Koch Vision has released Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War, a five-part, three-and-a-half-hour-plus documentary that looks at the quantum leaps the U.S. military is undertaking to bring cutting-edge computer technology to the armed services. Using CGI simulations, battle footage, authentic test and training films, and interviews with computer experts, Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War moves quickly through its various examinations of ground, air, and sea operations innovations, focusing on individual weapons and vehicles that will simply astound the average viewer.

Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War is broken up into five sections: Ground Forces; Air Power, Sea Power; Counter-Terrorism; and The Future of War. According to Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War, the key to 21st warfare lies squarely on one key element: information superiority. I suppose that’s always been the key to winning armed conflicts from man’s first war, but in the 21st century, the concept of gathered intelligence has gone completely digital, with the military shooting for a day when the average boot soldier will be linked up to a central computerized, satellite-controlled grid - which controls all sea, land, and ground operations - while outfitted and equipped with state-of-the-art computerized weaponry and even nanotechnology-designed uniforms that serve as both armor and emergency aid equipment. What he sees on the ground will be convey to a central command, which controls all aspects of a particular engagement, with the soldier’s computer intel providing vital info for the overall success of the operation.

Watching Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War, I was floored by the future weapons, vehicles and computer technologies and operational systems that are either close to being implemented or are in their formative stages of development. Not being in any way an expert (or even a novice for that matter) on such subjects, frankly, my first reaction to seeing some of the incredibly advanced systems in Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War was, “Hey, should they really be talking about this stuff out loud?” But I assume they know what they’re doing (can you imagine the stuff they’re not talking about?), and this documentary presents a fascinating, techno-junkie’s paradise of super-cool weaponry, assault vehicles and operational systems (I’ll comment on some of the items described in the doc, down in the individual section descriptions).

And since it comes from the producers of Popular Mechanics, even though it’s a general overview of these coming technologies, there’s plenty of emphasis on looking at the gadgets, and explaining in clear terms how they work (or will work). The first three sections that deal with specific military applications are probably the most compelling portions of the documentary, with the section on counter-terrorism coming off a little diffused (no doubt due to the less “sexy” aspects of airport x-ray machines versus stealth submarines) and the final section on the future of war plays more like a summing up of the previous four sections. But for a look at the fearsome, awesomely complicated weaponry and military systems that will be science fact not fiction in the next twenty years, Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War is a perfect introduction.

Here are the 5, 47-minute sections of the two-disc documentary, Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War, and my thoughts on each segment:

Ground Forces
Until robots start doing our killing on the battlefield (and according to Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War, that day will be coming sooner than you think), the foot soldier is still the best “computer” we have, and the advanced systems being developed will catapult the average dog face into becoming a 21st century warrior. Evidently, the highest priority the U.S. military has right now is integrating all land, sea, and air operational systems into one centrally controlled system, guided by GPS and “Blue Force Tracking” (where each and every soldier can be tracked on the battlefield). This section also looks at The Stryker, an awesomely fierce armored personnel carrier/tank that can punch a whole in anything while hauling ass down the road at 70 miles-per-hour! I also found the discussion of the nanotechnology-designed “Liquid Armor” concepts utterly incredible, with talk of soldiers’ uniforms that are as soft as silk, yet totally impervious to projectiles — while literally acting as “health monitors” that could apply medically operations such as CPR to wounded soldiers. Seriously?

Air Power

More than any other component, speed is the absolute leveler in any armed air combat: the fastest jet wins. So the discussion of the new supersonic “scramjets — where engineers predict hydrogen-compressed fuel systems that will produce speeds in excess of Mach 14 (!) - was fascinating. Stealth systems are also looked at, with the new Raptor fighter jets, as well as the F-22 and the infinitely adaptable F-35, providing some cool flight footage. Precision engagement is also discussed, with the AGM-130 and the JASSM “Fire and Forget” precision-guided bombing systems, looked at in detail. And wait until you see the X-45, the experimental unmanned stealth fighter jet.

Sea Power

Since 70% of the globe is covered in water, you had better have a navy that can go anywhere, deliver any ordinance, and get there quickly and silently. Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War looks at the CDN-21, the new class of aircraft carriers that will soon replace the Nimitz carrier class. I particularly liked the new RQ8A “Fire Scout” robotic Navy helicopter scout that looks like a toy you might build in your garage - a very deadly little toy. The AAAV (Advanced Amphibian Assault Vehicle) is something to behold, a jacked-up landing craft that can hydroplane across the water as its mounted gun blasts targets at the landing zone. The DD6-1000 Navy destroyer class is fascinating, with its 100 mile range for in-land targeting, along with the highly advanced CG(X) cruiser class ships. The new Virginia Class Submarines are also detailed here (with the sweet Advanced SEAL Delivery System mini sub).

Counter-Terrorism

According to the experts, building a Fortress America isn’t possible, or even the most effective way to deal with the absolutely frightening reality of Islamic terrorism. What can save us from another attack is upping our intelligence gathering capabilities, and all sorts of computer systems are looked at in this section, including the use of UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) on the Mexican border, radar tracking systems for carrier boxes from overseas ships, advanced x-ray and electromagnetic “cat scan” machines at airports that can pinpoint weapons, explosives, and biological agents, and nuclear detection systems. My favorite technology? The distinctively “low-tech” use of bluegill fish to monitor our fresh water systems.

The Future of War
This section basically sums up the previous four segments, but there are some awesome new weapons and vehicles featured here, including the kick-ass “Crusher,” a six-wheeled all-terrain unmanned assault vehicle that guides itself over rough territory, and the futuristic-looking FSF1 Sea Fighter.

The DVD:

The Video:
The full screen, 1.33 video image for Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War is just okay, with compression issues popping up on a large monitor. The image wasn’t the sharpest, either.

The Audio:
The Dolby Digital English mono audio mix was adequate for this dialogue-heavy doc, but I would have liked to hear those vehicle engines in 5.1.

The Extras:
There are no extras for Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War.

Final Thoughts:
Military buffs and techno-junkies will enjoy Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War, a five-part look at the coming advanced military systems, weapons and vehicles that will define American 21st century warfare. Since it’s from Popular Mechanics, the emphasis is on giving detailed explanations for all the items looked at, with those explanations given in a clear, concise, easily understood manner. I recommend Popular Mechanics: The New Technology of War.

Paul Mavis is an internationally published steam and television historian, a colleague of the Online Film Critics Society, and the author of The Espionage Filmography.

Many fee-based watching video movie webservices , resources warn that non-paid watching video services can only provide you low quality films with annoying resolutions that destroy your online movie watching experience, it is Website host, i.e. does the site have alot of bandwidth for good viewing, or working links to the streaming movies you want to watch? These very important considerations that will have the greatest impact on the quality of your relaxation is what you will choose: download movie sites or watching site. Download movie sites offers a great resolution , so you can watch your favorite films in hd quality anytime. Download Made for Each Other divx

Steven Soderbergh tries to make one like they reach-me-down to and comes up short with “The Good German.” A post-World Clash II drama upon midst the rubble of a bombed-excuse Berlin, this disgraceful-and-Caucasoid backlot production endeavors to recapture the bitter romanticism of such ’40s studio artifacts as “Casablanca” and “A Foreign Affair” while adding contemporary frankness. But doing what came naturally to Hollywood craftsmen 60 years ago is absolutely harder than it appeared, as Soderbergh can’t duplicate the look and feel of the old-fashioned entertainments he means to honor. Despite the starry look for, the prominent will steer clear, leaving the director’s latest honorable but failed trial to artfilm buffs.

Soderbergh has made much of how he used actual ’40s lenses and just one camera, embraced studio-confined limitations and otherwise tried to direct much as Michael Curtiz would have done. But aficionados hoping to luxuriate in a full-blown simulation of Golden Era style will come away disappointed.

“The Good German” has little of the luster, sheen and pictorial nuance of a top-flight Hollywood picture of the old school. The contrasts are far too extreme; many compositions contain large areas of impenetrable black, and faces and other light objects are overexposed to the point of being washed out. Pic looks less like a 1942 Warner Bros. melodrama than a 1962 “Twilight Zone” episode intercut with background shots from Rossellini’s “Germany Year Zero.”

Based on an estimable 2001 novel by Joseph Kanon, Paul Attanasio’s sturdy script could scarcely boast a time and place more ripe with international intrigue and world-weary cynicism. In July 1945, Truman, Churchill and Stalin are on their way to Potsdam, outside of Berlin, to carve up the broken remains of Europe, with results that would help establish the boundaries for the foreseeable East-West stand-off. But already, the deadly cat-and-mouse games that became the stuff of countless Cold War thrillers is being played out among the wartime allies in the four zones dividing Berlin.

Entering the fray is Jake Geismer (George Clooney), an American war correspondent returning to the capital for the first time since the late ’30s. Startled at how completely the city has been destroyed — a stark, 1.33 ratio docu opening credits sequence provides vivid first-hand evidence — Jake is less concerned about his journalistic responsibilities than he is about finding Lena, the German woman he was forced to leave behind.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince full movie download bluray

The movie’s rhythms seem off from the outset. A long sequence of the young Corporal Tully (Tobey Maguire) driving Jake into town from the airport feels awkward; the vehicle doesn’t appear to be moving at the correct rate compared with its docu backdrop, Maguire is too cranked up while Clooney is too subdued, and the characters do not establish a rapport. Right out of the box, pic puts the viewer at arm’s length.

Tully narrates the film’s first section, a responsibility later assumed by Jake and then Lena. Enthusiastically acted by Maguire, Tully could be the immature younger brother of William Holden’s Sefton in “Stalag 17,” an opportunistic black-marketer for whom his position in the motor pool creates no end of possibilities; he supplies American whisky to the head of the Russian sector, General Sikorsky (Ravil Isyanov, excellent), and doesn’t hesitate to offer Jake an hour with his girlfriend, who is none other than Lena.

Lena (Cate Blanchett) becomes the most intriguing character in the picture, partly by default; Tully is found murdered 24 minutes in — there’s no way around revealing this development, as all else hinges on it — and Jake remains an unnatural man of action. But the men merely put into relief the extent to which Lena’s life is, in every possible way, in extremis. She suffered horribly during the war, is now a prostitute, her husband is apparently dead and all she wants is to get out of Germany.

With dead dark eyes, a dramatic slash of a mouth and a sullenness that encases whatever is left of her heart and soul, Lena is a vivid, if not exactly unique, creation, and Blanchett soon all but disappears into the forlorn, desperate character. She summons shades of Dietrich, to be sure, but brings Lena fully to life, at least to the extent she has life left in her.

After Tully’s body, his uniform stuffed with money, is fished out of the river at Potsdam, the plot gears start turning in earnest, putting the film more squarely on the rails. Jake, under some suspicion himself, begins poking his nose into areas where it’s not appreciated; he’s warned off his investigation by the American military governor, Colonel Muller (Beau Bridges), while army attorney Bernie Teitel, an interesting character nicely underplayed by Leland Orser, provides Jake with useful information from the Russian police report.

Ultimately, however, all roads lead to Lena, who cagily plays a long game by holding her big cards very close to the vest. Despite her obstinacy, Jake romantically persists in trying to help her, only to be repeatedly beaten up for his trouble. Akin to Jack Nicholson’s nosy Jake in “Chinatown,” Clooney’s nosy Jake is forced to wear a bandage on his ear for a good part of the time.

Looming behind the intricate personal dramas is the specter of momentous geopolitical and ethical issues, notably the behind-the-scenes struggle between the Yanks and Ruskies to snare the services of the top German scientists, moral and legal considerations be damned.

Clooney underplays in laconic fashion as he tries to round out a man whose seen-it-all attitude cloaks a romantic heart. But both he and Soderbergh seem afraid or unable to reveal the conviction for melodrama necessary to put across a story like this. For actor and director, the project seems like trying on a new coat, and it doesn’t fit either of them. Final scene reps the film’s one explicit homage to “Casablanca,” an ill-advised move in that it forces the inevitable negative comparison.

Genuine pleasure is generated by Philip Messina’s production design, which has made a convincing mess of numerous standing backlot street sets to convey a ruined Berlin; Louise Frogley’s costume designs, which revel in the eclectic nature of what deprived people scraped together to wear and Thomas Newman’s voluptuous score, which draws attention to itself at times, but nonetheless achieves discordant moods and levels of complexity rare in film music these days.

As for the lensing, Soderbergh, working under his nom de camera Peter Andrews, has become a handy and effective d.p. on his own films when working in color. But black-and-white is a different discipline. So even though the director had worked in the format once before, on his second picture, “Kafka,” and Clooney had similarly shot “Good Night, and Good Luck” on color stock from which the hues were then drained out, it’s a pity that, just this once, Soderbergh couldn’t see clear to hiring an old pro who knew all the tricks and could have concentrated exclusively on this aspect of the picture.

In “A Perfect World,” Clint Eastwood plays a legendary Texas Ranger named Red Garnett, but it’s inscrutable to tell just how the attribute came by that legendary status. The year is 1963, and when Red hears that a career mobster named Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner) has busted out of prison and taken a inadequate fellow hostage, he acts identical to he’s been told that a kitty is stuck in a tree. Standing far-fetched and warn in his ranger’s uniform and white cowboy hat, he looks skilled but sluggish, as if he plans to gambol right on the holder no more than as soon as he wakes up from his nap.

Actually, not much happens after Red begins his search either, and for a while the unhurried, devil-may-care pace that Eastwood has given to his material is disorienting. For a movie about a cop chasing an escaped prisoner, it seems curiously languid, almost meditative. Watching it, you think, where’s the action, the crashing cars, the gunplay and the glib one-liners?

In other words, where is the Clint Eastwood we know?

The answer is “Not here, so get used to it.” And strangely enough, we do. Directed by Eastwood from a script by John Lee Hancock, “A Perfect World” is one of the Academy Award-winning actor-director’s most unexpected, most satisfying films. This isn’t the first time that Eastwood has turned the tables on our expectations, but he’s never been this bold in the past, or this sure of himself.

I have no idea how audiences will react to this intimate, unassuming, gently funny character study. Most of the film is spent in the car with the convict and his hostage, Phillip (played with remarkable restraint by T.J. Lowther). For the boy, who is too young to know what’s really going on, the kidnapping quickly becomes the adventure of a lifetime. Raised a Jehovah’s Witness, Phillip has been denied many of the common pleasures of being a child — like being able to dress up for Halloween. And Haynes is clever enough to turn their exploits together into a game of cops and robbers, with fake names and all.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen full movie download dvd

As Haynes and his new partner poke around committing petty crimes and trying to avoid police roadblocks, they become fast friends. And why not? Like a father who’s only around on weekends, Haynes lets the kid do all the things his mother usually won’t allow. For example, at one stop Phillip finds a Halloween costume — it’s a Casper the Friendly Ghost suit — and while Haynes is being chased by the cops outside, he’s inside the store slipping the costume under his shirt.

The scenes between Haynes and his new pal are the film’s best; in fact, they may be the best scenes Eastwood has ever put on film. The more time Haynes spends with Phillip, the more he sees himself in the young boy’s eyes. A criminal since boyhood, Haynes grew up in a whorehouse under the intermittent supervision of a brutal, alcoholic father. And because he feels that he was cheated out of his own childhood, Haynes’s determination to show Phillip a good time takes on a special urgency.

This isn’t a spectacular role for Costner, but he does spectacular things with it. As Haynes, he doesn’t wear his criminality on his sleeve. Instead, he underplays the character’s violence with such cunning skill that he becomes dangerously likable. When Phillip tells Haynes that he’s never ridden on a roller coaster, the escaped con ties him to the roof of their stolen station wagon and gives the ecstatic boy — who’s still wearing his Casper suit — a ride to remember.

Meanwhile, after commandering a mobile headquarters designed for the governor, Red and his crew — which includes a deputy (Leo Burmester), an FBI man (Bradley Whitford) and a criminologist named Sally (Laura Dern) — take to the highway in search of their prey. But from all the success they have, they might as well be out on a joy ride themselves.

In most movies of this sort, the filmmakers try to create an atmosphere of apprehension, but not here. In fact, Eastwood appears to take a certain amount of pleasure in deflating the tension. As the movie builds to a climax, he keeps tossing in lazy bits of comedy. As an actor, he does much the same thing. Though he has a few sharp, comic exchanges with Dern (who does a serviceable job with an impossible role), Eastwood seems to spend most of his screen time goofing on his character and playing his squint-eyed prowess for laughs.

We expect a final faceoff between these two screen icons, but when the time comes for the criminal and the cop to stand toe-to-toe, Eastwood is so slow to come to his mark that the confrontation is a non-event. Yet almost despite itself, the scene works. “A Perfect World” may not be the Clint Eastwood-Kevin Costner movie that we expected, and on some level, it may even seem perverse. But maybe that’s what big star power is really about.

In its apparent assault to dramatize candidly and irreverently the organize by which secondary-finished candidate medics manage to turn into fixed doctors, the cloud come hell succeeds in depicting the average intern as some kind of a Hippocratic oaf. At times it comes perilously close to earning the nickname, Carry On, Intern.

The separate stories of five interns, four male and one female, are traced alternately in a sort of razzle-dazzle style by the screenplay from Richard Frede’s novel. Three of the stories are predictable from the word go and the other two are thoroughly unbelievable.

As these personal stories unfold, a kind of cross-section of hospital life is transpiring in the background. Chief features are a rather gory childbirth sequence, a mercy killing incident and a wild party passage imitative of the one in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but hardly as appropriate or amusing. Support characters run to stereotype, i.e. the ugly, prim nurse who removes her spex, lets her hair down, gets stinko and becomes the hit of the party.