2008

George Bailey (James Stewart) has the picture perfect life: a loving wife, Mary, four young children, and his own business, which he inherited from his father. However, on Christmas Eve, George encounters severe business difficulties at the Bailey Building and Loan. George's Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) loses the cash they owe the bank, which is owned by the Scrooge-esque Mr. Potter . This leads George to a life crisis, and he contemplates suicide. He's saved at the last moment by the appearance of his guardian angel, Clarence.

Cast: James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Beulah Bondi, Ward Bond, Frank Faylen, Gloria Grahame, H. B. Warner (1946) [NR]

Col. Mike Kirby picks two teams of crack Green Berets for a mission in South Vietnam. First off is to build and control a camp that is trying to be taken by the enemy the second mission is to kidnap a North Vietnamese General...

Cast: John Wayne, David Janssen, Jim Hutton, Aldo Ray (1968) [NR]

Jack Campbell, a workaholic Wall Street exec, gets to see what his life might have been like if he'd stayed with his former sweetheart, Kate. Thirteen years after they split up, Jack falls asleep in his posh New York apartment, then awakens to find himself a family man, with his now-wife Kate, daughter Annie and new baby.

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Téa Leoni, Jeremy Piven, Josef Sommer, Saul Rubinek, Don Cheadle (2000) [PG-13]

Naive and idealistic Jefferson Smith, leader of the Boy Rangers, is appointed on a lark by the spineless governor of his state. He is reunited with the state's senior senator--presidential hopeful and childhood hero, Senator Joseph Paine. In Washington, however, Smith discovers many of the shortcomings of the political process as his earnest goal of a national boys' camp leads to a conflict with the state political boss, Jim Taylor.
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Cast: Jean Arthur, James Stewart, Claude Rains, Edward Arnold, Guy Kibbee, Thomas Mitchell, Harry Carey (1939) [NR]

Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) hears a voice, followed by a brief vision of a baseball field. He believes that if he builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield, Shoeless Joe Jackson from the infamous 1919 Chicago "Black" Sox will return to play baseball. By being willing to take a chance, Ray gets a second time up at bat in life.

Cast: Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta, Burt Lancaster (1989) [PG]

In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. But on his way to the Big Leagues, Ron stumbled, his dreams broken by drinking, drugs, and women. Then, on a winter night in 1982, not far from Ron’s home, a young cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter was savagely murdered. The investigation led nowhere. Until, on the flimsiest evidence, it led to Ron Williamson. The washed-up small-town hero was charged, tried, and sentenced to death—in a trial littered with lying witnesses and tainted evidence that would shatter a man’s already broken life…and let a true killer go free.

For 12 days after his brazen assassination of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was at large, and in Manhunt, historian James L. Swanson tells the vivid, fully documented tale of his escape and the wild, massive pursuit. Get a taste of the daily drama from this timeline of the desperate search.

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium...

From Publishers Weekly - Though the idea of listening to an economics text may bring to mind nightmarish visions of incomprehensible facts, figures and graphs, this audiobook is refreshingly accessible and engrossing. Journalist Dubner reads with just the right mix of enthusiasm and awe, revealing juicy morsels of wisdom on everything from what sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common (a propensity to cheat) to whether parents can really push their kids to greatness by buying them Baby Einstein toys and enlisting them in numerous before- and after-school activities (not really).

After a startling diagnosis from his doctor, Oswald T. Campbell leaves behind the cold and damp of the oncoming Chicago winter to spend what he believes will be his last Christmas in the warm and welcoming town of Lost River. There he meets the postman who delivers mail by boat, the store owner who nurses a broken heart, and the ladies of the Mystic Order of the Royal Polka Dots Secret Society, who do clandestine good works. And he meets a little redbird named Jack, who is at the center of this tale of a magical Christmas when something so amazing happened that those who witnessed it have never forgotten it.