Here’s a great idea: movies at airports.

Changi Airport – which has a butterfly garden, free Wi-Fi, a giant indoor slide, lounge chairs with built in alarm clocks and pretty must everything a traveler on a long layover could want – also has free movies theaters on site.

Open 24 hours, the movie screening area in Terminal 2 features movies available on the Fox Movies Premium website. The theater in Terminal 3 shows six different movies throughout the day. The line up right now includes Captain America, the Green Lantern, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Ice Age, Johnny English Reborn and Kung Fu Panda 2.

Coming soon: an IMAX theater at Hong Kong International Airport.

Scheduled to open this spring, this will be the first IMAX theater at an airport.

Admission will not be free. However, “Cinema-goers will be fulfilled by the extraordinary enjoyment when watching 2D or 3D movies,” the airport announced on Facebook.

There are a lot of things you can do while hanging around the airport: eat, drink, snooze, shop, read, talk to a stranger or maybe get some work done.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could also take in a movie?

If you happen to be spending any time at the Toronto Pearson International Airport between now and September 19th, you can do just that.

The 35th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is underway, and from now through September 19th, 2010 travelers passing through the airport can watch TIFF movie trailers in small pop-up theaters.

The 10 X 10 foot screening rooms are set up near gate 140 in Terminal 1 and near gate C35 in Terminal 3. Better yet – each evening theater-patrons can watch the trailers while munching on free popcorn.

Toronto Pearson proud to support TIFF from GTAA Toronto Pearson on Vimeo.

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The process took quite a bit longer than it might have because I kept clicking on links at these museum websites and, well, you know how that goes… a half hour later I’d get back to the task at hand.

So for Museum Monday this week, I’ll just share a few of the links that caught my eye.

First up: The Stafford Museum, in Weatherford, Oklahoma.

Named in honor of four-time astronaut Thomas P. Stafford, a post on this museum’s site sent me to a Gizmodo posting of a half-dozen awe-inspiring time lapse videos from space.

Here’s one:

And I can’t even remember now which museum site sent me to this video about jobs in aviation – circa 1947 – but I had to stop and watch the entire thing.

Have you visited a great aviation or space-related museum lately? Share your favorite here and it may be featured on a future edition of Museum Monday.

Seventeen artists have created “custom moving image work” (video art) for the two giant installations in the TBIT arrivals area. One screen is a 25-foot monitor grid; the other screen links 58 monitors together in a 90-foot long serpentine filmstrip.

Filmstrip video screen at LAX

What will you see?  The topics and themes are pretty far-ranging, but here are just two of the descriptions that seem especially appropriate for the airport:

Current by Patty Chang and Noah Klersfeld:

“Filmed in the baggage handling area of LAX. two kaleidoscopic videos play back to back.  First, 25 screens show the repeated image of a houseplant traveling on conveyor belts from the check-in counter to the baggage sorter. Then, the 25 screens simultaneously show 25 different versions of that journey.  Order sits beside chaos.”

To and From LAX, by Chip Lord, includes:

“footage from airports around the world to represent the global network and reflect the travel patterns to and from LAX. From amongst the universal spaces of travel emerge the emotions of greeting, boredom, and excitement as 25 destinations are represented.”

Altogether the new video installations at LAX offers three hours of artist-made material. Enough to entertain you and your kids through a long delay. Enough to make you want to volunteer to pick up a friend at the airport. And maybe enough to make you schedule a long layover, so you can say you went to LA for dinner and a movie – at the airport.

(Photos courtesy:Jay Berkowitz/LAWA)

“Atlanta’s famed Loew’s Grand Theater on Peachtree Street employed full-time artists to design and paint posters for the films shown there. Artists based their work — which they created in media such as oil, watercolors and chalk — on photo stills and publicity images from the movies.”

The posters come from the collection of Herb Bridges, a movie memorabilia collector who specializes in “Gone with the Wind” items and who worked as an usher at the Loew’s theater when he was a teenager.

(No one is walking off with this bag!)

The story out of Phoenix about a couple who managed to steal more than 1,000 pieces of luggage from the baggage claim carousels at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is alarming, for sure.

But we shouldn’t be surprised.  While many airports have some sort of security in the bag claim area, the job of making sure passengers walk off with only their bags is the responsility of each airline. And in most airports, airlines haven’t been actively monitoring bag match-ups for years.

I’m working on a story about this for my column next week on MSNBC.com, and would love to hear from you if you have any first hand experience to share.

In the meantime, here are some other travel tidbits you might find useful:

Through November, the folks at 3M are once again hosting “privacy havens” at several busy airports around the country.

This year, you’ll find these quiet spots at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and in Terminal 8 at New York’s JFK International Airport. (Exact locations here).

On the busy days right before and after Thanksgiving, these “privacy havens” will also be offering free massages and free Wi-Fi.

And two sweepstakes you may want to enter:

To coincide with the new movie “Up in the Air,” with George Clooney, American Airlines is having an auction and a sweepstakes.  You’ll need to use AAdvantage miles to bid on travel, movie and “experience-” related items in the auction, but entering the contest, which has prizes that include a trip to Los Angeles and 260,000 AAdvantage miles, is free. You’ll just need to watch the trailer and then enter your details.  (Auction bids and sweepstakes entries must be in by Jan 5, 2010.)

And Hilton (which seems to have a part in the Up in the Air movie) is also having an Up in the Air sweepstakes.  You can enter by booking a Hilton stay, but if you’re not heading out on the road before January 18, 2010 you can enter for free by “sending your hand-printed name, address and phone number on 3” x 5” paper to Hilton “Up In The Air” Sweepstakes Alternate Entry, P.O. Box 8600, Westport, CT 06888”

Good luck!

Through August 15^th, 2009, the airline is also having a photography competition and is asking people to send in photographs on the theme “Air France livery: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow“.

I know the contest is open to everyone, but I can’t tell you much more than that because so far I’ve only found instructions written in French. I can tell you, though, that the top prize is a Breitling watch worth €3,800 (about US $5,100) and that other prizes include Air France flights and Airbus A380 simulator experiences.

Instead, we often watch films in-flight.  And as I wrote here a while back, Delta Air Lines is joining with the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and showing five short films that have been chose as finalists in the airline’s Fly-In Movies competition. The videos weren’t up yet when I first wrote about, but now they are.  You can watch the films on-board or on-line and vote on your favorite by April 12.

Have a little Oscar fever?

Then check out the possible Academy Award-winners of the future on an airplane – or on-line – courtesy of Delta’s Fly-In Movies.

Five short film finalists were selected by programmers of the upcoming 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and will be shown, for free, from March 1 through April 12 on Delta Air Lines flights with personal, seatback in-flight entertainment systems (Delta on Demand).

Not flying anywhere between March 1 and April 12?

The films will also be on-line.

You can even vote your favorite film.

The five films include:

* “Cold Calls” by Jack Daniel Stanley: In this 80′s spoof, a woman receives increasingly bizarre phone solicitations from an obsessive telemarketer.
* “Eight Percent” by Alexander Poe: Two high school exes meet up ten years later on an awkward date.
* “Gerald’s Last Day” by Justin Rasch and Shel Rasch: Gerald the dog has been scheduled for his termination by the dog pound at 5 p.m. Can he seduce a potential adopter before his time runs out?
* “The Green Film” by Andrew Williamson: It’s not easy being green-especially when you’re a filmmaker. So how do you make the greenest movie of all time? Watch and learn.
* “Locks” by Ryan Coogler: Dante wears his hair in dreadlocks. When he goes to the local barbershop, we see into his heartbreaking home life and learn how big his heart is.

Travelers no doubt did a double-take this afternoon when they spotted a pink-panther in the atrium at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) this afternoon.

But never fear: it was just a promotion for The Pink Panther 2, the sequel to the movie that starred Steve Martin as the bumbling French police detective, Inspector Jacques Clouseau.