.

I became abrupt with customers. Sears has the nicest customers in the world, but I didn’t care. I was rude and surly and I was occasionally watched by spies hired by the company to pose as shoppers. One asked to try on a pair of boxers. I said no, that it was obvious they were much too small for his rather ample rear end. I handed him an extra-large pair. I got written up. I asked for lawn care. They said no, but this time they didn’t offer me a raise. I finally quit.

Halfway through college, and still drifting, I decided to become a high-powered tax lawyer. The plan was sailing along until I took my first course in tax law. I was stunned by its complexity and lunacy, and I barely passed the course.

Around the same time, I was involved in mock-trial classes. I enjoyed the courtroom. A new plan was hatched. I would return to my hometown, hang out my shingle and become a hotshot trial lawyer. Tax law was discarded overnight.

This was 1981; at the time there was no public-defender system in my county. I volunteered for all the indigent work I could get. It was the fastest way to trial, and I learned quickly.

When my law office started to struggle for lack of well-paying work — indigent cases are far from lucrative — I decided to go into yet another low-paying career: in 1983, I was elected to a House seat in the Mississippi State Legislature. The salary was $8,000, which was more than I made during my first year as a lawyer. Each year from January through March I was at the State Capitol in Jackson, wasting serious time, but also listening to great storytellers. I took a lot of notes, not knowing why but feeling that, someday, those tales would come in handy.

Like most small-town lawyers, I dreamed of the big case, and in 1984 it finally arrived. But this time, the case wasn’t mine. As usual, I was loitering around the courtroom, pretending to be busy. But what I was really doing was watching a trial involving a young girl who had been beaten and raped. Her testimony was gut-wrenching, graphic, heartbreaking and riveting. Every juror was crying. I remember staring at the defendant and wishing I had a gun. And like that, a story was born.

Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn’t sure how to start. Over the following weeks I refined my plot outline and fleshed out my characters. One night I wrote “Chapter One” at the top of the first page of a legal pad; the novel, “A Time to Kill,” was finished three years later.

The book didn’t sell, and I stuck with my day job, defending criminals, preparing wills and deeds and contracts. Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

I had never worked so hard in my life, nor imagined that writing could be such an effort. It was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear. But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics. Writing’s still the most difficult job I’ve ever had — but it’s worth it.

John Grisham is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Confession” and a contributor to the forthcoming collection “Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit.”

By John Grisham - Op-Ed Contributor NY Times

Of Two Minds About Books

2010-09-02T12:17:00.000-04:00

The book business tries to serve two readers, the one who loves the tactile page and the one who loves the digital ease.

SAN FRANCISCO — Auriane and Sebastien de Halleux are at sharp odds over “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” but not about the plot. The problem is that she prefers the book version, while he reads it on his iPad. And in this literary dispute, the couple says, it’s ne’er the twain shall meet.

“She talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium. He added, sounding mildly piqued, “She uses the word ‘real.’ ”

By the end of this year, 10.3 million people are expected to own e-readers in the United States, buying about 100 million e-books, the market research company Forrester predicts. This is up from 3.7 million e-readers and 30 million e-books sold last year.

The trend is wreaking havoc inside the publishing industry, but inside homes, the plot takes a personal twist as couples find themselves torn over the “right way” to read. At bedtime, a couple might sit side-by-side, one turning pages by lamplight and the other reading Caecilia font in E Ink on a Kindle or backlighted by the illuminated LCD screen of an iPad, each quietly judgmental.

Continue reading "Of Two Minds About Books"

Toy Story 3 is First Animated Film to Hit $1 Billion

2010-09-01T15:11:00.000-04:00

Disney-Pixar's Toy Story 3 earned $1.01 million at the U.S. box office this weekend, pushing the film past the $1 billion mark worldwide—a first for an animated feature.

Toy Story 3 ($1.012 billion) bypassed DreamWorks' Shrek 2 ($919.8 million/2004) as the highest grossing animated movie. It also became the seventh movie ever to reach $1 billion worldwide. For Disney, Toy Story 3 is the studio's second film to cross the billion mark this year, along with Alice in Wonderland ($1.024 billion). Disney first hit the milestone in 2006 with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ($1.066 billion).

Read the remainder of this article at: Licensemag.com

Thrift Shop Finds a Green Role for Used Film Props

2010-08-27T11:35:00.000-04:00

Eva Radke, the founder of Film Biz Recycling in Long Island City, in her nonprofit shop of props from television and commercial productions.

ON a recent steamy morning Liz Minot stood on the second floor of an industrial building in Long Island City, Queens, the flea-market-like space around her stuffed with thousands of objects. She was unpacking boxes, and out of one came an enormous vegetable peeler, at least a foot long. Then a huge kitchen whisk.

The place is not a giant’s lair though; these are props from a recent Nickelodeon commercial. Now they are for sale, along with shelf after shelf of more practical housewares.

The 2,600-square-foot room, at 43-26 12th Street, is a prop shop run by Film Biz Recycling, a nonprofit started in 2008 by Eva Radke, a former art department coordinator who worked on films and commercials for 15 years. Her shop is loaded with items donated from television and commercial productions.

Shoppers who drop by from Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. or on Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. can find, at discounted prices, dishes, glasses, kitchen utensils (real ones), lamps, throw pillows and more. Though some items — like yellowed, fake copies of the Declaration of Independence and that veggie peeler — are likely to go to other industry folks to use as props (one shoot’s trash is another shoot’s treasure), there are plenty of practical items and bits of unusual apartment décor.

“We’re not handing people garbage,” Ms. Radke said as she led a tour of the cramped space. “This is stuff that we want anybody to be able to afford, to have something really, really amazing and beautiful. This whole store has been curated by decorators, people with an eye.”

But Ms. Radke’s store is also a front for a more complicated operation. “I want to prove to every industry that our refuse and our leftovers and our quote-unquote garbage is worth something,” she said.

Ms. Radke experienced an “aha” moment in 2007 while working on a toothpaste commercial: In the dead of winter she was charged with finding fresh mint plants. “We found someone in Florida to hydroponically grow these mint plants,” she said. “They sent them on a special plane.” The producers took one look and decided that they preferred the plastic plants she had secured as a plan B. “I thought, I have to change this.”

Her initial focus was not environmental. “It started out as a social mission,” she said, adding, “there are families that need that wooden spoon. Don’t throw it away.” Today the charitable and environmental aspects are equally important to the organization.

Ms. Radke advises productions and not only sells items to the public but also diverts tons of stuff — lumber, doors, furniture, clothing and more — to organizations like Build It Green!, Materials for the Arts and Blissful Bedrooms. Production companies can save money in two ways: by getting a tax break for the contribution to a nonprofit and by avoiding the disposal costs they might otherwise pay.

The shopper benefits too, of course, by getting a nearly new set of dishes or throw pillows on the cheap and also by helping the environment.

A possible added bonus: celebrity sightings. The store is near the busy Silvercup Studios, where “30 Rock” and other shows are filmed. Cheyenne Jackson (a Broadway actor-singer who has a recurring role on “30 Rock”) was spotted walking along Queens Plaza South on that recent steamy morning.

By STEVEN McELROY - NY Times

New Reality TV Show Follows Storage-Unit 'Auction Hunters'

2010-08-27T09:49:00.001-04:00

First there was History Channel's American Pickers and Pawn Stars, television shows appealing to collectors and dealers. Now Spike TV is launching a new show called Auction Hunters.

The unscripted show delves into the competitive world of storage-unit auctions and follows two auction hunters, Clinton "Ton" Jones and Allen Haff as they bid for units, consult experts, establish value and ultimately scour the antique and collectible markets in search of buyers.

"Auction Hunters" premieres November 9 at 10:00 PM, ET/PT.

By AuctionBytes.com

Kidz Bop, Adams Media Team for Book Series

2010-08-26T10:43:00.000-04:00

Adams Media has signed on to publish a young adult book line based on U.S. music brand Kidz Bop. The first of three titles will hit retail in May 2011.

The book line will feature fiction and nonfiction content, including a fill-in-the-blanks story, junior novelization chronicling the lives of the Kidz Bop kids and rock star's guide to starting a band. Each title will come with a unique code to redeem a free Kidz Bop mp3 download. The books will retail from $4.99 to $8.99. Ebook versions will also be available.

"Adams Media is an ideal publishing partner for Kidz Bop," says Victor Zaraya, chief operating officer at Kidz Bop. "They understand how to best utilize the Kidz Bop brand, music, Kidz Bop Kids and our innovative Web platform to create an integrated product extension that will connect with our fans."

By License! Global

Booksellers Brace for ‘Mockingjay’ Landing

2010-08-24T11:01:00.000-04:00

“Mockingjay,” the final volume of Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy, comes out Tuesday August 24, 2010 from Scholastic Inc.

Long before it was published, it reached the coveted top spot on Amazon.com. Its publisher ordered an enormous number of copies printed. Eager readers have planned to celebrate its arrival at elaborate midnight release parties.

It is not “Harry Potter” or “Twilight,” but there are echoes of those phenomena in the reception of “Mockingjay,” the final volume of Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” books, a trilogy of dystopian young-adult novels.

Booksellers around the country are hoping that “Mockingjay,” which is set to be published on Tuesday, will give them a much-needed lift in sales as the summer draws to a close.

“It will be the biggest book in the Y.A. section, probably for the entire year,” said Sarah Hutton, the children’s book buyer and store manager at Village Books in Bellingham, Wash., using the shorthand for young-adult books.

The “Hunger Games” trilogy unfolds in a grim future-world where children are sent into an arena to fight to the death. Ms. Collins has described the story as rooted in the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

While dystopian fiction for teenagers has been around for decades, it has recently experienced a small revival in books like “The Maze Runner” by James Dashner and “Incarceron” by Catherine Fisher. Many of these books have also built a considerable audience among adults.

Much of the conversation about the “Hunger Games” trilogy has happened online, from fan fiction to Facebook pages devoted to the series.

“The teen market is all over the place, but they are what is selling at the moment,” said Connie Griffin, the children’s book specialist at Bookworks in Albuquerque. “We’re getting away from the whole fallen-angels thing, the high school dramas, the dragons and the straight mysteries.”

Scholastic, publisher of the “Hunger Games” trilogy, has planned to print 1.2 million copies of “Mockingjay” and issued strict orders that booksellers not sell it until 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.

Many independent booksellers, including Bookworks, have tried to build excitement by planning book-release parties with trivia, costumes and games, similar to the events held when volumes in the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series were released. (Borders has planned release parties for Saturday.)

At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., managers have ordered 3,600 copies of “Mockingjay,” a supply they hope will last about three weeks. Gerry Donaghy, the new-book purchasing supervisor at Powell’s, said he expected the book would be right behind the Stieg Larsson “Millennium” series in sales for the year.

After “Mockingjay,” though, booksellers don’t see another surefire hit around the corner.

“It’s one of those waves — this is the big one, and we all want to get our boards up on this,” said Carol Chittenden, the owner of Eight Cousins, a bookstore in Falmouth, Mass. “There are lots of other little waves coming along, but I don’t know what the next big wave will be. That’s part of the fun and part of the frustration of the thing.”

By Julie Bosman - NY Times

Random House, Dr. Seuss Launch Seussville.com

2010-08-18T12:39:00.000-04:00

Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Random House's Children's Books have green lit Seussville.com, featuring games, a searchable book catalog and more.

The Web destination includes a comprehensive character guide, customizable avatar activity, an author section with a new biography and galleries of Dr. Seuss' early sketches and artwork, as well as parent and teacher resources.

"Seussville is the definitive online resource for children of all ages to play with, learn about and explore their favorite Dr. Seuss characters and books, and to discover new ones," says Judith Haut, senior vice president of communications and marketing at Random House Children's Books. "Dr. Seuss created more than 400 illustrated characters and with Seussville our goal was to bring those characters to life."

Big Bad Tomato Interactive Agency, based in Los Angeles, aided development of the website.

From License Mag

Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero

2010-08-12T14:37:00.000-04:00

CHARLIE CHAN

To many Asian-Americans, Charlie Chan is an offensive stereotype, another sort of Uncle Tom. Chan, the hero of six detective novels by Earl Derr Biggers and 47 Hollywood movies between 1926 and 1949, not to mention a 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, is pudgy, slant-eyed and inscrutable, and he speaks in singsong fortune-cookie English, saying things like, “If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.” The California-born author and playwright Frank Chin, who has written essays denouncing Chan, would like to see him disappear altogether.

But Yunte Huang, who was born and grew up in China, can’t get enough of Chan and has written a book about his obsession: “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History.” The book, which comes out from Norton next week, is part memoir, part history, part cultural-studies essay and part grab bag of odd and little-known details.

Biggers, who overlapped at Harvard with T. S. Eliot but did not exactly share his literary taste, said he got the idea for Chan while sitting in the New York Public Library in 1924 and reading about a real-life Honolulu detective named Chang Apana. Mr. Huang suggests that Biggers may have misremembered the details, but there is no doubt that Apana was the model for Chan, and Mr. Huang gives a full account of a life that was in many ways more interesting than the fictional version: born in Hawaii to Chinese parents, Apana moved to China and then back to Hawaii, where despite being virtually illiterate, he rose in the detective ranks of the Honolulu police. He wore a cowboy hat, carried a bullwhip and was said to leap from rooftop to rooftop like a human fly.

Mr. Huang gives an equally full account of Chan’s movie history and of the actor with whom he was most memorably associated: a Swede named Warner Oland, who played a Jew in the first talkie, “The Jazz Singer,” and then, because he had vaguely Asian features, made a specialty of Oriental villains. (The original Chan, George Kuwa, was Japanese.) Oland was a heavy drinker, Mr. Huang writes, and liked to take a nip before slipping into the Chan persona: it slowed down his speech and put a congenial, Chan-like grin on his face. In 1938, after Oland had boozed himself to a premature death and was replaced by an American named Sidney Toler, movie producers encouraged him to try the same trick.

But the most interesting story in “Charlie Chan” is Mr. Huang’s own. “I have an alphabetic destiny,” he said, laughing, over lunch in Chinatown last week. In the late 1980s he had been a student at Beijing University and, after the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, where he would have been on the day tanks opened fire if his parents hadn’t lured him home on a false pretense, he determined to leave China. He got hold of a guidebook to American colleges, and “Alabama starts with A,” he pointed out. “I was pretty desperate to get out of the country and the University of Alabama was the first school I looked up.” He added that when he got there, “Tuscaloosa was another planet,” and went on: “Nobody walked in the street. Everything was so slow, so clean and so empty.”

When he got sick of the South, Mr. Huang said, he decided to go to Buffalo for a Ph.D. in English literature. He felt, he writes in “Charlie Chan,” “like a bottom-feeding fish, one that cannot see the light of day in the muddy pond of America.”

But why Buffalo? “Buffalo begins with B,” he said, grinning. He worked as a delivery boy there, but happily gave up the restaurant business. “Graduate school is really easy compared to restaurant work,” he pointed out.

At an estate sale he bought a couple of Biggers’s novels and was immediately hooked. He began renting all the Chan movies he could find.

Mr. Huang, who is 41, divorced and the father of a young daughter, speaks nearly perfect, idiomatic English. He learned the language, he said, from listening to Voice of America broadcasts with his family and also from going to church in Tuscaloosa. “On Sunday morning I’d stand on the corner carrying a Bible,” he explained, “and people would stop and ask what church I was going to. ‘Yours,’ I’d say. I saw a lot of churches that way.”

After Buffalo he spent four years teaching literature at Harvard, in Cambridge, Mass., before taking a job at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and next year he has a fellowship at Cornell. “I’m kind of stuck in the C’s right now,” he said, “and I can’t really move on. “Charlie Chan — that’s a double C.”

Chan was an obsession he pursued for years, he said, while trying to write a memoir called “The Yellow Alabaman” until a friend encouraged him to put that book aside and write instead about the detective. It was the aphorisms, the fortune-cookie sayings, that first attracted him, and then he became interested in the way Chan is a projection of American fears and American imaginings about China — an embodiment, as he writes in the book, of “both the racist heritage and the creative genius” of his adopted nation’s culture.

Over lunch he said: “I grew up watching Chinese opera, where you have some of that same exaggeration, and growing up in that literary culture was very useful for understanding cultural ventriloquism and the whole idea of crossing over. It was fascinating to see how Chan was a sort of ‘yellowface’ performance.” He added that in the 30s the Charlie Chan movies were immensely popular in China, of all places, where they were seen as an antidote to the sinister caricature of the Fu Manchu films, but that attitudes had changed. Not long ago he was discussing with a Chinese publisher the possibility of translating “Charlie Chan” himself and bringing it out in China. The publisher listened politely and said, “Right now we’re actually more interested in Fu Manchu.”

By Charles McGath - NY Times

To learn more about Charlie Chan visit www.charliechan.net

Harry Potter and children’s literature; getting toy ideas from what children like to read

2010-08-11T13:42:00.000-04:00

It's always interesting to see what children say they like when it comes to play and entertainment. That was why I thought we could all benefit from the findings of a study I found in a blog, Writing and Illustrating, by Kathleen Temean. The study, conducted by Denise Davila and Lisa Patrick for the January 2010 issue of Language Arts, is entitled "Asking the Experts: What Children Have to Say about Their Reading Preferences."

To View the Full Article Click on the Orange Title.

Disney Rolls Out Family Karaoke Video Game

2010-08-09T14:59:00.000-04:00

Disney Interactive Studios has released Disney Sing It: Family Hits, a video game featuring more than 30 sing-a-long songs from a number of popular films.

Some of the songs featured in the video game include "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" from Cinderella, "The Bare Necessities" for The Jungle Book, "Almost There" from The Princess and the Frog, "You've Got a Friend in Me" from Toy Story, "Hakuna Matata" from The Lion King and "Our Town" from Cars. The songs are accompanied by videos featuring montages and original footage from the films.

The title is available now for the PlayStation 3 and Wii.

By License Global

BOOK REVIEW | GOLDEN GATE: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge

2010-08-06T14:57:00.000-04:00

The Golden Gate Bridge under construction, 1935.

A View of the Bridge

It’s hard to believe that only 73 years ago, the Golden Gate Bridge did not exist. The airplane is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. The particle accelerator is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. Betty White is older than the Golden Gate Bridge.

Yet today, the structure rises like “a natural, even an inevitable, entity,” as Kevin Starr, the California historian and author of over a dozen volumes on his home state, writes in “Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge.”

This is an exultant, discursive and strange little book. Starr is not older than the bridge; at his birth, people had already been shuttling across it for three years. But his narrative tour does evoke a grandfatherly ramble. Imagine setting off over the Golden Gate and being forced to stop every few feet not only to greet each passer-by, but also to endure a cursory biography or windy tangent. It gets difficult to enjoy the view.

Starr harks back — way back — “one hundred million years” back, to the “eons of geological time” it took to form the strait that his subject spans. After a brief lesson on ice ages and sediment formation, he’s on to the nearsighted Spanish, whose galleons cruised the waters off the West Coast for over 200 years until finally, in 1769, an expedition moving on foot from the south ascended the hills and reported back with the “exciting news” that they had spotted what would become known as San Francisco Bay.

Starr zips through the railroad era to the quake of 1906 to the mid-1920s, when a resurgent city and the rise of the automobile combined to create a crucial stimulus for bridging the Gate: horrific gridlock. Fifty thousand commuters were ferrying to and from San Francisco every weekday. On weekends, those who had floated their cars northward for woods and relaxation returned only to endure waits of “one, two, even three hours” for a boat ride home. Something had to be done.

So ensued a decade of political and architectural wrangling. The bridge was designed and redesigned (an early version resembled an “upside-down rat trap”). Money was promised. Wary constituents were wooed, including those “of a certain vintage” who feared that the bridge would “profane its site.” But this is hardly a suspense story (behold: bridge), and Starr’s dutiful recounting of civic process, wanting drama, grows tedious.

Players large and small come and go, with few save Joseph Strauss (a “P. T. Barnum of public works” and the bridge’s chief engineer) and Charles Alton Ellis (a professor of engineering and armchair classicist who transports Starr into a bizarre digression on Pythagoras) coming into relief. There is also unintentional comedy at critical moments: “Enter Frank Doyle . . . ” a segue goes; “Enter Amadeo Peter Giannini . . . ”; “Enter Leon Moisseif . . . ” — the effect is one of vaudeville characters tap-dancing onto the stage just in the nick of time.

Things pick up when the bridge does. Deep-sea divers plunge to inky depths to dynamite wells for the south pier; towers rise and cables are spun “more than 700 feet above the surging sea”; a geologist descends with his trusty hammer “into the very core” of a site pumped clear of water to “bang on the rock walls” and test their strength.

Starr’s structure, alas, is more rickety, his text marred by repetition and clumsy phrasing. We read at least three times that the Golden Gate was named after the Golden Horn of the Bosporus. Joseph Strauss is “dapper,” and so, on the next page, is the civic leader Frank Doyle. Then there are circularities like this: “There was only one way for Ellis to test his conclusions — through mathematics. A bridge could not be built to see if it worked. It would have to be tested through mathematics before it was built.”

The best writing concerns the courage of construction workers — “scaffolding and ladder men, painters aloft in their bosun’s chairs . . . willing to risk the high steel at a time when millions of Americans were out of work” — 11 of whom died just three months before the bridge was complete. In describing them Starr summons a reverence untainted by unfortunate juxtaposition, which is not so in his chapter on suicides, where the dead include “the poet, the political fixer, the founder of Victoria’s Secret.”

The bridge is a worthy object of adoration. But here, I was hoping for a little more polish, a little more insight (a discussion of the bridge as art directs us to “the Web site art.com”), a little more fact-checking (the “tunnels through Twin Peaks” are not “on Stockton and Irving Streets”), a little less sentimentality (“So hail and farewell, Golden Gate Bridge!”). Then again, perhaps it’s unfair to nitpick a love letter.

By Jennifer B. McDonald is an editor at the Book Review.

MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE OTHER GUYS'

2010-08-06T08:57:00.000-04:00

Will Ferrel and Mark Wahlberg in “The Other Guys.”

A Not-So-Macho Cop’s Moment of Truth

Is it possible to run a bait-and-switch scam in reverse? I can’t think of another way to describe the odd trick pulled off by “The Other Guys,” a new goofballs-and-fireballs comedy directed by Adam McKay. The closing credit sequence is, in effect, a tease for a movie quite different from the one that has just concluded.

Bold, brightly colored charts and graphs fill the screen with enraging data about bloated chief-executive bonuses, billion-dollar bank bailouts, Ponzi schemes and other entries in the encyclopedia of modern financial infamy. Looking at these shocking numbers in isolation, you might be tempted to think that you had just watched an angry populist satire skewering the powerful and the privileged. But such topical provocation has been missing from commercial American comedy for a very long time, and “The Other Guys” is no exception. Its plot does feature a devious equity-fund manager (played by the reliable British weasel-for-hire Steve Coogan) and a Wall Street vixen, but the plot is neither the movie’s point nor its most memorable feature.

Instead, Mr. McKay plays to his strengths and those of his frequent collaborator and the movie’s star, Will Ferrell. In other words, “The Other Guys” is most authentically itself when it indulges in a free-form but nonetheless highly disciplined silliness that has the effect of dissolving, rather than piquing, whatever worldly anger or frustration you may be harboring. Once again, and for the first time in a while, Mr. Ferrell uses his big body, his quick mind and his infinitely fungible voice to yoke disparate and ridiculous traits into a brand new and yet instantly archetypal comic character.

Allen Gamble, Mr. Ferrell’s mild-mannered, desk-bound police detective, lacks the pompous aggression of Ron Burgundy in “Anchorman,” the aw-shucks aggression of Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights” or the infantile aggression of Brennan Huff in “Step Brothers” (all directed by Mr. McKay). Instead, he is aggressively, ostentatiously, explosively passive — a combustible milquetoast. Gamble is timid, gullible, irresistible to gorgeous women and yet oblivious to their interest. He makes no sense at all, except in the absurd context of the movie’s craziest moments.

Gamble’s foil is Terry Hoitz, an unlucky detective played by Mark Wahlberg, who looks like an inflamed bantam rooster next to Mr. Ferrell’s timorous ostrich. Actually, the two of them supply a more vivid — if less comprehensible — zoological metaphor in the film’s funniest scene, a rhetorical sparring match in which lions battle tunas for animal-kingdom supremacy.

When it operates in this nonsensical zone of verbal riffing and broad slapstick (the most inspired example of which is a brawl at a funeral conducted in respectful whispers), “The Other Guys” provides some pretty good laughs. Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson make fun of their action-hero personae and then step aside to let Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Wahlberg do their thing. Those two are gracious enough to cede a little room to Michael Keaton, as the leathery precinct captain, and to Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans Jr., as Gamble and Hoitz’s obnoxious squad room rivals.

It all hums along nicely for about 45 minutes, with Eva Mendes showing up for a purring, good-natured turn as Gamble’s wife, Mr. Wahlberg mooning over her and Mr. Ferrell shrugging off her charms. But like the misbegotten “Cop Out,” “The Other Guys” engages in a genre blending that is also a cynical commercial hedge.

Not confident enough to be a loose, nutty spoof of macho cop action movies, it also tries to be one of those movies more or less in earnest. And so the guns are drawn, the mock swaggering becomes a bit less mock, and there is enough vehicular chaos, breaking glass and stuff blowing up to satisfy viewers for whom jokes about tunas, lions, pimps and the improbability of Eva Mendes as a mate for Will Ferrell are likely to be too sophisticated.

“The Other Guys,” apart from the unfulfilled promise of the end credits — it may be that no team can humble the unrepentant fat cats of the financial sector, but it would be nice to give Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Wahlberg a shot — raises expectations that it has no real inclination to fulfill. The movie’s best bits would stand alone nicely on YouTube, or on Funnyordie.com, the comic video boutique of which Mr. McKay is an owner and where he sometimes dabbles in short-form hilarity. A feature film made out of such bits combined with overscaled, unimaginative action sequences will make more money, of course, which is something of a scam in its own right.

“The Other Guys” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some swearing, shooting and sexy stuff, all carefully kept within what the ratings board considers teenager-appropriate bounds.

THE OTHER GUYS MOVIE TRAILER

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Adam McKay; written by Mr. McKay and Chris Henchy; director of photography, Oliver Wood; edited by Brent White; music by Jon Brion; production designer, Clayton Hartley; costumes by Carol Ramsey; produced by Mr. McKay, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Miller and Patrick Crowley; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

WITH: Will Ferrell (Allen Gamble), Mark Wahlberg (Terry Hoitz), Eva Mendes (Sheila), Michael Keaton (Captain Mauch), Steve Coogan (Ershon), Ray Stevenson (Wesley), Samuel L. Jackson (Highsmith), Rob Riggle (Martin), Damon Wayans Jr. (Fosse) and Dwayne Johnson (Danson).

By A. O. SCOTT - NY Times

Video Game Deal for Upcoming Yogi Bear Film

2010-08-06T08:36:00.000-04:00

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has signed D3Publisher to develop a Yogi Bear-themed video game for Wii and Nintendo DS. Yogi Bear: The Video Game will hit stores this holiday season, coinciding with the feature-film release Yogi Bear from Warner Bros. Pictures.

In the game, players help Yogi Bear save Jellystone Park from being shut down through exploring, jumping, crawling, belly sliding and zip-lining throughout the location. Actor Dan Aykroyd provides the voice for Yogi Bear in the game and movie.

"With more than 50 years of history, the Yogi Bear license has proven to be smarter than the average bear," says Bill Anker, vice president of business development and licensing at D3P. "In time for the Hollywood release of the film, the video game promises to deliver the full Yogi Bear experience that parents can enjoy with their children."

Yogi Bear, a live-action CG-animated adventure in 3-D, hits theaters on Dec. 17. The film stars Aykroyd, Justin Timberlake, Anna Faris, Tom Cavanagh and T.J. Miller.

License Global

Scholastic, Post Cereals Team Up Again for "39 Clues"

2010-08-05T03:51:00.001-04:00

In anticipation of the release of the 10th and final book for adventure series "The 39 Clues," Scholastic Media and Post Cereals have paired again for promotion.

This month, "The 39 Clues: The Lost Pages" will be featured on 4 million packages of Honeycomb, Golden Crisp and Waffle Crisp cereal boxes. Shoppers will also get six free digital cards when they enter a unique code at The39Clues.com/mycards.

DreamWorks Studios recently acquired movies rights to The 39 Clues property, targeted to kids ages 8 to 12.

By License Global

Simon & Schuster, LivingSocial Debut Teen Digital Book

2010-08-02T10:11:00.000-04:00

"Loser/Queen," an online serial novel for teens by Jodi Lynn Anderson, has gone live in partnership with Simon & Schuster's Children's Publishing and LivingSocial's Visual Bookshelf. JCPenney is a sponsor.

The first few chapters of "Loser/Queen" are available now at LoserQueen.com and online readers are invited to vote for final cover art. New chapters and additional voting opportunities will be announced every Monday until Sept. 13. The Web title will only be available online until Sept. 20 and will be followed by a paperback and e-book edition release on Dec. 21.

"Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing is committed to exploring new ways to deliver content to our core audience and to have that audience be a part of the experience," says Justin Chanda, publisher of S&S Books for Young Readers. "I think 'Loser/Queen' is a big step forward in the digital landscape, not to mention being a terrific story, by a first-class author."

Earlier this week, S&S Children's Publishing launched the U-Ventures iPhone App inspired by the original book series "Choose Your Own Adventure." The first of three apps available now is U-Ventures: Return to the Cave of Time.

By License Global

Jimmy Wayne completes 7-month, 1700-mile walk

2010-08-02T08:57:00.000-04:00

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Country singer Jimmy Wayne can finally put his feet up.

He arrived in Phoenix Sunday with a broken foot after walking approximately 1700 miles over the past seven months. A high school marching band and dozens of fans walked with Wayne down the home stretch as he approached his destination at HomeBase Youth Services.

Wayne took steps gingerly with his right foot in a walking boot while people chanted his name.

Wayne started the "Meet Me Halfway" campaign Jan. 1 in Nashville with the goal of walking halfway across the country for at-risk youth, specifically for those in danger of aging out of the foster care system with no support or resources. He was a homeless teen, in and out of foster homes, until a couple took him at age 16.

http://meetmehalfway.jimmywayne.com

By Caitlin R. King - Associated Press

Associated Press video producer Yvonne Leow in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Video Game Review | Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies

2010-07-29T01:45:00.000-04:00

Japanese Tale With Western Flourishes

In some ways, Nintendo’s handheld DS game machine represents the last vestige of video games’ old identity as playthings for children.

Of course the big story about electronic games recently has been their swift evolution into mainstream entertainment. From FarmVille to World of Warcraft to Call of Duty to Bejeweled to Wii Sports to the downloadable iPhone game of the moment, adults are playing games on PCs, phones and living-room consoles all the time these days.

But they do not seem to be playing the Nintendo DS in quite the same way, at least not in the United States. I have never — not once — seen anyone over the age of about 20 playing a DS in public. But I do see guys in their 20s and 30s on the subway playing sports games on Sony’s competing PlayStation Portable device fairly regularly.

And that’s a shame because Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, released recently in North America for the DS after selling more than four million copies in Japan, is one of the most affecting portable games I have played. Developed by Level-5 (makers of the delightful Professor Layton puzzle games for the DS) and published in North America by Nintendo itself, Dragon Quest IX is also the rare Japanese role-playing game that can appeal deeply to fans of Western-style role-playing adventures, like myself.

As someone who grew up on cornerstone franchises of Western role-playing like Ultima, Wizardry, Bard’s Tale and Might & Magic, I’ve always found most Japanese role-playing games a bit confining. Japanese games of this ilk have traditionally had very tight stories populated by very specific casts of characters, leaving the player with relatively little freedom; this year’s Final Fantasy XIII took that approach to an infuriating extreme by basically placing the player on rails for 60 hours.

By contrast, Western role-playing games (championed by developers like BioWare and Bethesda Softworks) let the players loose so their actions will determine the fate of the game world.

Dragon Quest IX is quite deft in how it stays true to the roots of Japanese-style gaming (as illustrated by its strong sales in Japan) while integrating a degree of openness and freedom in its design that appeals to Western tastes.

For example, while the player’s character is thrust into the role of an angel who must uncover the roots of a catastrophe that has befallen both heaven and earth, the player also has the ability to design his or her three adventuring companions from scratch. A more hidebound Japanese game would force you to partner with specific premade characters defined by the game’s developer. (I immediately recreated my original Bard’s Tale group from 1985.)

Dragon Quest IX is also populated by a seemingly endless series of side quests and optional areas in its vast virtual world. So while there is certainly a main story to follow, you still have the freedom to take off and explore at your leisure, removing that claustrophobic feeling that is so frustrating to Western players.

But make no mistake, this is still a thoroughly Japanese game, as reflected perhaps most obviously in its anime-inspired art style. Understandably, it will always be tough for gruff Western gamers to accept that their powerful, sword-swinging warrior looks like a 12-year-old boy playing dress-up. And it can be just a little weird to Western tastes to see a character who looks like a little girl wearing fishnet stockings, a short skirt and high heels. In a similar vein, the music (which can be turned off) can be cloyingly cutesy to Western ears.

But once you buy in, Dragon Quest IX can easily provide 50 to 100 hours of entertaining gameplay. Even if you’re an adult, don’t be afraid of the DS.

By SETH SCHIESEL - NY Times

WB's Green Lantern Video Game Set for Summer 2011

2010-07-26T17:31:00.000-04:00

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and DC Entertainment plan to roll out Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters video game in summer 2011, timed to the release of the feature film.

The action-adventure title will be available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and Nintendo DS.

"Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters gives players the chance to experience the world of the Green Lantern mythology in an interactive way, going beyond the events of the film and comic books," says Samantha Ryan, senior vice president of production and development at Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. "The game is the first to center around DC Comics' Green Lantern franchise and we're excited to give fans the opportunity to experience the power of the ring with engaging gameplay."

By License Global

The Five Best Dog Movies of All Time

2010-07-25T09:28:00.000-04:00

Dog movies are an American staple. When listing the five best movies of all time you may think that it would be the ones that made the most at the box office, but this leave out many classic dog movies. The five best dog movies of all time are: Old Yeller, Homeward Bound, Marley and Me, Best in Show, and Benji.

Old Yeller, perhaps one of the biggest tear jerker movies of all time, is a well loved classic adapted from the 1956 novel. This is the story about a family in the antebellum south. The father is away trying to earn money. Old Yeller is a stray dog who befriends the family and even defends them from a rabid wolf. This movie is popular among adults and children alike. This is the first movie that focused on the love between a boy and his dog, and it spurned many other films and books with a similar theme.

Homeward Bound: the Incredible Journey is a great family movie. This 1993 film is a remake of the lesser known 1963 film The Incredible Journey. Homeward Bound is about the journey of two dogs and a cat as they make their way home. The animal personalities rule the film. Chance, the American Bulldog, is a scrappy wanderer who tries to put out an air of not needing anyone. Shadow, the loyal and older Golden Retriever is a caring soul who watches out for the other two animals. Sassy, the long haired cat, is a prissy, pampered pet who longs to return to the comforts of home. Together these three have funny adventures as well as heart rending ones in their journey to find their loved ones. This movie helped to establish the idea of animals having individual personalities as many pet owners will attest to.

Marley and Me, the newest film on this list, is guaranteed to be a classic. Based upon the book by John Grogan, this film depicts the lovable but worst dog ever, Marley. Marley gets into disaster after disaster from tearing his home apart to shaking in his boots at every thunderstorm that rolls across Florida. Marely and Me depicts the life of Marely from puppyhood up to old age and the journey he has with his family along the way. The love for a dog that never seems to do the right thing is one that many pet owners will connect with.

Best in Show, the 2000 mockumentary about contestants in a dog show, is a hilarious look into the world of dogs and their owners. This movie is more about the people who love their dogs than about the dogs, but dog owners everywhere will love it anyway. There are five dogs featured in the film: a Norwich terrier, a Bloodhound, a Weimaraner, a Shih-Tzu, and a Poodle. These dogs represent pretty common entrants into dog shows. Their owners back stories, however, are what really brings personality to the film from the over-obsessive yuppy pet parents to the Weimaraner to the quirky owners of the Norwich terrier.

Benji, a classic dog movie from the 1970’s, is a great one for anyone who has ever adopted a stray, mixed dog. This movie includes as a great mystery as Benji works to save two children who have been kidnapped. This film is guaranteed to be loved by the whole family as much as Benji, the stray dog, is loved by so many people in his town. Benji was such a popular dog character that his character was reprised for additional films all the way up to 2004, thirty years after the first Benji film debuted.

By: Linda Betarno

The author invites you to check out hundreds of photos of dogs at the popular dog website: www.dogsonline.com