3.   The Bee Gees - Their Greatest Hits: The Record

   ~ Bee Gees (Audio CD)

    Original Release Date: 2001

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From Amazon.com: Don't look for a richly illustrated, critical essay-packed hagiography with this 40-track, double-disc overview of the Bee Gees recording career. In typical, telling fashion, the Brothers Gibb have eschewed such exercises in ego inflation and simply let the best of their remarkable body of music speak for itself. Through it all, their familiar voices lock together in the sort of transcendent, seemingly genetic harmony that few singers since the Everly Brothers (early Gibb inspirations) have managed. Beginning with the plaintive 1966 hit "New York Mining Disaster 1941," this set traces the Gibbs' journey from successful Beatles-era balladeers to '70s white R&B gods and the undisputed kings of disco (we're reminded here that their shrewd metamorphosis began with "Nights on Broadway" and "Jive Talkin'"--long before the mega-success of Saturday Night Fever). But even as that dance craze faded, again threatening to turn the Bee Gees into pop anachronisms, the Gibbs simply stepped out of the limelight for a while, turning their talents to MOR hit-making for the likes of Samantha Sang, Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand, and Dionne Warwick. Those hits ("Emotion," "Heartbreaker," "Islands in the Stream") are featured here in modern rerecordings by the band, along with the Streisand-Barry Gibb duet, "Guilty." And if the Gibbs haven't had much of an American chart presence in recent years, they remain superstars throughout the rest of the world, a richly crafted pop music presence that simply won't be denied.

  Movies

1.   The Wizard of Oz

    Starring: Judy Garland

    (1939) ~ DVD

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From Amazon.com: When it was released during Hollywood's golden year of 1939, The Wizard of Oz didn't start out as the perennial classic it has since become. The film did respectable business, but it wasn't until its debut on television that this family favorite saw its popularity soar. And while Oz's TV broadcasts are now controlled by media mogul Ted Turner (who owns the rights), the advent of home video has made this lively musical a mainstay in the staple diet of great American films. Young Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland), her dog, Toto, and her three companions on the Yellow Brick Road to Oz--the Tin Man (Jack Haley), the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr), and the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger)--have become pop-culture icons and central figures in the legacy of fantasy for children. As the Wicked Witch who covets Dorothy's enchanted ruby slippers, Margaret Hamilton has had the singular honor of scaring the wits out of children for more than six decades. The film's still as fresh, frightening, and funny as it was when first released. It may take some liberal detours from the original story by L. Frank Baum, but it's loyal to the Baum legacy while charting its own course as a spectacular film. Shot in glorious Technicolor, befitting its dynamic production design (Munchkinland alone is a psychedelic explosion of color and decor), The Wizard of Oz may not appeal to every taste as the years go by, but it's required viewing for kids of all ages.

2.   The Notebook

     Starring: Gena Rowlands, James Garner

     (2004) ~ DVD

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From Amazon.com: When you consider that old-fashioned tearjerkers are an endangered species in Hollywood, a movie like The Notebook can be embraced without apology. Yes, it's syrupy sweet and clogged with clichés, and one can only marvel at the irony of Nick Cassavetes directing a weeper that his late father John--whose own films were devoid of saccharine sentiment--would have sneered at. Still, this touchingly impassioned and great-looking adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks novel has much to recommend, including appealing young costars (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) and appealing old costars (James Garner and Gena Rowlands, the director's mother) playing the same loving couple in (respectively) early 1940s and present-day North Carolina. He was poor, she was rich, and you can guess the rest; decades later, he's unabashedly devoted, and she's drifting into the memory-loss of senile dementia. How their love endured is the story preserved in the titular notebook that he reads to her in their twilight years. The movie's open to ridicule, but as a delicate tearjerker it works just fine. Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember were also based on Sparks novels, suggesting a triple-feature that hopeless romantics will cherish.

3.   Wings of Desire

    Starring: Bruno Ganz

    (1988) ~ DVD

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From Amazon.com: "There are angels over the streets of Berlin," quotes the movie poster, but these are like no angels you've ever seen. Bundled in dark overcoats, they watch over the city with ears open to the heartbeat of the human soul, listening to the internal musings and yearnings of earthbound humans like existential detectives. In these delicate, astounding scenes we float through the thoughts of dozens Berlin citizens, from the weary and worn to the hopeful and young, as the angels record the magic moments for some heavenly record. But when Damiel (the empathic and sensitive Bruno Ganz) falls in love with an angel of another sort, the lonely trapeze artist Marion (willowy, sad-eyed Solveig Dommartin), he gives up the contemplation and observation of life to experience it himself.

Wim Wenders's most purely romantic film is like poetry on celluloid, a celebration of the transient and fragile moments of being human: the warmth of a cup of coffee on a cold day, the embrace of a friend, the touch of a lover, the rapture of love. Opening with an angel's-eye view of Berlin in silvery black and white (delicately captured by the great cinematographer Henri Alekan, who photographed Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast 40 years earlier), it transforms into a gauzy color world when Damiel "crosses over" by sheer will. Peter Falk plays himself as a fallen angel with a special sensitivity for celestial visitors ("I can't see you, but I know you're there," he proclaims), and Otto Sander, whose smiling eyes brighten a face etched by eons of waiting and watching, is Damiel's partner. Wenders made a sequel in 1993, Faraway, So Close, and Hollywood remade the film as City of Angels with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan.