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Ooooooh how the times have changed. In the past the major newspapers would expose things like the Pentagon Papers or the occasional Watergate break-in. Now they’re ripping the covers off… our DVD rental habits?

Seriously: in major city by major city, postal code by postal code, the New York Times tells the United States the top films it’s borrowing from Netflix .

Here’s how things break down in the 90026. With three of the top five unseen by Susan and me clearly our viewing tastes differ somewhat from our Netflixing neighbors (films in bold are discs we’ve spun):

1. Rachel Getting Married
2. The Wrestler
3. Burn After Reading
4. Twilight
5. Vicki Cristina Barcelona
6. Milk
7. I Love You, Man
8. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
9. Pineapple Express
10. Changeling

Without checking out our queue, I’m pretty sure the only film of the four unseen on our list is Rachel Getting Married, but I’d be surprised if its lurking anywhere higher in our Netflix purgatory than, say,  Syriana , Babel or Infamous. If there’s a “Hell No!” option Twilight would get it from me. As to the other two? Meh. If they show up streamable through my PS3 via my Netflix on-demand list I might give ‘em a play — like we did the fascinating James Toback documentary about Mike Tyson last night.

To Live & Ride In L.A. from TRAFIK on Vimeo

Just found this clip on midnightridazz.com, and as I was watching it unspool way too quickly I kept thinking “Awesome!” and  “I wish this were longer — like feature length.” Then at the end my prayers were answered when the screen read:  “Coming 2010.”

While it seems focused on the scene’s youthful fixed-gear niche, this old single-speed freewheeler is very much looking forward to this.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Shawshank Redemption. Twenty? Thirty? I’ll probably see it that many times again before I shuffle off. It is one of my favorite motion pictures. It is one of the best ever made. Out of all of its magic — and every freakin’ frame is nothing but the stuff — the one slice that never fails to break my heart and reduce me to a blubbering snuffling wreck no matter how many times I see it is this brilliant, brilliant one — a short film in and of itself, starring James Whitmore:

The actor died today in Malibu at the age of 87. Rest in peace.

Agh. I waited too long. For the past however many days I’ve been snickering ever time I biked by a monster billboard north of Venice Boulevard at National, and of course I knew better to get a snap of it while I could, but I didn’t and this morning, it’s gone. Bah.

The billboard up until yesterday was part of a mega ad campaign promoting the DVD release of a 50th-anniversary edition of  Walt Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty,” and most prominently featured the above classic moment when Prince Charming is about to bestow the kiss that will awaken her from her comatose state.

I’d seen several variations on the promo featuring different scenes accompanied by the headline of “See More Than Ever Before,” but whoever created and approved the pairing of that headline with the above image of Charming positioned atop the pronated babe either is really really numbskulled or — more likely, gawd bless ‘em –  knew exactly what the hell they were double entendre-ing.

“Sleeping Booty,” anyone?

Previous entries here: Leonardo, Vote, Midnight Ridazz

No, not this Batman currently breaking box-office records in all its awesomeness, that one. The one that started it all. The one with the campy Caped Crusader and the campier Joker and the campiest songs by Prince.

Don’t know how old the oldest shirt you have in your collection is, but though there’s some cracking and peeling evident, this one’s still in surprisingly good condition considering it dates back to Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Freakin’ Nine. When the smallest portable cellphone was the size of a brick and twice the weight, when the intarneight was barely more than a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, when you could go to the airport with someone leavin’ on a jetplane and wave at them from the gate while they waved at your from inside the plane.

Good gosh: my daughter still had a couple months to go before she was born.

I’m pretty sure I bought this one at the old Burbank Miller’s Outpost that used to stand across the street from NBC, and damn if I didn’t wear it proudly in the days leading up to the film’s June 23 opening — and to the theater, too.

And today.

In no real order:

1. Haircut.
2. Take the dogs for a good long neighborhood walk.
3. See “The Dark Knight” with Susan.
4. Replace the bottom bracket on my bike and maybe get a new handlebar stem, and a new chain and while I’m at it swap out the brakes (and put them back on my road bike) with the new set that’s been sitting in my closet since a week after I got the bike last January.
5. Drop off my rear wheel at Orange 20 to get it rebuilt with a new hub, because the bargain-basement loose-bearing hub that came with the bike is toast.
6. Hit a driving range because I’m scheduled to play in a business trip golf tournament (at this PGA championship-level course in Savannah, Georgia, where I’m bound to break records for the highest score — even with steady practice) in less than two months and I haven’t so much as picked up my clubs in more than two years (other than to put them in the basement).
7. Go to an AT&T store and get the new iPhone because I can’t wait no longer — but I’ll have to because by “get” I mean wait 10 days (or more) for it to arrive because the AT&T stores around town are apparently on a no-stock/shipment-only basis. Yes, that’s right. I’d rather wait a week-and-a-half (or more) than in line at The Grove for an hour or so. Because I hate lines. And because I hate The Grove. And yes I understand there are other Apple Stores out there. I’m not an idiot. I hate the Beverly Center, too. And the Glendale Galleria.
8. Put Buster through a test day and night run in his new outdoor tortoise house I built last month.
9. Go for a Sunday morning bike ride.
10. And probably a half-dozen other things I can’t recall right now because it’s Friday afternoon and I just wanna go home and chill with my baby and a DVD.

UPDATED (07.27): 1. Not done. 2. Not done. 3. Done. 4. Partially done. 5. Done. 6. Done, and didn’t hit too badly for a two-year layoff. 7. Done. 8. Done. 9. Not done. 10. Well, I did laundry and watered the yards. Bonus unseen big task: Basically rebuilt the bottom of the new tortoise hutch, replacing the screen and slats with plywood.

Just a quick paragraph or two about the movie Stardust, which Susan and I watched last night and which despite being a top-shelf big-budgeted production delivered such a disappointing blip on the domestic box office radar during its theatrical release last summer  (regardless of a relatively positive critical reception) as to leave forgettable me thinking when it arrived in the mail from Netflix last week that it was a different movie entirely (specifically: Across the Universe). It even took me a couple minutes in from the beginning to realize it wasn’t.

And I loved it. L O V E D it! Visually stunning, beautifully performed, delightfully fantastical and wonderfully paced, discovering Stardust is something of a bittersweet triumph in seeing how fantastic it was while also knowing how much it was ignored by U.S. moviegoers.

So next time you’re in the video store or adding films to your Netflix list, think about giving Stardust a try. It’s magically delicious!

So my main beef — quite literally — with Iron Man derives in the first couple scenes when Tony Stark is safely back on U.S. soil after having been held prisoner by terrorists for long enough to McGuyver Iron Man 1.0 and kick their collective holy-waring ass. The first thing he does is turn to his colleague in the limousine that’s ready to whisk them away from the freedom bird that brought him back to his homeland of Southern California and he says that the first thing he wants is an “American cheeseburger.” In the scene immediately following he emerges from the limo to a bunch of news cameras and reporters and his driver hands him… a bag that just so happens to prominently feature the Burger King logo.

Seriously Mr. Stark, a Whopper is the best you and your crew could do? Not that I don’t put BK near the top of my fastfood burger list, but hear me out. When one of the richest most successful and powerful men in the world returns home to a hero’s welcome after miraculously surviving three months of captivity at the hands of extremist goons in the rugged and isolated Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California mountains of Afghanistan, he could pretty much snap one finger and contract TV’s Extreme Home Makeover team to build and equip him a burger stand in about an hour, and with the other finger staff the grill with the finest chef in all the land while simultaneously having a pound of the finest and freshest Angus or Kobe beef delivered.

If not something that over-the-top, at very least hit an In-N-Out or Tommy’s — or better yet, the resurrected Mo’ Better Meatty Meat Burger goodness of Indulge Cafe at Pico and Redondo.

But instead, in this movie that begs me at every turn to willingly suspend my disbelief, I’m expected to swallow that the best that could be done to fulfill this man’s first desire was a warmed-over Whopper? Snagged from the drive-through no doubt? Gah!

With the exception of some other petty issues, this is pretty much the one thing in the entire motion picture that jerked me back to the reality and screamed of product placement.

Those other gripes deal with:

1. Director Jon Favreau’s cameo scenes as Tony Stark’s bodyguard — was that really necessary?
2. The whole unrequited love thing between Stark and Penny — yawn!
3. The climactic finale seemed decidedly not quite fantastic enough — more please!

If you haven’t already figured it out, the shallow extent of such peckings means I thought the movie rocked.

P.S. And there’s a reason to sit through the credits — all of them.

1. Roland Emmerich is the director.

2. Roland Emmerich is the writer.

3. Roland Emmerich is the producer.

4. No one in the industry has the balls to tell him to stop it. Instead he’s all “I have this great idea for a movie that I want to manage on every level because I’m Roland Emmerich” and Hollywood’s all “That’s gonna make $100 mil easy!”

5. Case in point: “The Day After Tomorrow,” which Roland wrote, produced and directed and was already bad enough but then he had to go ahead and CGI in those marvelous ravenous wolves who had escaped from a lifetime in captivity at the zoo but somehow did not die in the flood/freeze because apparently they were smart enough and not terrified enough in their new unfamiliar surroundings to get inside a building and hang until it was safe to come out. But apparently they were too stupid to feast on the countless corpses strewn throughout the city because they instead starved themselves into a frenzy with a preference for live prey, mainly Jake Gydsinthehall.

6. Yeah yeah I know, he also directed “Independence Day,” which was a rollicking good movie twelve years ago, but he blew all the capital accumulated from that blockbuster when he exec-produced craptastic stuff like “Godzilla” and “The Patriot.” And no it’s not unpatriotic to not like “The Patriot.”

7. Someone was smoking crack and a lot of it — probably Emmerich — to imagine that saber-toothed cats were ever ever ever t-h-i-s big:

8. I mean seriously, what a tool to have these cats standing somewhere around six feet tall at the shoulders with a head sized three times that of the average hominid of the day? Please! But typical that Emmerich couldn’t work with a life-sized smilodon and had to go and create his cgilodon, no doubt for the drama. I can just hear him having a fit yelling at the CGI team to “Make zee cats beegah!”

9. And no the humans aren’t pigmies. Nice try.

10. In fact: “Smilodon was the largest saber-toothed cat. It was a fierce predator about 4-5 feet (1.2-1.5 m) long and 3 feet (0.9 m) tall. It weighed about 440 lbs (200 kg). It was a bit smaller than a modern-day lion (Panthera leo), but much heavier. — Enchantedlearning.com

11. Let us now turn our deficient attentions on the skills of the ancient architects that exist in Emmerich’s funked up imagination. Strictly speaking they just did not build elaborate shit like this at the beginning of The Holocene:

12. Especially if the assumption (why start now?) can be made that the continental location of the film is ancient South America (the home of terror birds — surprise: somewhat realisitically rendered! — and the aforementioned saber-toothed cats). Or maybe it starts in South America but this tribe globetrots to the Gobi Desert via the land bridge that spanned the Bering Strait? That’s quite a hike!

13. Oh wait they have boats — sailboats!

Fancy-pants double-sailed aero-sleek America’s Cup winners, not the wimpy single-sailed variety whose first recorded use by the Egyptians didn’t take place until 6,000 years later.

14. Whether the good guys make a long journey or not there’s no way the above-pictured fort/fight scene takes place in Malta, which in fact, a Google search reveals is where the temple of Hagar Qim is — the oldest free-standing structure in the world at 3,600-years-old. It’s about 400 years older than the wonderous Egyptian pyramids.

15. It might be tempting to defend the film with a potential scenario that coulda happened to explain the absence of any ruins. Like maybe uh… maybe there was a large-but-not-too-large meteor that impacted directly upon the above-pictured Elks Lodgian-style fort in 9,800 BC or maybe 9,754 BC, totally destroying its existence and stuff. Yeah.

16. No. But spoken like a true Emmerichian. Congratulations.

15. Having beaten the historic inaccuracy of this movie to death you probably want me to just clam up and willingly suspend my disbelieve like all the other teenagers this type of pap caters too, but my disbelief is far too valuable to just hang it up so cheaply. I can do it for “The Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars” or any of the Narnian Chronicles (the password is: fantasy), but if you base a movie in a real place on a real planet with creatures that existed in a certain way but then just go and make all sorts of shit up to suit your needs, well then excuse silly old me for expecting that reality to be delivered somewhat authentically.

16. And besides all that, it’s PG-13. I hate PG-13.

(click to quadruplify)

This morning my friend and fellow IAAL•MAF’er Manny and I scouted out next Saturday’s Watts Happening II Ride down to the 54th Street location of the horrific SLA/LAPD shootout of May 1974  and back where we arrived just in time for Mama’s Tamales to be open for a bite.

Getting back home a bit after the noon next on the agenda was a bike ride with Susan up Sunset to the famed and fabulous Vista Theater for the $5 bargain matinee screening of “There Will Be Blood” (which while being some powerful filmmaking and acting I’m still trying to decide if I actually liked or not).

On the way out I set the cam on a low wall in the back of the auditorium and grabbed this three-second snap to show why it is one of my favorite places to see a movie.