Blazing Saddles, Fargo, Groundhog Day, Halloween, Notorious, Rocky and sex, lies and videotape are among the 25 films selected this year for inclusion in the National Film Registry, Variety reports. This update to the catalog of "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" films to be preserved in perpetuity also includes the silent fare Flesh and the Devil (the first on-screen pairing of John Gilbert and Greta Garbo) and Tess of the Storm Country (the 1914 feature that made Mary Pickford a star).Before you start grumbling, Liar, Liar, made in 1997, was not yet eligible.read more
Connoisseurs of great, ratings-challenged TV shows thought they'd died and gone to heaven when cable channel Trio introduced its Brilliant But Cancelled programming block back in 2003. Trio unearthed some fascinating pilots that never made it to air, such as a TV version of Fargo with Edie Falco, and critically acclaimed but short-lived series such as East Side/West Side with George C. Scott. When Trio was shut down after NBC bought parent company Universal, it seemed that the cool concept had bitten the dust. But the channel's creator Lauren Zread more
Question: That German guy in the Volkswagen "Unpimp My Ride" commercials looks very familiar — I think I've seen him in movies, but I can't place him. Can you help?
Answer: The actor in Volkswagen's "Unpimp My Ride" commercials is Swedish-born actor/director Peter Stormare, whom most people first noticed in Fargo (1996). He was one of the two hired kidnappers; the other was Steve Buscemi. He's also in TV's Prison Break, playing a hard-ass Italian prisoner. Stormare's forte is playing freaky, which the Volkswagen ads exploit to the hilt: I think my two favorite among his many bizarro roles are pornographer Dino Velvet in 8mm (1999) and the Devil himself in Constantine (2005). But I'll watch him in just about anything, because you can always count on his not-of-this-Earth spin.
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