Warren Miller's Power of Snow Collection (Storm/Cold Fusion/Ride/Fifty)
One needn't be an extreme snow-sports enthusiast to enjoy the beauty, wit, and endlessly inventive action-cinematography of Warren Miller's films. A pioneer in sports filmmaking, Miller began his career--as we find out in this excellent, four-title boxed set--shooting 8mm footage in 1947 Sun Valley, Idaho, keeping body and soul together with ketchup soup and wild rabbits. A half-century-plus later, Miller produces, narrates, and occasionally provides a cameo in his films; three of them, included here, are travelogues set in some of the wildest, most dazzling, and even exotic places on Earth.The best of the lot,Cold Fusion, involves serious globe-hopping through four continents: Join a long, long hike through Kenya to ski what remains of a disappearing glacier, and later watch the surreal ballet of multiple "aerialists" launched high on the slopes at Colorado's Winter Park Big Air Expedition. Scale up--and snowboard down--an impossibly steep peak in Waddington, U.K., and then, believe it or not, ski Iran, a place "between dreams and awakening, of hot tea and cherry tobacco."Rideprovides its own thrills, traipsing after Whistler's avalanche hunters as they launch explosives clearing landslides before landslides clear skiers. Stick around for stops in New Zealand and France, plus helicopter skiing in the North Cascades, snowboarding the bouncy trail of the Breckenridge Bumps, and cross a war zone in Russia to reach (via creaky cable cars and choppers) the top of Europe.Stormcontinues the fun in British Columbia's Blue River, Aspen's Roaring Fork Valley, Lake Tahoe, and Antarctica's South Georgia Island, the haunting first site of Ernest Shackleton's legendary, ill-fated voyage. Rounding out this DVD collection is the retrospectiveFifty, an album of highlights (e.g., snowboarding in the Chugach Range, near the site of the Valdez crash) that takes a fun, then-and-now approach.--Tom Keogh