Five Best Movie Gifts for the Movie Buff in Your Family at Christmastime

#1: Movie fans love free passes to the movies. You can purchase them at your own favorite chain, or, as I did, pick one up at Sam's. I got some for the AMC Theater Chain, because that is where the Chicago Film Festival was held, and I spent 2 weeks seeing movies there, at the clip of four a day.

#2: Go out to www.Netflix.com and order gift certificates for NetFlix. If your movie fan misses the movie when it is new, they can rent it on Netflix.

#3: If your budget permits, buy one of the new Blu-Ray machines that streams video directly to your television set. We had an older Blu-Ray machine (which loaded slowly) but we found that one that streams video directly to your flat-screen TV was on sale for $150 at Best Buy (www.BestBuy.com). The very same machine cost $250 in July, when my son got one for his birthday. Ours was $150 on special, so it is a good time to pick up this high-end gift.

#4: Go to your local bricks-and-mortar store and purchase actual disks of favorite movies. Often, you can pick up some older films very inexpensively at your local Family Video or Blockbuster chain.

#5: Books are good gifts. Go to Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com and check out Leonard Maltin's latest "best of" or any in the movie category. I focused on Films of the Seventies in publishing "It Came from the '˜70s: From The Godfather to Apocalypse Now," which was just released as an e-book and a paperback on December 14th. With 50 films, 76 photos, major cast and interactive trivia, this look at the character-driven films of the seventies (www.ItCamefromtheSeventies.com), such as "The Godfather" (I & II), "Alien," "Star Wars," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is the kind of movie-making that spawned directors like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and William Friedkin, who were just starting out in the seventies, a decade when I reviewed film and books for the Quad City Times. If you want some background on how certain special effects were achieved in those classic films of the seventies (www.ClassicCinemaoftheSeventies), you could do worse than to check out this 250-page book, which, as an e-book, sells in the $8 range. And to see if I'm current, google "The Best Films of the Decade 2000-2010," to see my more recent picks for purchase.