ShareThis(YOU'VE GOT MAIL: DELUXE EDITION. 1998. RATED PG. WARNER BROS. $19.98)This light romantic comedy -- the third pairing of Tom Hanks with Meg Ryan -- is predictable but totally charming, thanks to the charisma and chemistry of its two stars.An update of the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film "The Shop Around the Corner," which starred James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, "Mail" is about bitter business rivals, Kathleen Kelly (Ryan), who runs a small children's bookstore called the Shop Around the Corner; and Joe Fox (Hanks), whose family owns the Barnes & Noble-style mega franchise Fox Books, which has just moved in ... around the corner.While disliking each other from their first meeting, Kathleen and Joe unknowingly start to fall in love via Internet chatting. Joe figures out Kathleen's his chat mate first and ... you know the rest, even if you haven't seen the movie. The journey to the happy ending is made extra pleasant by well-cast co-stars, including Parker Posey as Joe's neurotic book editor fiancee, Patricia; Greg Kinnear as Kathleen's dispassionate journalist fiance, Frank; Dabney Coleman as Joe's many-times-divorced dad, Nelson; and Jean Stapleton, Steve Zahn and Heather Burns as Kathleen's co-workers at the bookshop.Forget Ryan's ridiculous "going to the mattresses" faux boxing scene, in which Kathleen prepares to battle back, and there's little to quibble with here. Among the many marginal extras are the exceptional featurette "You've Got Chemistry," a history of great screen couples, and the music video of Carole King's "Anyone at All," a song featured in the film. -- SUE ADOLPHSON(JOAN CRAWFORD COLLECTION: VOL. 2. 1934-1953. NOT RATED. WARNER BROS. HOME VIDEO. $49.98 (FIVE DISCS)Warner Bros.' second collection of Joan Crawford films is even better than the first, covering a wider range of her career and unearthing more than the usual suspects. The earliest of the films is the pre-Code "Sadie McKee" (1934), with Crawford climbing up the social ranks and having romances along the way. The latest film in the collection is "Torch Song" (1953), with Crawford as a bitter Broadway star who's vicious to everybody but who ends up coming under the spell of a blind piano player. It's total, crazy camp and irresistible.In between, there are good entries that cover Crawford's prime, such as "A Woman's Face" (1941), about a scarred woman whose life is transformed by plastic surgery, and "Strange Cargo" (1940), a religious allegory co-starring Clark Gable. Finally, there's "Flamingo Road" (1949), with Crawford as a city woman from the wrong side of the tracks who finds herself stuck in a small Southern town.The collection comes with three new featurettes about her career and vintage shorts, cartoons and radio shows. At her best, Crawford connected with the lofty aspirations of people who didn't have much hope. She was a heroine of the working class, and despite the assumed mid-Atlantic speech, she never fully escaped the roughness of her origins, or overcame her anger about them. Her audience read these qualities in her and made her their queen. To immerse yourself in Crawford's work is to enter into that complicated psychological dynamic. -- MICK LASALLE(LILLIE. 1979. NOT RATED. ACORN MEDIA. $59.99)Lillie Langtry was more or less the Paris Hilton of Victorian England, except with considerably more wit. Born on the isle of Jersey to a churchman, Lillie grew up a tomboy, but once she got to London, after making a bad marriage to a widower who pretended to be wealthier than he was, she became the top of the heap of women who were known as "professional beauties."Francesca Annis glimmers as the belle of the ball in this 1979 "Masterpiece Theatre" series, although, in truth, she's not convincing in the first episode, as a 15-year-old girl, no matter what her father says about her advanced development. No matter. Even tied to her deadweight of a husband, Edward (Anton Rodgers), she sweeps through British society, wowing and wooing every man in sight, including Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, Randolph Churchill and the Prince of Wales, who becomes her lover.Later on, Langtry became an actress, an American citizen, a California winery owner and a racehorse owner. The old-fashioned production values make the series seem at first like a soap opera, but you'll quickly overlook that minor deficiency.Annis' Lillie is a bit of a schemer, but she also has a good heart, and you'll come to admire her self-reliance and determination to be an independent woman in an age where women were expected to know their places: in kitchens, in bedrooms or on pedestals. -- DAVID WIEGAND(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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