The problem with American shows about cars is that they're so enthusiastic. They're all, "Ooo, look at my fast car, isn't it pretty, and here's the list of the show's sponsors who will sell you enough spare parts to ensure you'll spend weekend after weekend in your garage, covered in grease and utterly miserable." Thank the BBC for the grand British institution that is Top Gear, whose tenth season is now on DVD (BBC Warner, $39.98). It's less a car show, more an excuse for three overgrown schoolboys to drive fast enough to scare themselves and then mock each other. There's Jeremy Clarkson (the tall, sardonic one), Richard Hammond (the short, enthusiastic one) and James May (better known as Captain Slow, a man that could get lost on a circular track.) They are unified by their fearless dedication to fast cars and comfortable slacks. Oh, and their seething hatred of Volkswagen Beetles. It's officially an institution. Now in its twelfth season in the UK, that means it's run longer than Monty Python's Flying Circus. And, whisper it quietly, but it's arguably a lot funnier. Although that's not always deliberate: After all three hosts spending a sweltering week driving uncomfortable super cars around the wrong bits of Europe, Clarkson proudly proclaims, "Top Gear: Ambitious, but rubbish!"

In conjunction with the Harry Ransom Center's ongoing exhibit The Persian Sensation: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the West (on display through Aug. 2), the HRC kicks off the Orientalist Silents film series Thursday night. The first two films of the free series feature two of silent cinema's most adored leading men, The Sheik's Rudoph Valentino (whom H.L. Mencken called "catnip to women") and The Thief of Bagdad's Douglas Fairbanks. But it's the last film in the series – the one without any actors at all – that'll knock your socks off. Lotte Reiniger's shadow art film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an adaptation of The Arabian Nights, is believed to be the first ever full-length animated film. A visual stunner, Achmed is all bendy bodies and filigreed landscapes. And remarkably expressive, too, considering the entire film is rendered in (a sometimes very creepy) silhouette.

The Sheik screens Thursday, June 11, at 7pm. For more info, go here.

The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz Blog is reporting that Richard Linklater's latest project – which was billed as a sort of spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused –  has been put on hold: "We still think it's very marketable. It's just has to go on the shelf for now," said a rep for the director and his production banner Detour. And if Linklater has to go on the shelf, what of all the slackers? Linklater, who just celebrated the DVD release of his Augie Garrido doc Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach in town last week, will receive the Maverick Award at the Woodstock Film Festival in September. He'll also screen his latest film Me and Orson Welles, which premiered to good reviews at the Toronto Film Festival in 2008, but was one of many films there to walk away without a buyer. Word is, Linklater will be self-distributing the film come fall.

This week’s free web-based game is just for kicks. If “kicks” for you is pulling the supports of curiously designed structures and deciding the fate of an insufferably waving child standing unsteadily above the water. Just me? So be it, but I’ve spent hours pouring over which supports can and can’t be removed to keep this brat afloat.

Sometimes I just yank obviously necessary pieces just to watch the kid flounder unhappily (stand down breeders, he has a floatie, besides, it’s not like I’m throwing toddlers in the pool like these parents).

I recommend muting the infernal techno quickly and making your way through the game’s 30 levels by pulling just one support to get to subsequent challenges. After that, go for score and see how many supports can be pulled before the kid’s frown turns right side up.

Click here to play.

If you crave more Newtonian physics based games – making gravity and inertia your enemy, and sharpening your engineering skills – I recommend http://www.physicsgames.net.

Enjoy.

In anticipation of Goran Bregovic & His Wedding and Funeral Orchestra's June 17 show at the Bass Concert Hall, Austin Public Library will be screening five films that have been scored by the Balkan composer, including 1994's Arizona Dream. We haven't seen it in years, but we remember rather loving Emir Kusturica's trippy little comedy, which stars Johnny Depp, Vincent Gallo, Lili Taylor, Faye Dunaway, and Jerry Lee Lewis. The clip below, which combines context-free scenes from the film with Bregovic's "This Is a Film," gives you a pretty good indicator of the film's many surreal charms. That's Iggy Pop, by the way, sounding off about a man and a fish. The film series kicks off tonight at 6pm at APL's Manchaca Road Branch with Time of the Gypsies. Go here for more on the series. Note: The films take place at different branches every week, but all screenings are free.

Trinidad, which screened at last year's aGLIFF, premieres tomorrow night on Showtime. The doc, by PJ Raval and Jay Hodges, is about Trinidad, CO, and its transgendered population (it's called the 'sex change capital of the world'). Go here to read the Chronicle's August '08 interview with PJ and here to check out its airtimes on Showtime. It will also be available On Demand from June 3 to June 30.

If you’re not still trying to transport your way to the elusive cake at the end of the deadly, deadly tunnel that was last week’s waste of time, Portal, then perhaps the four iterations of Shift will keep you busy.

Like Portal, Shift’s controls are easy: left and right keys to move and spacebar to jump. But instead of portals to help you achieve your goals you have the ability to flip the x-axis and turn what was negative space into positive space, in other words the black floor and white space becomes the black space and the white floor. This switch turns chasms into skylights and spiky ceilings into death drops.

The original game shouldn’t be too much of a struggle, but Shift 2 ups the ante by adding the y-axis into the mix making strategies more complex and difficult to visualize. Shift 3 and the recently released Shift 4 do little to improve the game, including a map system that is more frustrating than rewarding.

Click here to play the original and you can go from there.

Let’s hope Shift 5 adds another dimension making for one trippy, interactive M.C. Escher painting.

Enjoy.

Congrats are in order for longtime Austin animator and former Gals Panic frontman Lance "Fever" Myers, whose work on Superdeluxe.com we covered way back in January. At the time, Superdeluxe had been engulfed and devoured by Adult Swim, leaving Myers short series The Ted Zone high and dry. Since then, Myers and co-conspirator L.B. Deyo have been hard at work on their squeaky-new animation webiste, TheVideoTwo.com, which features both animated and live-action shorts scrupulously designed to blow your mind. Now comes word that Myers' short Skip and Lester: Here's the Stapler If You Need It has been chosen to be a part of the Houston Film Commission's 2009 Texas Filmmaker's Showcase, which will include a screening at the L.A. Film Festival on June 26. Woo-hoo, right? As if that weren't enough to make Myers' summer, um, funner, the animator also sends word that he's signed on with London-based online distribution/representation outfit Future Shorts, which bills itself as "the largest short film network in the world." Three of Myers short films -- Skip and Lester, Subsidized Fate, and (our all-time favorite, check it out after the jump) The Astronomer -- will be officially repped and screened by the online giant. Congratulations Mr. Fever!

Certainly it comes at little surprise, given the near-universal harshness of the reviews, that Jim Jarmusch's latest, The Limits of Control, is vacating Austin after a mere one-week run. This Thursday, May 28, will be the last day to catch a screening at the Arbor Theatre. Consider making Limits a priority because I'm here to tell you that all the naysayers are flat-out wrong. Distributor Focus Features has probably already given up on garnering any more business in the hinterlands after the poor showings the film had in its New York and L.A. debut and decided to cut its losses. Since no advance screenings were held in Austin for critics, I caught the movie over the weekend. Yes, the film is dreamy and enigmatic, but is by no means as ponderous and abstruse as many of the reviews have made it out to be.