Nathan Weinbender

At first glance, “Blancanieves” looks like a gimmick: It’s a Spanish film based loosely on the story of Snow White, and it’s photographed to resemble a black-and-white silent film from the earliest days of narrative cinema. But, like 2011’s mostly silent Best Picture winner “The Artist,” this is the case of convention breeding invention, and director Pablo Berger is artistically liberated by his techniques when most filmmakers would be shackled by them. Spain’s official selection as Best Foreign Film for this year’s Oscars (it wasn’t nominated), “Blancanieves” begins in the tradition of grand, lurid melodramas. In 1920s Seville, a famed bullfighter is gored in the ring, and his pregnant wife goes into labor as she looks on. She dies giving birth, and her husband, now paralyzed, rejects his newborn daughter in grief.

The work of bestselling humorist and Sandpoint native Patrick F. McManus is returning to the stage in the new production “McManus and Me: The First 20 Years.” The show, which makes its Washington state premiere in time for Father’s Day weekend, is the sixth adaptation of McManus’ stories to star Tim Behrens as a one-man cast of colorful characters. Credited as an “indentured actor”– he claims that designation is for tax write-off purposes – Behrens has been bringing McManus’ witty musings to life for the past 20 years. He transforms himself throughout the show to portray the wacky residents of the fictional town of Blight, Idaho, with such wild names as Melba Peachbottom and Rancid Crabtree.

G-Dog is the last nickname you might expect to belong to a guy like the Rev. Greg Boyle, but the reformed gang members he works with have been calling him that for years. A Jesuit priest who received a bachelor’s degree in English from Gonzaga University, Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit program designed to keep the at-risk youth of East L.A. off the streets. (His motto: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”) Boyle and his staff care for nearly 12,000 kids every year, mostly from low-income families susceptible to drugs and gang violence.

Pop culture has never been good at letting things go. It’s always been about hammering reliable formulas into the ground, but in a world of fan fundraisers and online forums, we’re starting to see a new kind of recycling system at work: the resuscitation of long-dead television series inspired by pure cultish devotion.