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Yesterday I walked into my local supermarket to find they already had a massive Christmas tree up ornamented with gift cards. Yes, it’s quickly approaching “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and that means gifts to buy, preferably before you find yourself scrambling from store to store in a panic on Christmas Eve.

With that in mind, here are five drool-worthy stocking stuffers for the cinemaphiles in your family, all of them due to be released in the next few weeks.

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1. Frank Sinatra: Concert Collection (November 2, 2010, $54.99 at Amazon)

Get hep to this, man: seven discs containing fourteen hours of TV specials and filmed concerts, with Ol’ Blue Eyes joined by Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Gene Kelly, Antonio Carlos Jobim, John Denver, Bing Crosby, and of course Dino. Four of the specials have never been released, and a host of isolated TV clips are thrown in for good measure. Top it all off with a 44-page booklet chock full of rare photos and scholarly commentary, and the Chairman of the Board is truly back in all his scotch-soaked glory.

The seventh “Bonus Disc” sounds like the perfect thing to have playing in the background while you are decorating your tree: a “Happy Holidays with Bing and Frank” color TV special. (more…)

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About ten years ago or so I saw Cyndi Lauper live when she opened for Tina Turner. She was very pregnant at the time and sang every one of her hits except the one her fans most wanted to hear, ”Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” The crowd was waiting for it, ready to explode and dance and sing along.

Not only did Lauper not sing it, she got snotty with the audience when they called out for it. At the end of her set she said, “Nope, not gonna sing it,” and  walked off.  (more…)

When Captain Lou Albano entered the ranks of professional wrestlers in 1953 their “sport” ranked somewhere above pornography and below football betting cards in cultural respectability. When he departed more than three decades later, professional wrestling was a global phenomenon attracting viewers on closed-circuit TV pay per views, MTV, and Saturday morning cartoons.

Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan had something to do with this. So too did the overlooked Captain Lou Albano, who, along with Cyndi Lauper–a live-action cartoon character as unusual as Albano–launched the pop-culture non sequitur ”Rock and Wrestling Connection” that strangely catapulted rather than killed the careers of its participants. (more…)