Remember the old days, when Memorial Day Weekend marked the start of the summer blockbuster season? Well, those days are gone, Grandpa! Summer starts in, like, February now.

Still, Memorial Day Weekend is big, so it’s odd that no one even tried to challenge “X-Men: The Last Stand” today. Surely there’s enough potential audience for TWO movies. “Mission: Impossible III,” “Poseidon” and “The Da Vinci Code” all had “counter-programming” (i.e., new movies you can watch if you don’t feel like fighting the huge crowds), yet “X-Men” goes out there unopposed. Which means even if it’s not exactly the best movie ever (and it’s not), it will still do gigantic business over the holiday weekend.

The highlight of Monday’s screening of the film was that we saw two amusing trailers beforehand: “The Devil Wears Prada” (with Meryl Streep as an ice-cold fashion-magazine editor) and the remake of “The Omen.” I was sitting next to my pal Lady Dawn, and as she has already observed in her blog, we giggled like schoolgirls, at the former because it looked funny, and at the latter because it looked awful. After the trailers, when the movie should have started, the screen went dark and the lights came up. We thought we were in trouble for not taking the previews seriously — “We will turn this movie around and go right back home if you critics can’t behave yourselves!” — but it turns out it was just a problem with the projector. Whew.

“X-Men: The Last Stand” is reviewed in this week’s “In the Dark,” as are two indie films: “Moonlight” and “The Proposition.” Subscribe to “In the Dark” at get reviews and other film-related merriment sent to your e-mail box automatically every Friday. It’s fun!

(By the way, “X-Men: The Last Stand” is another example of liberal Hollywood trying to impose the mutant agenda upon us. I’m getting pretty sick of it.)

Let’s get this one out of the way first. In a previous blog entry, I made fun of somebody dumb who kept writing to me wanting a certain starlet’s e-mail address. That prompted someone whose e-mail address is “cutie4eva_573″ to write me in that person’s defense:

I cannot believe how u treated Keyamaz u idiot! no 1 is stupid but u. the way how u treat people is proof that ur an [swear word],idiot,[swear word] and trash.

Surely “no 1 is stupid but u” is one of the more ironic statements I’ve read this week.

Publishing my reviews at DVD Talk has opened me up to a whole new group of angry people. One discussion thread on the message boards over there is devoted to my review of “The Da Vinci Code,” with some people saying I was biased from the get-go (they think I hated the book, missing the part in my review where I said I liked the book), and others arguing the opposite. It’s noteworthy because many of the people writing make valid points, though I do wonder why some of them get so worked up about it.

In the non-rational, non-valid department, someone posted a message there in response to my review of the “Tristan & Isolde” DVD. It’s a real delight, actually, from a teenage girl named Camille. It recalls some of the very emotional response I got to my “Titanic” column lo those many years ago:

eric d. SNIDER is a BIG loser, who in some points of his “review” was right, ( ex: Franco had kind of a stupid accent) but he was over all wrong. NUMBER ONE SNIDER, It’s a movie targeted MAINLY for teen audiences. So give it a break, because it got to the teen audiences. NUMBER TWO, “we belong together” by gavin Degraw, is a great song. I know this is your opinion, but i think you, being the USELESS critic that you are, probably just listened to 5 seconds of it. It describes Tristan and Isolde’s true love for each other. NUMBER THREE, Sophia Miles was wonderful in this movie ( do you think you could’ve done better??) and James Franco doesn’t just have one facial expression. Over all, this was a great movie, and i know it can be cheesy at times, but otherwise, its a great movie ( not what i would call an EPIC, but a great move none the less)
I DISAGREE very much with the utter stupidity of Snyder’s review.
THANK YOU.

No, thank YOU! That was a great letter, maybe a little bad in parts, but otherwise a great letter (not a FANTASTIC letter, of course, but a great one nonetheless). Really, I mean it, a great letter — notwithstanding its flaws, which are noticeable — but overall a great letter.

Here are a few more from my catch-up started in the last post. You are invited to click the links if you want to buy any of these titles; the links take you to Amazon.com, where I get a tiny kickback if you buy anything there (even if it’s not the item you originally clicked on).

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” by Jonathan Safran Foer I hate Jonathan Safran Foer for being a successful novelist who is younger and a handsomer than me, but I sure enjoyed this, his second book, about a pleasantly strange 9-year-old boy in search of clues regarding his father’s death on 9/11. I haven’t read Foer’s first work, “Everything Is Illuminated” (though I did enjoy the movie based on it), but it was much better-reviewed than “Extremely Loud.” Maybe it’s so brilliant that “Extremely Loud” seems weak by comparison, but I found the latter novel to be a witty, poignant story about loss and sadness.

“A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole. Onto the short list of books I love the most jumps this hysterical masterpiece about a pretentious, over-educated, under-employed, lazy, hypocritical, pontificating, obese New Orleans man named Ignatius J. Reilly. He lives with his mother, avoids work at all costs, goes to movies just to be offended by the sleazy they contain, and is forever complaining about fictitious physical ailments. Toole paints a variety of memorable Louisiana characters whose paths cross Ignatius’, but none are as delightfully loathsome as the great fathead himself. I would love to see a movie version, but I can’t imagine an actor both good enough and fat enough to do him justice.

“Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer,” by James L. Swanson. This non-fiction account of Lincoln’s assassination and the subsequent pursuit of John Wilkes Booth is so well-researched and so craftily told that you’d think you were reading a novel. And yet it’s al true, with no speculative fiction involved: If it’s in quotation marks, someone actually said it. (Swanson used contemporary interviews, court transcripts, and so forth.) And if it’s in the book, it really happened (or at least it is the most reasonable and commonly accepted theory of what happened). Swanson doesn’t burden the book with footnotes or source-citing, though endnotes and a bibliography do assist those looking for documentation or further reading material. He focuses instead on telling an extraordinary story in a clear, accessible, exciting manner. I never would have thought a history book would be a page-turner, but this one is.

I’m supposed to do this every time I read a book worth recommending, yet somehow I’ve failed to do it even once this year. So here’s a little catch-up. You are invited to click the links if you want to buy any of these titles; the links take you to Amazon.com, where I get a tiny kickback if you buy anything there (even if it’s not the item you originally clicked on).

“The Final Solution,” by Michael Chabon. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” wrote this novella about an old man in the 1940s who used to be a big-time detective, is now retired, and becomes involved in solving a case. His name is never given, but we understand: It’s Sherlock Holmes. As always, Chabon writes with a tenderness and eloquence that few other modern writers can match. The story is engaging and satisfying, a great joy to read — and a pretty good Sherlock Holmes story, too!

“Oryx and Crake,” by Margaret Atwood. I had this one read to me on CD by actor Campbell Scott on a road trip. It’s a fine novel, set at some point in the near future, where most of humanity has apparently been wiped out and one man, called Snowman, now lives near the beach and is the only connection the new breed of people — strange, peaceful, childlike adults — have to the old world. Through flashback, we learn how it all happened, and how the evil genius behind it was a friend of Snowman’s. It’s a great story, well told by Atwood.

“A Long Way Down,” by Nick Hornby. The “About a Boy” author’s latest novel is about four strangers who meet on New Year’s Eve on the roof of a building known as a popular suicide spot — which is exactly what they were doing up there, only instead they talk each other out of it, sort of, and become this strange confederation of friends. Like all of Hornby’s work, it’s funny and melancholy simultaneously, a real spirit-lifting pleasure.

“Flicker,” by Theodore Roszak. Here is a big, thick mystery for serious lovers of film, about a man who comes to realize that the works of an obscure B-movie director named Max Castle contain subliminal messages and are part of a larger conspiracy. The fictional Max Castle is folded into real-life film history (he’s said to have assisted Orson Welles on “Citizen Kane,” etc.), and the smartly written, deep-thinking novel demonstrates a genuine passion for the production and viewing of movies. (Note: The book’s title appears in all-capital letters on the cover, “FLICKER,” and at a glance, the “L” and “I” next to each other look like a “U.” I saw more than one person on the train do a double-take when they saw me reading it.)

Since other cool kids like Sean Means and Dawn Taylor do Friday roundups, I figured I should, too. If the cool kids don’t like it, they are welcome to beat me up, as always.

Three wide releases this week:

- “The Da Vinci Code,” which is large and serious and not nearly as mindlessly entertaining as the book.

- “Over the Hedge,” a delightful surprise that puts you in the mind of Pixar and not “Shrek.”

- “See No Evil,” starring a professional wrestler named Kane as a psycho killer.

“See No Evil” wasn’t screened for critics, of course. But there was a promo screening last night at 10 p.m., so I went.

It was a double feature for me and the aforementioned Dawn Taylor and her indefatigable husband Patrick, as we saw “The Da Vinci Code” immediately before it (see the diatribe below for more on that). Between “Da Vinci Code” and “See No Evil,” which did I enjoy more? Well, “See No Evil” is an hour shorter….

The crowd for “See No Evil” was ugly and unruly, and I mean that to apply to their behavior as well as their physical appearance. Consider who’s going to come to this: people who like vicious, bloody horror films, and wrestling fans. At least two women had their toddler-age children with them (at 10 p.m., for a gruesome slasher flick). Somewhere in Portland, a trailer park was empty.

One young man was missing two fingers on his hand, the result not of misadventure but of a birth defect. This made him the life of the party among his friends before the movie started, as he cracked one coarse joke after another about his missing fingers, getting boisterous belly laughs each time. I think I was actually a little jealous of how much his audience was eating up his every word. But mostly I was annoyed to realize he was just making the same basic joke (“My left hand is incomplete!”) over and over again. I said to Dawn, “I wish I were missing some fingers, so I could be really popular.”

The reviews are all here on the site, of course, as well as in “In the Dark,” the e-zine that you really should subscribe to so you can have reviews, DVD releases and other important movie stuff e-mailed to you every week. I’m just sayin’.

* * * * * * * *

Now for that diatribe.

The A-list press — daily papers and significant weeklies — got to see “The Da Vinci Code” either Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, depending on the market. Everyone else — read: online critics — had to wait until Thursday night, at a chaotic public screening where the P.R. agency in charge wouldn’t even let the on-site rep tape off seats for us. (That’s a basic courtesy provided by, oh, pretty much every other P.R. agency in the country. But anyway.)

Online critics have a bad reputation, primarily because of Harry Knowles and his Ain’t It Cool News site, a garish, sloppy outlet that prides itself on posting reviews and spoilers as early as possible.

Studios don’t like that. Studios like it when reviews are printed the day the movie is released, in regular daily newspapers. Studios, run mostly by wealthy conservative older white men, aren’t comfortable with this whole “Internet” thing. They’re suspicious and untrusting of it, again largely because of barnacles like Knowles and his ilk, who give the rest of us a bad name.

And so when there’s a movie that’s high-profile but not very good (like “Da Vinci Code”) or that they want to keep under wraps for purposes of marketing or suspense, they hide it from the online press. The print press is OK, because they’re good about not publishing things before opening day. But online guys?! You can’t stop those mavericks!!

(This attitude is backwards, by the way. Who are most movies marketed toward? Young people. And where do young people get their information? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not from newspapers. The movie studios should be embracing online news and entertainment outlets, not eyeing them disdainfully.)

It’s also stupid that the “no online press” rule is applied so uniformly. In every market, there are P.R. agencies that handle the local screenings and publicity. For Portland, it’s a Seattle-based company called Janet Wainwright Public Relations, Inc., that deals with all Sony films, including “Da Vinci Code.” Now, the people at these agencies are supposedly up-to-date on what the critics are writing and when they’re publishing it. We’re told to send them clips or URLs every week. So how hard would it be, when a situation like “Da Vinci Code” comes up, to say: “OK, this critic never posts his reviews until opening day, and his site doesn’t reveal spoilers. He’s proven himself to be trustworthy. So he’s OK.”

Instead, the studios assume that ALL online critics are renegades who post reviews early and are not to be trusted, and they instruct their agencies in the local markets to act accordingly. The studios issue national decrees, when it would be very easy to handle it locally.

So only print critics got to see “Da Vinci Code” in a timely fashion, Tuesday and Wednesday. And guess what? As of Wednesday night, the following print outlets had posted their “Da Vinci Code” reviews online:

Time, Entertainment Weekly, the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, the New York Post, the Arizona Republic, USA Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Salt Lake Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Los Angeles Times.

By the time I left to go watch the film Thursday night, another 20 print outlets had joined them, for a total of at least 34 reviews that were posted early. And that’s just the ones linked from Rotten Tomatoes.

So … if the newspaper and magazine critics were posting their reviews early anyway … tell me again why the online critics weren’t invited?

Sigh. My people have been oppressed for centuries.

Here we go, kids! Time for Eric’s Sack of Mail, where we read letters from people who weren’t angry or irrational!

This first one is pretty mellow, dude. It comes to us from “Kidg1000,” who writes in response to my observation that the movie “Grandma’s Boy” has no plot:

Obviously you have never smoked bud. ["Bud" is what the potheads call pot.] if you have, you would know that an actual plot would bog a movie like this down. its made simply to watch while high.

And that was my problem: I wasn’t high when I watched it. Of course, I’m pretty sure EVERYTHING is funny when you’re high, so I’m not sure that’s the best way of judging a film’s merits.

In this week’s “Snide Remarks,” I talked about my new MySpace page. This caused a reader calling himself Humpty Dumpty (e-mail address “littleskeezy”) to feel disillusioned:

I think you were more of a bada** BEFORE the myspace account. How did you ever finally allow yourself to get conned into getting one? Your logic was so good…having your own website, blog, “thousands” of readers…which I really don’t consider to be too far of a stretch….

Anyway, who needs a silly, trendy myspace? What’s it coming to?

Yes, I’m a total sellout. Next stop: podcasts!

A long-time correspondent named Craig writes in next with this question:

I was wondering if you’ve seen other films follow this pattern:

Netflix just informed me of a “film that I might enjoy,” based on my previous ratings of “Tadpole” and “Igby Goes Down,” called “One Last Thing.” I had never heard of this film, and I guess they didn’t offer it for your review either. Netflix and IMDB show it as having a release date of 2005. I checked out the reviews linked from Netflix and they’re all dated May 5, 2006 (the presumed theatrical release date), but the DVD release is set for May 23.

That seems awfully quick. I mean I’ve heard of direct to video, but are such short runs with preplanned early video releases common nowadays?

It’s not common yet, but this particular indie studio (Magnolias Pictures) is trying it. It’s basically for movies that are going direct-to-DVD after having played at film festivals or whatever, and they’re giving them a brief, cursory theatrical release first.

Why? An experiment, mostly. Presumably, people who see it in the theater won’t be aware of its imminent DVD release. So ideally, they see it, they love it — and then three weeks later, while it’s still fresh in their minds, they see it at the video store and buy it. If it were months and months later that they saw it available for purchase, they might have forgotten how much they liked it and not consider buying it.

The big studios are using the same logic with kids’ films, especially: Get that sucker out on DVD while the kids are still talking about it. If you wait nine months before releasing the DVD, kids’ enthusiasm will have cooled and they’re less likely to harass their parents into buying it for them.

“One Last Thing” did indeed open on a handful of screens on May 5, including one here in Portland. It was done without much warning, promotion or press screenings. It played for a week, I think, and that was it.

Moving on: Marie writes in regards to a previous blog entry:

You noted the age difference of the married characters in “Slither.” When I saw the movie I immediately thought that the double name of the older man, “Grant Grant” was a reference to “Humbert Humbert” from “Lolita.”

Fascinating, no?

Fascinating, YES! I hadn’t thought of that, and it could be a coincidence, but it’s a nice one.

Finally, in 2003 I wrote a column about Hostess mini-doughnuts, which they call “donettes.” I observed that “Donette” would be a pretty name for a girl. And now a girl named Donette has written to me!!

Hi There, My name is Donette, Do you think that is a pretty name for a girl? I was born before Hostess came out with donettes. It is a combination of my Mom and Dad’s first names. Anyway I was very self consious about my name until I was about 25 years old. My recommendation to parents is to not make up weird mnames for thier kids. Life is hard enough…

I agree whole-heartedly about parents not making up names, ESPECIALLY if the way they’re doing it is by combining their own names. That said, “Donette” isn’t TOO strange a name, and rather pretty. Though I would spell it Dawnette, so it least it looks like a girl’s name.

And with that we seal up the ol’ Sack of Mail until next time. Keep those rational, intelligent e-mails coming!

It’s been a busy few days for angry e-mails, so we’ll dispense with the chit-chat and get right to the anger!

First up: Lydia, a reader at DVDTalk (where my movie reviews have started appearing as of recently), had this to say:

Let me preface this by saying that I have seen none of the three movies you just reviewed–not Hoot, not MiIII, not The Promise–and yet, I couldn’t help but notice that you rated Hoot and The Promise as rentals because of their unbelievability, and MiIII as a recommended because of its unbelievability….a little inconsistent! Why not just say you like things being blown up better than owls or foreign movies, and have done with it?

Well, I do like things being blown up better than owls, but I think I like foreign movies better than I like things being blown up. So it’s a toss-up.

If believability were the ONLY factor I was considering in reviewing the movies, then it would indeed be inconsistent to rate one positively because it’s unbelievable while rating others negatively for also being unbelievable.

But even a casual glance at the three reviews in question will show that each of them is several hundred words long, and that most of those words have nothing to do with the films’ believability. It’s just one of many elements, and often not even an important one. For example, “The Promise” is only so-so as a film — but it’s not being unbelievable that gets it marked down.

Next we have Matt Levison, whose mattlevi12@hotmail.com address was “unavailable” when I tried to reply. He also reads my reviews at DVDTalk, and he was upset when I made a joke about Tom Cruise being a “gay scientologist.” But because his reply was so impassioned (read: profane), I’ve had to bleep out a lot of parts, and now it reads like a “Match Game” question:

I read your review of ‘Mission: Impossible III’ and… I think you should go [blank] a big fat [blank]. What the [blank] are you talking about when you say he is a gay scientologist. Show some respect you [blank] homo. Calling people gay is a direct admission that you are gay. Go [blank] [blank] your father with a [blank].

My word! Why do I get the feeling that I could call Tom Cruise a brainwashing kidnapper rapist and it wouldn’t bother Matt Levison nearly as much as when I called him gay?

(I don’t really think Tom Cruise is gay, by the way. Just crazy. There’s a fine line.)

Moving along, I received this missive from one B.W. Johnson. He writes:

Mr. Snide er [Hooray! It's the 1,000,000th incident of someone thinking it's clever to point out the "snide" part of my last name!]

If somebody had been killed with a flying axe at the end of a spelling bee movie, would that satisfy your blood lust? [Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes, but only if Akeelah is the one swinging it.] Can you spell Deus Ex Machina? [Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes, but what does deus ex machina have to do with anything?] I note that you are long on violent movies. [No, I'm long on GOOD movies. Sometimes good movies are violent, yes. But lots of times they're not.]
Akeelah & The Bee is the kind of movie I would take a teenage daughter to see. I would be just as comfortable if she saw the movie with some of her friends. Take a sugar pill and watch it again.

I truly have no idea why he mentioned deus ex machina. It doesn’t apply to “Akeelah and the Bee,” nor to any other part of his e-mail. I wrote back to ask him what he meant, and he didn’t reply.

Finally, you may recall that after I panned the dreadful Amanda Bynes film “She’s the Man,” I got an angry letter from Robert Mackey, operator of the “Amanda Bynes NOW!” Web site. He subsequently included me on his list of the 10 “most hateful critics,” which in this case meant “the 10 critics who disliked ‘She’s the Man’ the most, if you can imagine someone not liking a film that stars Amanda Bynes!!!!”

Well, in my review of the Lindsay Lohan disaster “Just My Luck,” I noted that I hadn’t been as frustrated and annoyed by a movie since … well, since “She’s the Man,” two months earlier. This reference prompted Robert Mackey to write to me again — only this time, he claimed his name was Bill Mackey. (The e-mail address — which doesn’t work when I reply to it — is “rwmackey.” So maybe his name is Robert William (Bill) Mackey.)

Could you take some advice and act on it for perhaps the first time in your life, Eric?

“Just My Luck” stars Lindsay Lohan. It does not star Amanda Bynes, nor is it “She’s the Man”. Therefore, there is no reason for you to continue to trash either in your review of “Just My Luck.”

This is your final warning. If you continue to slam “She’s the Man” in further movie reviews, I will ask whatever association that polices you film nerds to drum you out.

I am delighted beyond all measure that a 40-year-old Amanda Bynes groupie is so tunnel-visioned that he thinks he could somehow persuade my bosses to censure me for my constant (twice now) denigrating of Ms. Bynes’ work.

In my reply to him — which I sent through the “contact” address at Amanda Bynes NOW, to ensure he got it — I invited him to go ahead and contact everyone I write for. I even provided their e-mail addresses. I also reminded him that any editor receiving a letter on the order of “tell Eric to quit picking on Amanda Bynes!” would assume it had been written by a 14-year-old girl and disregard it.

Obviously, I’m going to slam “She’s the Man” as often as possible now, just to see what Robert “Bill” Mackey does. If he comes to my house and kills me, well, it will have been worth it.

I hadn’t heard this story, but apparently last December, Kiefer Sutherland destroyed a hotel lobby Christmas tree. (He was drunk, obviously.) Well, a new documentary, “I Trust You to Kill Me,” about the rock band Kiefer manages (Rocco DeLuca & the Burden), contains footage of the incident, and when Kiefer appeared on a British talk show recently to promote the film, that’s the clip he chose to bring along.

The indispensable gossip site Defamer has it here.

You MUST watch it. It’s hilarious, particularly the two lines of dialogue immediately preceding the attack.

In a related story, crazy drunk Kiefer has been trying to get as many people as possible to see this film, which at this point does not have a distribution deal. A friend of mine reports that her brother, a member of the band Maroon 5, was recently among those accosted by Kiefer on an L.A. street and brought back to his house — a converted warehouse — to watch the film. Kiefer was completely wasted at the time, and practically begging everyone to stick around and hang out.

I love drunk Kiefer Sutherland. I love that he doesn’t care about his public image or about covering up potentially embarrassing incidents. Any other celebrity would be mortified if he or she were caught destroying a Christmas tree in a stupor. What does Kiefer do? He shows the footage on TV.

I think the next season of “24″ should include drunk Kiefer. Maybe the season starts at 1 a.m., and Jack Bauer is at a nightclub, totally smashed. He’s drunk for the first few hours of the crisis, behaving even more recklessly than usual. He sobers up by 6 or 7 a.m., of course, but then maybe he starts drinking again at 10 p.m., so the season can end with him sauced, too.

“Hey Kiefer, you’re a pirate, man.”
“That would explain everything.”

Here’s the latest plagiarism update: We won!

The University of Missouri-Kansas City has paid the money we demanded after a student there, Samir Patel, plagiarized 58 movie reviews by me and 14 of my fellow writers from HollywoodB****slap.com/EFilmCritic.com.

The complete story can be found here.

The previous blog entries on the subject are, in order, here, here and here. There’s a thread about it on the message board, too.

So the other day I was at my new favorite cafe/office, The Fresh Pot, clacking away on my laptop and enjoying a tasty mug of hot white chocolate, when a man approached me and said, “Can I ask you about your laptop? Is that a new design?”

Now, I had noticed the man before, sitting at an adjacent table and clacking away on his own laptop, the very latest model from Apple. My computer, on the other hand, was an Apple iBook in the classic “clamshell” style, purchased in January 2001 and now fast approaching the end of its life. (Don’t worry, I have a lovely desktop model at home that I use for most of my computing. The laptop is only for when I’m at the office.)

I told the guy, “No, actually, it’s quite old. I bought it five years ago. I don’t think they even make these anymore.” (Subsequent research confirmed that they discontinued the product about six months after I bought mine.)

He was quite taken with the nifty design, though, and I realized my computer is so old, it’s “retro.” Maybe people will start buying these old iBooks in thrift stores and the Salvation Army and carry them around with their “vintage” clothes and ironic old slogan-bearing T-shirts.

In other words, maybe my crappy old laptop is so old, it’s cool again. Hooray for me!