If you find yourself in Oxford, Miss., this weekend, stop by and say howdy, or how-do, or whatever they say in Mississippi. Why on earth would I be in Mississippi this weekend? Well, I’m honored to say that I will be part of the fourth annual Oxford Film Festival as a panelist and juror. The fact that I’m doing it as a last-minute replacement for my friend Scott Weinberg, who can’t make it due to a serious dental emergency (ouch), does not reduce the honor.

My panel is called “Film and the New Media: Writing about Film in Print and for the Blogosphere.” It’s at 4 p.m. Friday. I don’t know if anyone who reads this blog lives in or near Oxford, but hey, maybe.

This is a very sudden trip — I only got the call from Weinberg at noon today, and I have to fly out at 6:20 a.m. tomorrow — and so I’m a little scatterbrained at the moment. Mostly it means that all the stuff I was planning to do tomorrow and Friday and over the weekend, I have to do today instead. But I’m glad to fill in for Weinberg, and besides, I’m not one to pass up a free trip to Mississippi! Or at least apparently I’m not. It’s never come up before.

Monday’s “Snide Remarks” will almost surely be late in arriving, as I haven’t written it yet, and I won’t get back to Portland until 11 p.m. Sunday night, and I don’t know how much downtime I’ll have in Oxford. Friday’s movie reviews and “In the Dark” should be on the regular schedule,  assuming they have Internet service in Mississippi. And maybe I should refrain from making Mississippi jokes until after the festival, just as a courtesy.

There is no “Snide Remarks” today, nor will there be one next Monday or the Monday after that, because I’ll be covering the Sundance Film Festival.

However! Please do not despair. I will do my best to entertain you in other ways. I’ll be doing my usual daily reports from Sundance, with the first one appearing Saturday. Also, I’m going to post some other amusing reading material for you here shortly.

In the meantime, why not watch a video of two old French-speaking men fighting on a TV news broadcast?

The Online Film Critics Society, of which I’m a member, has finished its voting and announced its awards for 2007. It turns out most of the things I voted for wound up winning, which is always nice; where I voted for something else, I’ve noted it.

Here are the winners. If you’re curious to see who the nominees were, you’ll find the list here.

Best Picture: “No Country for Old Men”
Best Director: Joel & Ethan Coen, “No Country for Old Men”
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, “There Will Be Blood”
Best Actress: Julie Christie, “Away From Her” (My vote: Marion Cotillard, “La Vie En Rose”)*

Continue reading…

Astute readers may have noticed that this is the last Friday of the year, and thus the time when I should be posting my “Best and Worst Movies of 2007″ article and related features. They will be posted by Monday.

There are two reasons for the delay. One is that I didn’t accomplish as much during my week-long visit to the ancestral Snider homeland as I thought I would, waylaid as I was by family merriment and some under-the-weatherness.

The greater reason is that the studios made us wait a little longer than usual this year to see some of the key potential-top-ten-list films. It’s impossible to see everything in a year, of course, but this year there were a few titles I noticed appearing on other critics’ lists that I hadn’t seen yet. Then there were a few others that I had seen but wanted to revisit before finalizing my list. I’m trying to avoid the trap of “Well, this A- movie I saw in November is fresher in my mind than the A- movie I saw in March, so I’ll put it on the list and bump the March one.”

So I’m giving myself the weekend to get everything together. I might sneak in and post stuff early, but for sure it will be there by Monday. It’s probably best to just crawl into bed and sleep the weekend away to make the time go faster.

We’re about to run headlong into Thanksgiving, and you know what happens after that: 33 days of relentless Christmas shopping!

Many of us do a lot of our buying through Amazon.com, and there’s a simple way you can do that and support EricDSnider.com at the same time. Every time you click an Amazon link from here and subsequently buy something — even if it’s not the item you originally clicked on — I get a small commission. These small commissions help do things like pay our hosting costs, feed the Laotian kids who work in my sweatshop, etc.

So when you feel an Amazon mood settling upon you, simply come to EricDSnider.com first, go up to the “Buy Stuff” tab at the top of the page, and click the “Shop on Amazon.com” link. That takes you to the regular Amazon front page, and any shopping you do will count as a referral from me. In the process, you win my undying gratitude. What more could you want?

(You can also save the Amazon link as a bookmark in your browser. However, you have to make sure your browser has saved the entire coded URL –

http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2F&tag=thelandoferic&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

– and not just a basic http://www.amazon.com.)

As you may have heard, the Hollywood writers are on strike as of today, and so in solidarity, I have refused to write a “Snide Remarks” column.

J/K! I’m totally J/K. The reason I didn’t write one is that I didn’t have any ideas. But it sounds so much more principled to say it was on purpose, doesn’t it?

More bloggy stuff later today, including a post about the writers strike and how it affects YOU, the average TV-viewing American.

Hey, taco fans! Don’t forget that tomorrow (Tuesday) from 2-5 p.m., every person in America is entitled to eat a free taco at Taco Bell! (Note I said “entitled,” not “obligated.”)

This is because Taco Bell pledged that if someone stole a base during the World Series, they’d give everybody a taco. And sure enough, someone named “Jacoby Ellsbury” on a team called the “Boston Red Sox” stole second base during Game 2.

There are a couple of downsides. One, it’s Taco Bell. Two, it’s only for the regular hard-shell taco, not the better-tasting soft taco. But hey, it’s free, and while you only get one, there’s nothing stopping you from going to every Taco Bell in town, or as many as necessary before you’re not hungry anymore.

I like the legal mumbo-jumbo they had to put at the bottom of the web page promoting the giveaway. It’s pretty elaborate for a taco giveaway. One of the main points is that if you suffer harm from the taco, you won’t hold Major League Baseball liable. Your beef (ha!) is with Taco Bell. Duly noted.

Frequently, when a comment-poster here on EricDSnider.com realizes he has made an error, he will come back and post a new comment correcting it, while also lamenting the fact that we have no “edit” feature on the site. If he could edit his previous comment, he wouldn’t have to post the follow-up correcting it!

Sometimes these lamentations are expressed in such a way as to imply that there are many, many sites that allow user comments which also enable users to come back and edit their comments, and that EricDSnider.com is merely behind the times.

We would love to implement this feature here. If you know of a site where this is done, please point us in that direction so we can copy their system.

I personally do not know of any such sites. Every site I know of that lets you edit your own comments is also a site that requires you to register in order to post comments in the first place.

We don’t want that system. We like the current system, where anyone can post, on a whim, without having to register a user name and password first. And under that system, I am not aware of any way of letting the posters edit their comments after the fact. If you’ve seen a site that does it, lemme know.

(Of course, it is also possible that when posters express frustration over our lack of a self-edit feature, they are fully aware that such a thing is not common and that their desires fall under the category of Wishful Thinking, similar to “I wish this site rewarded me with cash every time I visited!” or “I wish this site caused my computer to give off a lemony fresh scent!” In that case, I wholeheartedly agree that it would be awesome.)

I have a couple of things to mention that are unrelated but that both fall under the category of Making the Site Better.

First, I’ve gotten better at recording the podcasts for “In the Dark” and “Snide Remarks.” Maybe you listened when I first launched them back in December, thought, “Good heavens, was he recording this on an airplane runway?,” and never listened again. I would not blame you.

But as I’ve gotten more practice with them, I’ve found new ways to improve the sound quality. Specifically, I stopped using the lousy microphone I had lying around and started using my iMac’s built-in mic instead. It’s actually better than the one I paid money for, especially when I choose the “use ambient noise reduction” setting. There is a noticeable improvement in quality between the podcasts now and the podcasts a couple months ago. So you might give ‘em another try.

Second, you might have noticed that we’ve added some Google ads on most of the site’s pages (although not here on the blog, yet). This isn’t Making the Site Better so much as it’s Making the Site More Profitable.

Continue reading…

This week’s new films are “Hairspray” and “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.” So, you know, it’s a big week for the gays.

“Hairspray” is as delightful, upbeat, and entertaining a musical as has been produced in many, many years. Having seen the Broadway version, in which the gravel-voiced Harvey Fierstein played overweight housewife Edna Turnblad and earned a laugh every time he opened his mouth, I was skeptical about John Travolta taking the role for the movie. It didn’t help, of course, that nearly everything Travolta has done in the last 10 years has been horrific, and that the same applied to the director, Adam Shankman, whose previous work includes “The Pacifer,” “The Wedding Planner,” and “Cheaper by the Dozen 2.”

So you can imagine my rapturous surprise, then, when both the director and the actor proved to be just right, as is the entire film. It’s a genuinely positive, happy, feel-good movie, in the best possible way. If you come out of it and you’re not humming, then you must have done something wrong. Go back in and watch it again.

Continue reading…