The best remastered; How DVDs, YouTube, and HBO make home entertainment witty, wise, and beautiful.(Home Box Office Inc.)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

YouTube gets 100 million hits a day. Staring at YouTube's videos on the computer and sending them on seems to have become everyone's primary job. Google snapped up YouTube, "the premier digital video repository on the Internet," for $1.65 billion. YouTube provides information, arcana, and jokes. Clearly, the whole idea of entertainment has to be redefined. With so much so easily available, and so little of it shaped, thought through, or actually worked on, the more you watch, the more you need to watch, because unprocessed information is not dramatic. Movies in the multiplexes are in a slump, mundane, and unappealing. The home TV-the big screen, not the computer-is suddenly the place where good things happen. HBO staggers with thoughtful films and compelling series that take over several years of your life. DVDs now have such a wealth of extras on their secondary discs that they approximate a film festival attended by living experts and dead stars.

When William Becker, who brought all the great European movies to America through Janus Films, began putting them on laser discs some 20 years ago, he added extra tracks of interviews. Today, Janus's sister company, Criterion, makes the best and richest DVDs of all. The perfect present is Criterion's "Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films," a luxurious box of 50 DVDs.

G. W. Pabst's film Pandora's Box comes with four separate scores-orchestral, cabaret, modern, and a piano improvisation. Each of them imparts a different mood to the story of the amoral Lulu, who meets her match in Jack the Ripper. Louise Brooks, whose magnetic beauty and tough modern presence make her seem like a visitor in the films of the 1920s, fascinated the critic Kenneth Tynan, whose classic New Yorker profile of her is reproduced in the little book that comes with the disc. It also contains an incisive essay by critic J. Hoberman and a final one by Brooks herself. The second disc contains a 1998 documentary, and an intriguing 1971 interview with her by the great documentarian Richard Leacock. An old lady with long white hair in Rochester, New York, Brooks says Pabst preferred "sexual hate" to sexual love and reveals that when she was in a room with the stars of the time, she felt "black and furry." "You can't be a great actress unless you think you are beautiful," she says, wrongly, and wistfully notes, "I don't meet any brilliant people anymore." She died in 1985. Two little DVDs can make you a Louise Brooks expert in a few hours, a true cinephile.

The Criterion DVD set for Orson Welles's perpetually unfinished film Mr. Arkadin contains Welles in full makeup ...