Parodies

Dwight Howard proudly broke out his iPad Mini before the Lakers' battle against the Chicago Bulls on Sunday afternoon to share the Orlando Sentinel "Forget You" parody with those in the locker room. The Lakers visit the Magic on Tuesday, Howard's first return to Orlando since the trade last August. The video, released Thursday by the Sentinel, crudely animates current Magic players crooning to Howard. The Lakers center gave his compliments to the video's creators and singers.

It's no wonder that Luis Buñuel wanted to turn "The Monk" into a movie. Once banned, now merely cherished, the 1796 novel is a lurid amalgam of religious devotion and sin, earthly temptations and supernatural doings. Buñuel never made his movie, but there have been numerous adaptations. The latest, from French director Dominik Moll, is a work whose elegant atmospherics ultimately overwhelm the story, even with the terrific Vincent Cassel in the title role. Moll's version, arriving stateside almost two years after it opened in France, is a decided change of pace for the director of "With a Friend Like Harry" and new territory as well for Cassel.

Editor's note: This interview was conducted in Britain last summer, before the fate of Stevens' character was known. Dan Stevens was a virtual unknown before "Downton Abbey" premiered on PBS two years ago. But between the launch of the series and the premiere of Season 3, a lot changed for Stevens; the Cambridge grad became a heartthrob across the globe in the role of Matthew Crawley, a middle-class lawyer sucked into the gilded cage that is...

As the housing market collapsed in 2007, an analyst at Standard & Poor's composed a little tune for colleagues -- "Analyst D's" own version of "Burning Down the House" by the Talking Heads. The email, cited in the U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit against the ratings agency filed in Los Angeles late Monday, came in March 2007 after the analyst conducted a risk analysis of bonds packed with souring mortgages the previous year. "With apologies to David Byrne," the email began, "here's my version of 'Burning Down the House' Watch out Housing market went softer Cooling down Strong market is now much weaker Subprime is boi-ling  o-ver Bringing down the house Hold tight CDO biz -- has a bother Hold tight Leveraged CDOs they were after Going -- all the way down, with Subprime mortgages Own it Hey you need a downgrade now Free-mont Huge delinquencies hit it now Two-thousand-and-six-vintage Bringing down the house.

In what has been one of the strange joys of this awards season, a parody Twitter account attributed to Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has become a treasure trove of comedy gold with its digs at Terrence Malick, pictures of cats and general sense of levity that is at odds with the super-serious nature of the filmmaker's work. That Haneke's "Amour" has been winning prize after prize, including the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and five Oscar nominations, plus a Golden Globe on Sunday night, has made it seem even better.

Written by Marlon Wayans and Rick Alvarez and not so much directed as vaguely steered by Michael Tiddes, "A Haunted House" is a ramshackle parody of recent found-footage horror movies in the vein of the "Scary Movie" movies. If you already saw the titles referenced here, mostly the "Paranormal Activity" films, the otherwise forgotten "The Devil Inside" and kind of "The Exorcist" - the crucifix but not the pea soup - there may be a certain passing feeling of being in on the joke. The problem is that's all the joke there is. "A Haunted House" revolves around Malcolm (Wayans)

BallerballFilms has posted a YouTube clip pleading with teams around the NBA to trade for Lakers forward/center Pau Gasol. Set to the Sarah McLaughlin track "Angel," the clip parodies her campaign to prevent animal cruelty. "Please trade for Pau Gasol, he's miserable in Los Angeles and needs your help," begs the video. Gasol is currently sidelined with a concussion suffered in the Lakers' loss to the Denver Nuggets on Sunday. The Lakers last year tried to trade Gasol for Chris Paul.

NASA's purpose and vision might be a mystery to some, but the agency's top official says there's a quick primer on the space agency's mission and accomplishments. And it's done Gangnam style.  “I find, as I travel around, not very many people know what we do today,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said Wednesday to a National Research Council committee that is reviewing the agency's human spaceflight program. Luckily, he added, there's a solution. Created by interns at Johnson Space Center, “NASA Johnson Style” spoofs South Korean pop star Psy's viral hit, “Gangnam Style,” while waxing lyrical about the Houston center that's home to NASA's astronaut program.

Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, confirmed on Monday they were expecting, and already there were parody tweets from the yet-to-be born royal highness. Just minutes after the announcement, social media sites were alight with the news of the pregnancy. The hashtag “royalbaby” was trending on Twitter, and several parody handles, including @royal_fetus, the British-spelled @royalfoetus, and @IamRoyalBaby had sprung to life and gained thousands of followers. One American comedian snagged Twitter real estate @RoyalFetus more than a year ago, and first tweeted on April 29, 2011, the couple's wedding day. Today, after months of radio silence, it tweeted simply - “I EXIST!

You know your parody worked brilliantly when someone -- ideally a big someone -- doesn't have a clue that it's a parody. The Onion did not, in Lincoln's phrase, fool all of the people all of the time. But it evidently fooled more than a quarter of a billion people for some of the time -- the subscribers and Web readers of China's Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, with more than 3 million subscribers worldwide and tens of millions of daily hits to its website. This organ of well-scrubbed “information” reported as sober fact the Onion's parody of People magazine's “sexiest person alive” listing of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as its own sexiest man alive.