I just discovered this news item from Salt Lake City in April. It seems a would-be robber walked into Cafe Trio, held out a bag to the cashier, and said “fill the bag.” Alas, the cashier thought the crook’s request had been to feel the bag — “feel” and “fill” are often pronounced identically in Utah — and so proceeded to reach out and feel the bag. The crook reportedly said, “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” and stormed away empty-handed.

I feel bad for the criminal here. Apart from the attempted robbery, he did nothing wrong. “Fill the bag” is a reasonable thing to say, and he said it correctly. It’s not his fault people around him are used to hearing “fill” as a mispronunciation of “feel.” Let this be a lesson to those of you considering a career in crime. You must beware of regional homophones.

(P.S. Despite KSL’s assertion to the contrary, the restaurant is spelled Cafe Trio, not Cafe Treo. It’s an Italian place and the food is quite delicious.)

This week’s edition of “Eric’s Bad Movies” at Film.com features “Over the Top,” which has long been regarded as the “Citizen Kane” of arm-wrestling movies.

I’m astonished by how many bad movies Sylvester Stallone has made. I suspect this will not be his last appearance in “Eric’s Bad Movies.”

Oh, and I have a favor to ask. Would you mind posting your comments regarding the article at the article itself, at Film.com? I know, I know, you have to register a user name to post there, but comments are like gold nuggets for the writers. It’s a cheap way of making the Film.com overlords think that readers love us. Thanks, ‘preciate ya.

We’ve already amply covered the subject of negative reviews of “The Dark Knight” being attacked by the movie’s fans (or pre-fans, since most of them hadn’t yet seen it when they went ballistic). But it turns out you can write a glowing, extremely positive review and still upset some of the fanboys!

Here is an e-mail I got yesterday from an anonymous person. His or her — oh heck, let’s assume it’s a guy — e-mail address contains “86,” which usually suggests the year of birth, and the word “kelly.” So it’s probably a 22-year-old guy named Kelly. At any rate, this is what he said:

I have an objection to your superficial and colorless description of the Joker as “the devil.” [Actually, I said he's like the devil.] How very lazy it was for you to make that comparison.

Continue reading…

Earlier this month, a very sad thing happened: Utah Valley State College became Utah Valley University.

Longtime readers will recall that when I lived in Utah Valley (i.e., the Provo/Orem area) and worked for a newspaper there, UVSC was one of my favorite things to make fun of. In fact, it was a favorite thing for many people in that region to make fun of. I wrote several “Snide Remarks” columns for the sole purpose of mocking UVSC, and mocked it in passing in several others. (Search for “UVSC” on this site and you’ll get plenty of hits.)

Becoming a university instead of a state college doesn’t automatically mean it’s now a really awesome center of learning, of course. It may be on the right track, but it still has open enrollment, which means you can go there no matter how stupid you are. I will continue to childishly poke fun at the place regardless of what it’s called.

So why is the switch from UVSC to UVU sad for me? Because it invalidates my song “UVSC,” which was a parody of “Under the Sea” and cannot survive a change in lyrics. I’d have to write a whole new song. And if you’ve heard “UVSC” — which you can do for free here, or download it for 99 cents here — you know that it’s a thing of beauty that can never be duplicated. Not that I do a lot of shows in Provo (the only place the song is funny) anyway, but still. It’s the end of an era.

Farewell, UVSC! I shall always remember you and laugh. (At you, not with you.)

I have an old friend named John Williams. Not old in the sense of being elderly, and not John Williams in the sense of being a famous film-score composer; old in the sense of I’ve known him a long time, and John Williams in the sense of being a guy in his mid-30s from Utah.

Anyway, this John Williams, like the other one, is a talented musician. When we were living in the same dorm at BYU, he was in a band called Anyone For Squash, which practiced in our basement and which some of us uncharitably called Anyone For Guitar Lessons. They went on to record a fine CD and do some shows around town and goodness knows what else, and then they all graduated from college and did other things.

John graduated from college a couple times, actually, and was an English teacher at Utah State University for a while before moving to Southern California, where it is my understanding that he continues to be both a college student and a college instructor of some kind. He’s super-smart,  and also a good singer and musician.

And now he’s in a new band! They are called Faded Paper Figures, their MySpace page is here, and you can download their album, “Dynamo,” from CD Baby. You can also listen to their stuff for free at both places, to see if you wanna download it.

Faded Paper Figures belongs to the genres of indie and electronica, or “indietronica” as some of the kids are apparently calling it. They remind me of The Postal Service: electronic but not techno, and indie but not emo.

I like the album a lot, and maybe you will too! At any rate, good luck to you, John. It was great to hear your work again in the new Indiana Jones movie.

You think “Dark Knight” fans are bad? You should have seen the fervor when Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” was released! That’s the shaky premise of this week’s “Snide Remarks” column, entitled “The Fanboys Respond to ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 1595.” Enjoy and forsooth and stuff. Oh, and there’s not a podcast version because much of the effect is lost when it’s spoken rather than written.

Holy posthumous Oscar, Batman! Get a load of Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight,” a groundbreaking and all-around excellent superhero flick that happens to feature one of the most fascinating, most unnerving villain performances ever. I use this term facetiously now and then, but I mean it when I say that this Joker is good old-fashioned nightmare fuel.

For that reason and others — the film’s length, its overall darkness, the gruesome and awful things that happen to people in it — I want to emphasize that it is NOT a movie for children. Teenagers, sure. But young kids? No way. Take that PG-13 rating seriously for once.

Also opening wide today is “Mamma Mia!,” a terrible musical! with a stupid plot! draped around some great ABBA songs! The continued success of the stage version mystifies me, although I suspect it’s a lot more energetic and fun in person than it is on film.

“Space Chimps” (reviewed at Film.com) is a pretty good animated comedy for the kiddies and their parents. It’s gonna make about $3 at the box office this weekend, but if you’ve already taken the tykes to see “WALL-E” and “Kung Fu Panda,” this is a good Plan C.

Finally, in limited release is a comedy called “Kabluey” that’s well worth checking out. It was the opening-night film at the Oxford (Mississippi) Film Festival that I attended back in February (my account of the weekend is here), and I’m delighted that it’s getting some kind of theatrical release, albeit not a very big one. You can visit the film’s website to keep an eye on when/if it’s coming to a theater near you.

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.

As expected, this week’s edition of “Eric’s Bad Movies” at Film.com is “Batman & Robin,” the disaster that brought the Batman franchise to a screeching halt 11 years ago. One of my rules for this column is that I don’t want to do films that I already reviewed, but I made an exception here because my original review wasn’t a proper one. It was a he-said/she-said thing with another writer at my college paper, and it hardly counts. Plus, ’tis the season, what with that new Batman movie coming out tomorrow.

By the way, one of the reasons I don’t want to use already-reviewed films for “Eric’s Bad Movies” is pretty straightforward: If it’s bad enough to warrant EBM attention, that means it’s bad enough that I don’t want to watch it again. Time had dulled my memory of how awful “Batman & Robin” is, but it all came rushing back when I rewatched it, compounded now by the fact that I knew what was going to happen. At least the first time had the element of surprise, that flavor of fresh badness. The second time was like re-taking a crap.

Next week: a movie starring someone who has already been featured in “Eric’s Bad Movies” as a director, and directed by someone who has a prior directorial offense on our list, too. Using those clues, the EBM archives, and IMDB, you could actually figure out exactly what next week’s movie is. The first person to post the correct answer wins … something. Possibly nothing. But it would be cool, right?

So I was in the shower Wednesday morning, and I was thinking about the Rotten Tomatoes users’ unusually vicious responses to negative reviews of “The Dark Knight,” and you know me, I’m always looking for a little fun, so I thought, “I should post a negative quote on Rotten Tomatoes just to see if they wish fiery death upon me, too.”

And so I did. I wrote a “review” of the film that simply said this:

This is easily the worst Batman film so far, and I include “Batman & Robin” in that statement.

Just kidding. It’s fantastic. My real review will be posted Thursday. I just wanted to see if a negative quote on Rotten Tomatoes would get me the same kind of psychopathic comments that other negative reviews have gotten. If it does, I guess that means those idiots really are just going by the one-sentence quotes, and not actually clicking over to read the whole review.

At Rotten Tomatoes, I gave it a “Rotten” rating and posted the first sentence as my quote: “Easily the worst Batman film so far, and I include ‘Batman & Robin’ in that statement.”

(Didja know that the RT staff doesn’t assign Fresh or Rotten or choose the quotes, but that the critics themselves usually do it? I suspect the big-time critics like Ebert have interns do it for them, or maybe the RT people give them special consideration. But most critics — particularly those of us on the lower rungs — provide our own quotes.)

I did all of this just before 10 a.m. Within 45 minutes, there were 67 comments posted. You can read them all here. To my great surprise, almost everyone did actually click the link to read the whole review before they posted, and thus saw the joke and laughed at it. In fact, the sudden massive influx of traffic clogged my site for several minutes.

Continue reading…

Writing about great movies: hard. Writing about terrible movies: easy. Result: Put off ‘Dark Knight,’ write about ‘Mamma Mia’ instead.