True Love

While You Were Sleeping is a connect-the-dots romantic comedy about a lonely transit-booth collector, a comatose businessman, his nice-guy brother and a crowd of meddlesome character actors hanging around to deliver a line or two. Clumsily designed to emulate the success of Sleepless in Seattle (Charmless in Chicago?), the film stars the preternaturally perky Sandra Bullock, the caterpillar-eyebrowed Peter Gallagher and ubiquitous everyman Bill Pullman. While its central conceit - girl falls for boy, boy falls (literally)

The wedding ritual is a most anxious kind of drama. The stars, of course, are the bride and groom. Antagonists and supporting players abound among the infighting in-laws and critical friends. The director is whoever officiates at the ceremony, be it judge or preacher. The "stage manager" coordinates the event and caters the reception. Conflicts range from the trivial to the epochal, from where the newlyweds plan to spend the honeymoon to where they plan to spend the rest of their lives.

Udder whimsy from the verdant, undulating hills of ever-cinematic New Zealand, The Price of Milk is a too-cute-by-half exercise in magic realism in which a scruffy dairy farmer (Karl Urban) and his free-spirited fiancee (Danielle Cormack) experience a serious case of matrimonial jitters. Written and directed by Harry Sinclair in a somewhat strained tone of offbeat merriment, this fairy-tale-like musing on true love in cynical times also involves a talismanic quilt, an agoraphobic dog, an eccentric old Maori woman and her team of Maori nephews, and several paddocks' worth of cows.

Prelude to a Kiss, newly arrived at the Helen Hayes Theater, is not really a silly play. It just acts like one. Playwright Craig Lucas presumably is saying something about the strength and nature of true love in this fantasy about a young man whose bride unwittingly exchanges bodies with an old man right after the wedding ceremony. True love is the husband planting a kiss squarely on the lips of his soul mate, even if she happens then and there to be indistinguishable from that superb, grizzled character actor, Barnard Hughes.

Prince Albert hints of finding true love Here's a story of sexual intrigue we're even less inclined to believe than Monica Lewinsky's: Prince Albert of Monaco says he has a serious girlfriend, and he'd like to marry her, but he just can't reveal her name. "It is a little premature to say if she will share my life, and even too soon to talk about it," the 40-year-old heir to the throne told Paris Match magazine. "It is not solely up to me. " Speaking in the vaguest of vagaries, he added: "If things evolve as I hope they do with this woman, there is a real possibility that this is a serious relationship.

Dear Halle Berry: Hope this works out better than the David Justice thing. Yes, we know those are cynical sentiments to offer when a girl announces her engagement. But we're still smarting from the actress and the baseball star's lengthy, vituperative 1996 divorce, which featured restraining orders, bicoastal jurisdictions, suicide threats and his-'n'-hers tabloid coverage. If she's learned to love again, God bless her. This week, Berry told the world - through the medium of "Entertainment Tonight" - that she plans to marry the current man in her life, Eric Benet.

Getting on a game show was on my list of "Things to Do in L.A. " So was finding a stunning blond California girl. So, after I was rejected for "Scrabble," I decided "The New Dating Game" might fulfill two goals. Auditions were tough. A few dozen guys nervously gathered at the Sunset Gower Studios, eyeing each other and filling out forms. Contest coordinator Lance Romance - no one ever knew if it was his real name - told us to answer honestly, but be clever. Guys around me were cabbage farmers-actors or shoe salesmen-models.

Even after she had spent three hours in a Lambertville bar listening to a toilet seat manufacturer talk about his work - a man so self-absorbed, he didn't ask her how old she was - Anna Marie Hall kept her faith in the dating service. She persevered, even when one magnanimous suitor insisted that because he had paid for the movie ticket, she should pay for the popcorn. And the date with the guy from New Hope who was heading to a tavern in a thunderstorm when lightning struck a tree, which fell in front of them so they were rear-ended by another car . . . just another chapter in a book with a happy ending.

Atwang with mountain music and actors stretching their vowels in long, loping cadences, Cold Mountain is the equivalent of comfort food: old-fashioned, earthy (lots of root vegetables), satisfying. Director Anthony Minghella's adaptation of the Charles Frazier best-seller is a romantic odyssey set against the turmoil of the Civil War, and it teems with movie stars and charismatic thespians, popping up in unexpected quarters. The costumes - the fancy hoop skirts, the rebel woolens, the hats (my word, the hats!

With Valentine's Day approaching and love in the air, hate and fear appear to be coloring most relationships on the movie screen. Consider the following advance report in the Los Angeles Times on 520 movies scheduled to be released this year: "Expect more torrid tales of passion and obsession. An erratic but erotic woman terrorizes her boyfriend in 'Last Rites.' . . . A married woman revives a steamy affair in 'Wildfire.' Brian Dennehy's marriage falls apart when he becomes infatuated with a French woman in 'The Belly of an Architect.

When I finally met Nora Ephron six years ago, I did something I had never done before in a few thousand interviews and I haven't done since.   I told her I loved her. I have always loved her, since first reading her Esquire pieces in the 1970s. Of course, her admirers are legion. We love her extraordinary wit, her inimitable style, her appetite for risk and change. Her actual appetite, for butter, pate, steak, pie, and her rejection of the egg-white omelet, of which she noted, "People who eat them think they're doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed.

SOMETIMES, a piece of news socks you in the gut. It may not be momentous, like Mitt Romney winning his home state by a whopping three-point margin, and it might not be entirely unexpected, like the death of Amy Winehouse. But when it happens, you stop whatever you are doing, lean back in your chair and take a deep breath. It's worth a moment of reflection. That's what happened when I heard that Davy Jones had died of a heart attack at age 66. I hadn't thought about the ex-Monkee in a very long time until, last month, when I caught that old Brady Bunch episode in which he croons to a flaxen-haired Marcia, "Gehl, look whut yeuve dun too mee. " Watching a very young Davy train those liquid brown eyes on an undeserving Marcia made me sigh, despite my 50-year-old self.

Sunday Where we live Bruce Norris' Pulitzer Prize-winning, fiercely funny play Clybourne Park borrows real estate and minor characters from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun to look at issues of white flight and gentrification in an ingeniously inventive way - above all, proving that it really is about location, location, location. The show goes on at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Arden Theatre , 40 N. Second St., and continues with performances on a Tuesday-through-Sunday schedule to March 25. Tickets are $29 to $48. Call 215-922-1122.

'TIS NEARLY Valentine's Day, fellas, when you're expected to sit down with your gal to see "The Vow," or something like it. Something very dangerous to your relationship, your self-esteem. Starring someone like Channing Tatum - bigger, better-looking, unafraid of commitment, supplied by screenwriters with an endless supply of cute things to say and do. In "The Vow" Tatum asks his girlfriend to move in with him by spelling out the question in the blueberries he places next to the pancakes he's just made for her. See what I mean?

Q: I'm in a difficult situation. My friend and I are in a "friends with benefits" relationship. I want more, but he wants to stay just FWB so we don't lose the friendship. This is not the kind of relationship I want. But every time I try to leave or stop being FWB, he gets all upset and says that if I just stay around and give him time, we will become more than FWB. This has been going on for eight months now. What do I do? Steve: Ask him if he has a cute friend, because you're going to be dating others.

"LIKE CRAZY" tracks the imperiled, intercontinental romance of two young lovers. Anton Yelchin is Jacob, a soulful woodworker who falls hard for Anna (Felicity Jones), the British journalism major who sends him a comical mash note one day after class. And why not? Who wouldn't go weak in the knees after getting an unsolicited love letter from Jones, with her gorgeous green eyes and adorably shy smile that reveals a set of fantastically irregular British teeth? I haven't been this smitten since I saw Kate Beckinsale's overbite in "Cold Comfort Farm.

Nicholas Sparks' latest novel, The Best of Me , has all the flashes of a Sparks book: small-town life; love and its regrets; wrenching plot twists; agonizing choices. Plus a ghost. Or is it a ghost? "I don't want to be the kind of writer who writes the same exact story without changing anything," says Sparks, who reads from his work at the University of Pennsylvania Bookstore from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday. "I'm always asking myself, 'How can I make it new and interesting?' " Enough readers have found his stories new and interesting to give him a very successful career as a writer, with 16 novels and multiple New York Times best-sellers.

By Jeffrey Eugenides Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 416 pp. $28 Reviewed by Glenn C. Altschuler On a warm spring day at Brown University in the early 1980s, after Leonard Bankhead and Madeleine Hanna had "picnicked on each other," Maddy whispers "I love you," in a voice edged with "a sense of peril. " Leonard reaches for his copy of A Lover's Discourse , by Roland Barthes, finds the page with the words "Je t'aime," and hands it to her. Overcome at first with happiness, Madeleine reads on: "Once the first avowal has been made, 'I love you' has no meaning whatever.

D EBBIE REYNOLDS had a pretty good weekend - or at least her creditors did. The star of "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," mother o f Carrie Fisher and ex-wife of Philadelphia crooner Eddie Fisher, auctioned off her collection of Hollywood memorabilia. Marilyn Monroe's vent-blown dress from "The Seven Year Itch" fetched $4.6 million. The outfit worn by Audrey Hepburn in the Ascot race scene of "My Fair Lady" drew a $3.7 million bid. The auction house, Profiles in History, was still calculating the sale's final tally yesterday.

Why did Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver wait until now to dissolve their 25-year-old matrimonial, financial, and political merger? Haters might say they staved off the inevitable till Arnold un -govinated as California's ruler - a cynical ploy to protect Arnold's political position and power. But we're no haters. "This has been a time of great personal and professional transition for each of us," the couple say. "We are continuing to parent our four children together," they added, referring to Katherine , 21, Christina , 19, Patrick , 17, and Christopher , 13.       Schwarz-love love never dies Speaking of The Govinator Dynasty , the nation's foremost investigative journal, the National Enquirer, reports that Maria and Arnold's 17-year-old son, Patrick, has fallen prey to Miley Cyrus ' good-( yet-oh-so-bad!