Plastic Drums from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

A part of me would like to do the alpha male thing and watch the Super Bowl game, but it seems more fitting on my first night back in Manhattan to squirrel down to the Film Forum and watch Jerry Schatzberg‘s The Panic in Needle Park, which I haven’t seen in ages. (Why is there a “The” in front of the rest of the title? This implies that there was one famous/notorious panic in needle park that made headlines.)

Kitty Winn, Al Pacino

Speaking of Al Pacino, he and someone who looked an awful lot like John Cusack and a couple of others were watching a screening of Salomaybe? last Friday afternoon at the Aidikoff screening room, just before the 7 pm screening of Crossing Over. It appears that Salomaybe is an exploration of Oscar Wilde‘s Salome in the same way that Pacino’s Looking for Richard was about Shakespeare’s Richard III.

It hit me yesterday that Gossip Girl Blake Lively is the same classy blonde lassy that Bridget Fonda was 17 or 18 years ago. Not in terms of acting chops, but appearance-wise. In her prime Fonda was the best. I wrote a Fonda profile for the N.Y. Times that appeared in late ’92. It involved visiting her on the set of Bodies, Rest and Motion in Arizona a few weeks/months earlier. Now married to composer Danny Elfman, Fonda hasn’t made a film since ’02.

Blake Lively; Bridget Fonda

Any new film starring Matthew “king of the empties” McConaughey exudes toxicity, but his latest — Ghost of Girlfriends Past (New Line, 5.1) — looks especially grotesque. The thought that some will certainly pay to see it makes the mind go into a fetal tuck. Here’s a brilliant critique of the trailer by Burbanked.

I was accused of having plebian taste buds a few days ago after expressing profound disappointment with the sandstorm-level grain on Criterion’s Third Man Blu-ray disc. A tiny bit shamed, I popped it again after arriving home last night from Los Angeles, trying this time to watch it with a Glenn Kenny attitude. Wow, love that grain. Grain is so beautiful. Oooh, yeah! It didn’t work. I still felt burned. I felt angry, in fact.

Old black-and-white films shot under less-than-optimum conditions (like The Third Man) look too filmy on Blu-ray so they need to be moderately de-grained. End of discussion. Not wiped clean like that 2002 Paramount Sunset Boulevard DVD, but definitely cleaned up a bit. Because low-rent peons like myself don’t want renderings that are overly celluloid-looking (i.e., grainy, speckly, eight-at-the-gate). We want an image that looks better than what the original filmmakers and labs were able to render. An image quality that the old-time filmmakers would have chosen for sure if it had been put before them.

This is what I can’t stand about the grain purists. They actually maintain with a straight face that Billy Wilder and Orson Welles would have said if given a choice, “Oh, no — don’t make the image look too clean and silvery! We prefer our classic films to be a little muddy, a little clouded up by that grain-storm effect. Better that way.”

Why aren’t the big home-video outfits putting out Blu-rays of the big-format films of the ’50s and ’60s? All the classic 70mm roadshows (Lawrence of Arabia, Mutiny on the Bounty, Dr. Zhivago, Oklahoma!, Around the World in Eighty Days, Ryan’s Daughter, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, the mediocre ’63 Cleopatra, West Side Story), VistaVisions (North by Northwest, Vertigo, To Catch a Thief) and whatnot. Not because they were uniformly great films, but because they’d look terrific on Blu-ray.

Note: Yes, I’m aware that Sony is working on a Lawrence Blu-ray, but it’s taking them forever. I was told last year that they may actually wait until 2012 to put it out so they can call it a 50th Anniversary edition.

Last night Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle won the Directors Guild of America for best director of 2008. I don’t want to go out on a limb, but the industry seems (stressing that word) to have arrived at a consensus winner. Congrats to Boyle and to the Fox Searchlight team for a brilliant marketing job.

I was 35,000 feet in the air when Boyle’s win was announced. I should have caught this in the plane and re-posted straight away but my battery gave out. The airlines all need to offer power outlets to each and every passenger — not just business and first-class.

Note: I chose “Shocker” for a headline before seeing the same on MCN. I’ll stand my ground, won’t back down.

No question about it — this Funny or Die Obama video is at least five times funnier than last night’s riff on SNL. (Thanks to heybub1 for the tip.)

Our genes tell us to show obeisance before power. Which is why the majority of job applicants for any highly desirable gig tend to imitate the behavior of those who’ve already succeeded in the field. Which usually means acting perky, smiling a lot, kowtowing, groveling and…did I mention the tendency to smile? Then there are your X-factor applicants. They tend to exude confidence and centered-ness. They look smart, talk smart, don’t necessarily smile unless there’s something to smile about and look you straight in the eye. Applicants who are just…themselves.

Consider these ten video reels of college-student applicants looking to land a special red-carpet Oscar gig that’s being offered by mtvU. But consider in particular the audition tape of one David Distenfeld, a junior at Duke University.

Distenfeld obviously loves Oscar culture, knows his shit, and talks like a seasoned and intelligent adult. He’s probably capable of kowtowing in a pinch, but it doesn’t seem to be in his nature. He’s not a journalism student (he’s actually studying filmmaking) but he’s a chip off the Ebert block.

Now consider the other nine applicants — NYU freshman Diana Snyder, Bowling Green State University’s Nicole Lovince, Drexel University’s Dylan Steinberg, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University’s Chantell Black, University of Miami’s Nick Maslow, Fordham University’s Justin Shackil, Rice University’s Fateem Ahmed, San Diego State University’s Megan Telles and the University of Cincinatti’s Rachel Alig.

Every one of these kids is trying their best to act like an E! or Access Hollywood interviewer. And they have it down pretty well. They all have that empty, fluffy, celebrity-worshipping, bullshit ice-cream attitude that every executive producer of every TV entertainment show tends to like and hire. They all suffer from Ben Lyons disease (which, trust me, will probably lead to high-paying gigs for most of them when they get out of school).

If you care (and I know it’s much hipper not to) please help stamp out the Stepford virus and vote for Distenfeld. You’ll be helping to shape the tone of future TV entertainment coverage if you do.

Smart employers always hire the X-factor types. Because they’re the ones who (a) will probably do the best job and (b) will probably resign within 18 months to take a higher-paying job (or one with better opportunities). It goes without saying that most employers tend to hire the imitative chimpanzees because they like being bowed down to. This is one reason why the world is so fucked up — i.e., the wrong people have the best jobs. A confederacy of clones.

“Disgorge, Fat Cats” — Maureen Dowd, N.Y. Times, 2.1. “Herbert Hoover Lives” — Frank Rich, N.Y. Times, 2.1.

“I sometimes feel sorry for the good friends of mine that made it too quickly in their careers and got too soft and rich and complacent to develop the panoply of skills to shepherd their own dreams along. Unless they do catch up fast they will surely and sadly miss the next big, wonderful, entrepreneurial phase of this industry. [Because] it’s common knowledge that the coming reality in the not-too-distant future is going to let us all work and play inside of a brand new paradigm.” — Director-writer-actor Mike Binder in a 1.29 piece for TheWrap.com

“Sometimes there’s a [kind] of blockbuster whose grosses can’t be predicted by even the wisest of box-office sages,” writes Vulture‘s Lane Brown.

“For example, who could possibly have anticipated Paul Blart: Mall Cop‘s explosive $39 million opening weekend? Certainly not Sony Pictures, who admitted in yesterday’s LA Times that they barely thought it’d make half that. And now, as their movie Segways speedily toward $100 million, it’s finally helped give a catchy name to all films with outsize profits and similarly awfulsome premises: Blarts.

“How does one identify a Blart? Sometimes they feature the Rock as an NFL star who unexpectedly becomes the father of an 8-year old and must, for some reason, perform ballet (The Game Plan, $90 million domestic). Others star Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy as members of the same biker gang (Wild Hogs, $168 million). Did your movie earn $94 million with a cast that included George Lopez as the voice of a dog (Beverly Hills Chihuahua), or $217 million, thanks to a trailer that featured computer-generated rodents eating their own poo (Alvin and the Chipmunks)? Congratulations — you Blarted!

“The only things Blarts usually share are family-friendliness, an inexplicably enormous gross, and a screenplay that seems like it was probably submitted on a dare (also, it helps if a participating actor publicly refers to it as a ‘piece of shit.'”

If I may be so bold, a “Blart” is a film that has hit the jackpot with the lower end of the American middle-class gene pool. Simple.