• Richard Curnock (1922-2007) - British actor who appears in Paradise. He died February 6, in Stratford, Ontario. (CBC)
• Donfeld (1934-2007) - Oscar-nominated costume designer for Prizzi's Honor, Days of Wine and Roses, Tom Sawyer and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? His other credits include Spaceballs, Viva Las Vegas, The Great Race and the television series Wonder Woman. He had a brief stint as a set director in the mid-'70s. He died February 3, in Los Angeles (LA Times)
• Victor Griffin (c.1918-2007) - Singer, dancer and actor who appears in Annie. He died February 3, in Syosset, New York. (Variety)
• Griffith Jones (1910-2007) - British actor who appears in Olivier's The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France, as well as The Wicked Lady and Miranda. He died January 30. (Telegraph)
• Frankie Laine (1913-2007) - Singer of the title songs to a number of westerns, including 3:10 to Yuma, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Blazing Saddles. He also appears in Blake Edwards' He Laughed Last and Bring Your Smile Along, as well as Meet Me in Las Vegas and Make Believe Ballroom. He died of complications from hip surgery February 6. (LA Times)

Every year the Library of Congress announces that it will shelter 25 films for posterity and here's the list for this year, from Variety. Joining the 450 films currently in the vaults are a range of pictures from features to documentaries. This year's pack includes the 1913 protest film Traffic in Souls, a very early American feature film with a then-stunning budget of $25,000. A film "so fast-moving and so packed with direct and veiled references to the vice trade that it's a wonder audiences could keep pace with it," comments ace silent film historian Kevin Brownlow.

More familiar inductees include recent hits like Blazing Saddles, sex, lies and videotape, Rocky and Halloween. Then you have classics like Notorious, and key works like The Big Trail by Raoul Walsh, The Last Command by Josef von Sternberg, the debut of Rouben Mamoulian, and the first Garbo-Gilbert picture Flesh and the Devil. The rarities are perhaps even more interesting: the early Chinese-American film The Curse of Quon Gwon and long-time experimental filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas' Reminiscence of a Journey to Lithuania. A couple of the entries are performance films: St. Louis Blues (1929), a two-reeler that is the only existing film of Bessie Smith, seen singling the W. C. Handy song. And for more current relevance, the documentary The T.A.M.I. Show. with the late lamented James Brown performing "Night Train" and the Supremes doing "Where Did Our Love Go?" for purpose of comparison with The Dreams in Dreamgirls.

In 1989, Daniel Neman, a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, began counting flatulence jokes in movies, beginning with the lovable cop-and-dog buddy comedy K-9. This year, thanks to Nacho Libre and Click, his list of movies with funny farts has reached a milestone of 100 (that seems surprisingly low). So, to celebrate, he has written a little piece in his paper about the overused gag, which he claims made its first appearance thirty years ago in Blazing Saddles. Basically he tells us what we should already know: flatulence isn't actually funny, especially not after more than 100 movies. So why do filmmakers continue to include flatulence for comedic effect? Neman blames film school, that place where he says future writers and directors learn to copy what has been done before. In fact, according to him, the entire lack of originality in Hollywood these days is because of film school.

Well, I kinda see Neman's point about film students being too obsessed with the filmmakers who came before them, but if film school graduates were actually copying the greats that much, then today's movies would probably be better than they are. Anyway, I went to film school, and I don't recall a class that taught flatulence. Maybe in the ten years that I've been out of school it was added to the curriculum, but I doubt it. The kinds of movies that use fart jokes, except for maybe Blazing Saddles, are just not the kind studied at film school.

So what could be the real reason screenwriters put the gag into their scripts? Easy answer: People still laugh at it. Even if we know it isn't really funny we still sometimes laugh. Especially if we're 10, and exist in the demographic to which Hollywood caters.

[via Fark.com]