Yesterday afternoon L.A. Times/”Company Town”‘s Ben Fritz reported that “just four days after debuting on store shelves, Avatar has sold 2.7 million Blu-ray discs to consumers in the U.S. and Canada, according to 20th Century Fox — more Blu-rays than any previous movie has sold.

“The previous record holder, The Dark Knight, has sold 2.5 million Blu-rays since its debut 16 months ago.

“Fox also sold 4 million standard definition DVDs. The combined total makes Avatar the biggest DVD launch of the year, breaking a previous mark of 4 million Blu-ray and DVDs combined set by The Twilight Saga: New Moon on its first weekend in March.”

If I had to listen to singing of this quality this for very long, I would literally get sick. Conan O’Brien and Jim Carrey performing Five For Fighting‘s “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” at Saturday night’s “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour” — Gibson Amphitheater, Los Angeles, 4.24.10.

“And then you do this Jedi serenity waiting-to-die thing….yeah, that’s it…your eyes closed, waiting for it…and then…no, you won’t be struck or fall…your brown tunic will fall and Obi-Wan will just, y’know, dematerialize. That way he’ll transform rather than die, without actually getting tagged by a light saber. No, I just want it that way. Alec? I don’t care, dammit, if it makes no sense to you. Listen, Alec…I wrote this, I’m the director.”

Is there an embed code for this webcast of Al Pacino talking to Katie Couric on 60 Minutes “about his films and how he prepares for them, including his upcoming movie in which he stars as Dr. Jack Kevorkian in You Don’t Know Jack“? Yes, it turns out.

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Selectively speaking, Ashley Horner‘s brilliantlove is an exceptionally hot and skillful depiction of sexual delirium. A tale about a lickin’ love affair between a couple of none-too-brights that succumbs to melodramatic poisoning by way of (horrors!) money and ambition, this British-produced Tribeca Film Festival entry, which I caught the night before last, is at the very least a stylistic stand-out. And yet I’m not sure where it stands (or writhes) in the annals of erotic cinema.

I know it feels a bit more feverish and free-fall than vaguely middlebrow sex films like Sex and Lucia and Warm Summer Rain and the like, but isn’t quite as kinky as Last Tango in Paris or graphic as The Brown Bunny or as given to obsessive perversity as In The Realm of The Senses, and yet it’s definitely a cut above. It’s certainly above the realm of Michael Winterbottom‘s 9 Songs, which I found tedious.

I said “selectively” because the story isn’t all that great. It would’ve been fine for me if brilliantlove had just been about the simple matter of Manchester (Liam Browne), a novice photographer, doing Noon (Nancy Trotter Landry), a taxidermist, over under sideways down. I certainly would have preferred a less dramatically loaded story. One about healing the broken wing of a small bird, let’s say, and the commitment that such an effort may require of two kids with very little money. Something along those lines.

That sounds like I’m describing straight hard-R porn, I realize, but Horner is very good at capturing that erotic dreamwhirl feeling that takes over when you’ve really lost yourself in someone else and you’ve long ago stopped noticing their less than radiantly attractive aspects because you’re just breathless and sliding around and shrieking and crying and finding God, or being kissed by Him/Her.

This movie really gets and recreates that, and it’s all the more remarkable due to the fact that Browne and Landry, while pleasantly or nominally attractive, aren’t model- or movie star-fetching. I for one have a major blockage about women with big feet, but Horner’s special touch somehow persuaded me to put this phobia aside.

“So, Jeff…are you thinking about seeing The Human Centipede?,” an IFC guy asked me a night or two ago. My response was something along the lines of “Gee, I…uhm, well, not at the moment but…” That was party-speak for “I’ve heard such repellent things that I tossed it out of my mind and haven’t given it a second thought until ten seconds ago.”

“It’s time to add a new type of bad movie to the ever-growing list: The aggressively bad movie,” wrote Horror Chick on 4.23. “There’s no ironic badness or nudge-nudge wink-ery here — it’s more like ‘screw you, you were sucker enough to see this movie and now we will do our best to make bile shoot straight up your esophagus and launch out your nostrils’ bad.

“Our prime example is The Human Centipede (in theaters — or maybe just Manhattan’s IFC Center). ‘Wait,’ you say, ‘isn’t that the ass-to-mouth movie?” Yes. Yes it is. In every literal and figurative sense.”

Anyone who’s ever succumbed to addiction or dealt with an addict over an extended period knows what a fascinating monster denial can be. Addicts can be right on the edge of obliteration with death blowing cool air on the back of their necks and still they don’t think they’re in any kind of trouble. Lindsay Lohan‘s dad has his issues, but at least he understands this.

I’ve seen where addiction ends up, and it’s always the same place if the victim doesn’t wake up. I’ve said before that Lindsay’s saga needs an ending — she needs to save herself or she needs to die, which at least might have an instructive effect in the same way that James Cagney going to the electric chair in Angels With Dirty Faces may have helped the Dead End Kids to fly straight. All I know is that the people in the Collisseum cheap seats are getting restless. They don’t want another Whitney Houston saga that lasts for years and years. Poop or get off the pot.

It was known, of course, that Alex Gibney‘s Untitled Eliot Spitzer Film, which screened earlier this evening via the Tribeca Film Festival, would focus on the sudden and scandalous fall of Eliot Spitzer, the former New York Governor, due to his involvement with prostitutes. What I didn’t anticipate, and what in fact surprised the hell out of me, is that the doc unfolds and holds like a masterful political suspense drama.

Untitled Eliot Spitzer Film director Alex Gibney during post-screening q & a; former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.

I was expecting a smart and comprehensive recap of the Spitzer saga — a kind of PBS Frontline-type deal. What I got instead was a totally gripping nest-of-vipers thing with a complex and self-destructive anti-hero and a great supporting cast including an assemblage of powerful, politically connected bad guys worthy of Sidney Lumet or Scott Turow or John LeCarre even, and all of them real as hell.

Gibney has always been a first-rate documentarian. But in Spitzer and his psychology and the forces that conspired against him he’s found a great political melodrama that not only matches but enhances his abilities, resulting in a beautiful synchronicity. This movie is going right into my list as one of the best films of 2010.

What a dirty, stinking story this is — a balding oddball hero with the right ideals and goals brought down by a fatal flaw, but whose public exposure and ruin is orchestrated by his powerful enemies, and not just any enemies but some of the same financially speculating, double-dealing Wall Street scumbags whose actions brought this country to the brink of financial ruin. Goodness falls, evil triumphs — great movie material!

It is always the mark of a top-notch film when you think you know what it’s going to do plot-wise, and it more or less does that in terms of what it “tells” but with so much more punch and pizazz and intrigue than you expected. And you come out of it going “wow, damn good!”

One analogy is Fred Zinneman‘s The Day of the Jackal (1973), a thriller about a man hired to assassinate former French president Charles DeGaulle. You know going in that he won’t succeed, but the film holds you regardless. Another similar work is Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981) — a movie packed to the gills with cops, attorneys and prosecutors but which finally delivers a moralistic tale about dark urges, choices, alliances and a New York City demimonde.

One of Spitzer’s enemies, Home Depot co-founder Kenneth Langone, talks to Gibney for the film, and is quite the fascinating character. Sptzer’s other foes included former NYSE chairman Richard Grasso, former Citibank/Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jack Grubman, former Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget, former AIG honcho Hank Greenberg and Canary Capital Partners’ Edward Stern, to name but a very few.

I’m being kicked out of the Starbucks I’m sitting in so that’s all she wrote, but this is a stellar knockout documentary. It’s actually called Client-9 in the opening credits, but that title is just a temp, Gibney said. Distribution ought to happen by the fall. It’s too early to say, of course, but this looks to me at the very least like a prime contender for the 2010 Best Feature Documentary Oscar, whatever the competition. Because it’s sharp and true and riveting as hell, and that’s what gets the gold.

I ask again for the front page: how is the idea of Mickey Rourke playing Genghis Khan any less ridiculous than John Wayne doing the same thing 54 years ago?