My friend Jeff Bayer’s site, The Scorecard Review, is hosting its 8th annual TSR Movie Awards, in which the films of 2009 are judged not by snooty, knowledgeable, well-informed members of the Academy, but by YOU, whoever you are. They’re arranged by categories: Funniest, Saddest, Scariest, etc. And it doesn’t matter how many movies you’ve seen, because you’re simply giving each nominee a score of 1 to 10, and you skip the ones you haven’t seen. So go vote here.

Funny story about the TSR Movie Awards. Jeff put up the nominees a couple weeks ago, and the “Twilight” sequel, “New Moon,” was mentioned a few times. This caught the attention of the Twilighters, who vigilantly scour the Internet for all references to their sparkle-monster franchise, and hundreds of them showed up to vote in the TSR Movie Awards. In one day, Jeff said he got twice as many votes as he’d gotten in last year’s entire contest. But the way these people “voted” was to give everything “Twilight”-related a 10 and everything else in the category a 1. In the Best Supporting Actress category, they gave Anna Kendrick high scores for her work in “Up in the Air” while giving her fellow nominees low scores. Why? Because Kendrick is also in “New Moon.”

That’s the mentality we’re talking about. “It’s a movie we love! We need to go stuff the ballot box so that it will win awards so that we can love it more!!” As punishment, Jeff deleted all those frivolous votes and removed most “New Moon” mentions from the ballot. You want to vote for “New Moon”? Too bad. Your loser friends ruined it for everyone.

The rest of you, go ahead and vote.

Over at Cinematical, I wrote a piece called “Happy 25th Birthday, PG-13 Rating!” that you might find interesting. At Film.com, we have another edition of Eric’s Ten-Year Itch, this time examining “Deep Blue Sea,” a shark movie that I still find entertaining a decade later.

Next, take a gander at the right-hand column of this here website and you’ll see two recent changes. One is that I’ve added my Twitter feed so you can see what sort of fascinating observations I make in 140 characters or less, without actually having to use Twitter. I feel like the only legitimate uses of Twitter are 1) sharing amusing links and 2) cracking one-liners, and I’d hate for you non-Twitterers to miss out. As an alternative, you can just ignore it.

The other change is the ad for Dish Network, the one that seems to suggest you can only use that particular satellite TV service if you are Mormon and/or if you intend to watch the LDS General Conference in October. Rest assured, this is not the case! People of all religious inclinations, or of no religious inclination at all, are welcome to use Dish Network. That ad was chosen by the people who choose such things because they knew I had a lot of Mormon readers, and what’s the use in having Mormon readers if you can’t sell things to them? (Of course, most of my Mormon readers live in Utah, where you don’t need satellite, or even cable, to watch General Conference, but shush.)

Anyway, I get a commission if you sign up for Dish Network by calling that phone number, so you should sign up for Dish Network by calling that phone number.

Continue reading…

Happy April 20 to you! For some of you, 4/20 means celebrating marijuana. For others, it means celebrating Hitler’s birthday. For still others, it means celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. Whatever your celebration of choice, I hope you are able to spend it with friends and loved ones, stoned.

Speaking of Columbine, one of the movies that got blamed for it was “The Basketball Diaries” — which, coincidentally was released April 21, 1995, and is the subject of this week’s edition of Eric’s Time Capsule at Film.com.

Last week’s Time Capsule was “James and the Giant Peach.” You may recall that this film was blamed when a disturbed youth hijacked a giant peach and rolled over his aunts with it.

Filling in for the ailing Mike Russell, I appeared on KUFO’s Cort & Fatboy program Friday to discuss “State of Play” and “Crank: High Voltage.” You can hear it in the C&F podcast, available here. I show up about two-thirds of the way in. (If you download it, I’m at 38:45.)

My late reviews of “Crank: High Voltage” and “17 Again” are also online, for your approval.

Elsewhere, Eugene Novikov summarizes the weekend box office in the style of H.P. Lovecraft.

Here’s FX’s safe-for-TV edit of Samuel L. Jackson’s famous line from “Snakes on a Plane.”

At Post Modern Barney, there is a list of uncomfortable plot summaries (some of them involving adult language). For example, “The Empire Strikes Back”: Boy is abused by midget, kisses sister, attempts patricide.

Finally, my 2-year-old nephew Logan says: “Wait, what?”

Hey! What are you doing here? Go read the new “Snide Remarks” column, entitled “Receding Airlines”!

And then also read this week’s edition of Eric’s Time Capsule at Film.com, about “Losin’ It,” which was one of those teen sex comedies so popular in the early 1980s! Teens sure loved sex in those days!

And then also visit People Who Sit in the Disability Seats When I’m Standing on My Crutches!

This week’s “Snide Remarks,” including the audio version, is here.
The audio version (i.e., the podcast) is also here.
Subscribe to the podcast’s feed with this URL.

Not so much “funny” as “well written and fascinating” is this week’s edition of Eric’s Time Capsule at Film.com, focusing on “New Jack City,” which turned 18 this week. Read!

Elsewhere, my friend Ken describes a fun movie-related game called “If you liked….” If you liked “The Joy Luck Club,” you’ll love “Fight Club”!

Perhaps you have wondered what lolcats from the Soviet bloc would look like? Wonder no more!

Somebody had a contest to add horror elements to classic book covers, and these are some of the winners.

Finally, if you are Mormon, or live among Mormons, you might find truth and humor in this: Stuff Mormons Like.

Here are some me-written things published elsewhere in the last couple weeks that may amuse, interest, or annoy you.

At Film.com:
Eric’s Time Capsule: “Leaving Las Vegas”
Memo to Shatner: It’s Time to Shut Up
Choosing Between “Saw V” and “High School Musical 3″
The Differences Between Nicholas Sparks and William Shakespeare

At Cinematical:
Soderbergh to Make a Live-Action 3D Rock ‘n’ Roll Musical About Cleopatra
Fan Rant: An R Rating for “Slumdog Millionaire”? Give Me a Break!
Forgetting Showing It — Now You Can’t Even Say the Word “Porno”
An Obsessive-Compulsive’s Guide to the “Friday the 13th” Movies (reprint from last year)

Wondering how Washington Mutual will re-brand itself now that it’s failed as a bank? Our old pal Randy Tayler shows us.

And the lovely and talented David Cornelius has revealed the template for all late-night talk show monologues.

You may be familiar with the juvenile (yet endlessly entertaining) game of adding “in my pants” or “in bed” or “in the bathtub” to the end of fortune-cookie fortunes, song titles, or famous sayings. Someone is doing it with comic strips now, replacing the punchlines with “in my pants.” He even matches the fonts, which is a nice touch. Enjoy yourselves (in my pants)!

Comics in My Pants.

For the most part, my writing in Toronto was focused into “dispatches” containing mini-reviews of two or three films. Here’s a handy list o’ links to them, with the pertinent titles indicated.

For Film.com:

Dispatch #1 (“Burn After Reading,” “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” “The Brothers Bloom”).
Dispatch #2 (“JCVD,” “Il Divo”).
Dispatch #3 (“Rachel Getting Married,” “Genova,” “The Burning Plain”).
Dispatch #4 (“The Wrestler,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”).
Dispatch #5 (“Pride and Glory,” “What Doesn’t Kill You,” “Religulous”).
Dispatch #6 (“The Burrowers,” “Synecdoche, New York,” “Miracle at St. Anna”).

For Cinematical:

Dispatch (“Ghost Town,” “Dean Spanley,” “RockNRolla”).
Review: “Nothing But the Truth”
Review: “The Lucky Ones” (which I actually saw at a pre-Toronto screening)
Review: “Lovely, Still”

(More to come for Cinematical, too. Will update.) (Nope, that’s it.)

Finally, if you’re curious, here’s a list of everything I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival, in order. The links do NOT go to my reviews (which for the most part I haven’t written yet), but to the films’ pages at IMDB. I’ve also indicated what my grade will probably be for each movie, though you must bear in mind that letter grades are an inexact science and sometimes change between seeing the movie and writing the review.

Continue reading…

We don’t really assign writers to specific “beats” at Cinematical, but somehow I became the guy for stories relating to the Harry Potter date change. (If you haven’t heard, the film version of “Half-Blood Prince” has been pushed back to July.) Since I know many of you are fans, I thought I’d link to the stories so far.

Here’s the original announcement about the date change. Be sure to read the mildly insane comments that people have posted.

Then there was the matter of Entertainment Weekly’s suddenly obsolete cover, which hit stands the day after the announcement.

Next, the news that with Harry Potter out of the way, “Twilight” was moving to its old slot.

Finally, a succinct debunking of several myths surrounding the Harry Potter date change, for your enlightenment.

By the way, the rivalry between Harry Potter fans and “Twilight” fans — where one group adores its franchise with all its might and can’t tolerate anything good being said about the other franchise — is stupid, to put it mildly. To put it less mildly, it’s incredibly stupid. To put it less mildly still, grow up and quit being such retards. Love, Eric.