Stephen Colbert tells things that have been misbehaving that they are “On Notice.” They’re not dead to him yet, but he’s keeping his eye on them, and they should know it. It’s like having two strikes against you.

Here is my “On Notice” list. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a good start.

I have harnessed the power of the Internet to alter photos taken from television!

Create your own “On Notice” board here.

Roger Ebert speaks of the Idiot Plot. It is “any plot containing problems which would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots.” The most egregious Idiot Plots hang the entire film on them, as in most cross-dressing comedies, where the protagonists look nothing like the gender they are impersonating, yet no one notices. Why does no one notice? Because if they did, the movie would be over. Hence, it’s an Idiot Plot: Everyone has to be stupid for the movie to exist.

In less conspicuous examples, the overall plot is fine; it’s only some of the details that require the characters to be idiots. Usually this involves characters making their situations worse through poor decisions of their own, yet failing to realize that their problems are now their own fault. Nearly all horror movies suffer from this, of course. Idiots go into dark basements alone and are terrorized, yet never seem to say, “Shoot! I KNEW I shouldn’t have gone into that dark basement alone!”

I bring up the Idiot Plot because two of this week’s new releases made me think of it — one because it has an Idiot Plot, and the other because it does not.

“Babel” is an overlong, overinflated film from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Amores Perros”). It has four interconnecting stories set all over the world, and two of them have developments late in the film that are the direct result of the characters making one stupid decision after another.

This is a problem because it makes you lose sympathy for them. Their actions are so outrageously foolish that you think, “Even in the heat of the moment, I would never do something that dumb.” You don’t feel sorry for them as the victims of circumstance anymore.

Meanwhile, “Stranger Than Fiction” is notable for having characters who are all smart, all the time, and who behave the way real people would behave under these circumstances. What’s interesting is that the plot — in which a man discovers that he is the main character in a novel someone is writing — is obviously not realistic. It works, though, because the movie treats it like a legitimate story, not like a goofy premise that requires no effort.

The other new wide release is “A Good Year,” which is a bad movie. It features Russell Crowe doing comedy, and by “doing” I mean “failing at.”

“Borat” goes wide today after opening on about 1,000 screens last week, so if it wasn’t playing where you live before, it probably is now. Go see it, unless you’re certain you will be offended by it.

“Harsh Times,” starring Christian Bale as an L.A. gangster (wait, what?), opens in semi-wide release today, about as many screens as “Borat” had last week. It is not reviewed today because the one screening of it was opposite the “Babel” screening, and I had to choose. (Both were Tuesday. Monday was wide open, no screenings. But when a studio gets it into its head to screen a film on a certain day, it never budges, no matter what. You’d be surprised how often this happens.)

I’ll try to review “Harsh Times” — along with “The Return,” a PG-13 horror film that they didn’t bother screening at all — this weekend.

Oh, and regarding “Babel”: Isn’t that a Paramount film? How did I see it? Ah, but it’s actually Paramount Vantage, Paramount’s wing for arthouse-style films. And believe it or not, Paramount and Paramount Vantage have different publicists in the Seattle/Portland area, so the Paramount ban did not affect me. It’s an example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, for surely if Paramount wanted me banned from all its screenings, they probably meant that to include Paramount Vantage releases, too. Whoops!

I know you’ve been jonesin’ for more Children’s Letters to Raven-Symone, so here’s another batch of them. I’ll try to post them more often so we can get caught up.

Basic background: I registered symone.raven@gmail.com and posted it on this blog, specifically saying it is NOT Raven-Symone’s e-mail address and that it IS my e-mail address. I was working under the assumption that people would ignore the disclaimer and use the address to write to Raven anyway. I was right.

Deeper background: Click the “Children’s Letters to Raven-Symone” category and read the earliest entry.

Continue reading…

Good news, nerds! We now have RSS feeds for “Snide Remarks” columns, movie reviews, and this blog. Actually, we’ve had them for a while and just didn’t tell you. I’m not sure why it was a secret. I barely understand what RSS is, and I only gained that semi-understanding a few minutes ago, when I asked my nerd friend Randy to explain it to me.

Anyway, you can find the RSS feed under the “Snide Remarks” and “Movie Reviews” tabs at the top of the page. The blog RSS feed is linked on the right-hand side of the blog, above the calendar. Or, OK, fine, here they are: “Snide Remarks” RSS | Movie reviews RSS | Blog RSS.

RSS is a way to know when your favorite Web sites have been updated without wasting precious seconds going to them or precious brain cells remembering that they are always updated on certain days. RSS is so popular with the kids today that people have been e-mailing me demanding — DEMANDING! — that we institute it on EricDSnider.com. They say, “Eric, I am too lazy to remember that movie reviews are always posted on Fridays, ‘Snide Remarks’ on Mondays, and the blog pretty much every day! I demand an RSS feed to remind me! Please do additional work so that I can do less work!”

I’ll have you know that in my day, if you wanted to know whether a site had new content, you had to GO to the site and LOOK! And this was on DIAL-UP modems, too! You’d wait 60 seconds for a site to load, only to discover it hadn’t changed since the last time you visited it. And that was fine, because we were happy just to HAVE the Internet! You kids today, with your RSS feeds, and your podcasts, and your 100-hour TiVos, and your Lexuses that parallel park by themselves, and of course your rock ‘n’ roll! Bah! Applesauce! Fiddle-faddle and confundrum!

Anyway, you’ve got your RSS feeds. Weary me no more with your teasings!

The funniest movie this week, or any week so far this year, is “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” though you can just call it “Borat” for short. I saw it at a MySpace screening several weeks ago, and my review has been posted since then. But today’s the day the review becomes official. There’s no turning back now! This movie really is being released.

Actually, Fox decided a few weeks ago to open it in only about 900 theaters today and the rest next week. They thought that while the Internet is ripe with Borat buzz, and though Borat has been showing up all over pop culture the last few weeks, there might not be enough awareness of the film in “middle America” (i.e., everything between the coasts).

They might be right about that, and it’s interesting to see a studio being thoughtful about these things. I suspect the failure of “Snakes on a Plane” was sobering. That film SEEMED to have huge buzz, but it turned out all that excitement was only on the Internet. Regular people — people who use the Internet to check e-mail and maybe glance at a couple favorite sites — either didn’t know or didn’t care about the movie. Fox seems to think that might be the case with “Borat,” so they’re being cautious.

I have no idea how “Borat” will play in middle America. The MySpace screening audience loved every minute of it, but who’s to say they’re a barometer of public tastes? These are people who spend all their time on the worst-looking, least-functional Web site ever built. What do they know?

The widest release this weekend is “Flushed Away,” a cartoon from Aardman Animations, the people behind “Wallace & Gromit.” This one is computer animated, though, rather than being made with clay. (The reason: Much of it takes place in water, and water is ridiculously hard to convey with stop-motion photography of clay figures.) The writers and directors are not the same staff from “Wallace & Gromit,” though the directors did work on “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”

Anyway, it’s about a fancy-pants rat who winds up living in the sewer with the common rodents, and I couldn’t see it because it is being distributed by Paramount Pictures.

You know, I always include that link whenever I mention Paramount, so you can see the story of why they banned me from their press screenings. But I’m not giving enough credit. Allied Advertising is responsible, too. They’re a national advertising and P.R. firm, headquartered in Boston with offices all over North America. The Seattle office handles Portland affairs. I mention it because I’m not 100 percent certain that the decision to ban me wasn’t entirely Allied’s, with no input from Paramount at all. Certainly no one from Paramount ever contacted me; it was all Allied, claiming the decision came from above, but who knows? And it was definitely Allied who made the decision to ban me from screenings for the other studios they handle (Weinstein Company, Dimension and Miramax) — allegedly because Paramount asked them to, but again, how do I know that?

Anywhich, the other wide release today — also a children’s film — is “The Santa Clause 3,” in which Tim Allen falls off some more roofs and some more reindeer break wind. ‘Tis the season! Apparently!

You can have the latest reviews, DVD releases and other movie tidbits e-mailed to you every Friday by subscribing to “In the Dark,” a most wholesome and delightful e-zine guaranteed to be chock-full of goodies and jam-packed with, er, more goodies.