Q.Why do DVDs come out on Tuesdays? Why not another day of the week?

A. Even people in the video business did not have an answer for this at first.
Part of the answer is simple logic, said Soumya Sriraman, vice president of marketing & operations for DVD distributor Visual Entertainment. It’s a way to get people into stores in the middle of the week, when sales might be slow otherwise. And, the DVDs are not competing for consumer dollars with movies opening in theaters. That said, releasing home entertainment on Tuesday is a tradition going back to before DVDs, to the days of the record business. According to Sriraman, the Tuesday releases took advantage of the buzz around reports published in music-industry trades on Mondays. According to another observer, radio stations would change their playlists on Tuesday, so new music would be in stores as it was being heard on the radio. So, it’s less about DVDs than about habit.

Memoirs of a Geisha
PG-13, 134 mins.
Arthur Golden wrote a terrific novel a few years ago, and Hollywood proves yet again it can still kill even the most engaging story.  Here, a rural Japanese girl  (played by Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi) becomes a big-time courtesan in 1930s Kyoto, but where’s the heart and soul?

King Kong PG-13, 180 mins.
Director supreme Peter Jackson decided to follow up the hit “Lord of the Rings”  trilogy with a remake of everyone’s favorite 1933 raging-ape-in-love story. Still set in the 1930s, this Kong is deeply emotive, more so than his human counterparts (except Naomi Watts, who does great green-screen work), and unlike the execrable 1976 version, the audience is allowed to think. That is, when they aren’t bombarded with earsplitting sound and too-generous eye candy.  

Get Rich or Die Tryin’
R, 134 mins.
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson stars as a drug dealer inspired by his child’s birth to leave the business and become a rapper. A real stretch for Fiddy, to be sure.

Stay  R, 93 mins.
Ewan McGregor wears disturbingly short pants in this sleek psychodrama about death, delusion and multiple planes of reality. Trippy.

The Squid and The Whale
R, 99 mins. 
This melancholy-yet-endearing comedy by Noah Baumbach chronicles the
lives of two Brooklyn brothers entangled in the custody battle their parents (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) are waging.

Capote R, 114 mins.  
Philip Seymour Hoffman has come a long way from the timid sound man in “Boogie Nights.” His character study of Truman Capote, set while the writer was crafting “In Cold Blood,” examines the practical and moral implications of the literary achievement.

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