Canadian box-office stats -- February 21

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.

My Name Is Khan -- CDN $703,401 -- N.AM $3,253,168 -- 21.6%
Avatar -- CDN $82,060,000 -- N.AM $687,962,011 -- 11.9%
When in Rome -- CDN $3,340,000 -- N.AM $29,344,987 -- 11.4%
Tooth Fairy -- CDN $4,810,000 -- N.AM $49,721,400 -- 9.7%
Dear John -- CDN $5,830,000 -- N.AM $65,801,765 -- 8.9%
From Paris with Love -- CDN $1,860,000 -- N.AM $21,361,504 -- 8.7%
Valentine's Day -- CDN $7,020,000 -- N.AM $86,927,385 -- 8.1%
Shutter Island -- CDN $3,030,000 -- N.AM $41,062,440 -- 7.4%
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief -- CDN $3,800,000 -- N.AM $58,714,813 -- 6.5%
The Wolfman -- CDN $3,250,000 -- N.AM $50,363,730 -- 6.5%

A couple of discrepancies: When in Rome and My Name Is Khan were #9 and #10 on the Canadian chart, respectively (they were #12 and #17 in North America as a whole), while Crazy Heart and Edge of Darkness were #8 and #10 on the North American chart, respectively (they were #12 and #11 in Canada).

"He's rejecting the gods a hell of a lot."

Sam Worthington seems to be making a career out of playing hybrid creatures (half human and half something else) who reject their stronger, more powerful half in favour of their weaker half, as it were.

In Terminator Salvation, he sided with the humans against the machines that gave him his programming. In Avatar, he sided with the Na'vi against the humans who gave him his genetically-engineered body. And soon, in the upcoming remake of Clash of the Titans, he will, it seems, side with the humans against the gods who gave them life.

Worthington spoke a bit about this aspect of his latest role in an interview that was posted this week at HitFix.com:

"In the original, Perseus is part-man, part-God, as you know, and he accepts the God side pretty easily in the first one, accepts all the gifts the Gods give him, and to me, that wasn't a very good message to give to my 9-year-old nephew or any kid, I think, is that you have to be a God to achieve something," Worthington explains. "So one of these things I said to [director Louis Leterrier] and talked to Louis about was that he wants to be a man and do this as a man, and do it with other men. I think that's a good message that anything is possible if you're banded together as men, so that's where it differs a lot. He's rejecting the Gods a hell of a lot. And then the second thing is that Greek mythology, your destiny is set for you, and I thought that was another crap message to give to my nephew, because to say to him, 'You're already going to be destined to do this, this and this.' I believe you can make your own fate, so we played against that, so my Perseus is, to use that word again, a boisterous belligerent kind of teenager, is how I've been playing him, who you tell him you can't do something and he'll run headlong into doing him and that gets him into a lot of trouble. He's not the Golden Boy, he's the teenager who has to learn how to grow up. That's what I consider the main difference from the first film."

In related news, Gemma Arterton, who plays an enigmatic figure named Io, had this to say about her character in an interview that was posted this week at ComingSoon.net (emphasis added):

Yeah, she's changed quite a lot actually, and because she's very enigmatic, I had to work out a lot of who she was myself, rather than it being in the script. I think the way I describe her now is that she's like a guardian angel, even though she's not heaven-sent. She's very other-worldly, and she's been touched by the Gods, so she has healing powers, but she's also cursed in that she can't age. She's kind of trapped with these gifts that she's been given, quite similar to Perseus actually, grappling with being human and at the same time, having these godly traits. Her role in the film is to guide Perseus through his journey and help him, mainly to realize that he should open up and embrace his Godlikeness in order to defy the Gods, which is what both of their missions are. So throughout the film, she kind of comes in and advises him and around Io, Perseus becomes quite vulnerable and we see another side to him, which we don't see with the rest of the characters, with the boys. She's kind of like a mother figure, rather than a romantic kind of... they're much more like brother and sister or like a mother. She's very protecting. She brings a real feminine touch to the film.

HitFix.com and ComingSoon.net have also posted full set-visit reports, the latter of which includes a three- or four-paragraph plot summary that highlights some of the differences between this film and the original version that came out back in 1981.

On a side note, I find it rather odd that both of these websites have capitalized the word "god" even though they always use it as a noun and never as a proper name. Is the movie studio itself setting the example here, in its press kits and so on, or did both of these websites make the same mistake independently?

James Cameron and the art of breathing.

Has any sci-fi filmmaker paid as much attention to the simple act of breathing as James Cameron has?

Many films, from Star Trek to Star Wars, tend to operate on the assumption that most planets out there have air that's fit for human consumption. But Cameron has now made three different films in which human beings encounter alien lifeforms, and in every single one, he draws attention to the fact that humans need to change either their environments or themselves if they are to move about in these new worlds.

In Aliens (1986), virtually all of the action takes place in a colony that has been established on another planet for the explicit purpose of making its air breathable. And if memory serves, the film even suggests that the newly-arrived, parasitic aliens might be making even more changes to the colony's atmosphere -- terraforming the terraformers, if you like.

In The Abyss (1989), a man played by Ed Harris actually breathes a special kind of liquid so that his lungs can withstand the pressure as he dives deep, deep down to where some aliens are living underwater here on Earth. And as his body reacts to the liquid flooding his lungs, a Navy SEAL assures him: "We all breathed liquid for nine months. . . . Your body will remember."

And now there is Avatar, which begins with a man waking up inside some sort of liquid as he comes out of cryogenic hibernation (one of several birth and re-birth motifs throughout the film); he then spends the rest of the movie projecting his mind into a hybrid body that was genetically designed to allow humans like him to move around in the poisonous air of another planet.

People have been talking about Avatar -- and its depiction of the environment and our relationship to it -- in political terms, both pro and con, ever since the movie came out. But I think we can see that Cameron has always had an interest in the ties that bind us to our environment (whether it be natural or artificial) on a deeper, more purely existential level.

You might say that, just as our souls are embedded within our bodies, so too our bodies are embedded within something even bigger -- and that this is a theme that Cameron, whose films often involve technological extensions and enhancements to the human body, is particularly interested in.

If I were a more ambitious thinker these days, I might go even further and point to the spiritual, religious and/or mythological references in Cameron's films and try to make something of the fact that the word for "breath" in both Hebrew (ruach) and Greek (pneuma) is identical to the word for "spirit". But I'm not, so I won't -- at least not yet.

Canadian box-office stats -- February 14

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.

My Name Is Khan -- CDN $347,361 -- N.AM $1,944,027 -- 17.9%
Avatar -- CDN $78,010,000 -- N.AM $661,217,278 -- 11.8%
When in Rome -- CDN $2,980,000 -- N.AM $26,280,610 -- 11.3%
Tooth Fairy -- CDN $4,110,000 -- N.AM $41,982,992 -- 9.8%
Edge of Darkness -- CDN $3,230,000 -- N.AM $36,324,976 -- 8.9%
Dear John -- CDN $4,630,000 -- N.AM $53,949,098 -- 8.6%
From Paris with Love -- CDN $1,420,000 -- N.AM $16,607,903 -- 8.6%
Valentine's Day -- CDN $4,040,000 -- N.AM $56,260,707 -- 7.2%
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief -- CDN $1,870,000 -- N.AM $31,236,067 -- 6.0%
The Wolfman -- CDN $1,810,000 -- N.AM $31,479,235 -- 5.7%

A couple of discrepancies: My Name Is Khan was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #13 in North America as a whole), while Crazy Heart was #9 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).

The Black Hole remake -- a brief update

Way back in September 2008, I passed along a bit of news to the effect that Disney was thinking of re-making The Black Hole (1979). That news was confirmed in November 2009, when it was announced that Joseph Kosinski -- director of the upcoming Tron Legacy -- had been given the job of updating this other Disney property as well.

At the time, not much was said about the concept behind the new movie, except that it would be "ground[ed] in the science of a black hole, much more so than in the original". But a few days ago, Kosinski had this to say as well, in an interview with the MTV Movies Blog:

"It won't be a sequel like 'Tron,'" he explained. "This one will be a reimagining. For me, it would be taking ideas and iconic elements that struck me as timeless and cool and preserving them while weaving a new story around them that's a little more '2001.'"

Among the elements Kosinski intends to keep are the red robot, the gnarly death of Cygnus' top dog Dr. Alex Durant (played originally by Anthony Perkins) and the design of the ship.

"I saw 'Black Hole' as a little kid," said Kosinski. "What sticks out most is the robot Maximilian. The blades and the vicious killing of Anthony Perkins. That freaked me out and that's definitely going to be an element that will be preserved. The design of the Cygnus ship is one of the most iconic spaceships ever put to film. From a conceptual point of view, we know so much more about black holes now, the crazy things that go on as you approach them due to the intense gravitational pull and the effects on time and space. All that could provide us with some really cool film if we embrace it in a hard science way."

Make of all that what you will. Personally, I find it interesting that both Tron and The Black Hole have been handed to the same director, since I always thought the "recognizers" in Tron (1982) bore a certain family resemblance to Maximilian, the evil red robot in The Black Hole.

St. Columba, the movie -- a brief update

Three months ago, in a post on films with early-medieval Celtic themes (including The Secret of Kells, which surprised many people last week when it became one of five nominees for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature), I mentioned that Norman Stone was developing a movie about St. Columba, the Irish monk who brought Christianity to Scotland in the 6th century.

At the time, Stone had revealed that Jeremy Irons would be playing Columba himself -- but it was also said that producers were "in talks with another A-list Hollywood star said to be interested in the project".

Now, it looks like the identity of this A-list star may have been revealed -- and he won't be in the movie. A few weeks ago, Stone told WENN (or one of WENN's sources) that Liam Neeson had been offered the part of King Aidan, "who has fiery clashes with Columba" -- but after mulling it over for some time, Neeson turned the role down. Stone speculates the decision may have been connected somehow to the grief that Neeson experienced after the death of his wife Natasha Richardson early last year, though Neeson has shot a few other movies since then, including the upcoming remakes of Clash of the Titans and The A-Team.

Says Stone: "The script was with him for several months and I understand he loved it. He has decided not to go ahead, which is a pity, but the decision was made after what has been a difficult time for him and I respect the circumstances. He is a truly great actor."

Canadian box-office stats -- February 7

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.

Avatar -- CDN $71,760,000 -- N.AM $629,344,204 -- 11.4%
When in Rome -- CDN $2,300,000 -- N.AM $20,944,734 -- 11.0%
Sherlock Holmes -- CDN $19,770,000 -- N.AM $201,484,470 -- 9.8%
Up in the Air -- CDN $7,160,000 -- N.AM $76,616,959 -- 9.3%
Tooth Fairy -- CDN $3,210,000 -- N.AM $34,462,568 -- 9.3%
Legion -- CDN $2,980,000 -- N.AM $34,731,934 -- 8.6%
Edge of Darkness -- CDN $2,400,000 -- N.AM $28,947,851 -- 8.3%
From Paris with Love -- CDN $610,903 -- N.AM $8,158,860 -- 7.5%
Dear John -- CDN $2,240,000 -- N.AM $30,468,614 -- 7.4%
The Book of Eli -- CDN $5,600,000 -- N.AM $82,045,140 -- 6.8%

A couple of discrepancies: Up in the Air was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #12 in North America as a whole), while Crazy Heart was #8 on the North American chart (it was #13 in Canada).

"What we ask for is liberty ... by law!"

I was still a kid when I first heard about the Magna Carta, a 13th-century document that limited the right of English kings to abuse their power. And I can remember being intrigued by the fact that King John, the monarch who was compelled to sign this document against his will, had previously been the evil Prince John that I'd heard about in all the Robin Hood stories.

So my ears perked up when I saw this newest ad for Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, and heard the last line in particular:



Is this a nod to the Magna Carta? Have Scott and his screenwriters moved the timeline around, to allow Sir Robin of Locksley to become one of the barons who forced this document on John? I guess we'll find out when the film opens May 14.

But just for the record, I think this particular bit of historical revisionism could be kind of fun. It certainly has the potential to induce less eye-rolling than that ludicrous bit in Gladiator (2000) where Marcus Aurelius proposes turning the Roman Empire into a democracy after he's dead.

Speaking of Robin Hood and revisionism, my friend and colleague Steven D. Greydanus now keeps a blog for the National Catholic Register, and he recently posted an item there on the cultural significance of Hollywood's skeptical approach to iconic legendary figures such as King Arthur and, yes, Robin Hood.

And while we're at it, I never did get around to posting a link to this six-month-old story in the Hollywood Reporter, which says a "futuristic" version of the Robin Hood legend is currently in the works at Warner Brothers. Make of that bit of news what you will.

Schroedinger’s cat, God, and religious tradition.

M. Leary has a brilliant post up at Filmwell on A Serious Man, the latest film by the Coen brothers to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. Here is the spoiler-filled note on which it ends:

If the central question of this film rotates on Schroedinger’s cat, the religious implication is this: If the tradition is the box, is God alive or is he dead? The answer being that we really can’t know. If the tradition is the box, then there is a sense in which both answers are correct. I suppose this matches the Coen Brother’s personal take on religion well, as A Serious Man becomes a great example of a classical modern description of religious language. It is both meaningful and meaningless at the same time. But they have been constructing this thought throughout the film in various ways, skillfully exemplified in the stoned kid’s reading of Torah, all the way until the end, at which point we seem to witness a hierophany of a prophetic sort and direct punitive judgment at the same time. Perfect Coen twist. (Is religious language meaningful? Is it? Really? Then comes a massive blast of effective religious language.)

Larry agonizes through this rich vein of Jewish self-reflection. But it is only when he alights upon a mediating position about the whole religion issue that allows him to accept a bribe every now and then that the total possible reality of this religious language/tradition rears its ugly head. We don’t need to know whether or not God is behind the whirlwind and the phone call. It is enough to know that Larry will never be able to have certainty about God’s presence in either, and is thus thrust into an even more serious existential crisis than the one that he began the film with. It is now not a matter of the question of: What should I do?, but: Why is this happening to me?

Religion is a balance of existential crises. A Serious Man seems to suggest that we are at least able to choose which crisis we are willing to live with.

Never mind the Titans, what about the Gods?

Surprise, surprise: the newly-released international trailer for the Clash of the Titans remake is more explicit about the anti-theistic elements than the North American trailer:



As a religious person myself, you might think that I would take offense at this, but so far, I don't. In fact, I kind of get a kick out of what this movie seems to be doing. The original Greek myths weren't very flattering to their gods, and it only makes sense for this movie to continue in that vein.

Now if only I didn't keep getting Babylon 5 flashbacks. Based on this trailer, I half-expect the Perseus of this movie to yell at some point, "Now get the hell out of our galaxy!"

Incidentally, have you noticed that Sam Worthington's first three major Hollywood roles are all hybrids of a sort, with his characters half-human and half-something else? In Terminator Salvation, he was half-robot; in Avatar, he is half-Na'vi; and now, in Clash of the Titans, he is half-god.

In other news, yesterday Warner Brothers confirmed the rumour that Clash of the Titans will be given a last-minute upgrade to 3D, and that its release date will be bumped to April 2 -- partly to allow more time for the 3D conversion, but also partly to get the film out of the way of two other 3D movies that are already coming out in March (namely Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and the DreamWorks cartoon How to Train Your Dragon; and hey, will Avatar still be kicking around then?).

Ten thoughts about Legion.

What a mess this movie is. When I first heard the premise two years ago, it raised certain questions for me -- questions that I raised here and elsewhere -- and I was curious to see how the movie would answer them. Well, in a nutshell, it doesn't. It doesn't even raise them. In a few cases, it even ignores the basis on which I asked them.

First thought: How can anyone make a movie about a rebel angel -- in this case, Michael, who turns against God and his fellow angels to protect humanity after God decides to wipe us out -- and not bother to make even a passing reference to Lucifer? Y'know, even just a line of dialogue to the effect that "This has happened before, but for a different reason", or something like that?

Now, what would have been really daring would have been if they had featured a scene in which Lucifer showed up and offered to team up with Michael against God -- not because Lucifer has any interest in saving humanity, per se, but simply because Lucifer wants to stick it to the Big Guy -- and then you could throw in a few extra complications down the road as Lucifer tries to stab Michael in the back, too. I mean, c'mon, there's a rich back-story here, and if they're going to play around with it and subvert it in some way, the least they could do is demonstrate some familiarity with it and, I dunno, make it interesting.

Think about it. Not only would Lucifer want to oppose God just for the sake of opposing God, but Lucifer, I think, would also want to guarantee that humanity survives on some level, if only so that he can torment humanity. So he and Michael could have forged an interesting alliance, kind of like how the democracies under Churchill and Roosevelt teamed up with Stalin's totalitarianism to defeat Hitler; there would always be this question hanging over their alliance, regarding what the allies might do to each other if and when they win the current battle.

And just think, the humans fighting alongside Michael might have had to decide whether to team up with Lucifer, knowing that he intended to do them harm once he had helped to ensure their survival. If Milton's Satan could say that it was better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven, perhaps these humans could have decided it was better to suffer and live in the world as it is (under Satan's influence) than to be wiped out entirely (under God's orders).

I'm not a big fan of this movie's premise, but now that it's out there, the simple fact is that there are so many things that could have been done with it which this movie simply doesn't do. Doesn't even think of doing.

Second thought: Where the heck is the "legion" referred to in the movie's title? We only get a good look at two of the angels: Michael and Gabriel. We hear about others, but they seem to do all their work through the human beings that they possess. (Note: these are angels, not demons, possessing the human beings. Just as there is no Lucifer in this film, so too there are no demons.) So Michael, who is rebelling against God because he believes in humanity even when God doesn't, spends a lot of the movie killing human beings that have been assimilated by the heavenly collective -- but with the exception of Gabriel, none of the other angels are even remotely put in harm's way. What cowards.

Third thought: Are we supposed to believe that angels are just like human beings, except for the wings? Pretty much the very first scene shows Michael landing on Earth and cutting off his wings. He then goes into a bathroom and reaches inside the cabinet for a first-aid kit. And I immediately wondered if angelic anatomy and/or physiology was really all that similar to ours. (Does their blood clot the same way ours does? Etc., etc., etc.)

Fourth thought: There's an obvious Mary-and-Joseph thing going on here, with the pregnant woman whose child is the ultimate hope for humanity, and the man who pines for the woman and is prepared to help her look after the baby even though it isn't his. I confess I even got a kick out of the fact that, the first time we see the woman, she sits down wearing a red blanket over her blue whatever (thus echoing the traditional colour scheme in icons of the Theotokos, where blue symbolizes Mary's humanity and red symbolizes her divinization; compare that to traditional icons of Jesus, who wears blue over red, symbolizing the humanation of his divinity).

But c'mon. Why is God trying to wipe out humanity only eight months after this child was conceived? Is this child the Son of God? If so, why is God suddenly pulling the plug? If not, then why does the child matter in the first place? (Side note: The movie never says who the child's father is, but there is, shall we say, no indication that the mother is a virgin. And no indication that there was any sort of annunciation. Though the man who pines for the woman does admit to being kept awake by "dreams" he's been having lately...)

And that's another thing: Is this supposed to be the First Coming or the Second Coming? The director has reportedly said that this film acts as though the New Testament never happened. But if that's the case, why do the characters use words like "Christ" as a curse-word? How did that word get into their language? (It's kind of like how The Invention of Lying depicts a world in which no one has ever believed in God or religion, but they still say they live in the "21st century" or whatever even though they have presumably never believed in Christ, without whom we wouldn't have a division between B.C. and A.D. in the first place.)

Sixth thought: There is, one must admit, some sort of basis in the Old Testament for a characterization of God as one who gives up on people and prepares to wipe them out, but can possibly be persuaded to change his mind (or, if you prefer, to un-change his mind). The movie refers to the example of the Flood, and I would also point to Exodus 32, where God threatens to wipe out the Israelites after they have worshipped the Golden Calf; Moses quickly persuades him to let the Israelites live (well, most of them, anyway), partly on the basis that it might harm his reputation among the pagans if he were to kill the Israelites so soon after saving them from the Egyptians.

But here's the thing: in both of those examples, God always makes room for a remnant; when he sent the Flood, he saved Noah and his family, and when he threatened to destroy the Israelites, he promised to make Moses into a "great nation" in their place (so, strictly speaking, God wouldn't have been destroying all of the Israelites; he just would have been doing a lot, lot, lot of pruning). But there is no such allowance for a remnant in the scenario envisioned by this film.

Seventh thought: This movie seems to draw a weird kind of parallel between God and the government. Suffice it to say that we hear talk of "militias" that have begun to fight back against the angels. Between that and the fact that this movie's very premise is bound to offend a lot of conservatives, it would seem that the movie's politico-cultural sensibilities are kind of all over the place.

Eighth thought: What exactly does "death" entail in the world of this movie? Is there an afterlife? If so, what is it like? Is it possible for angels to "die", with or without their wings, and if so, what happens to them when they do? (This, obviously, connects to my earlier question re: the physiology and anatomy of angels, and how closely it resembles that of humans.) If we're dealing with ultimate supernatural issues here, then I'd like to get a better handle on what the stakes are. Is the soul merely annihilated at death, or does it continue in some form? Etc., etc., etc.

Ninth thought: In a similar vein, I'd like to know what an angel's powers are. It's hard to get a handle on Michael, because he cuts his wings off at the beginning and seems, for all intents and purposes, to be just another human from that point on. But what about Gabriel? He swings a giant mace around, but if he didn't have a tool in his hand, what would he be capable of? If angels can possess people, then what else can they do? Read minds? Make things levitate? Use the Force? I'd like to think that there is something more to being an angel than simply being able to fly and lift heavy objects. (Yes, they can apparently possess people, too, but I don't believe we ever see Gabriel or Michael do the possessing, so it's unclear just how an angel does that sort of thing; do they do it with nothing more than their minds, or do they need some sort of object/device to get inside someone's head? Just where are the angels when all this possessing is going on, and what are they doing, exactly?)

Tenth thought: Why are some people possessed but other people never possessed? There is a throwaway line of dialogue to the effect that angels can possess people who are weak-minded or weak-willed -- I forget the exact term -- but my friend and I agreed that some of the characters who never get possessed don't seem particularly strong in the mind/will department. So that throwaway line of dialogue only went so far, for us.

Bonus thought: Legion has a lot in common with some of the other movies showing at the multiplex right now. Like The Book of Eli, it has strong religious and/or apocalyptic elements. Like Avatar, it features a warrior who turns against his boss and his former colleagues to save the natives of some planet or other. Like Creation, it stars Paul Bettany as someone who parts ways with God partly because of the impending death of a child. Like Tooth Fairy, it features a protagonist who has wings, at least some of the time. And like A Single Man, it features a woman named Charlie (or Charley).

Truly, I ask you, has any single movie ever brought together so many other contemporaneous movies at the same time?

Canadian box-office stats -- January 31

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.

Avatar -- CDN $66,070,000 -- N.AM $595,752,416 -- 11.1%
Sherlock Holmes -- CDN $19,210,000 -- N.AM $197,601,522 -- 9.7%
When in Rome -- CDN $1,200,000 -- N.AM $12,350,041 -- 9.7%
Tooth Fairy -- CDN $2,320,000 -- N.AM $26,104,387 -- 8.9%
Legion -- CDN $2,420,000 -- N.AM $29,022,786 -- 8.3%
It's Complicated -- CDN $8,620,000 -- N.AM $104,111,035 -- 8.3%
The Lovely Bones -- CDN $3,000,000 -- N.AM $38,005,738 -- 7.9%
Edge of Darkness -- CDN $1,220,000 -- N.AM $17,214,384 -- 7.1%
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel -- CDN $14,740,000 -- N.AM $209,294,997 -- 7.0%
The Book of Eli -- CDN $4,950,000 -- N.AM $74,511,765 -- 6.6%