Movies as urban time capsules.

One of these days, I'd love to take a movie that was made in Vancouver some years ago and take pictures of the places where it was shot, just to compare how those locations looked back then to how they look right now.

In the meantime, I live vicariously through the efforts of people who have done this sort of thing in other cities, from Thom Anderson's documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) to that site I linked to last year which noted how the car chase in Bullitt (1968) hops all over San Francisco.

And now there is Scouting New York, a brand new website that features shot-by-shot then-and-now looks at films like Rosemary's Baby (1968) ...




... and Taxi Driver (1976):




Enjoy.

Clash of the Greco-Roman myth movies!

The Greco-Roman gods haven't been a very popular subject at the movies these last few decades. The '80s gave us Clash of the Titans, the '90s gave us Disney's Hercules, and the '00s gave us Troy -- and while that last film may have been based on one of the seminal events in Greek mythology, it pretty much cut the gods and goddesses out of the picture. And that's about it.

The '10s could change all that, though. Three films that put the Greco-Roman gods front-and-centre are currently slated for next year alone, though one of them doesn't start shooting until March and could have its release date bumped to the following year. But the other two films are essentially in the can, and trailers have already been released for them. So here they are:

First, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, which comes out February 12 (for some reason, even the "international" trailer lists one of director Chris Columbus's previous movies as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, even though the film was known outside the U.S. as ...the Philosopher's Stone):







Second, Louis Leterrier's remake of Clash of the Titans, which comes out March 26:



And then, some time after that, Tarsem Singh will release Dawn of War, which was known until recently as War of Gods. Production Weekly says that film will start shooting in Montreal in March -- which is right around the time the first two movies will be coming out. Perhaps Singh and his producers want to get a better look at the competition before their own cameras start rolling.

Canadian box-office stats -- November 22

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

Law Abiding Citizen -- CDN $9,100,000 -- N.AM $70,018,193 -- 13.0%
The Men Who Stare at Goats -- CDN $2,980,000 -- N.AM $27,680,089 -- 10.8%
Pirate Radio -- CDN $542,214 -- N.AM $5,184,068 -- 10.5%
Disney's A Christmas Carol -- CDN $7,960,000 -- N.AM $79,836,002 -- 10.0%
Couples Retreat -- CDN $10,460,000 -- N.AM $104,992,030 -- 10.0%
Planet 51 -- CDN $1,220,000 -- N.AM $12,286,129 -- 9.9%
2012 -- CDN $10,340,000 -- N.AM $108,131,263 -- 9.6%
The Twilight Saga: New Moon -- CDN $10,000,000 -- N.AM $142,839,137 -- 7.0%
Paranormal Activity -- CDN $6,330,000 -- N.AM $106,082,922 -- 6.0%
The Blind Side -- CDN $1,480,000 -- N.AM $34,119,372 -- 4.3%

A couple of discrepancies: Law Abiding Citizen, Paranormal Activity and Pirate Radio were #6, #8 and #10 on the Canadian chart, respectively (they were #11, #13 and #12 in North America as a whole), while Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, The Fourth Kind and Michael Jackson's This Is It were #6, #9 and #10 on the North American chart, respectively (they were #12, #14 and #11 in Canada).

Women + history + religion + controversy = big box-office in Europe

Agora finally has an American distributor, and the film may have its box-office success in its native Spain to thank for that.

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, the film, which depicts the growing clash between the female philosopher Hypatia and the "unstoppable surge of the Christians" in 4th-century Alexandria, premiered at Cannes in May, and was then shown in a slightly shorter form at the Toronto film festival in September -- but no American distributors picked it up.

They began to get interested, however, when the film opened in Spain last month and began raking in the dough; its box-office total there currently stands at about $30 million. Fox and Sony were said to be eyeing the film two weeks ago, but today it was announced that Newmarket -- the distributor behind Memento (2000), The Passion of the Christ (2004) and the upcoming Charles Darwin biopic Creation -- had sealed the deal.

Newmarket plans to release the film in "the first half of 2010."

In quasi-related news, Pope Joan also opened in Europe a few weeks ago -- specifically, in Germany -- and it topped the box-office chart there in its first week, at least.

Based on a novel about a 9th-century woman who supposedly ruled the Catholic church while disguised as a man, the film version of Pope Joan was first announced three years ago, but it went on to have a somewhat troubled production history; among other things, its original director and lead actress were replaced, and there was some debate as to whether or not John Goodman would play Pope Sergius. (In the end, he did.)

According to the IMDb, the film will be distributed in the United States by Summit Entertainment, the company behind the Twilight phenomenon, and in Canada by Seville Pictures.

You can watch trailers for the two films below:

Early medieval Celtic matters.

The Sunday Mail reports that Jeremy Irons is going to star in The End Time, a film about St. Columba, the Irish monk who brought Christianity to Scotland in the 6th century. The film will be directed by Norman Stone, whose credits include the original C.S. Lewis biopic Shadowlands (1985).

Regarding his new film's main character, Stone says: "He was not a saintly saint and this film will be more of a character study and a political thriller than a Christian epic. Columba will not wear a halo. It needs big-screen treatment and in Jeremy we have the right person to deliver the performance we are looking for."

Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter says The Secret of Kells, an animated film inspired by the 8th-century illuminated Bible known as the Book of Kells, will have a brief theatrical run in Los Angeles next month in order to qualify for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. It is one of 20 films that have been submitted for the award.

The film was produced by the Irish firm Cartoon Saloon, and its subject matter is deeply Irish as well -- but as Variety noted several months ago, the work on this film spanned several countries on two or three continents:

There's a scene in "The Secret of Kells," when an eighth-century Irish monk is rummaging through his papers and throwing them in the air, which sums up the sheer international complexity of the project.

It was animated by a Polish artist working in a Hungarian studio, then cleaned up by a Mongolian who could only communicate with Irish director Tomm Moore via a translator from Transylvania.

"The Secret of Kells," co-directed by Moore and Nora Twomey, was made across five countries — Ireland, France, Belgium, Hungary and Brazil — and funded by a patchwork of co-production coin.

"I call it Franken-finance, pulling the pieces from different parts from Europe," says producer Paul Young.

The film is currently slated for an American release in March; I don't know if it will be coming to Canada as well. Co-director Moore has a blog devoted to the film here, and you can see a few trailers below, the last of which has been dubbed into French:

Why Anne Rice's Jesus movie never happened.

Remember how Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt was going to be turned into a film a few years ago? And how the producers sponsored a special section on religion and the movies in Variety magazine? And how Rice and the producers eventually parted ways?

The Boston Globe ran a devastating story on would-be producer David Kirkpatrick over the weekend that focuses primarily on his recent efforts to start a secular movie studio in Massachusetts, but it also sheds some light on what happened to the Anne Rice movie way back when:

The story of the Plymouth studio project has always been a study in optimistic public predictions while, behind the scenes, major players struggled to keep the project going, and sometimes fought among themselves. Since Kirkpatrick’s initial visit to Massachusetts in 2006, he has parted bitterly with at least five collaborators - from the Fitchburg businessman who introduced him to Massachusetts officials to the Good News team to best-selling novelist Anne Rice. Rice had planned to sell Kirkpatrick the rights to her novel “Christ the Lord,’’ which Good News executives were counting on to show that the new company was a force in movie-making. But Rice angrily withdrew when he didn’t pay her.

“David, you broke my heart,’’ she wrote in a scathing e-mail, obtained by the Spotlight Team.

The major constant through the three-year project has been Kirkpatrick himself, who rose from lowly story analyst to become the top movie executive at one of Hollywood’s leading institutions. The charismatic Kirkpatrick has been the face of the Plymouth studio from the start. But he makes little mention of his career’s steep decline since he was ousted from Paramount in 1991. Even some former business partners at Good News said they didn’t know Kirkpatrick had gone through bankruptcy. As far as they knew, Kirkpatrick was still a movie mogul who had accepted Jesus Christ as his savior and wanted to devote his career to creating family-friendly entertainment. . . .

Kirkpatrick recalls his bankruptcy as “a very tough and humbling experience,’’ but he believes it contained the seeds of a better life, a chance to see “what’s important and valuable.’’ In the midst of bankruptcy, Kirkpatrick began working with a group of Christian businessmen who were eager to offer an antidote to the shallow values of Hollywood. Kirkpatrick, who said he once considered the seminary, told his new collaborators that he wanted to share their vision of spiritually uplifting books, movies, and even cellphone messages. “Spiritainment’’ they called it.

On March 21, 2006, Kirkpatrick was professionally reborn. He became one of six cofounders of Good News Holdings, and he began planning his comeback from an office building on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Soon enough he was setting his sights on Plymouth.

‘Spiritainment’

This much is true: Good News Holdings did not let Christian humility get in the way of self-promotion.

In March 2007, under Kirkpatrick’s guidance, the company bought a seven-page advertisement starting on the cover of Daily Variety magazine announcing that they were on a quest to feed “audiences’ hunger for a higher vision.’’ A serene-looking Kirkpatrick promised that his company would soon begin filming “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,’’ based on the best-selling book by Anne Rice, a born-again Christian who wrote “Interview with the Vampire.’’

Never mind that Good News had no way to pay for the $263,420 advertising package - those bills still haven’t been paid. Good News had less chance of finding the $40 million Kirkpatrick estimated that it would cost to film a movie about Christ on location in Israel. But the publicity of the Kirkpatrick-Rice alliance was valuable, boosting the company’s profile as it prepared to raise funds for its own movie studio in Massachusetts.

Rice withdrew from the “Christ the Lord’’ project a few weeks after the ads ran because, she said, Kirkpatrick repeatedly rebuffed her requests for payment and did not seem to be preparing for movie production. She fired off a scorching e-mail after he began writing her letters that, she felt, were an attempt to bully her.

“As I look back on it now, the entire enterprise on your part looks like a scheme,’’ Rice wrote in an e-mail in May 2007. “Did you have some idea that you could draw me deeper and deeper into the project and then make a demand on me for funds?’’

Kirkpatrick said that the split with Rice was painful, that he eventually attempted to pay her, but too late. Rice, reached by e-mail, declined to comment. . . .

Good News Holdings had at least one other movie project in the works back then, namely an adaptation of a teen horror novel called Dudleytown. At the time, they said the film and the book would come out simultaneously, but in the end, neither project seems to have been completed. The IMDb has no listing for Dudleytown, the movie's official website is gone, and the Amazon.com page for the book says it was supposed to come out in July 2008, but you still can't order it; instead, you can only "Sign up to be notified when this item becomes available."

Canadian box-office stats -- November 15

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

Law Abiding Citizen -- CDN $8,580,000 -- N.AM $67,326,000 -- 12.7%
The Men Who Stare at Goats -- CDN $2,440,000 -- N.AM $23,376,000 -- 10.4%
Couples Retreat -- CDN $10,150,000 -- N.AM $102,133,000 -- 9.9%
Pirate Radio -- CDN $274,049 -- N.AM $2,869,000 -- 9.6%
Disney's A Christmas Carol -- CDN $5,950,000 -- N.AM $63,289,000 -- 9.4%
Michael Jackson's This Is It -- CDN $6,370,000 -- N.AM $68,211,000 -- 9.3%
2012 -- CDN $5,460,000 -- N.AM $65,000,000 -- 8.4%
The Box -- CDN $944,184 -- N.AM $13,206,000 -- 7.1%
The Fourth Kind -- CDN $1,180,000 -- N.AM $20,588,000 -- 5.7%
Paranormal Activity -- CDN $5,940,000 -- N.AM $103,847,000 -- 5.7%

A couple of discrepancies: Pirate Radio was #9 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire was #4 on the North American chart (it was nowhere in the Canadian Top 20).

Looking down from the heavens, at the heavens.

I finally caught up with the bonus features on the Blu-Ray editions of the last few Star Trek movies this week, and one sentence kind of jumped out at me. It comes courtesy of Michael Fincke, an astronaut who appears on the Star Trek: First Contact (1996) disc via the featurette 'Greetings from the International Space Station':

I'd really love to be in heaven someday, looking down to see my great-great-grandchildren living on Mars and going to other star systems, and using some kind of faster-than-light drive.

In the popular imagination (briefly satirized a couple months ago in The Invention of Lying), "heaven" is generally thought of as somewhere "up in the sky", past the clouds but perhaps not as far as outer space. And even after you accept the fact that the Earth is a sphere, it is still possible to think of people "looking down" at us from up there even though they couldn't possibly have the entire planet in view; like satellites, they can always move to another point in their orbit.

But of course, the universe doesn't stop at the edge of our planet's atmosphere; the world as a whole is much bigger than that. So anyone observing the activity between planets, to say nothing of different star systems, would have to be looking at us from much, much further back -- especially if they were doing so from a vantage point outside this universe altogether. And I can't help thinking that we'd look pretty small to them, from there.

I know, I know, I'm being much too literalistic here. But that's part of the fun of encountering old idioms in new contexts.

Who's the movie font now, see?

Two years ago, I linked to a video (and a now-defunct website) which put forth the notion that too many movies were using the Trajan font in their posters and credit sequences. Now, Adrian Curry at The Auteurs says a number of posters produced over the past few years have begun to rely upon the supposedly-neutral Helvetica font, instead; this trend began, he says, with the posters for Hard Candy (2005) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006).

Canadian box-office stats -- November 8

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

Law Abiding Citizen -- CDN $7,510,000 -- N.AM $60,704,335 -- 12.4%
Couples Retreat -- CDN $9,470,000 -- N.AM $95,680,555 -- 9.9%
Astro Boy -- CDN $1,490,000 -- N.AM $15,110,804 -- 9.9%
The Men Who Stare at Goats -- CDN $1,180,000 -- N.AM $12,706,654 -- 9.3%
Michael Jackson's This Is It -- CDN $5,170,000 -- N.AM $57,013,286 -- 9.1%
Disney's A Christmas Carol -- CDN $2,380,000 -- N.AM $30,051,075 -- 7.9%
Where the Wild Things Are -- CDN $4,560,000 -- N.AM $69,220,584 -- 6.6%
The Box -- CDN $483,055 -- N.AM $7,571,417 -- 6.4%
Paranormal Activity -- CDN $4,980,000 -- N.AM $97,108,475 -- 5.1%
The Fourth Kind -- CDN $577,341 -- N.AM $12,231,160 -- 4.7%

Canadian box-office stats -- November 1

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

Zombieland -- CDN $8,530,000 -- N.AM $71,181,556 -- 12.0%
Law Abiding Citizen -- CDN $6,150,000 -- N.AM $51,485,280 -- 11.9%
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs -- CDN $12,700,000 -- N.AM $118,604,078 -- 10.7%
Astro Boy -- CDN $1,120,000 -- N.AM $11,316,418 -- 9.9%
Couples Retreat -- CDN $8,580,000 -- N.AM $87,026,280 -- 9.9%
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant -- CDN $897,829 -- N.AM $10,809,975 -- 8.3%
Michael Jackson's This Is It -- CDN $2,840,000 -- N.AM $34,442,926 -- 8.2%
Saw VI -- CDN $1,730,000 -- N.AM $22,534,749 -- 7.7%
Where the Wild Things Are -- CDN $4,030,000 -- N.AM $62,650,379 -- 6.4%
Paranormal Activity -- CDN $3,460,000 -- N.AM $84,627,372 -- 4.1%

A couple of discrepancies: Zombieland and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs were #8 and #9 on the Canadian chart, respectively (they were #12 and #11 on the North American chart), while The Stepfather and Amelia were #8 and #10 on the North American chart, respectively (they were #11 and #12 in Canada).