Clerks II at Cannes; FL on BoD; Free-Konomics; Pro-Pop-Culture Book Introduction in Progress

A three-day weekend awaits w/plenty of time for chores, movie-watching, reading, blogging, and watermelon eating... Items for this morning:

• Kevin Smith describes his experience ("An 8-minute standing ovation") with the Cannes (a friend of mine used to pronounce it "Cans" and I didn't have the heart to correct him) premiere of Clerks II. Can't wait!
• Foxy Librarian recently watched Burden of Dreams, and had similar thoughts to mine on Fitzcarraldo's similarities to Apocalypse Now. Hey Foxy -- If you haven't seen Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse yet, it's time! (BTW -- Paramount is releasing a 2-DVD set of both Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux in August... As the Amazon commenter said, it's too bad they couldn't have worked it out to include HoD in that set as well.)
• Here's how the authors of Freakonomics handled a situation where a suburban-Chicago school-board member did not like the fact that their book was on some required classoom reading lists. Excerpt: Now that District 214 students are free to read Freakonomics, we thought it might be nice to send some copies their way. If you attend a District 214 school and want a free signed copy of Freakonomics, please send your name and address to FreakonomicsDistrict214@freakonomics.com. We’ll honor the first 50 requests.
• Speaking of popular culture, here's Grant McCracken describing the process of writing the introduction for his upcoming book. Excerpt: The academics and the essayists insisted that popular culture was a corruption, that the consumer was a dupe, that something had gone terribly wrong now that capital and commerce had been allowed to interfere with culture. It was crap as an argument even in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but the intellectuals made it their badge of difference, their cri de coeur, their enduring accusation to the friends of capitalism, their warning to the rest of us... ...They were dead wrong. Popular culture got steadily better.