Has any television show or movie ever cursed the film prospects of actors the way Saved by the Bell has? Can you imagine anyone involved in the show doing anything but living in the Indiana/California high school known as Bayside? No. You can't.

We'll grant Tiffani(-Amber) Thiessen some cred for vamping it up as Valerie Malone on 90210, and Liz Berkley, no one's faulting you for trying to shake off your SBTB image. M-P Gosselar & Mario Lopez, as much as you blew us away with NYPD and Pacific Blues, respectively, Dead Man on Campus and Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story are one thing: awful.com/horrible. Lark Voorhies - you got engaged to Martin Lawrence and still couldn't even get into one of his mediocre movies! As for Dustin Diamond, we'll let him off the hook this time. [Of the series' stars, only Dennis Haskins managed to do anything of note - and that was sit next to me at the coffee shop in the South Bend (IN) airport. Unfortunately, people tell me this doesn't count as a "movie".]

Damn, I’ve got to get to Russia, soon.

For those of us more interested in the section of the Expedia email revealing what plane is making the trip than, say, that the flight leaves at 6:30 in the morning, this week’s announcement of the conglomeration of all Russian aircraft companies was a call to action.

Admit it, you've spent more than a few moments browsing your life away on IMDB.com. Yeah, yeah, you started trying to find out who directed Casablanca. But you ended up looking at what the spawn of Joe Piscopo is working on. And that's ok.

This feature will compile those utterly useless tidbits of information for you, so next time you're having a conversation with someone, you can say, "Did you know someone made a documentary about Stephen Tobolowsky?"

I run for several reasons, none of which involve my health.

For one thing, running is useful when late. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie that I didn’t run to. This was especially the case during a ten-day visit to Paris where I was often running to movies, from other movies. (If you’re wondering why I would be doing this during a ten-day sojourn in Paris, you should read David Sedaris’s chapter, “The City of Light in the Dark” in his book Me Talk Pretty One Day.)

For another thing, I often run for lack of teleportation. That is to say, teleportation has not been invented yet, to my knowledge, and it is sometimes unacceptable to me to think about how much time I am wasting in getting from one place to another. By running, I can speed up the interim period, and then pretend that it never existed.

Here’s why I bring this up.

One of my dream jobs is to curate for an art cinema. Of course, it would have to be the art cinema du jour of a major city, frequented by the filmmakers whose films I program. Until then, I will use this as a forum for my series ideas. If any curators out there see something they like, contact me at jeff@cosmodromemag.com.

CINEMA NO MOSS

Until fairly recently, artists and art critics have viewed color as a secondary mode of expression, associating it with superficiality and instability. In the nineteenth century, realist painters contained color within the boundaries of line, arguing that this is the natural order of things. In the 1940s and ‘50s, realist filmmakers tended to use black and white for its associations with rawness, grittiness, and “the real.” David Batchelor has called this history one of “chromophobia,” wherein artists and critics fear color for its associations with the foreign, the superficial, and the unstable.