Today is the fifth Friday of February — something that can only happen in leap years, and only when Feb. 1 is a Friday, too. February gets five Fridays only once every 28 years, so enjoy it while it lasts!

Our leap day movies (also rare, since movies usually come out on Fridays) are “Semi-Pro” (OK, but not Will Ferrell’s best work), “Penelope” (a delightful modern fairy tale), and “The Other Boleyn Girl” (aka skit night at the Renaissance Faire).

In limited release you’ll find the wonderful “Band’s Visit” from Israel and the slightly less wonderful (but still good) “Caramel” from Lebanon.

Today is also the birthday of Howard Tayler, whose web comic “Schlock Mercenary” is a consistently amusing sci-fi treat. Since his birthday is Feb. 29, that means 1) his friends and family only have to celebrate it once every four years, and 2) I’ll never forget when his birthday is. It’s a built-in mnemonic device! I’m actually much better friends with his brother Randy, yet I have no idea when Randy’s birthday is. (December? Maybe around the 10th?)

So happy 40th (i.e, 10th) birthday, Howard!

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OK, not every joke in this commercial works — the finger thing really only means something in one context, not in the other — but it’s still pretty funny.

We’re having some technical difficulties here at EricDSnider.com with the commenting feature. Apparently you can still post comments here on the blog, but on the rest of the site — movie reviews, “Snide Remarks,” etc. — it’s not working. The Laotian kids in the sweatshop are working on the problem. In the meantime, feel free to use this space to make fun of Chris Buttars.

(P.S. Related to the above problem in the sense that both are the fault of our crappy, crappy hosting service, I haven’t been able to receive any e-mail for the last 12 hours. So if you sent me something, it’s clogged in the system and will spew out once we run the snake through the pipes.)

UPDATE: My fat webmaster Jeff has deployed a Band-Aid to the problem (pending a long-term solution to the crisis), so you can post comments again. Post away!

“Hartsburg, USA,” by David Mizner. One of the skills I most envy in good writers is the ability to get inside the heads of their characters and show the readers what they believe and why. Mizner does that exceptionally well in this comic, lightly satiric novel about a small-town school board election that comes to represent the Red vs. Blue divide in America.

The candidates are a born-again Christian busybody housewife and a failed-screenwriter liberal journalist. They’re polar opposites, yet Mizner makes them both seem real and empathetic — no small feat, considering the emotionally charged issues that come up in their heated campaign, and their very different opinions on them.

Mizner doesn’t stack the deck against either side. Both candidates have their strengths and flaws, and while I assume Mizner himself is probably more like the liberal character, he represents the conservative character’s thought process as well as if it were his own.

The writing is often funny and always affectionate toward its characters (though the characters themselves are not always nice to each other). It’s also very insightful with regard to the political process and the way it divides people who, differences aside, all have a lot in common, too.

Saw this online. Don’t know who did it. Made me laugh.

The Oscars were reasonably short (3:17), reasonably entertaining, and not terribly surprising. Jon Stewart was very funny (Gaydolf Titler!), Helen Mirren was elegant even while saying the word “cojones,” and a whole lot of foreigners won awards. Several of the acceptance speeches were actually quite touching and sweet, which is rare.

I correctly predicted 13 out of 24, same as last year. I note that while I intentionally avoided matching Entertainment Weekly’s predictions in the short categories because of their poor track record, this year we split: EW got the documentary short right, I got the animated short, and we both missed the narrative short.

The big winner of the night was “No Country for Old Men.” That’s only the second time since I started doing top 10 lists in 1999 that my pick for the year’s best film actually won the Oscar for Best Picture. (The other time was “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.”) Am I starting to have the same tastes as the Academy? Am I turning into an old white liberal rich man? I hope so!

“No Country” won four prizes. The second biggest haul was three awards for … “The Bourne Ultimatum”? It won all three of its categories (editing, sound editing, and sound mixing) — not bad, considering the first two “Bourne” films didn’t even get nominated for anything.

After the jump, the complete list of winners, in case you didn’t watch the show and haven’t been anywhere else on the Internet yet today.

Continue reading…

Matters of race, politics, abortion, and homosexuality appear in this week’s “Snide Remarks,” and my Utah readers probably already know what that means: It’s about Sen. Chris Buttars (R-West Jordan). If you’re not familiar with Buttars, you’re in for a treat. Please feast on this week’s column, entitled “A Crock of Buttars.”

And speaking of loathsome, vile things, my review of Larry The Cable Guy’s “Witless Protection” is up at Film.com. The final paragraph reads: “If you find any of this funny, please rush out and see ‘Witless Protection.’ And please don’t ever do anything that would make me aware of your existence. I prefer not to know.” This was toned down (at the request of my editor) from my original conclusion, which was: “If you find any of this funny, please rush out and see ‘Witless Protection,’ and then please take your own life. It is the only honorable course of action.” I accept the need for the alteration, though I stand by my original position.

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A couple of my Cinematical pals posted articles this week that made me laugh. They might make you laugh, too, if you are a fairly hardcore movie buff.

First is Scott Weinberg’s response to the news that Hasbro and Universal are teaming up to make movies based on board games (including Candy Land). Weinberg (whose dental agony facilitated my recent trip to Mississippi, you may recall) provides seven other possible game-to-movie adaptations, including who would direct them. It’s the latter element that is most clever, in my opinion.

Then we have James Rocchi, the world’s politest Canadian, offering his Oscar predictions based on what he thinks Ernest Borgnine will vote for. Why Borgnine? Because Rocchi figures most of the Academy is like him: old, white, liberal, rich, and male. So when in doubt, ask yourself: What would Ernest Borgnine do? Rocchi writes in Borgnine’s voice, too, which makes it extra-funny.

It’s rather perverse to open a Larry the Cable Guy movie on Oscar weekend, isn’t it? I guess that’s what they call counter-programming, like releasing a chick flick on Super Bowl weekend.

Larry’s movie, “Witless Protection” (what’s with this guy and pun titles?), was of course one of Hollywood’s Shameful Secrets®, not screened for critics before opening today. Curiously, the film “Be Kind Rewind” — which premiered at Sundance last month — was also not screened for critics in most cities. Some of us skipped it in Park City because we figured we’d get a press screening when it opened locally. Shows what we know.

As for movies whose distributors are not embarrassed by them, “Charlie Bartlett” and “Vantage Point” are the two big releases today, and both of them are pretty good. “Charlie Bartlett” was actually supposed to open last July, and I saw it way back then, wrote my review — and then had to sit on it for seven months when they pushed the film back on the schedule. It was very annoying to have that review sitting there on my desktop, waiting to be posted, for all that time. The organizer in me kept wanting to do something with it, and kept being frustrated by the knowledge that I couldn’t. So I’m glad to have it gone.

Finally, two good horror movies are in limited release. George Romero’s “Diary of the Dead” is pretty decent, while “The Signal” — in which a signal goes out over all the TVs, radios, and cell phones and causes people to become violent — is fantastic. It’s scary and funny, very much in the spirit of the “Evil Dead” movies.

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With brothers Joel and Ethan Coen up for multiple Oscars this weekend, I’ve had the unfortunate experience of seeing them referred to as “the Coen’s” many times on the Internet. (Why not in print? Because print writers have copy editors.) And so this is as good a time as any to remind you of a very important punctuation fact:

“COENS” DOESN’T NEED AN APOSTROPHE, AND NEITHER DO PLURALS OF ANY OTHER LAST NAMES*.

This is a distressingly common mistake. Even sensible people who would never dream of writing “I have two cat’s” or “My neighbor’s are really loud” still buy signs to hang outside their houses that say “The Johnson’s” (or whatever their last name is; sometimes it isn’t Johnson).

One Smith, two Smiths. Keeping up with the Joneses. I don’t care how “weird” it looks to pluralize “Jones” as “Joneses,” that’s how you do it. Does it look weird to pluralize “boss” as “bosses”? Well, it shouldn’t.

Now, if you want to indicate that this is the house belonging to the Johnsons, you can use an apostrophe — but it goes after the “S.” The Johnsons’ house. The sign on your mailbox or front porch could say The Johnsons’, if you like. But it could also just say The Johnsons, as in The Johnsons live here. Best to leave the apostrophe out altogether if you can’t remember where it’s supposed to go.

The only reason you would use The Johnson’s is if there’s one dude called The Johnson, and this is his house. But honestly, how often does that come up?

So the directors are not the Coen’s. They are the Coens. “No Country for Old Men” is the Coens’ movie. I hope it win’s many award’s on Sunday.

(*Yes, obviously a name like D’Angelo or O’Malley has an apostrophe. Don’t be a smart-aleck.)