Timing is everything.

Thursday, August 28, 2008 | 5:23 PM

Mike Scott at New Orleans' Times-Picayune notes the impeccable taste Lionsgate is showing in releasing "Disaster Movie" on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29th:

Around these Katrina-scarred parts, Aug. 29 is still -- and will be for some time -- a black-armband kind of day.
For Lionsgate studios, however, Aug. 29 isn't quite as sacred. For them, the third anniversary of the day the levees were breached and New Orleans slipped under is something on the order of perfect timing: a ripped-from-the-headlines release date for the big-screen, low-concept spoof "Disaster Movie."

Oops. [Hat tip to Nikki Finke]

Also in honor of the occasion, Slate's rerunning Josh Levin's unsparing piece on "Disaster Movie"'s spoof-specializing director-writer team Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer from earlier in the year, when "Meet the Spartans" graced theaters with its presence:

Isn't it massive consumer fraud to charge $10.50 for a barely hour-long movie? Perhaps, but it would've been unforgivable to make Meet the Spartans any longer than an hour. This was the worst movie I've ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a "movie" and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film. Friedberg and Seltzer do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it. They are not filmmakers. They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization's decline under the weight of too many pop culture references.

[Photo: Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's "Disaster Movie," Lionsgate, 2008]