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.