The American political/cultural landscape is To Sir, With Love.

Obama is Sidney Poitier.

The tea partiers and the far-right wingnuts are the classroom rabble.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats are the other teachers, cowering in the faculty lounge, willing to put up with the abuse until retirement age.

Next week’s special SIFF Cinema screening of Lynn Shelton’s $5 Cover: Seattle has a $12-$15 cover. In other news, the cinema is a world of make believe.

Of all the millions in Twilight tourism and merch sales to young vampire fans, the real-life native tribe depicted in the books essentially gets nothing.

Even before the Apple iPad announcement, organizations have been preparing to enter a new era of paid online content. One of them is On the Boards, Seattle’s own bastion of modern dance and performance art. It’s just launched OntheBoards.tv, with pay-per-view streams of live performances that just don’t get around to every town.

Add one more vanished institution, up north-way. Snohomish County’s last drive-in cinema, which closed for the season last September. won’t reopen. Instead, the site will become a Swedish Health Services emergency room.

“Don’t you agree with me that, in some things, the old fashioned ways are best?”

This line from Barbarella might describe the mini-todo over SIFF Cinema’s current “Sci-Fi on Blu-Ray” series.

They’re showing 12 Monkeys, Planet of the Apes, 2001, Logan’s Run, and The Man Who Fell to Earth in the modern hi-def home DVD format, projected onto a theater size screen.

The nice folks at the Northwest Film Forum, noting that Blu-Ray’s hi-def is still lower-def than film itself, responded by quickly scheduling a 35mm screening of Planet of the Apes this Thursday (Jan. 28), followed by a panel discussion “about the future of film exhibition.”

(In other NWFF news, critic Dennis Lim named Policebeat (one of the productions NWFF helped organize, and one of the films that kickstarted the Seattle filmmaking scene) one of the Sundance Festival’s “top 10 fiction films of the decade.”)

As you may know, film reviewing legend Roger Ebert can no longer speak, following several surgeries in recent years. Turns out he can no longer eat or drink either. But that doesn’t stop him from remembering the great tastes of his past.

The Muppet Movie was just added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry!

It’s the madcap return of the MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got a great house for sale at its 2007 price.

From the lesser Washington, the Wash. Post opinion section lists the “Worst Ideas of the Decade.” Among them: The battle of Bora Bora (you know, where Bin Laden escaped), TV dancing competitions, anti-vaccination conspiracy scares, Bush’s crony capitalism disguised as “compassionate conservatism,” and “world-is-flat movies” (Crash, Babel).

The Metacritic gang has compiled a list of the decade’s best-reviewed movies. My ol’ high school classmate Brad Bird gets numbers 3 and 26.

Jim Windolf, writing in Vanity Fair, has a lot of frowner words to say about America’s recent obsession with cuteness. And he even comes close to understanding it.

This comes when Windolf goes into the artistic roots of Astro Boy creator Tezuka Osamu, one of anime/manga’s first popularizers. Osamu made some big-eyed boyish heroes and placed them in awe-inspiringly beautiful settings. But his stories were informed by his lifelong obsessions with two related, real-life horrors—war and environmental destruction.

The current crop of ironic image artists displaying at places such as Roq La Rue take Osamu’s schtick a step or two further. These ladies and gents depict superficially cloying animals and children as portals for the viewers, drawing them into tableaux scenes portraying a full range of powerful emotions.

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody lists his own top films of the decade. They’re a bunch of foreign and Amerindie snob-appeal faves, plus Knocked Up.

I’ve only seen 23 of Time Out New York’s top 50 movies of the decade.

Both Canlis and the Sorrento Hotel’s bar now have special cocktails named after characters in the Twilight novels and movies. Sorry, but  this is the only Cullen I’ve ever admired.