My superficial objections to Sarah Palin:

1. Her children have the following names: Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig Paxson. My objections to non-names are well documented. I have always taken a firm stance on this issue.

2. She speaks with the lazy-vowel accent, common in rural parts of the West, that drives me crazy. Here’s a sound bite from her introductory speech on Friday, in which she refers to “oil fillds” and “the United Stillworkers Union.” Again, my feelings (sorry, “fillings”) about this are on the record.

I’ve updated my previous list of season-premiere dates to include brand-new series. There aren’t as many new shows this year as there usually are (more fallout from the writers’ strike), so it shouldn’t be too hard to check out the ones that look promising. It helps that several of the new entries are on the CW, which makes it easy to write them off.

Hoo boy! Do you smell that? That’s the movie studios dumping their leftover crap into theaters because it’s the last weekend of summer. Four wide releases this week, and THREE of them are Hollywood’s Shameful Secrets©®™. I don’t know if we’ve ever had that many in one weekend before. Perhaps this is Hollywood’s most shameful weekend in history.

The one that was screened for critics was “Traitor,” which actually opened Wednesday. I reviewed it for Film.com. It stars Don Cheadle as a man who might be a terrorist. Great cast, a few good ideas, not a very good movie.

The three that the studios were embarrassed by are:

• “Disaster Movie,” which is the latest from the masterminds who brought us “Date Movie,” “Epic Movie,” and “Meet the Spartans,” which probably tells you everything you need to know right there.

• “Babylon A.D.,” starring Vin Diesel as a mercenary transporting a woman from Russia to America. The director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly disowned the film, saying Twentieth-Century Fox forced him to water it down, cut 15 minutes out of the running time, and totally ruin it. Generally, if the director of a film tells you it’s lousy, you should go ahead and take his word for it.

• “College,” in which some high school kids go on a “campus preview” weekend at the college; hilarity ensues. The film wants to be the “Animal House” or “American Pie” of the 2000s. I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.

I’ll have reviews of “Disaster Movie” and “College” by tomorrow. I’m seeing them back-to-back this afternoon, so keep me in your prayers. “Babylon A.D.” is still up in the air. Of the three, it’s the one that has the most potential for being entertaining — bad sci-fi films are funnier than bad comedies — but it’s also the one that nobody’s paying me to review, and cramming three Shameful Secrets into one weekend is kind of rough. So we’ll see.

Also reviewed are the terrific indie drama “Frozen River” and the so-so prestige flick “Elegy,” starring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz’s breasts. (For real! Both of them! They practically have speaking roles!)

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I stole this from E! Online. (Thanks, Kristin!) Please note that this schedule is only for returning shows. The schedule for premiere dates of brand-new series is forthcoming. Also, note that times are for the Pacific and Eastern time zones. Everything airs an hour earlier in the Mountain and Central zones. (Why? These reasons.)

UPDATE: I’ve added the new shows to the schedule. They’re marked with an asterisk. This info comes from The Futon Critic. If something is wrong or missing, take it up with them.

Monday, Sept. 1
Gossip Girl (CW), 8 p.m.
One Tree Hill (CW), 9 p.m.
Prison Break (Fox), 8 p.m.

Tuesday, Sept. 2
The Shield (FX), 10 p.m.
*90210 (CW), 8 p.m.

Wednesday, Sept. 3
America’s Next Top Model (CW), 8 p.m.
Bones (Fox), 8 p.m.

Continue reading…

“Cocktail” isn’t the worst film to be featured in Eric’s Bad Movies at Film.com, but it is among the most boring and emotionally hollow. If anyone other than Tom Cruise (at the height of his popularity) had starred in it, it would have been a made-for-USA Network special.

Someone e-mailed me to ask that I reinstate the “guess next week’s movie” game, and I explained to him why I had stopped. (It was because I wasn’t working a week ahead, so I often didn’t know what the next movie would be.) Then that person posted a comment last week imploring me to reinstate it, as if I hadn’t already explained its absence to him privately! So that person is dead to me and can’t guess anymore. We don’t tolerate cheekiness around here.

Anyway, next week’s movie is from the latter half of the 1990s and stars two people who had (and still have) music careers (separately — they’re not a duo) but became famous for their acting. One of them is definitely more famous now for acting than for music, while the other could be argued either way (but I’d lean toward acting). A third cast member is an Oscar-winner who has a close relative who’s also an Oscar-winner. A fourth cast member was in a famous Oscar-winning movie, though he himself did not win one. A fifth cast member has been nominated for an Oscar, but for writing, not acting. Make your guesses below, if you so choose.

The following people are celebrating birthdays today:

Macauley Culkin (28)
Chris Burke, the Down syndrome guy from “Life Goes On” (43)
Mother Teresa (98, except for being dead)
Tom Ridge, first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (63)
Mark Snow, composer of the “X-Files” theme music (62)
Chris Pine, who plays Capt. Kirk in the upcoming “Star Trek” reboot (28)
Geraldine Ferraro (73)
Will Shortz, New York Times crossword puzzle editor (56)
Eric D. Snider (34)

In some regions, today is also known as Totally Stupid Day.

Feel free to wish any of these people a happy birthday and/or Totally Stupid Day in the space below!

My friend Luscious Malone and I like to say this when we’re watching a movie or TV show in which an actor appears onscreen only briefly and only to do or say something dumb, demeaning, or embarrassing. For example:

“The good news is, we got you a part. The bad news is, you play Adam Sandler’s Elderly Sexual Partner #3 in ‘Zohan.’

Or:

“The good news is, we got you a part on ‘Lost.’ The bad news is, you’re going to emerge from one of the Others’ houses just in time to get shot.”

Last night I was watching an old TiVoed episode of “Law & Order: SVU” when I found myself saying this:

“The good news is, we got you a part. The bad news is, you play a forensics technician whose only line is telling Detective Benson at a Central Park murder scene, ‘My team’s looking for sperm clusters and foliage smears.’ Learn that line really well! Deliver it with gusto! Then be sure to put it on your demo tape!”

My team’s looking for sperm clusters and foliage smears. Yeesh. Thanks, SVU. You’re delightful.

Can you believe it’s been five years since I wrote a “Snide Remarks” column entirely about PETA? Me either! So here’s a new one, “That’s So PETArded,” which seeks to make up for lost time. I confess I’m kind of proud of the Shamu part, and especially the SnideCast recording of it.

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Gazing out the window at my local coffeehouse, I saw a guy ride past on a bicycle with a DVD case from Video Verite (a local rental place specializing in non-mainstream DVDs) sticking out of the back of his pants, half in and half out. It was too big to fit in his pocket, and he didn’t have a backpack or anything, so he put it there. I guess I just wanted to warn you that if you rent a DVD from Video Verite, there is a slight chance that it has recently spent time in a guy’s sweaty butt crack. Just FYI.

(Yes, of course I tried to get a picture, but he was gone before I could do it. It’s a shame, because it would have gone nicely in my Gallery of People’s Unfortunate Butt-Related Choices.)

Movie reviews! Behold them in their splendor!

First, if you happen to live in the Portland area, you should check out “Kabluey,” which opens at the Living Room Theaters today. This was the opening-night film at the Oxford Film Festival, which I attended back in February. The director/writer/star, Scott Prendergast, a Portland native, will be at this weekend’s evening screenings for a Q&A, so that’s cool, and it’s a pretty good movie anyway.

“The Rocker,” which opened Wednesday, is a so-so starring vehicle for Rainn Wilson, in a role seemingly originally meant for Jack Black or Will Ferrell. My review is at Cinematical.

“Hamlet 2″ is one of the year’s oddest comedies, and also one of the funniest. It stars Steve Coogan as a loser high-school drama teacher who stages a controversial play that upsets the community. It opens in about 90 theaters today and will go wide next week.

“The House Bunny” stars the brilliant Anna Faris — I’m not kidding, she really does have a great gift for comedy — as an exiled Playboy bunny who becomes house mother to a sorority of misfit college girls. It’s from the writers of “Legally Blonde,” and it shows, but it’s a surprisingly funny movie.

“Death Race” is dumb, obviously, but it’s not even the fun, self-aware kind. Just the dumb kind. And the races — the film’s only real chance to be entertaining — are dull. My review is at Film.com.

“Man on Wire” is a terrific documentary about a French guy who walked on a tightrope between the Twin Towers back in 1974. The film plays out like a bank-heist movie, very exciting and entertaining.

And I caught up with the unscreened “Mirrors” last weekend and declared it meh.

Finally, “The Longshots” opens today without being screened (at least not in this region), which makes it one of Hollywood’s Shameful Secrets®. It’s a family-friendly drama about an 11-year-old girl who wants to play Pop Warner football. Somehow, it managed to be directed by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, and to star Ice Cube.

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