The Eternals

This excellent 250-track anthology contains many tracks originally recorded in the Fifties and early Sixties that would be picked up on by bands all over the world and are still being performed today. The originals have a glamour all of their own, having been recorded in the country where rock and the blues had their birth.

Rhino's four-disc collection The Doo Wop Box may not contain every classic doo wop single ever recorded, but it comes damn close. Featuring 100 tracks, superb sound, and amazingly detailed liner notes, the set is one of the best various-artist box sets ever assembled; although these four discs will be all the doo wop some listeners will ever need, hopefully the set will make most listeners want to investigate the genre even further.

Rhino's first box set of doo wop classics was obviously successful enough to bring about a second, four-CD set. This time around, with all of the hits covered on the first box, the compilers have dug deep into the genre's history to put together a selection of some of the music's great sides, lesser-known hits, and rarities.

A box office failure at the time, John Boorman's 1974 cult science fiction film Zardoz is an entrancing if overly ambitious project that offers pointed commentary on class structure and religion inside its complex plot and head-movie visuals. Its healthy doses of sex and violence will involve viewers even if the story machinations escape them. Beautifully photographed near Boorman's home in Ireland's Wicklow Mountains by Geoffrey Unsworth (2001), its production design is courtesy of longtime Boorman associate Anthony Pratt, who creates a believable society within the film's million-dollar budget.
A bewigged Sean Connery is Zed, a savage "exterminator" commanded by the mysterious god Zardoz to eliminate Brutals, survivors of an unspecified worldwide catastrophe. Zed stows away inside Zardoz's enormous idol (a flying stone head) and is taken to the pastoral land of the Eternals, a matriarchal, quasi-medieval society that has achieved psychic abilities as well as immortality. Zed finds as much hope as disgust with the Eternals; their advancements have also robbed them of physical passion, turning their existence into a living death. Zed becomes the Eternals' unlikely messiah, but in order to save them–and himself–he must confront the truth behind Zardoz and his own identity inside the Tabernacle, the Eternals' omnipresent master computer.

–Paul Gaita