The Monday after Thanksgiving is what the sports world calls a “bye week” for “Snide Remarks,” also known as “I didn’t write one.” Who can work when he’s surrounded by adorable nieces and nephews and vaguely appealing siblings and parents? The only part of me that got anything done last week was my digestive tract.

We do have a new edition of Eric’s Time Capsule at Film.com, however, featuring “Beverly Hills Cop,” which was released 24 years ago this week and became a smash hit in spite of not being very good.

And hey, look at this — an article at E! Online about the “Twilight” phenomenon quotes me! I’m huge!

Over at the Mormon-themed blog By Common Consent, a few of the merry jesters occasionally do a feature where they read items from the Police Beat column in the BYU newspaper and make fun of them. Which is what everyone who reads Police Beat does, of course; these guys just do it online, for everyone to read.

I was their special guest this week, and you can read the transcript of our observations here. Be forewarned: Some of the talk is fairly PG. I also made a joke about rape, which apparently some people don’t think is funny. Which is news to me! But they went back and bleeped that part after some of the readers complained, replacing it with “do something highly objectionable.” Is that all rape is? “Highly objectionable”? The people on “Law & Order: SVU” always make it out to be a lot worse than that. Huh.

Anyway: Enjoy the Police Beat Roundtable! And be sure to scold me for making jokes about taboo things!

Two items of possible interest:

At Film.com, I wrote “The Differences Between Nicholas Sparks and Shakespeare,” which was necessitated by Sparks actually comparing himself to the Bard. Seriously. He repeated it again in Entertainment Weekly last week. This guy needs to be punched.

And at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg interviewed me and Will Goss about our respective reviews of “An American Carol,” and the reaction they got. Will reviewed it for Cinematical, totally hated it, and got ripped to shreds. I reviewed it here, expressed milder feelings about it, and, um, also got ripped to shreds. Anyway, the conversation about the whole thing might interest you, if you like reading conversations about things.

If you were a movie critic this week, you’d be as busy as the proverbial one-legged man in the proverbial butt-kicking contest. And when I say “proverbial,” I really mean it’s mentioned in the book of Proverbs. Look it up!

Let’s run through today’s reviews alphabetically:

“An American Carol,” a right-wing spoof about a Michael Moore-ish figure being taught patriotism, is one of Hollywood’s Shameful Secrets®. I intend to review it this weekend.

“Appaloosa” (review at Cinematical) is an entertaining Western starring Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen that gets just a little soggy near the end. Two-thirds of it is vastly enjoyable, though.

“Beverly Hills Chihuahua” (review at Cinematical) belies its horrific trailer and is actually fairly charming and innocuous. I even laughed a few times!

“Blindness,” in which everyone except Julianne Moore mysteriously goes blind, will have to wait. I was prevented from seeing it not by blindness but by scheduling problems. Look for a review this weekend-ish.

“Flash of Genius”: Meh. True story. A guy invents something, then the Ford Motor Company steals it, then he fights them. Meh.

“How to Lose Friends & Alienate People” (review at Film.com) also gets a “meh,” which is disappointing, because I do love the star, Simon Pegg. He’s miscast, though, as an oblivious jerk.

“Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” about two teenagers falling in love over the course of one magical night in New York City, is hilarious, sweet, and effortlessly real. It captures the emotions of such an evening very nicely. Michael Cera for the win!

“Religulous” shows Bill Maher interviewing people who believe in God, making fun of them, then insisting everyone should just take his word for it that God is imaginary. Thanks, Bill! Will do!

Finally, if you’re near Portland this evening and have a radio within earshot, tune that radio to 101.1 KUFO at around 7:00 to hear me on the Cort & Fatboy show discussing some of these new releases. I believe listening online is also a possible thing that can be done. Usually my pal Mike Russell does the movie thing for C&F, but he’s out of town or sick or in rehab or something, so I’m filling in. Fun times for everyone! Except possibly Mike!

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Remember when I said I was going to be on the /Filmcast on Monday? Well, I totally was. The recording has been posted, and you can listen to it here. I come in around the 52-minute mark. I believe there may be a bit of saucy language in my segment (though not from my own mouth, of course), but nothing beyond the PG-13.

Hey, if you wanted to hear me talk about “Burn After Reading” but don’t have my phone number and haven’t run into me in person, you can listen to the /Filmcast (that’s pronounced “Slash Filmcast”) at /Film (that’s pronounced “Slash Film”) tonight at 7 Pacific/10 Eastern. The gentlemen there have honored me with an invitation to join them in their live chat, and I’m told my part will start around 45 minutes into the program. The whole thing will be recorded and subsequently posted at /Film, so you don’t have to listen live if you don’t want to.

I don’t know if my barging into a /Film video had any bearing on my being invited to be a guest on their podcast, but the lesson I’m getting from this is that I should barge into more things.

Do you enjoy listening to movie geeks talk about movies and TV and video games and movies? Me too! And the nice folks at Always Watching were kind enough to invite me on as a guest geek for this week’s podcast (which is entitled The Watchers). You can view a rundown of what we discuss, and also listen to the podcast itself, and also subscribe to the podcast, here. (A mild warning: I think there’s some naughty language at one point, though I don’t remember when or how much.)

We recorded it Tuesday night, at which time it also was being streamed live for whoever happened to be listening. The regular crew is David Chen (who’s a big fan of mine, inexplicably), Devindra Hardawar, and Adam Quigley; guests were me, Myles McNutt of Cultural Learnings, and Alex Billington of First Showing. A good time was had by all. I think they talked more than I did, though, because I’m nervous around strangers, especially when I can only hear the strangers and not see them.

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.

Here’s another blast from the past. On the last broadcast of the semester in April 1999, for some reason I was the guest weatherman on the KBYU News. I don’t remember whose idea it was or how it came about. I was the editor in chief of The Daily Universe by then, and we worked closely with the TV people, so I guess it was synergy in action.

It wasn’t scripted; instead, you’d just watch the monitor in the camera and read the numbers off the screen, making you no more a meteorologist than the people at home doing the same thing. At the 1:32 mark, the numbers leave the screen and I realize I was warned about this and that I failed to glance at the last couple stats I would need before they disappeared, like I was supposed to. So instead I make something up.

Note: I don’t know what the anchorwoman’s name is (Joanna something) or what the deal is with my sweater.

Also note: They told me to take off my glasses so they wouldn’t get a glare off the lights.

Final note: I found this on the same tape as “Venus Envy.” What additional wonders will this old VHS tape hold??

[YouTube link]

Want to see a student film I appeared in 10 years ago? Of course you do!

It’s called “Venus Envy,” and it’s a spoof of cheesy 1950s sci-fi flicks, the kind that are obsessed with “radar” and “atoms” and “lasers” and “invaders from other planets.” It was directed by Brandon Sawyer and written by him and Randy Tayler. Both were buddies of mine, which explains Brandon’s interest in casting me, given my limited acting range.

I play a Venusian named Zankar. You can tell he’s from Venus because he wears tinfoil and speaks in a funny voice. The hero is played by Brian Judd, who for some reason went by the nickname Phontaine in those days. The beautiful lady scientist is played by Charisse Loew, who was from South Africa or something. I have no idea where she and Brian are now.

We shot the film on Dec. 11 and 13, 1997 (10 years ago this week!), and it played as part of the BYU film department’s annual “Final Cut” program the next April. Jared Hess, who would go on to direct “Napoleon Dynamite,” was a cinematographer on another film that year; Jon Heder wasn’t around yet, but his brother Doug was.

The film shoot was fun, except that I couldn’t really move between takes or else the tinfoil would rip. The experience, though obviously much smaller in scale than a feature film, was enlightening. I got a distinct sense of how much setup and preparation is necessary to make a movie, the amount of work that happens out of the camera’s field of vision, and the behind-the-scenes tricks that you do when you don’t have a CGI budget.

The sound isn’t great on this old VHS copy I found, so I subtitled a few lines that I thought might be indecipherable otherwise. All things considered, I think it’s a pretty funny little spoof.

(Warning: Features one use of the expletive “Gadzooks!” and an over-fondness of the verb “to thwart.”)

[YouTube link]