(Image: Hisaharu Motoda’s “Neo-Ruins” via Pink Tentacle)

The latest news from Wall Street seems to indicate that a complete financial meltdown is only a few weeks away. Before you violently horde every morsel of food from your local supermarket or begin a hostile take-over of your corner gas station, there are several movies you should watch in order to prepare for life after the downfall of Western civilization. There have been plenty of films in which the world we know is nothing but a burned out shell of its former glory. Nuclear holocaust and virulent plagues are common Earth-clearing disasters, but there’s no reason to think that a global economic collapse would be any less destructive. Let’s not forget that one of history’s most common causes for war is a desperate grab for resources during tough times. So without further ado, seven lessons from the movies, essential for surviving our impending doom:

1. Hoard gasoline!

Plenty of people are already getting a jump on this one, apparently upping demand to the point where falling oil prices are not translating to the pump. If you think waiting 15 minutes in line to buy gas at $4.50 a gallon is bad, watch The Road Warrior again. From the opening sequence where Mel Gibson gingerly harvests every precious ounce of fuel from an abandoned vehicle to the final deadly battle over a tanker truck, it’s clear that in a post-apocalyptic world, gas is gold. Sure, we’re working on becoming less dependent on the stuff, but what good is a Chevy Volt going to do you if the power grid is in shambles?

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• Erin at Steady Diet of Film alerts us to the news (which we might have figured out for ourselves, except that we have a bad habit of being in bars at 11pm on weeknights––we swear, we’re working on cutting back on that) that Medicine for Melancholy star Wyatt Cenac is now a correspondent for The Daily Show. His first segment, in which he attempts to understand primary season through the rubrick of plot developments on Lost, is embedded above. We’ll give you a preview: “A polar bear on a tropical island? There are so many reasons why that’s AMAZING!”
• Stacy Peralta’s was reproached for his lackadaisical sense of style by the gang member subjects of his doc Made in America. He tells Vulture: “These guys don’t step out the house unless they’re dressed really well. In fact, a couple of our subjects took me to task for how I looked. I’d be wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt, and they’d ask me, ‘Do you dress like that every day? You oughta think about how you dress more often.’”
• The MPAA be damned, Ridley Scott might make an uncensored film based on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and the very prospect has filmdrunk oversharing. Concludes a post headlined “BONER ALERT”: “Like all really violent things, it makes me slightly sexually excited.  That’s healthy, right?”

• IFC is expanding their efforts to bring film festival hits to the masses by developing a second video-on-demand label. Called Festival Direct, it will bring international festival favorites directly to cable boxes, skipping the middleman theatrical run afforded films on the IFC FirstTake program. Already on the slate: Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World…, and the Icelandic festival hit Jar City. 
• Roger Avary’s publicist issued a statement yesterday, apologizing for the screenwriter’s role in the accident that killed a friend and seriously injured his wife. “Words cannot express how sorry he is, and this tragic accident will always haunt him,” the statement read in part. Avary is due to be arraigned on charges of vehicular manslaughter on Friday.
• Charlize Theron will star alongside Viggo Mortensen in the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment is producing the film, for distribution by Weinstein subsidiary Dimension.
• Guatemalan Handshake director/Hannah Takes the Stairs co-star Todd Rohal, True/False Film Festival director David Wilson, and IFP’s Amy Dotson are some of the familiar names on the recently-announced Slamdance jury.