There was a flurry of wrong guesses last week, but only one commenter got it right: This week’s Bad Movie at Film.com is “Patch Adams,” a wretched, manipulative sham that stands as the supreme example of Movies That Make Us Want to Smack Robin Williams. So nice guessing, whoever it was!

Here is my anecdote concerning “Patch Adams.” In early January of 1999, I went with a friend to a theater in Salt Lake City for a screening of “A Civil Action.” I wasn’t really reviewing movies yet, but I’d gotten an invitation at the newspaper I worked for, so hey, why not. However, we arrived with just moments to spare before showtime, and the theater was already packed, so we couldn’t get in. Not wanting to waste the trip, we decided to see something that was also playing at this theater … and for some reason we chose “Patch Adams.” I don’t vividly recall my reaction, but I know it was not positive. Even with my critical skills still at a rudimentary level I saw through the film’s shameless fraudulence. Watching it again last week, I hated it rather passionately. There were a few times when I was yelling and gesticulating at the TV.

As for next week’s movie, it was going to be “My Giant,” starring Billy Crystal and a very tall man. But I sat down to watch it the other night and was dismayed to learn that it’s actually not all that bad. I’m not saying it’s good, just that it’s not terrible. More like a mediocre but good-natured sitcom. I had to turn it off after a half hour or so because I couldn’t afford to waste my time watching something that wasn’t excruciating. You see what my life has become.

So you get to guess on what the replacement film for next week is. (Don’t worry, I’ve watched it, and it’s appropriately awful.) Your clues are that it was released in the mid ’80s (think ‘84-’86); it was rated PG and generally aimed at families; it starred someone who had previously starred in a cult-favorite TV show; and though it was a box office flop, I think many people will recognize the title and basic premise. You might have even seen it on video.

Guess away! And in the meantime, enjoy my assessment of “Patch Adams.”

(This post contains minor “WALL-E” spoilers.)

Many of you saw “WALL-E” over the weekend, and no doubt some of you noticed biblical themes in it. You can’t name a main character “Eve” without invoking the Garden of Eden, of course; nobody could miss that. But what about all the humans living on a ship and waiting for an envoy to return with a plant as proof that it was safe to go home? Did that remind anyone of Noah’s Ark and the dove?

In my review, I mentioned that there were biblical allusions along with the cinematic references like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Buster Keaton. (I didn’t mention it, but writer/director Andrew Stanton is a Christian, and he discusses how that influences his work in this interview.) My review prompted a Methodist minister to write to me:

I have read 7 reviews so far all by the “top” critics, and while they are all excellent writers, they all, until you, have missed the biblical narratives so skillfully woven into the story. Thanks for having the guts to mention it.

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Earlier this year there was a film called “Teeth,” which you might remember hearing about even if you didn’t see it. It’s a horror comedy about a teenage girl who discovers she has teeth in her lady parts, and they act as a defense mechanism against unwanted intruders. In other words, when someone tries to rape her, he gets his wang bitten off. Eventually she learns to use this as a weapon against unsavory men.

The concept was upsetting to some men, as evidenced by comments they posted on my review. Some samples:

So, if someone made a movie where women’s breasts were cut off, would that be hailed as an artistic success? Of course not. I’m willing to bet that all of the men in the film are bad in some way, in order to justify what she’s doing. Geez… just another movie for angry and sadistic women to enjoy, and if we don’t agree in every detail then we’re sexists.

find me one positive male in this movie and then tell me it’s not sexist. And by the way, woman can rape too. The analogy would be perfectly apt if the movie was about a penis that shot acid into women’s vaginas. But no. It’s violence against men — horrific violence, for that matter — so it’s funny.

It seems that this is an example of how extreme violence towards men is somehow acceptable in the media, a film basically that centres around men having their penis’s bitten off, i’ve yet to see a film where the hero of the movie tears wombs out with his barbed penis and then justifies it with sexual political rhetoric!

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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.

Hey! Do you know what Twitter is? Me either! But I have an account there! You can follow me! My name is EricDSnider! Who knows, maybe sometimes I will think of a funny joke or an insight to share, and it will be one that can be explained in 140 characters or less, and I will send it out as a Twitter update! You’ll certainly want to be among my Twitter followers should that ever occur! I am 100 years old and I do not like or understand Internet fads!

My review of “Sex and the City” is among those that come up when you Google the film’s title and click the “reviews” link, so it’s been read by a lot of people who had not been to my website before. Some of these visitors have posted comments along these lines:

why bother to write a nasty review if you never truly watched the show or have decided to hate the movie from the get go?

If you don’t like this type of story- don’t go see it.

I don’t think you should have seen the movie if you never watched the show.

I wonder why you went to see it so quickly if you were not a fan.

Yes it is your job as a movie critic, but why would you even bother writing up a movie review for a movie you know you wouldnt be intersted in and wouldnt understand, it just makes it confusing for the fans who want to see it.

Many regular visitors smile at these comments from people who don’t seem to understand that I’m a film critic, and that film critics see pretty much ALL the movies. And granted, the last comment I cited is a little stupid, as the commenter doesn’t grasp the part of the definition of “job” that includes “getting paid,” which would answer her question of why I wrote the review. (I’m also not sure how a negative review is “confusing” to fans, especially if those fans have already decided they want to see the movie.)

But maybe these comments aren’t so dumb after all. It’s not like the banner at the top of the page says “Eric D. Snider: Professional Film Critic.” (Maybe it should.) To an impartial observer stumbling across the site, it could just be some guy’s blog where he talks about movies. In that case, it’s perfectly reasonable to wonder why he went to see the movie when he didn’t have any interest in it.

And then it hits me: The days of “movie critics” being an entirely separate and distinct group from “regular joes talkin’ about movies” are quickly waning. The Internet has made it so that anyone with a computer can declare himself a “movie critic” — and the fact is, a lot of these self-declared critics are every bit as good as the ones who write for newspapers and magazines. A lot of them are embarrassingly amateurish and detrimental to film criticism as a whole, too. But they’re still part of the group.

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The “Sex and the City” screening last night was really annoying, in that it was preceded by 30 minutes of coverage of the red carpet premiere in New York, beamed to theaters all over the country where these press/promo screenings were being held. I have no interest in red carpet coverage of anything, and certainly not for the premiere of a movie I’m lukewarm about anyway.

So if the red carpet stuff was at 7:30, why not skip it and show up at 7:55, just in time for the movie? Because while they generally set aside seats for critics, they also release those seats to civilians when the theater fills up. Technically, we’re supposed to be there 40 minutes before showtime — and “showtime” in this case was 7:30, even though the movie wasn’t actually starting until 8. So I had to get there at 6:50 or so.

Oh, and don’t forget: Once the movie actually started, it was 2 1/2 hours long. From beginning to end, including the 10-minute drive each way, the entire experience occupied four hours of my life, 70 minutes of which was just to sit around doing nothing and/or watching the awful, awful red carpet coverage.

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This has racked up a few million hits since being posted on Friday, so maybe you’ve already seen it. But if you haven’t, and if you’ve spent any time at all over the last few years looking at the various famous YouTube videos, you should take a look.

It’s the video for Weezer’s new single “Pork and Beans” (album hits stores next week), and it features cameos by an impressive number of YouTube celebrities: the “leave Britney alone” guy, the fat kid who lip-syncs the Romanian pop tune, the “Chocolate Rain” guy, Miss Teen South Carolina (”Some U.S. Americans don’t have maps”), and on and on. (There are several I’m not familiar with.) They’re the real folks, not impersonators, and they really interact with Weezer and with each other specially for this video. It’s cute, and it’s a terrific song about individuality from the always-terrific Weezer to boot.

Mormon Horror Movies

“Children of the Quorum”
“Friday the 31st” (aka “Home Teaching Day”)
“Pet Seminary”
“Enrichment Night of the Living Dead”
“I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I’m Telling Your Bishop”
“The (CTR) Ring”
“Rosemary’s Baby, Which is Her Fourth, and She’s Only 23″
“The Hills Have Tithes”

Did you know I wrote and recorded a bunch of comedy songs? Well I did! And they were on two CDs for a while, until I sold all of them (and printed some more … and then sold all of those), and then they became, officially, “out of print.” But now they have returned in digital form, thanks to an online outfit called Snocap.

It works essentially like iTunes: You can download an entire album for $9.99, or individual tracks for 99 cents. You can hear a 30-second sample for free. (For some reason it’s the first 30 seconds of each track on one album, but a random from-the-middle 30-second chunk for the songs on the other album.) Click the + sign next to the album titles to reveal the full track list, and pick ‘n’ choose whatever you want. I’ve noted the songs that deal with Utah and/or Mormon culture specifically, in case you want to only choose (or only avoid) those.

Liner notes for the songs can be found here for “Will Make Jokes for Food” (2003) and here for “Monkeys and Pirates Are Funny” (2006).

I’m going to try to the get the old Garrens Comedy Troupe CDs on here, too, once I’ve cleared it with the various other people involved. Figuring out who gets what percentage of the 99 cents per track is going to be a b-word. Maybe I just won’t tell some of the performers what I’m doing and keep the dozens of dollars I get all for myself.

Let me know if there are any bugs in the system. Snocap seems to have a pretty good set-up, but it’s all new to me, so I don’t know what problems there might be.

(My Snocap store should appear in the space below. If it doesn’t, try reloading the page. You might have to wait several seconds for the store to load.)