Nobody likes a private investigation firm that rats out iffy occupants of rent-controlled/rent-stabilized apartments. But at least these hired snoops are good for the occasional false-identity anecdote:

[Investigator Shane] Williams chimed in about a building where the illegal tenant listed his apartment under the name O. B. Juan KNobi.

Could it be that George Lucas is surreptitiously subletting a pad in some pre-war building downtown? Talk about a disturbance in The Force…

I suppose this is an inflection point in entertainment media: Hollywood’s favorite stock-sound effect, The Wilhelm Scream, is increasingly finding its way into today’s videogames.

Next thing you know, the gaming studios will get even more cinematic and start using the same newspaper prop over and over.

The American Psychological Association apparently feels that we’re due for a Seduction of the Innocent Part Two, with modern-day movie superheroes as the corrupters of young boys.

“There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic book superhero of yesterday,” said psychologist Sharon Lamb, PhD, distinguished professor of mental health at University of Massachusetts-Boston. “Today’s superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he’s aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity. When not in superhero costume, these men, like Iron Man, exploit women, flaunt bling and convey their manhood with high-powered guns.”

The comic book heroes of the past did fight criminals, she said, “but these were heroes boys could look up to and learn from because outside of their costumes, they were real people with real problems and many vulnerabilities,” she said.

Somehow, I think that Stan Lee is eating this up.

Kudos to New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott, who decoded the I’m-quitting saga of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater in a pop-cultural context:

How many see the resemblance between Steven Slater of #jetblue and Stephen Stucker, who played the sassy Johnny character in “Airplane”?

Sure enough, the resemblance is uncanny. I would have run side-by-side headshots of Steven and Stephen, but I couldn’t find decent enough photos of them (not surprisingly for Stucker, who’s been dead for a quarter-century). But it’s there. The fact that they are/were both gay probably also contributes to the similarity.

It also doesn’t hurt that Slater’s real-life meltdown could have been scripted right out of Airplane!. And by the way, don’t call me Shirley.

It’s been exactly 15 years since the release of controversial film Kids, which offered up this grit-core imagery of misspent Manhattan youth:

The plot seems inconsequential compared to some of the set pieces: the opening shots of the ‘Virgin Surgeon’ Telly deflowering an impossibly young looking girl; Caspar beating a man twice his age with his skateboard; Harold Hunter slapping his penis between his thighs in a public pool. It was crude, yet compelling — Kids felt authentic and thus gained importance because of its perceived authenticity. The lives these 13-to-17-year-olds lived seemed real. Janet Maslin of the then particularly dreary New York Times called it a “wake up call to the world”—this was then touted in the trailer.

“Seemed real” was key. Even though it was obviously a scripted movie, the mannerisms and body language of many of the young players were enough to lull you into thinking you were catching snippets of a demented documentary. The devouring of doomed children theme was, of course, provocative enough.

And maybe, toward the end of New York City socio-cultural nadir, that realism was too much to bear:

It seems that in many ways the city seems to have forgotten the film, just as many of those involved in the film also seem happy to forget it. Some might expect some sort of celebration of the 15th anniversary of the film, but few seem to be talking. ([Director] Larry Clark’s agent did not respond to inquiries.) [Writer] Harmony Korine has moved away from the realism of that film’s concept and execution, settling most recently on a bizarre faux-realism in his faux-documentary Trash Humpers. “It was not a movie I was dying to tell,” he has said of Kids. And our “Sassy” intern, Chloe Sevigny, has since said that she can’t bear to watch the film, and that she doesn’t like the movie much.

It was a landmark film, but I’m not sure what’s to be gained from a retrospective right now. It works well as a period piece, its shock value intact; in that way, it speaks for itself. The movie itself is teen-aged right now, and that’s enough. Maybe another 15 years of perspective is needed for a substantial look back.

I had thought that the model in that York Peppermint Pattie commercial looked familiar: It’s Alexi from IMBOYCRAZY.COM!

And this is that commercial, spliced together with Requiem for a Dream:

I think the extreme closeup on the pupil in both video-works was the inspirational hook. How else to draw a line between mint-flavoring and heroin? And the chop-quick cut scenes complete the parallels. Well done.

Not that Alexi endorses the smack habit. But she does encourage you to tan it, in the event that you can’t tone it. Yeah.

This funny quip has been making the rounds on Twitter this week, and I can’t think of a more apt summation of The Twilight Saga than this:

Dear Confused Teen Girls: Someone who sparkles and won’t have sex with you isn’t a vampire; it’s a gay guy.

Disheartening to realize that that dreamy bloodsucker is really a something-else-sucker. But on the bright side, those teenage girls can emulate their sexless fantasies with the nearest available gayboy.

On another tack, here’s another interpretation of Team Edward versus Team Jacob:

In the war between Team Necrophilia and Team Bestiality, I am Sweden.

Funny how a whole new pop-cultural perspective can be gained in a mere 140 characters.

I’m watching Marie Antoinette on Sundance Channel.

I dare you to not love the alt-rock soundtrack. Completely anachronistic to the movie’s setting in 18th-Century royal France, yet all the more memorable for that incongruity. From the opening strains of Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It”, through to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy”, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Hong Kong Garden”, and New Order’s “Ceremony”, it’s hard to imagine this film outside of a music-driven narrative.

The problem of leisure, indeed.

Today I turn 39. And the question before me is an unconventional one:

Just how many Caddyshack-inspired t-shirts should one man own?

I have my friend Kirby to thank for that puzzler. Last year, he sent me a nice little Bushwood Country Club tee, which I got a chuckle out of. Perhaps going with what works, this week he sent me, yes, another Bushwood-adorned short-sleever. Different color and logo, of course, but still, with “Bushwood” prominently displayed, along with the movie’s insider joke-tagline, “Some people just don’t belong”.

I appreciate the thought, of course. But really, two Caddyshack shirts for the summer wardrobe? People will start to talk. Not to mention that it’s a bit dated. Not everyone is familiar with a thirty-year-old movie, classic comedy though it may be — just ask any middle-aging corporate cog. To me, it looks to be easily taken out of context. So, really, I’m hesitant to wear this new shirt in public.

I’ll certainly not wear it to my birthday celebration dinner tonight, at NINJA New York. As gimmicky as that maze-adventure-as-restaurant is, showing up in a pop-culturally ironic t-shirt won’t aid anything.

I see that upcoming new release Grown Ups features Kevin James in the role of The Fat Guy (not really his character’s name, but it might as well be).

Meanwhile, the rest of this comedy’s main-character ensemble is: Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Rob Schneider. Those four share a common history as former cast-members of “Saturday Night Live” — in fact, they were all on the show at roughly the same time.

That background makes James the odd-man-out. In more ways than one: I can’t look at this movie’s lineup and not think that another “SNL” alum from the same era, the late Chris Farley, would have slotted into this project perfectly. Farley is, in essence, the missing ingredient in this de facto “SNL” reunion.

Not that Farley, had he survived, would have made this flick look any less sucky than it now does. The domestication of former frat-boy comics is predictable enough, but it doesn’t guarantee any laughs. Not even with a substitute fat schlub.

The discovery in New Zealand of several long-lost American movies from the silent-film era is interesting because of the dumb-luck logistical reason for these surviving prints’ existence:

Many foreign films remained in New Zealand after their commercial lives were over because the studios didn’t think the return shipping was worth the expense. “It’s one of the rare cases where the tyranny of distance has worked in our and the films’ favor,” [New Zealand Film Archive manager of corporate services Steve] Russell said.

By virtue of global location, New Zealand was the final destination for the distribution of physical media, like film reels, from America and Europe. So the end of the developed-world market ended up becoming the de facto storage archive for now-historic celluloid copies. Geography meets posterity.

That “tyranny of distance” seems to be a crucial factor in tracking down old films, and probably other mass-media artifacts from the early 20th Century. The recent restoration of Metropolis from a recovered copy in Argentina is further evidence. Archivists better book their tickets for the Southern Hemisphere and other remote locales…

Much like the much-reused Wilhelm Scream sound effect, movie and television productions seemingly pass around the very same for-show-only newspaper:

Someone on Reddit recently put together a compilation of photos from various television shows, commercials and movies, showing how one newspaper prop gets around and is reused, and reused again. I don’t know the story behind this prop newspaper, but I assume it was created as a royalty free prop for television shows. Somewhere along the line, the prop became a reoccurring gag between propmasters.

See a small sampling for yourself, below. The giveaway is that headshot photo of the woman, along with the surrounding headlines and blocktext:

I suppose this could be an elaborately Photoshopped bit of fakery, but I’m prepared to believe it’s truly the incestuous laziness of Hollywood on display. I will say that, based on my own indulgence of old TV shows, this much-copied broadsheet probably didn’t come into use until the mid-1980s. That’s the era of at least a couple of the screenshots below: “Married with Children” and “Doogie Howser, M.D.”. I’ve paid attention to the onscreen newspapers in older 1970s reruns, and noticed that some of the legible headlines were often relevant to the news of that time period, which hints that those shows might have used real daily editions.

The larger joke: That such video entertainment includes characters that still read newspapers, given that dwindling behavior in real life. Rather than update their bag of tricks, Hollywood’s propmasters can just wait until print newspapers die out altogether, and the problem will solve itself.

Somehow, it’s taken some two years for the restored full-length, two-and-a-half hour version of Fritz Lang’s signature silent film Metropolis to hit theaters.

And what will hit the screen will be, apparently, a wholly different movie:

For example, the “Thin Man,” who in the standard version appears to be a glorified butler to the city’s all-powerful founder, turns out instead to be a much more sinister figure, a combination of spy and detective. The founder’s personal assistant, who is fired in an early scene, also plays a greater role, helping the founder’s idealistic son navigate his way through the proletarian underworld.

The cumulative result is a version of “Metropolis” whose tone and focus have been changed. “It’s no longer a science-fiction film,” said Martin Koerber, a German film archivist and historian who supervised the latest restoration and the earlier one in 2001. “The balance of the story has been given back. It’s now a film that encompasses many genres, an epic about conflicts that are ages old. The science-fiction disguise is now very, very thin.”

I don’t know if the de-emphasis of the scientifictional theme is a plus, especially for such an iconic production. But Metropolis‘ chief influence has always been more in the broad strokes, especially visual, than the detailed narrative. Partly that’s because it’s been fairly inaccessible to modern audiences. But mainly, it’s because the central theme of man versus machine, self versus society, is timelessly relateable; so the details hardly matter.

Unlike last year, I didn’t spend today wondering why Star Wars Day falls on the fourth day of May.

So I commemorated the Force free of doubt. But I did heed this cautionary advice:

Just don’t celebrate enough to have a revenge of the fifth.

Thus, the above image of Sith Lord Darth Vader, rockin’ his iPod. The ways of the Force are mysterious indeed.

In the grand tradition of Hollywood’s spectacularly-destructive edifice envy, New York City gets an 8-bit beatdown in Patrick Jean’s short film, “Pixels”:

The old coin-op characters never looked so good. I particularly liked how the Tetris blocks conspired to drop-wedge onto the skyscrapers, destroying them floor-by-floor via the game’s horizontal-row completion. My second-favorite is the Breakout paddle pulverizing the Brooklyn Bridge, appropriately brick-by-brick. And I was glad to see representation by Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders in this playful carnage. Bonus image: A flyby view, about 1:21 in, of the Atari logo on one of the buildings in the Manhattan skyline.

I just wanna know who was holding the joystick while this videogamed assault was running wild. And what his/her final high score was.

As many times as I’ve seen and re-seen Crimes and Misdemeanors, I ought to know the essence of the final scene’s philosophy-professor voiceover by heart:

We’re all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale; most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices.

It’s a penetrating quote because it’s unavoidably true: You can’t separate yourself from your actions, especially to the extent that each decision cumulatively leads to the next. A lifetime’s running tally results in your very being. That director Woody Allen demonstrates this dynamic with equal parts comedy and tragedy proves its veracity.

Now that Green Day is on Broadway with “American Idiot – The Musical”, the obvious diss has been dropped ad nauseam: That this most un-punk of moves officially disqualifies the band from any disestablishmentarian punk-rock coolness they might still claim.

I’ll take it a step further: Green Day as fodder for a Broadway musical puts them in the same league as ABBA. Especially considering the premature talk of a movie adaptation for “Idiot”. From here on out, I don’t think I can listen to any Green Day song without it bringing to mind the Swedish supergroup, too. (And I actually like a certain degree of ABBA, too.)

Can’t get any less punk than that. Mamma Mia, you fake-cockney accenting bitches.

A new so-bad-it’s-good cult classic is born, out of last year’s Sundance Film Festival of all places. Birdemic: Shock and Terror is the realization of one man’s cinematic vision, bad spelling and all:

Evan Husney, who now works for the independent distributor Severin Films, was also at Sundance in 2009, where he spotted [director James] Nguyen driving a beat-up sport utility vehicle decorated with a prop eagle and fake blood, and blaring bird noises from its stereo.

“On the side of his car,” Mr. Husney said, “he had spelled the name of his own movie wrong. He had spelled it ‘Bidemic,’ without the R.”

Intrigued, Mr. Husney met Mr. Nguyen at a sparsely attended “Birdemic” screening. The movie, Mr. Husney said, looked “like a Super Nintendo game,” adding, “It was, like, the funniest thing I had ever seen in my entire life.”

I keep flubbing the film title myself, thinking it’s “Birdicide”; considering the backstory, I guess I shouldn’t feel bad about mangling it. Maybe I subconsciously think that “Birdicide” is more suggestive of violence, and less avian-flu redolent, than “Birdemic”. Or “Bidemic”, for that matter (which sounds like some kind of disease afflicting, or afflicted by, Vice President Joe Biden).

As for the videogame comparison, I’ll go a couple of steps further back in time: The swooping buzzards pictured above remind me less of Hitchcock’s The Birds and more of the old birds of prey from the coin-op classic “Phoenix”. Only less threatening. Even 8-bit arcade fare probably trumps the not-so-special effects in this flick.

From here, any building buzz for tonight’s Oscars ceremony has been pretty well displaced by the Cablevision-Disney blackout of the broadcast in the tri-state area.

But, all told, disgruntled Cablevision subscribers shouldn’t feel that bad. Because in an indirect way, the loss of some 3.1 million viewers dovetails with the overall lessening of impact that an Academy Award nomination has had on the box office this year:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doubled the number of [Best Picture] nominees this year in hopes of drawing more attention to more movies. But the revenue bump for this year’s crop is less than the one enjoyed by last year’s five best-picture hopefuls.

And of that $135 million, all but about $24 million went to the one film in least need of an Oscar bump: the record-smashing “Avatar.” The figures were generated between the nominations Feb. 2 and the last weekend before Sunday’s awards.

Last year’s best picture nominees pulled in $146 million over a comparable period, and most of that went to a film Oscar helped turn into a sensation: “Slumdog Millionaire.” Three of the five 2009 nominees at least doubled their take in that period, something no film in this year’s batch even came close to doing.

So this year, fewer people are watching the Oscars, or the theatrical releases that are up for Oscars. Nice symmetry.

I’m sure the industry reaction will be to amp up the number of nominations, rationalizing that this year’s Best Picture expansion failed because it just didn’t go far enough. How does twenty potential Best Pictures crowding the box office sound? Not that the box office is the true target:

And a nomination lasts forever, whether a movie is in theaters or being offered on Netflix, so the full story of the benefits of the expanded category hasn’t been told yet. Studios make billions of dollars on DVD and Blu-ray disc sales, not to mention what they collect from pay TV outlets at home and abroad.

At the end of the day, it’s just a marketing label. The pomp, circumstance, and statuette are entirely incidental.

The appeal of disaster movies has ebbed and flowed for decades. A recent spate of theatrical releases indicates that, currently, the flow is go: The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Book of Eli, The Road, The Happening, and Legion all attest to our public preoccupation with endtimes.

Whatever the sociological underpinnings for this fascination, better that we play them out on the big screen:

Crave danger but lack a death wish? Not to worry, I’ve got you covered. You and I can get hopped up on disaster porn. We can dream of swamps of fire, we can contemplate the sunspots on the sun. We can surrender to wind and water and meet an angel on the run. We can watch a faster ocean sweep a vaster Himalayan sky. We can get our kicks on the apocalypse. Every time a volcano pops, I get a little closer to Zen. Every time the ice cap crumbles, I feel a little cleansed. Let’s purge our souls as godheads roll and score it all to some slinky 70s soul. With 2012 around the corner, Hollywood’s throwing an eschatological feast.

Who knew the end of the world could give you such a tingly feeling?

Here’s one man’s reaction to a sneak peek of a CGI-rendered Smurf, from the upcoming animated feature film:

AAAAAAAA KILL IT WITH FIRE

A little extreme; I’d say the false sense of scale is making Prototype Smurf look abnormally large, and thus faux-monstrous. But anything that elicits such mock-horror doesn’t deserve any screentime around this blog, so I won’t inflict it on my audience. Let’s just hope the character designs are de-creepified by the time they hit the silver screen in 2011.