Stop Smiling, our very favorite regular grab bag of interviews with and mash notes to cultural figures, has an interview with Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner, the singer-guitarist and drummer who for more than thirty years have been the core of Anvil, the Canadian metal band who failed to fully launch into stardom after a few breaks in the early '80s, and who are now enjoying an unlikely late-career boost thanks to the movie Anvil: The Story of Anvil. The documentary, whose L.A. premiere was followed by a live performance attended by the likes of Dustin Hoffman--a sight that the guys liken to playing for the cover of Sgt. Pepper-- has inspired many a kneejerk comparison to This Is Spinal Tap, but the film itself is never mocking of its heroes, and its portrait of a lifelong friendship between two family men whose shared devotion to their music has sometimes been tempered by a fear that they're wasting each other's lives produces as many touching moments as it does comic ones. A labor of love, the movie was made by screenwriter Sacha Gervasi (The Terminal), who, having known the band members when he was sixteen, plowed his Hollywood riches into the movie.

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When Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he was running for governor of California in the wake of the disappointed reaction to the third Terminator movie, a lot of people were quick to make the obvious joke that turning to politics might be a good career move for him; running a state the size of California had to be easier for a guy who was then in his mid-fifties than trying to continue holding up his end in the action-icon game. In fact, his last movie appearance before taking office was a cameo at the start of 2003's The Rundown, in which he seemed to be graciously passing the baton to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. The news that Schwarzenegger has agreed to do another cameo, as himself, in Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables, should probably not be taken as a sign how just bad things have gotten for those who are supposed to be holding the reins out West. The Gov contributed a cameo to the 2004 Around the World in 80 Days, directed by Frank Coraci, a movie that was seen by approximately one-hundred thousandth of the number of people who recently saw Coraci and his leading man, Steve Coogan, making cruel sport of Joaquin Phoenix and Christian Bale. And he can also be seen, briefly and as himself, in a forthcoming Indian film, Kambakkht Ishq, which has an inside-Hollywood story and includes a cameo by...Sylvester Stallone.

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The Library of Congress has announced its annual selections of the twenty-five films chosen to be added to those included in the National Film Registry, on the basis of their "cultural, historic, or aesthetic significance." (They've been doing this for nineteen years now; this year's inductees bring the total up to a neat 500.) As usual, the list features a number of Hollywood classics, including John Huston's caper film The Asphalt Jungle (1950); John Boorman's modern Southern Gothic Deliverance (1972); Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, one of the earliest indictments of the potential rabble-rousing power of television; Erich Von Stroheim's silent feature Foolish Wives (1922); King Vidor's 1929 Hallelujah, an early sound musical with an all-black cast, and the 1961 Broadway musical adaptation Flower Drum Song, an early break away from the tradition of casting Caucasian performers in Asian roles; James Whale's Universal horror classic The Invisible Man (1933), starring the voice of Claude Rains; Nicholas Ray's febrile Western Johnny Guitar (1954); the 1957 On the Bowery, an attempt to fuse documentary locations and non-professional actors in a story of skid row alcoholics; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), an adventure film featuring some of the best work of the special effects master Ray Harryhausen; and the obscure sci-fi B-movie,The Terminator (1984). There are also films that document moments in the careers of legendary performers, such as the 1926 W. C. Fields short So's Your Old Man and the early Buster Keaton two-reeler One Week, and such historical curios as Disneyland Dream (1956), a color home movie of a family trip to Disneyland that provides "a fantastic historical snapshot of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Catalina Island, Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Disneyland in mid-1956"; three year's worth of documentary footage that George Stevens shot during World War II; and a film directed by the late James Blue for the United States Information Agency documenting the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Also included are experiemental and student films such as Len Lye's "scratch" film Free Radicals (1979), Mitchell Block's 1973 No Lies, and Pat O'Neill's "city symphont", Water and Power, which dates from 1989--the first year that the National Registry began to make its selections.

The full list is as follows:

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