With mere hours to go before 2007 is naught but a memory, let’s enjoy this cornucopia of end-of-the-year features, won’t we?

“The Best and Worst Movies of 2007″ is exactly what it sounds like. It also includes some miscellaneous data and a list of Hollywood’s Shameful Secrets© for 2007.

“Eric’s Media Inventory: What I Watched and Read in 2007″ is, curiously, also exactly what it sounds like. This is the one that maybe is only interesting to me, so you’re allowed to skip it if you want to.

Finally, this week’s “Snide Remarks” is, naturally, “The Best of ‘Snide Remarks’: 2007,” a collection of my favorite chunks from this year’s columns.

Have a safe and enjoyable New Year’s Eve, and I’ll see you in 2008!

This week’s “Snide Remarks,” including the audio version, is here.
The audio version (i.e., the podcast) is also here.
Subscribe to the podcast’s feed here.

Astute readers may have noticed that this is the last Friday of the year, and thus the time when I should be posting my “Best and Worst Movies of 2007″ article and related features. They will be posted by Monday.

There are two reasons for the delay. One is that I didn’t accomplish as much during my week-long visit to the ancestral Snider homeland as I thought I would, waylaid as I was by family merriment and some under-the-weatherness.

The greater reason is that the studios made us wait a little longer than usual this year to see some of the key potential-top-ten-list films. It’s impossible to see everything in a year, of course, but this year there were a few titles I noticed appearing on other critics’ lists that I hadn’t seen yet. Then there were a few others that I had seen but wanted to revisit before finalizing my list. I’m trying to avoid the trap of “Well, this A- movie I saw in November is fresher in my mind than the A- movie I saw in March, so I’ll put it on the list and bump the March one.”

So I’m giving myself the weekend to get everything together. I might sneak in and post stuff early, but for sure it will be there by Monday. It’s probably best to just crawl into bed and sleep the weekend away to make the time go faster.

With the heaping helping we got last Friday and on Christmas Day, we certainly don’t need any new movies today — and Hollywood was glad to oblige! Nothing opens wide today. Next week, only one thing opens wide (“One Missed Call”), and it’s barely being screened. So you have some time to catch up on what you’ve missed without falling behind.

“In the Dark” this week focuses on three limited-release pictures, all of which are worth seeking out (or waiting for, as the case may be).

Sure to be an Oscar contender is “There Will Be Blood,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a devious early 20th century oilman. It’s from Paul Thomas Anderson, director of “Magnolia” and “Punch-Drunk Love,” and it’s even better than both of those films.

Also generating buzz is “Persepolis,” an animated film about a young girl growing up during the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s. It’s France’s submission for the foreign-language category at the Oscars, and it’s sure to be nominated in the animation category, too. It’s a marvelous little movie.

Finally, there’s “The Savages,” about two grown-up siblings figuring out what to do with their aging father. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney star. It’s funny and poignant and stuff.

Sign up for the “In the Dark” e-zine here.
Listen to this week’s podcast version here.
Subscribe to the podcast’s feed here.

A roundup of what I’ve written at Film.com since the last time I did one of these updates. If you want to keep track of me over there, you can bookmark this page. Or you can just wait until I summarize everything in one of these blog entries.

Five Film-Related Things I’m Thankful For | Just in time for Thanksgiving!

20th Century Fox Hates the Internet | I think they’re assuming this whole “Internet” thing won’t catch on.

Money: Or, Why You Can’t Blame Jason Lee for Making The Chipmunks | You’d do it, too, for that kind of money.

Films I’d Hate to Market: The Kite Runner and Persepolis | “The rape scene isn’t too graphic!”

Will Newspaper Film Critics Become Extinct? | Not to toot my own horn, but the Alabama joke is one of my all-time favorites.

Thoughts on a Keira-Free Pirates of the Caribbean 4 | Will people watch another “Pirates” movie without Keira Knightley? Um, yeah.

Quantity and Quality: The Top 5 Performers of the Year | Giving one great performance in a year is noteworthy. Giving two (or three!) deserves serious praise.

And here’s one from Cinematical, where most of what I write is more newsy than funny, so I don’t always tell you about it. But for the 12 Days of Cinematicalmas, I did a Retro Cinema piece on “Gremlins.” Enjoy!

You may recall that last year (well, technically still “this year”) I took January off from reviewing new movies. I thought at the time that it might become a tradition, but this year (well, technically still “next year”) I don’t feel compelled to put myself on hiatus. Maybe I’ve seen enough great movies lately that I’m not feeling burnt out.

There’s also the fact that, for the first time maybe ever, there are January releases on the docket that look intriguing and that might actually be good! “Cloverfield,” the annoyingly hyped but admittedly cool-looking monster movie from producer J.J. Abrams, opens Jan. 18. The next week we get the fourth Rambo movie, apparently just called “Rambo,” which may not be good but which at least warrants some attention. Most January movies are altogether ignorable.

(Sidetrack: How can they just call it “Rambo”? Wasn’t the first one called “Rambo”? No sir. The first one was called “First Blood” and featured the character of Rambo. The sequel was called “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” and then came “Rambo III” and now what should be called “Rambo IV” is being called just “Rambo.” For a while they were calling it “John Rambo,” which would have provided a nice symmetry with Stallone’s recent “Rocky Balboa.” Then for a few minutes it was being called “Rambo: To Hell and Back” — really — and I’m glad they changed their minds about that.)

So it will be business as usual this January! Already I am looking forward to (links go to trailers) “27 Dresses,” “One Missed Call,” “Untraceable,” “First Sunday,” “Mad Money,” and wow, maybe I should rethink this.

Not that it’s a busy time of year or anything, but if you can spare a few hours, Hollywood has 829 movies it would like you to watch.

Opening today are:

• “Sweeney Todd,” a fantastic adaptation of the Sondheim musical starring Johnny Depp as the vengeful barber who slits his customers’ throats, and Helena Bonham Carter as the insane woman who bakes them into pies. The list of R-rated musicals is surely very short, but this is one of ‘em.

• “Charlie Wilson’s War,” based on the outrageous true story of a Texas congressman (Tom Hanks) who organized the CIA’s funding of the Afghans during their war with the Soviets in the 1980s. Humor and satire abound. Read the review at Film.com.

• “P.S. I Love You,” a romantic dramedy in which a young widow (Hilary Swank) is comforted by letters written by her dead husband pre-mortem. As I approached the theater for the screening I thought, “I cannot imagine anyone wanting to watch Hilary Swank read love letters from her dead husband for two hours.” Inside I ran into a friend who works for one of the ad agencies that arranges these screenings. She wasn’t working at this one; she had come because she just wanted to see the movie. And yet again I demonstrate that I know nothing about women.

• “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” co-written and produced by Judd Apatow, and while it isn’t up to the level of his “Knocked Up” and “Superbad,” it’s certainly a worthy companion. It’s a parody of musical biopics (especially “Walk the Line”), and it’s got some great scenes. “I’m cut in half pretty bad!” is a line that makes me chuckle every time I think of it.

• “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” which didn’t screen until Wednesday night, at which point I was already out of town for Christmas. One assumes it is more of the same monkey business that made the first “National Treasure” such an unexpected, “Da Vinci Code”-ripping-off hit. I’ll have a review posted over the weekend. Why, here’s that review now!

But that’s not all! On Christmas Day three more films open in wide release:

• “The Great Debaters,” an Oprah-produced true story about a debate team from a black college in the 1930s, made from the template of Inspiring Sports Dramas. Do you think they ever considered calling it “The Master Debaters”? Well, they should have.

• “The Water Horse,” based on a novel about a little boy who finds an egg that hatches and becomes the Loch Ness Monster. Presumably not based on a true story.

• “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem,” in which more aliens battle more predators. Not screened for critics, who historically have had very strong anti-alien and anti-predator leanings.

There you go! That should keep you busy for a while, or not quite as long if you only see the good ones.

And that’s it for me and the blog until at least the 26th. I’m in Southern California with my family for Christmas, the way nature intended. (White Christmas? Bah!) I hope yours is as merry as I know mine will be!

Sign up for the “In the Dark” e-zine here.
Listen to this week’s podcast version here.
Subscribe to the podcast’s feed here.

The other day I was driving to pick up my friend Lady Dawn so we could go to lunch when I heard my new choice for Worst Christmas Recording Ever. It was a version of “Silent Night,” sung by a vaguely country-ish female artist whose voice was just flat-out ugly. It wasn’t that she was off-key or anything; she simply had an unpleasant voice.

To make it worse, she added some words. Between “Silent night” and the next line (“holy night”), she added, “It was a …,” which made me laugh out loud, which I do not believe was the intended effect. It reminded me too much of a blues singer who will ad-lib “I tell you!” or “Lemme tell you ’bout!” or “I’m singin’!” between lines.

When I picked up Dawn, I described the song to her and did an impression of what the singer’s voice sounded like to me as reproduced here:

[Sample]

Dawn said, “Are you sure it wasn’t Stevie Nicks?” I said, “No, no, I’m pretty sure it was a country singer. She had backup singers that I assume were her sisters or something.”

When I got home, I checked the radio station’s website and discovered that IT WAS STEVIE NICKS!! My impersonation of her was so adept that Dawn recognized it instantly.

Here is the song. I encourage you to listen to the whole thing. Does her voice strike anyone else as grating and unlistenable? Does she sound to you, as she does to my mom, like a slowed-down chipmunk? Do the random fills (“Well, it was a!”) make anyone else laugh?

["Silent Night," by Stevie Nicks; vocals by fingernails on a chalkboard]

A now-former “Snide Remarks” reader named Andy sent this in response to this week’s column, “War Is Hell (at the Box Office)”:

Sorry Eric,

Not intrested in your politics. One too many ‘I’ve got serious things to say’ pieces. I just can’t take geo-politics from a guy who piles on teenage girls who like hor-sees.

Also, IT’S NOT WHY I COME TO A HUMOR-MOVE REVIEW WEB SITE.

Peace out, Craker

I assume he’s referring to the incident of Amber the Horse Girl.

I don’t know if he’s calling me a cracker (or “craker”), or if he’s signing his own name there. If it were the latter, “Craker” would probably be on the next line, not the same line as the “Peace out.” Then again, maybe all bets are off when dealing with someone who calls you (or himself) “Craker.”

As always in these cases, “I don’t come here to read your politics” probably means “I don’t agree with your politics.” Which is totally fine. Can we agree on Amber the Horse Girl, though? That was some funny shiz.

Here is a very level-headed, insightful article by David Wong called “10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On.” (It contains some PG-13 language and images.) At a time when there is increasing animosity between those groups, I find this attitude of “Can’t we all get along?” very refreshing.

Naturally, since the article is about finding common ground and respecting one another, most of the comments that people have posted in response to it are full of hostility and anger — merely proving one of Wong’s points, which is that there are a-holes in both camps who simply don’t want to understand how other people think.

Someone named Katrina (not the hurricane) did not appreciate my negative review of “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Her e-mail reads more or less the way you would expect an e-mail from someone who loved “Alvin and the Chipmunks” to read.

Dear Eric Snider,
I just read your review of the Alvin and the Chipmunks and you have made me extremely mad because you ,yourself, have no idea what you are talking about. Before you try to critizes a movie you need to watch it first. Theodore DID NOT eat Simon’s pop. That is impossable, seeing as how Theordore is the green chipmunk and Simon is the blue. Simon didn’t even eat Theordore’s poop after saying it was a “raisen.” He spit the the poop out and said ” You owe big time.”

I just saw the movie last night and it was written so that it would fit with the cartoon. You know the one called Alvin and the Chipmunks. If you read the dedication at the end of the movie you would of seen that Alvin, Theodore, and Simon were created 50 years ago. You must of not grown up watching the cartoon because if you did you would of seen all the jokes that came from the cartoon that were in the movie. And any one who agrees with you has never seen the cartoons either and has no education. So how about you spend your money and go watch the movie and then write your review.

Big Fan of the Chipmunks,
Katrina

She is correct that I accidentally reversed the roles of pooper and poop-eater in my review. I sincerely regret the error and have fixed it now. As if Theodore would ever eat Simon’s poop! That is totally something Simon would do, as any faithful viewer of the old cartoons would of known.