(This post contains minor “WALL-E” spoilers.)

Many of you saw “WALL-E” over the weekend, and no doubt some of you noticed biblical themes in it. You can’t name a main character “Eve” without invoking the Garden of Eden, of course; nobody could miss that. But what about all the humans living on a ship and waiting for an envoy to return with a plant as proof that it was safe to go home? Did that remind anyone of Noah’s Ark and the dove?

In my review, I mentioned that there were biblical allusions along with the cinematic references like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Buster Keaton. (I didn’t mention it, but writer/director Andrew Stanton is a Christian, and he discusses how that influences his work in this interview.) My review prompted a Methodist minister to write to me:

I have read 7 reviews so far all by the “top” critics, and while they are all excellent writers, they all, until you, have missed the biblical narratives so skillfully woven into the story. Thanks for having the guts to mention it.

Continue reading…

I’m back from my travels, and “Snide Remarks” is back with me. (I took it along as a sidekick.) This week’s edition, “A Good Sense of Rumor,” pertains to celebrities, and in particular the mocking of them.

Speaking of celebs, you might be interested in this post I wrote for Cinematical during the CineVegas Film Festival, in which Britney Spears and I attended the same party. OMG is right!

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 with this URL.

Whoa! Technical difficulties last night at EricDSnider.com headquarters. The server went down at the worst possible time — Thursday night when I’m posting reviews and sending out “In the Dark” — and prevented me from getting a lot of things done. But here we are now! We are OK. We have each other, and that’s the important thing.

Unsurprisingly, Pixar has knocked another one out of the park with “WALL-E,” an animated sci-fi love story that raises the bar yet again in terms of technical excellence and storytelling technique. I dare say it’s brilliant, easily the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. My review is at Film.com.

Then there’s “Wanted,” starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy as assassins. My review of this will be posted shortly is at Cinematical.

In limited release: “Stuck,” a horror-comedy about a woman who hits a homeless man with her car, then drives home with him still alive and embedded in the windshield; and “Expired,” an abrasive comedy from Sundance 2007 about two parking-enforcement officers in love.

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

Well, I guess this was inevitable. Today’s edition of “Eric’s Bad Movies” at Film.com features “Kazaam,” a movie that for some reason Shaquille O’Neal is the star of. I know! It doesn’t make sense to me, either.

I think next week’s movie, if you’re in a guessing mood, will be one that many people liked — it grossed over $200 million worldwide when it was released in the 1990s — but is terrible nonetheless.

I’m not a sociologist or historian, and the only subject I know anything about is movies, so take this with a grain of salt. But it seems to me that this blog, Seriously So Blessed, is hilarious. It’s a near-perfect satire of a certain subculture of Mormon life in the Provo/SLC area: the 20-year-old life-long-Provo girls who marry newly returned missionaries and write blogs about their fabulous lives. If you’ve never been a Mormon living in Provo you might not fully appreciate the nuances of the character, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s funny.

Note: The blog has an irritating music player that begins playing irritating music the moment the page loads. So be ready for that. It’s irritating.

Earlier this year there was a film called “Teeth,” which you might remember hearing about even if you didn’t see it. It’s a horror comedy about a teenage girl who discovers she has teeth in her lady parts, and they act as a defense mechanism against unwanted intruders. In other words, when someone tries to rape her, he gets his wang bitten off. Eventually she learns to use this as a weapon against unsavory men.

The concept was upsetting to some men, as evidenced by comments they posted on my review. Some samples:

So, if someone made a movie where women’s breasts were cut off, would that be hailed as an artistic success? Of course not. I’m willing to bet that all of the men in the film are bad in some way, in order to justify what she’s doing. Geez… just another movie for angry and sadistic women to enjoy, and if we don’t agree in every detail then we’re sexists.

find me one positive male in this movie and then tell me it’s not sexist. And by the way, woman can rape too. The analogy would be perfectly apt if the movie was about a penis that shot acid into women’s vaginas. But no. It’s violence against men — horrific violence, for that matter — so it’s funny.

It seems that this is an example of how extreme violence towards men is somehow acceptable in the media, a film basically that centres around men having their penis’s bitten off, i’ve yet to see a film where the hero of the movie tears wombs out with his barbed penis and then justifies it with sexual political rhetoric!

Continue reading…

Two big-budget comedies open today, and early word on both of them has been unpromising. Both are doing poorly on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment. And yet I liked them both — one a lot, and one a little (but enough to lukewarmly recommend it). What can I say?

“Get Smart” is the one I liked a lot, and I’m not entirely alone in that, though I am in the minority. It screened last weekend as a special CineVegas event, and I reviewed it for Cinematical’s film festival coverage.

The other one is Mike Myers’ “The Love Guru,” which I’m one of only a very few critics to give a “recommended” grade to. I was torn between C-plus and B-minus — the dividing line between recommended and not — and I eventually settled on B-minus because my overall feelings were more favorable than not. But it’s not exactly a glowing recommendation.

I was in Las Vegas when it screened, and the local screening was being handled by Allied Advertising, my relationship with which I have recently chronicled. Normally, my plan would be to check with the local publicist to get invited to the screening, but I already knew the Denver and Seattle offices of Allied were against me, and I didn’t want to test whether the Phoenix office had gotten the memo, too. So I just went to the screening and bummed a spare pass off one of the civilians in line, easy as that. Just in case you were wondering.

Oh, and my review of “The Happening” is up now, too. It’s not good.

The “In the Dark” podcast will return next week, when I’m back in Portland.

Anyone who is a fan of Pauly Shore better stop reading now!

OK, now that zero people have stopped reading, I’ll tell you about this week’s edition of “Eric’s Bad Movies” at Film.com. It’s “Bio-Dome,” the last of a string of Shore comedies from the mid-’90s, and by all accounts the worst of the bunch. I had seen snippets of it on TV before, but this was the first time I’d attempted to watch the whole thing. It was hard.

Kudos to those readers who correctly predicted this entry based on last week’s clues! I like the part where some people said it was “definitely” someone else. You’re definitely wrong! I haven’t decided what next week’s Bad Movie is, so no clues this time.

Oh! Perhaps you will be interested in this “Snide Remarks” column from 2003 in which I met Pauly Shore in person and lied to him.

For readers unfamiliar with the saga of the Paramount ban, I will recap it briefly before moving on to the surprising recent developments.

In July 2006, I went on an all-expenses-paid press junket for the film “World Trade Center.” I then wrote a column making fun of the whole shady practice, in which “journalists” are essentially wined and dined in exchange for fluffy, favorable coverage.

Paramount got mad at what I wrote and banned me — not just from future junkets (which I had no interest in anyway; this was a one-time thing), but from its press screenings, too. Press screenings are held, for most films, a few days before they open theatrically. All film critics in the major U.S. markets are invited to attend them. I was now removed from this list.

Now, the way these press screenings work is that they are handled in each market by a local public relations or advertising agency. In Portland, where I live, Paramount is handled by the Seattle office of Allied Advertising, which has branches around the U.S., most of which focus on film publicity. No one from Paramount ever contacted me directly. Instead, they had their Seattle publicist at Allied tell me I’d been banned. It was this Seattle office that had set up the junket I attended.

This Allied publicist also said that, in solidarity with Paramount, they were banning me from their other clients’ screenings too. Luckily, besides Paramount, Allied in Seattle only handled the Weinstein Company and Miramax. The other big studios were handled by other Seattle agencies, and none of them cared. (One of the other publicists even called me to say how funny and dead-on she thought the article was.)

So ever since then, my understanding has been that Paramount was mad, and that Allied in Seattle had removed me from their press list entirely. I kind of assumed that Paramount had strong-armed Allied into the latter decision.

But now new facts have come to light.

Continue reading…

My laptop crisis has been solved. Whew! It turns out to have been just a confluence of coincidences — no wifi signal, a dodgy DSL router, and an overtaxed CineVegas server — that made it seem like my computer had lost all connectivity. The fact that these things happened at midnight made it hard to troubleshoot, too.

Several readers here in Vegas e-mailed to offer help, which I appreciate. I am glad to see strangers come together in times of trouble.

I no longer have the ancient laptop, by the way. I bought a new one (well, a new used one) several months ago, and it’s fine for on-the-road purposes.

So “In the Dark” has been sent out. There is no podcast, but that’s because I’m traveling, not because of technical difficulties. “The Incredible Hulk” is good. I just barely saw “The Happening” this afternoon and don’t have a review written yet, but it’s remarkably dull, flat, emotionless, and surprise-free.

In limited release: “The Foot Fist Way” and “Mongol,” both good.