Avatar will be released on DVD/Bluray on Thursday, 4.22 — i.e., the 40th anniversary of Earth Day — and Fox Home Video doesn’t have cover art yet? It’ll be in stores in 34 days! If the Digital Bits, Bluray.com and Amazon.com don’t have it, nobody does. I foresee at least a triple-dip on this title — initial release, longer director’s cut, and 3D Bluray/DVD in ’11 or ’12.

IFC.com’s Stephen Saito has posted a non-reviewing review of James Franco‘s Saturday Night, which screened yesterday at South by Southwest. Pure observation/description, and not a whit of evaluation or judgment. I begged Franco’s reps a couple of weeks ago to let me watch a screener so I could review the doc concurrently with SxSW, but they couldn’t be bothered. Thanks, guys.

Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn manned up and actually reviewed the sucker, calling it “a compelling look at anachronistic media in action.” (That means the film has an issue or two, but is fairly good/satisfying overall.) HE’s Moises Chiullan says (a) “I could feel others near me shift in their seats after around the halfway point,” (b) “Things start to drag a bit in the last third” — does that mean a bit more than the halfway point problems? –and yet (c) “those who showed up because Franco’s name was attached or out of their love of the current cast (Bill Hader in particular) got plenty of what they were expecting.”

More dentistry happens today, hence the lack of activity. Somewhat less costly New Jersey dentistry, but then you need to add the rent-a-car fee plus gas. But it’s still cheaper. I’m one of the millions out there who don’t have dental insurance. And yet things are looking up — a screening of Hot Tub Time Machine this evening!

I was going to run an embed of A.O. Scott‘s latest Movie Picks video — i.e., a tribute to Peter Yates‘ beloved The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73). But of course, the Times tech guys (the very model of foot-dragging obstinacy) couldn’t be bothered to post it on YouTube. Bu then I happened on this Aliens piece, which ran last week…fine.

This high-quality clip from There Will Be Blood was sent this evening as a sampler by Movieclips co-founder Rich Raddon. The idea behind Movie Clips.com is “to give movie lovers, movie bloggers, and everyone else a place to easily find and embed licensed movie clips,” Raddon says. “I love YouTube but the quality is lacking and the search is difficult with all the UGC.

Except that you can watch YouTube clips on an iPhone, no sweat, and you can’t watch Movieclips.com on an iPhone. That’s not the whole ball game, of course, but mobility matters. Somehow and some way the Apple folks have to allow other video-viewing modes and softwares to play on their device.

“We have been working with the studios very closely over the course of 18 months to make Movieclips.com a reality,” Raddon says. “At some point we will have everything, but with the studios it is a process…the fact that we have over 12,000 clips from 6 of the 7 studios speaks to my years running the LA Film Festival (10 years) and the trust that is needed with these types of partnerships.

“Movieclips.com is not perfect. We will be closer when we reach an agreement with the Criterion Collection and the remaining studio Disney (we want that Miramax library!). But we are going about this in the best way possible, in a unique collaboration with the studios wherein we work with them on all the sensitivities with this type of content.”

A Serbian Film, an envelope-pushing (to say the very least) political allegory about Serbian repression and censorship, had a midnight showing on Sunday night/Monday morning night at South by Southwest, reports Speakeasy‘s Eric Kohn.

The film reportedly depicts rape and murder, “unspeakable” perversions, “on-camera sexual acts involving violence and young children,” “newborn porn” and “the unique magic of rigor mortis.” Delightful sounding! I’m truly sorry I missed it.

“After the movie ended, an awkward silence filled the room,” Kohn reports. “Screenwriter Srdjan Spasojevic, fielding questions during a q & a, described the movie as an angry reaction to the country’s rampant censorship laws. ‘This is a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government,’ he said. ‘We’re giving this back to you.’

“After the screening, some audience members wondered if Spasojevic’s dour tone was actually a ruse — that the filmmakers didn’t take the material all that seriously and the movie was simply intended as exploitation for its own sake.”

Which is precisely what some critics said in 1976 about Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini called it a a political allegory about Italian fascism while others suspected he simply used this as a metaphorical rationale/license to indulge his own sexual/erotic appetites and fantasies.

An official Fox Searchlight release says that principal photography on Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants begins today in Oahu and Kauai. George Clooney, Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard, Robert Forster (hooray, Bob!). Payne is directing a screenplay adapted by himself, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings.

But will it come out in late 2010? No word, no hint. I called Fox Searchlight’s Manhattan publicity office — zip. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s True Grit starts shooting this week (or imminently) also, and it’s locked to open on 12.25.10. If The Descendants shoots for 12 or 14 weeks it’ll be done in June, which gives Payne three or four months to cut it together. That’s doable. Clooney‘s The American, the Italy-based assassin movie from director Control‘s Anton Corbijn, will open sometime in the early to mid fall.

Most people don’t focus or even think about the weekend films until a few days before. That would explain the not-great tracking numbers for Hot Tub Time Machine in today’s report (3.15). The trailers have been online for sometime, but MGM/UA doesn’t seem to be spending much on LA billboard advertising. Maybe it’s a “viral campaign.” Jett says that all of his Syracuse pallies are down for it, but the tracking…I don’t know. Opinions on how big?

An over-the-top ludicrous tone, but ludicrous in “quotes” — winkingly so, intelligently so. Four guys together having an outrageous and disorienting adventure in which they’re behind the eight ball for most of the duration. That’s where the Hangover analogy comes from. That’s what Jett was saying, in any case.

The gist of author Michael Lewis‘s “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” is that the ’08 meltdown — the destruction of $1.76 trillion in subprime mortgage market holdings — was basically driven by “mass delusion,” says a HuffPost summary.

“The incentives for people on Wall Street got so screwed up…because their short term interests were so overpowering,” Lewis told 60 Minutes (or somebody else). “And so they behaved in ways that were antithetical to their own long term interests.”

In other words, they got drunk and crashed the family car and totalled it — blood and screams and shards of glass all over the pavement. These guys committed acts that were far more menacing and destructive than the Chicago gangsters and desperado hold-up men of the 1920s and ’30s. Much worse than anything Pablo Escobar ever did. And most of America is just…oh, well, whatever. I’ll wager that the followers of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman are mainly thinking, “If we play our cards right, maybe we can be the ones to fleece the country and make out like bandits…next time!”

Over the weekend HE’s Moises Chiullan saw Steven Soderbergh‘s Spalding Gray doc And Everything is Going Fine (which had its debut at Slamdance two months ago) at a South by Southwest screening. I’m not sure which day it showed (I’m in a hurry and the SXSW search engine blows) but Moises liked it, etc.

He mentions that during the q & a, one of the producers (Joshua Blum or Amy Hobby) answered a question about plans to release Gray’s performance films on DVD by saying, “We hope to see a box set come out through the Criterion Collection in 2011, but the deal’s not done yet.”

The set would presumably include Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box, Gray’s Anatomy and the Soderbergh pic. Producer Kathie Russo (i.e., Gray’s widow) added “it’s a real shame that not even Swimming to Cambodia is out on DVD, so this is a great opportunity to finally get this stuff out there.”

In the view of Marshall Fine, Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg (Focus Features, 3.19) “is not an audience-friendly film in any sense” and yet “it rewards those who are open to it. You have to work at it to gain access and hang with it, squeezing pleasure and the occasional chuckle out of its bitter beauty where you can.

Greenberg‘s Ben Stiller (N.Y. Times photo by Chad Batka)

“Prickly, abrasive, fragmented – that describes both Ben Stiller‘s performance as the title character and the film itself.

“Stiller’s Roger Greenberg is a man perpetually dissatisfied with everything about life and the world. As this roughly paced, sometimes jaggedly plotted film moves forward, we begin to see Greenberg for what he is: a miserable, tortured human being who can’t seem to stop broadcasting his pain to others.

“Baumbach has made an uncomfortable but fascinating film, one that could have been comic in an antic or wisecracking way, had he infused it with a little more warmth. But Greenberg doesn’t do warmth — he does pain, anger, longing and self-loathing. And Baumbach wants us to accept him as he is, on his own terms.”

What we have here, I sense, is a fairly intimate reaction on Fine’s part. He seems to recognize the personality and pathology of Stiller’s character. Perhaps (who knows?) as a submerged aspect of himself, or perhaps from a recollection of a family member or a close friend. In any case he’s clearly put off, and yet he recognizes that the film is up to something different — i.e., drilling in close, dealing a straight hand, not going for the intelligent yuks that Baumbach delivered in The Squid and the Whale.

I recognized Greenberg also, partly within my younger, less productive self and partly in the personality of my late brother, Tony. I didn’t find it “entertaining,” per se, but there was no rejecting the film, which I found refreshingly undiluted and stark and uncompromising.

I was especially impressed with Greenberg’s “settling in with the manner and psychology of Stiller’s character without feeling the need to go all ‘story’ on the audience. The humor is so subdued and embedded within situation and milieu that it’s not humor — it’s John Cassevetes-like introspection. I’m obviously saying that with respect.

“Is Greenberg funny? In a LQTM sense, yeah, but to most people LQTM isn’t what they go to movies for. I do, however. I was quietly smirking at Greenberg the whole time, having a quiet little blast with it. And then it grew on me the second time. I didn’t realize how sublime the ending is until I saw it again. That’s my fault.

“Stiller’s performance, in any event, seems to me like a landmark-type thing — a seriously ego-free inhabiting of antsy-quirk neuroticism. Being, not acting, and certainly with any audience comfort-winks. A breakthrough of some kind.”