According to this 3.26 N.Y. Times story by Jesse McKinley, grubby-ass little “Hoovervilles” are springing up around the country to an extent that…well, that they’re warranting a story in the N.Y. Times. I could take this if things got really bad. I don’t need no Bernard Madoff McMansion. I’ll be fine as long as I have plenty of electricity for my wifi, my two computers, my scanner, my chargers, my microwave, my toaster, my coffee-bean grinder and enough space for my 42″ plasma and Bluray player. And a glass-shelved TV table to hold all this stuff.

And room for chairs, tables, a futon, blankets, cups, plates, silverware, towels, canvas chairs, etc. Plus my suitcases. And some place to park the motorcycle.

For what a trailer is worth, Taking Woodstock director Ang Lee has hit the right comic-realism tone. Nobody’s doing “comedy” but it feels likably funny. And Lee doesn’t seem to have gotten anything wrong in his recreation of two distinct late ’60s cultures — Jewish Catskills and urban American hippie. And you can tell that Demetri Martin, who plays the lead role of Elliot Tiber, has that driven but amiable-plucky quality that we all like.

I’ve never watched Martin’s Comedy Central show (and I have no guilt about that) so introducing the film with pencil drawings seemed inspired, or at least unfamiliar.

This being the first look at the film, it’s not surprising that the trailer overlooks the fact that Tiber was and is a chip off the old Ennis del Mar block. I have to say I was a bit taken aback by Liev Schreiber‘s transgender appearance (including blonde tresses). But you can tell right away that Emile Hirsch is going to rule in this thing. The other costars are Eugene Levy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Paul Dano, Imelda Staunton. Whi’s the actor playing Woodstock organizer-producer Michael Lang?

Yesterday I asked why the 2009 Oscars are happening two and a half weeks later than they did last year — on Sunday, March 7, 2010 rather than Sunday, February 21, 2010. The idea is to avoid overlapping with the Winter Olympics, which will go from 2.12 through 2.18. So why not telecast the ’09 Oscars just a week later, or Sunday, February 28?

“The reason for the new Oscar date,” an insider confided right after the item posted, “is that a lot of the below-the-line [guys] who work the Oscars will be working the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies in Vancouver and will be out of the country during the ramp-up to the show. They just need the time.”

Update: A friend talked to someone attached to the upcoming, yet-to-be-shot Woody Allen film with Josh Brolin, Nicole Kidman, Anthony Hopkins, Freida Pinto, Naomi Watts and Antonio Banderas. And the “someone” says “it’s a serious comedy. Like Husbands and Wives (if only) and Manhattan.”

It was also revealed in that 3.23 Digital Bits chat with Warner Home Video execs that Exorcist director William Friedkin and cinematographer Owen Roizman are working together on the Exorcist Bluray disc, which presumably means Friedkin won’t mess up like he did with that ghastly French Connection Bluray re-do (i.e., bleachy colors, grainstorms, bleeding reds).

I had lunch two days ago with a friend. At one point he mentioned the two most despicable human beings on the planet right now — Bernie Madoff for obvious reasons, and that 73 year-old Austrian guy, Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years for purposes of sexual enslavement, which resulted in seven kids. I nodded but knew there was someone else. It hit me this morning — Octomom. She’s actually the worst of the three. Madoff and Fritzl were merely diseased monsters who satisfied their lusts, but Nadya Suleman represents malignant selfishness (born of celebrity-worshipping delusion) among this country’s lower classes.

Yesterday I explained my objections are to kids and kid movies, particularly ones that celebrate childhood as something sacred and wondrous where wild things run free. The best line of the piece: “The wake-up call of the Great Recession means that the age of the ‘infantilization of movies’ — a term coined by Pauline Kael, as I recall, in an attempt to describe the influence that Spielberg and Lucas began to exert in the mid ’70s — is coming to a blessed and merciful end.”

I should acknowledge that HE reader “Cde.” pointed out the following: “I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I’ll just say that [Where The Wild Things Are director] Spike Jonze seems to have a similar view to your own, which is exactly the reason that the studio freaked out and got into the huge battle with him that lasted eighteen months. They wanted reassuring, obvious bullshit that celebrates childhood and he made a film about the necessity of facing reality.

“A better way of putting all of that would be to say that Jonze wanted to make a film that was true to Maurice Sendak‘s feelings that, while children certainly have compassion, they are often unconsciously cruel or insensitive because of their lack of understanding of the world and those around them.”

It’s been pointed out in a 3.23.09 Digital Bits chat between readers and Warner Home Video executives, but I’ll repeat it anyway: Heat is “currently being remastered for Bluray” under the supervision of director Michael Mann, and that WHV hopes “to have it out shortly.”

Putting aside my aversion to any and all depictions of fecal matter in any form of art (including movies), Steve McQueen‘s Hunger has to be one of the most impressively composed endless-penal-suffering poems ever captured on film. To crib from my Toronto Film Festival response, is “top-notch — a frank and unsparing chronicle of political torture of IRA combatants by the British, and particularly the plight of Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who died from a hunger strike in 1981 at age 27.”

It’s been playing at Manhattan’s IFC Center for almost a week now. If you can get past the repulsion (or even if you can;t), you’ll find it unforgettable.

I wanted to tap something out about Greg Mottola‘s Adventureland (Miramax, April 3), but I have to be at a 6 pm screening of Paris 36. I rather liked Mottola’s film for many reasons, but the fact that it’s a settled, unforced and proportionately buyable ’80s relationship drama is definitely one. I love teen flicks that are psychologically layered, unextreme, unbawdy and raggedy. And Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart have all the right stuff. They do nicely by themselves and the film. Anyone who trashes this movie deals with me. I’ll write more about this later.

B’way and 50th, 3.25.09, 4:50 pm.

The 2009 Oscars will happen two weeks later than last year — on Sunday, March 7, 2010 rather than Sunday, February 21, 2010. So that’s two more weeks of Oscar advertising. This is a one-time delay to avoid coinciding with the Winter Olympics, which will go from 2.12 through 2.18. So why are they staging the Oscars two and a half weeks later? Why not just a week later, or Sunday, February 28? The ’08 Oscar show aired on Sunday, February 22.

For what it’s worth I passed along talk on March 1st that Sean Penn had been talking to Bobby and Peter Farrelly for their Three Stooges pic. Because earlier this afternoon (i.e., while I was watching Adventureland in the Broadway screening room) Variety‘s Michael Fleming announced that Penn’s definitely on board in that capacity.

Jim Carrey is going to play Curly, and reportedly plans to gain 40 pounds — good God! — and most likely get a Curly tennis ball haircut. (Where is is written that overweight is funny in and of itself? Because all it puts out in my eyes is grotesque.) And MGM is reportedly “zeroing in” on Benicio del Toro — a.k.a., Che Guevara — to play Moe

I accept the proposition that the Farrelly’s don’t have their edge any more and the torch has been passed to the Judd Apatow gang, but this is a great cast. They’ve all played retarded obsessives before — Carrey all his life, Penn in I Am Sam (which makes me cringe every time I hear because it should have been called Sam I Am), and Del Toro in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Let’s all take a moment of silence to remember the Stooges who were talked up at one time and might have been — Russell Crowe as Moe, Johnny Depp as whomever, Mel Gibson as Curly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Curly, Robert Downey, Jr. as Larry, etc.