I was just looking through my clippings file — yes, I’m a big enough nerd that I keep a file of stuff I’d like to blog about! — and I see quite a few items I’ve been meaning to comment on for a while, but haven’t yet gotten around to. Here’s a selection of them, briefly noted:

• Way back on December 30, the Library of Congress announced the 25 movies it was inducting into the National Film Registry for 2009; my local film critic, Sean Means, had the complete list on his blog, if anyone’s interested. I, of course, was very interested; film preservation is a Big Deal for me, and I always like to see what’s been deemed worthy of keeping around for posterity, especially when they’re movies I personally like. Titles that caught my eye on this year’s list include Dog Day Afternoon, one of Al Pacino memorable early films; the great Tyrone Power swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro; Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (which I confess I’ve never seen, and really need to); the first pairing of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, Pillow Talk; and The Story of G.I. Joe, a 1945 movie in which Burgess Meredith plays one of my personal heroes, the war correspondant Ernie Pyle, based on Pyle’s book of the same name. But the real stand-outs for me this time around are The Incredible Shrinking Man, a genre classic from 1957 that still holds up pretty well in the effects department, and was unusually thoughtful and intelligent in its treatment of a far-out premise; The Muppet Movie, which treated us to the incredible spectacle of Kermit the Frog riding a bicycle (it still makes me smile!); and, most poignantly in the year that saw his death, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the 15-minute short directed by John Landis that pushed the boundaries of what a music video was capable of being. Thriller is probably the pinnacle of that short-lived art form, which has now mostly devolved into concert footage and unimaginative, forgettable promo clips.
• Sean Means also alerted me to the passing of the actress Zelda Rubenstein on January 27. At only 4’3″ and possessing a weirdly childlike voice, it was perhaps inevitable that her filmography would consist mostly of eccentrics in oddball flicks dealing with mental patients and the supernatural. She is best remembered, of course, for playing the psychic who tries to figure out what’s happening to little Carol Ann in Poltergeist, although I also remember her brief appearance in Sixteen Candles. I did not know until reading her obituary that she was an activist for AIDS awareness, and also on behalf of little people (inspired by her experiences with Under the Rainbow, a painfully unfunny comedy about the behind-the-scenes carousing of the Munchkins during the shooting of The Wizard of Oz). Zelda was 76 years old.
• Speaking of Munchkins, one of the final surviving actors who appeared alongside Judy Garland in the Wonderful Land of Oz, Meinhardt Raabe, passed away only a few days ago, on April 9, at the age of 94. He played the Munchkin Coroner who pronounced the Wicked Witch of the East “really most sincerely dead.” In addition to those 13 seconds or so of screentime, he also had a 30-year run as “Little Oscar, the World’s Smallest Chef,” driving the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile around the country. And of course, he’s been a regular at Oz-themed fan conventions for decades. My favorite tribute to him was here; I’ve been trying to find out how many other Munchkins remain, but haven’t been able to track that information down…
• I no longer remember where I found this, but it’s pretty interesting, an essay written by the inimitable Orson Welles in 1955, about how onerous and intrusive the bureaucrats were becoming to the travelling man with all their demands for information and correct behavior when questioned. It makes one wonder what Welles would’ve had to say about the modern-day silliness of the TSA and airport “security theater.” Give it a read; it’s both amusing, and good food for thought.
• And finally, something guaranteed to make Gen-Xers feel old: the Rubik’s Cube, that multicolored torment, er, fad from our early adolescent period has been around for 30 years. Here’s a tribute that includes some information about Erno Rubik and just what the hell he was thinking when he came up with the diabolical thing. (And yes, I’ve still got mine. Two, in fact, one of which is still in its original package. I know, I know…)