Lancelot Links

Thursday March 11, 2010

Lancelot Links

If you‘re in the Twin Cities today through Sunday, the Heights Theater, a beautifully refurbished 1920s theater in northeast Minneapolis, and one of my favorite theaters in the entire freakin’ world, is hosting the Sixth Annual Arab Film Festival, with documentaries, comedies, etc. Here's a Star-Tribune piece on the festival by Erik McClanahan. No relation. If I were there (Mpls.), I'd be there (Heights).
Obama's health care speech at a university in... Georgia? I love his aside about “when you hit 48... and things start breaking down...” From this 47-year-old: Amen, brother. As Sully says, start watching the clip at 9:30.
I'm a long-time fan of Loudon Wainwright III so this video, via the New Yorker site, was fun: Wainwright singing “The Paul Krugman Blues.”�
Almost every Alfred Hitchock cameo in this 3:49 video homage.
Nice thoughts from Alec Baldwin on hosting the Oscars.
But the Academy didn't do anything in their three hours that demonstrated as much love for movies as Matt Shapiro does, in just over 4 minutes, in his 2009: The Cinemascape. And the kid's 17! Third time I‘ve posted it, 20th time I’ve watched it.
I don't know if I have 1,000 essential anythings, but here's a list from Bill White, late of the late Seattle Post-Intelligencer, on the 1,000 essential movies. It's an eclectic list. A personal list. No “Gone with the Wind” in 1939, for example. And he doesn't have half of my top 10 list: no “The Insider” or “All the President's Men” or... really?... no “The Godfather” or “Casbalanca” or “The Third Man”? But he does have “Watchmen” and “Julie and Julia” from last year???? Wow. I was going to say, “It's just a list, concentrate on what you have in common, not what you don‘t,” but... man, that is fucked.�
This photo from Baseball Researcher on a swastika-wearing Rabbit Maranville, circa 1914, reminded me of the 1931 James Cagney movie, “Blonde Crazy,” where a grifter-pal of Cagney’s has a gig selling swastika charms. By the way: Baseball Researcher aptly named himself. Nice work on this post.
The other day Peter Schmuck of The Baltimore Sun wrote a column about the unfairness of the imbalanced Major League Baseball schedule, particularly from the standpoint of the O‘s, J’s and Rays, who have to play those money-laden monstrosities, the Yankees and Red Sox, a buttload of times. It's a good point. To which Rob Neyer, from whom I got the original article, more or less yawns. Major League Baseball has some major league problems, which I reiterated last November, and that they‘re seemingly intractable is no excuse not to address them, as Neyer, with one of the best baseball bully-pulpits on the Web, is not. It’s the very reason to address them. Otherwise it's like writing about movies and not caring how studios distribute movies.�
Speaking of: I was recently introduced to Patrick Pacheco, a freelance writer out of New York, who has written a documentary, “Waking Sleeping Beauty,” about how the Disney animation studios turned themselves around in the years 1984 to 1994, that will get a limited released this month in four cities: New York, L.A., Chicago and San Francisco. Apparently those are the only four cities that care about animation. Hope Disney, which is distributing the doc, goes a little wider. Here's the trailer.�
Finally, via everyone's favorite uncle, Vinny, I present this Ted Rall cartoon that he's had on his refrigerator since the Bush tax cuts of 2001. To upend a cliche: It would be funny if it weren't true.