FilmChat

2012 Film Journal

2012-01-04T22:33:00.013-08:00

As per my 2011 Journal, videos and DVDs are in italics. Films I saw for the first time have an asterisk (*) next to them. Not counting extras and promo items.

Jan

Jan 1 -- Margaret [2011] *
Jan 2 -- Born Free [1966]
Jan 4 -- Copie conforme [aka Certified Copy] *
Jan 6 -- Daydream Nation *
Jan 7 -- Beauty and the Beast [1991; 3D version]
Jan 7 -- i am a good person/i am a bad person *
Jan 7 -- A Dangerous Method *
Jan 7 -- People of a Feather *
Jan 8 -- The Devil Inside [2012] *
Jan 8 -- The Way [2010] *

Jan 11 -- The Bridge on the River Kwai
Jan 13 -- The Grey [2012] *
Jan 13 -- Contraband [2012] *
Jan 13 -- The Amazing Spider-Man [1977; pilot episode] *
Jan 21 -- Underworld: Awakening [3D version] *
Jan 21 -- Red Tails *
Jan 22 -- The Devil and Daniel Webster [1941]
Jan 23 -- POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold *
Jan 26 -- One for the Money [2012] *
Jan 27 -- Joseph, King of Dreams

Jan 28 -- Margin Call *

2011 Film Journal

2011-01-01T18:51:00.110-08:00

As per my 2010 Journal, videos and DVDs are in italics. Films I saw for the first time have an asterisk (*) next to them. Not counting extras and promo items.

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

Jan 1 -- Amazon Falls *
Jan 1 -- Trigger [2010] *
Jan 1 -- Winds of Heaven: Emily Carr, Carvers and the Spirits of the Forest *
Jan 2 -- Last Train Home [2009] *
Jan 2 -- Exit through the Gift Shop *
Jan 3 -- Mighty Jerome *
Jan 6 -- Winter's Bone *
Jan 8 -- The Trotsky *
Jan 8 -- Season of the Witch [2011] *
Jan 8 -- The Fighter [2010] *

Jan 11 -- Assault on Precinct 13 [1976] *
Jan 15 -- The Green Hornet [2011; 3D version] *
Jan 15 -- The Dilemma [2011] *
Jan 19 -- No Strings Attached [2011] *
Jan 21 -- Country Strong *
Jan 23 -- Lifeforce [1985]
Jan 24 -- The Runaways [2010] *
Jan 26 -- The Rite [2011] *
Jan 26 -- Blue Valentine [2010] *
Jan 29 -- Incendies *

Feb 5 -- The Mechanic [2011] *
Feb 5 -- Sanctum [2011; 3D version] *
Feb 5 -- The Roommate [2011] *
Feb 6 -- Animal Kingdom [2010] *
Feb 9 -- You Only Live Twice
Feb 10 -- The Adjustment Bureau *
Feb 11 -- Daniel Amos: Instruction Through Film *
Feb 12 -- Rabbit Hole [2010] *
Feb 12 -- The Way Back [2010] *
Feb 14 -- Just Go with It *

Feb 14 -- The Eagle [2011] *
Feb 19 -- I Am Number Four *
Feb 19 -- Unknown [2011] *
Feb 20 -- Salt [2010; theatrical version]
Feb 21 -- Fallen Angel: The Outlaw Larry Norman [2011 version]
Feb 21 -- Tomorrow Never Dies
Feb 23 -- Hall Pass [2011] *
Feb 25 -- Centurion [2010] *
Feb 26 -- Rango [2011] *
Feb 26 -- Black Death [2010] *

Mar 2 -- Drive Angry [3D version] *
Mar 2 -- Gnomeo & Juliet [3D version] *
Mar 3 -- Nanny McPhee Returns *
Mar 3 -- Moonraker [1979]
Mar 5 -- Mars Needs Moms [3D version] *
Mar 9 -- Red Riding Hood [2011] *
Mar 11 -- The World Is Not Enough
Mar 12 -- The Living Daylights
Mar 13 -- Battle: Los Angeles *
Mar 16 -- Beastly *

Mar 17 -- West Is West [2010] *
Mar 18 -- Limitless [2011] *
Mar 18 -- Paul [2011] *
Mar 18 -- Diamonds Are Forever [1971]
Mar 21 -- The Man with the Golden Gun
Mar 23 -- Sucker Punch [2011] *
Mar 26 -- Hobo with a Shotgun *
Mar 29 -- The Assignment [1997] *
Mar 30 -- The Lincoln Lawyer *
Mar 30 -- Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules *

Apr 2 -- Born to Be Wild [2011; 3D version] *
Apr 2 -- Source Code *
Apr 2 -- Hop [2011] *
Apr 4 -- Insidious [2010] *
Apr 6 -- Arthur [2011] *
Apr 8 -- Your Highness *
Apr 8 -- Hanna [2011] *
Apr 10 -- Wholly Moses! *
Apr 11 -- Soul Surfer *
Apr 14 -- Green for Danger *

Apr 15 -- Rio [2011] *
Apr 15 -- Scream 4 [2011] *
Apr 18 -- African Cats *
Apr 19 -- So Dear to My Heart *
Apr 22 -- Water for Elephants *
Apr 27 -- Hævnen [aka In a Better World] *
Apr 28 -- Fast Five *
May 4 -- Thor [2011; 3D version] *
May 5 -- Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil [3D version] *
May 5 -- Prom [2011] *

May 6 -- Swamp Thing [1982] *
May 7 -- Something Borrowed [2011] *
May 8 -- The Kid from Brooklyn
May 14 -- Bridesmaids [2011] *
May 19 -- American Grindhouse *
May 21 -- Big Love [season 4, disc 1] *
May 22 -- Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides [3D version] *
May 23 -- The Court Jester [1955]
May 23 -- Priest [2011; 3D version] *
May 24 -- Kung Fu Panda 2 [3D version] *

May 25 -- The Hangover Part II *
May 27 -- Big Love [season 4, disc 2] *
May 28 -- The Beaver [2011] *
May 28 -- Big Love [season 4, disc 3] *
May 29 -- Modern Family [season 1, disc 1] *
May 30 -- Modern Family [season 1, disc 2] *
Jun 1 -- Win Win [2011] *
Jun 3 -- X-Men: First Class *
Jun 6 -- Midnight in Paris [2011] *
Jun 6 -- Meek's Cutoff *

Jun 8 -- Super 8 [2011] *
Jun 15 -- Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer *
Jun 16 -- Submarine [2010] *
Jun 17 -- Green Lantern [3D version] *
Jun 17 -- The Tree of Life [2011] *
Jun 22 -- Mr. Popper's Penguins *
Jun 24 -- Bad Teacher *
Jun 25 -- The Art of Getting by *
Jun 26 -- Cars 2 [3D version] *
Jun 29 -- Transformers: Dark of the Moon [3D version] *

Jul 1 -- Monte Carlo [2011] *
Jul 4 -- Modern Family [season 1, disc 3] *
Jul 4 -- Larry Crowne *
Jul 5 -- Modern Family [season 1, disc 4] *
Jul 7 -- Conan O'Brien Can't Stop *
Jul 8 -- Horrible Bosses *
Jul 9 -- Winnie the Pooh [2011] *
Jul 10 -- Inside Job [2010] *
Jul 11 -- Page One: Inside the New York Times *
Jul 11 -- Beginners [2010] *

Jul 13 -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 [3D version] *
Jul 14 -- Small Town Murder Songs *
Jul 15 -- Zookeeper [2010] *
Jul 20 -- Captain America: The First Avenger [3D version] *
Jul 23 -- The Smurfs [2011; 3D version] *
Jul 23 -- Friends with Benefits [2011] *
Jul 27 -- Crazy, Stupid, Love. *
Jul 29 -- Cowboys & Aliens *
Jul 31 -- Cave of Forgotten Dreams [3D version] *
Jul 31 -- Project Nim *

Aug 4 -- 30 Minutes or Less *
Aug 4 -- The Trip [2010] *
Aug 5 -- Walking with Monsters *
Aug 5 -- Rise of the Planet of the Apes *
Aug 6 -- The Change-Up [2011] *
Aug 8 -- The Help [2011] *
Aug 10 -- Final Destination 5 [3D version] *
Aug 11 -- The Tempest [2010] *
Aug 15 -- Another Earth *
Aug 15 -- The Whistleblower [2010] *

Aug 17 -- The Devil's Double [2011] *
Aug 19 -- One Day [2011] *
Aug 20 -- Conan the Barbarian [2011; 3D version] *
Aug 20 -- Fright Night [2011; 3D version] *
Aug 21 -- Iron Man 2
Aug 24 -- Spy Kids: All the Time in the World [2D version] *
Aug 26 -- Colombiana *
Aug 26 -- Our Idiot Brother *
Aug 29 -- Don't Be Afraid of the Dark [2010] *
Aug 31 -- The Debt [2010] *

Sep 2 -- Shark Night 3D [2011; 3D version] *
Sep 5 -- The Blue Lagoon [1980] *
Sep 9 -- Contagion [2011] *
Sep 9 -- Warrior [2011] *
Sep 14 -- Apollo 18 *
Sep 16 -- Drive [2011] *
Sep 17 -- Dolphin Tale [3D version] *
Sep 17 -- Straw Dogs [2011] *
Sep 17 -- I Don't Know How She Does It *
Sep 23 -- Abduction [2011] *

Sep 23 -- Moneyball *
Sep 26 -- Killer Elite [2011] *
Sep 28 -- Real Steel *
Sep 29 -- Like Crazy *
Sep 29 -- Tyrannosaur *
Sep 30 -- Courageous [2011] *
Sep 30 -- Take This Waltz [2011] *
Sep 30 -- Circumstance [2011] *
Oct 1 -- The Mill and the Cross *
Oct 1 -- Go-ji-jeon [aka The Front Line] *

Oct 1 -- Ish lelo selolari [aka Man without a Cell Phone] *
Oct 2 -- Without [2011] *
Oct 3 -- Pina [3D version] *
Oct 4 -- Dream House [2011] *
Oct 4 -- Boker tov adon Fidelman [aka Restoration] *
Oct 4 -- Hearat Shulayim [aka Footnote] *
Oct 4 -- Miss Bala *
Oct 5 -- In Darkness [2011] *
Oct 5 -- Jodaeiye Nader az Simin [aka A Separation] *
Oct 5 -- Sisters & Brothers [2011] *

Oct 6 -- Rundskop [aka Bullhead] *
Oct 6 -- Bir zamanlar Anadolu'da [aka Once Upon a Time in Anatolia] *
Oct 6 -- Higher Ground [2011] *
Oct 6 -- The Guard [2011] *
Oct 7 -- What's Your Number? *
Oct 7 -- The Ides of March [2011] *
Oct 7 -- Starbuck *
Oct 7 -- Sleeping Beauty [2011] *
Oct 8 -- A Torinói ló [aka The Turin Horse] *
Oct 8 -- Le Havre [2011] *

Oct 8 -- Elena [2011] *
Oct 9 -- The Lion King [3D version]
Oct 10 -- 50/50 [2011] *
Oct 11 -- Martha Marcy May Marlene *
Oct 13 -- The Artist [2011] *
Oct 13 -- Alpeis [aka Alps] *
Oct 14 -- Le gamin au vélo [aka The Kid with a Bike] *
Oct 15 -- The Thing [2011] *
Oct 15 -- The Big Year *
Oct 16 -- Footloose [1984] *

Oct 17 -- Breakaway [2011] *
Oct 21 -- Paranormal Activity 3 *
Oct 21 -- Johnny English Reborn *
Oct 22 -- Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope [2011 version]
Oct 23 -- The Three Musketeers [2011; 3D version] *
Oct 23 -- Footloose [2011] *
Oct 26 -- Anonymous [2011] *
Oct 28 -- Puss in Boots [2011; 3D version] *
Oct 29 -- Machine Gun Preacher *
Oct 29 -- Take Shelter *

Oct 30 -- In Time [2011] *
Nov 2 -- A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas [3D version] *
Nov 5 -- Tower Heist *
Nov 5 -- The Rum Diary *
Nov 7 -- Metropolis [1927; 1984 version]
Nov 8 -- Melancholia [2011] *
Nov 10 -- Jack and Jill [2011] *
Nov 11 -- J. Edgar [2011] *
Nov 11 -- Immortals [2011; 3D version] *
Nov 17 -- The Muppets [2011] *

Nov 18 -- Happy Feet Two [3D version] *
Nov 20 -- The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 *
Nov 21 -- Hugo [2011; 3D version] *
Nov 22 -- The Muppets Take Manhattan *
Nov 25 -- Arthur Christmas [3D version] *
Nov 26 -- We Bought a Zoo *
Nov 29 -- Amore, piombo e furore [aka China 9, Liberty 37] *
Nov 30 -- Young Adult [2011] *
Dec 1 -- War Horse [2011] *
Dec 2 -- Sigur Rós: Inni *

Dec 6 -- My Week with Marilyn *
Dec 7 -- New Year's Eve [2011] *
Dec 10 -- The Adventures of Tintin [2011; 3D version] *
Dec 10 -- The Descendants [2011] *
Dec 12 -- Shame [2011] *
Dec 14 -- Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol [IMAX version] *
Dec 14 -- The Sitter [2011] *
Dec 15 -- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows *
Dec 16 -- Persuasion [2007] *
Dec 17 -- Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked *

Dec 18 -- Star Trek: The Motion Picture [theatrical version]
Dec 19 -- The Iron Lady *
Dec 22 -- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [2011] *
Dec 27 -- The Darkest Hour [2011] *
Dec 28 -- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy [2011] *
Dec 28 -- Carnage [2011] *
Dec 28 -- Buck [2011] *
Dec 29 -- Tabloid [2010] *
Dec 31 -- Coriolanus [2011] *

Canadian box-office stats -- December 19 & 26

2010-12-28T08:57:00.001-08:00

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.

The King's Speech -- CDN $1,330,000 -- N.AM $8,343,435 -- 15.9%
The Tourist -- CDN $4,430,000 -- N.AM $40,878,000 -- 10.8%
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I -- CDN $27,220,000 -- N.AM $272,972,000 -- 9.9%
Yogi Bear -- CDN $3,160,000 -- N.AM $35,820,000 -- 8.8%
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader -- CDN $5,480,000 -- N.AM $62,597,030 -- 8.8%
Tangled -- CDN $11,360,000 -- N.AM $143,695,323 -- 7.9%
The Fighter -- CDN $2,100,000 -- N.AM $26,679,000 -- 7.9%
Tron Legacy -- CDN $6,660,000 -- N.AM $87,373,703 -- 7.6%
Little Fockers -- CDN $2,480,000 -- N.AM $45,083,800 -- 5.5%
True Grit -- CDN $1,520,000 -- N.AM $36,068,000 -- 4.2%

A couple of discrepancies: The King's Speech and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I were #6 and #10 on the Canadian chart, respectively (they were #11 and #13 in North America as a whole), while Gulliver's Travels and Black Swan were #8 and #9 on the North American chart, respectively (they were #12 and #11 in Canada).

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

The Tourist -- CDN $3,200,000 -- N.AM $30,613,520 -- 10.5%
Burlesque -- CDN $3,670,000 -- N.AM $35,537,765 -- 10.3%
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I -- CDN $25,990,000 -- N.AM $265,723,618 -- 9.8%
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader -- CDN $3,630,000 -- N.AM $42,752,237 -- 8.5%
Black Swan -- CDN $1,230,000 -- N.AM $15,791,753 -- 7.8%
Yogi Bear -- CDN $1,270,000 -- N.AM $16,411,322 -- 7.7%
Tangled -- CDN $9,800,000 -- N.AM $127,918,276 -- 7.7%
How Do You Know -- CDN $533,589 -- N.AM $7,484,696 -- 7.1%
The Fighter -- CDN $889,391 -- N.AM $12,569,403 -- 7.1%
Tron Legacy -- CDN $2,980,000 -- N.AM $44,026,211 -- 6.8%

A couple of discrepancies: Burlesque was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Unstoppable was #10 on the North American chart (it was #18 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- November 28 & December 5 & 12

2010-12-14T07:10:00.001-08:00

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.

Due Date -- CDN $9,520,000 -- N.AM $94,919,650 -- 10.0%
Burlesque -- CDN $3,250,000 -- N.AM $32,540,780 -- 10.0%
Faster -- CDN $2,050,000 -- N.AM $21,336,961 -- 9.6%
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I -- CDN $24,620,000 -- N.AM $257,672,721 -- 9.6%
The Tourist -- CDN $1,540,000 -- N.AM $16,472,458 -- 9.3%
Megamind -- CDN $12,290,000 -- N.AM $140,218,962 -- 8.8%
Love and Other Drugs -- CDN $2,350,000 -- N.AM $27,629,936 -- 8.5%
Black Swan -- CDN $416,650 -- N.AM $5,584,542 -- 7.5%
Tangled -- CDN $8,480,000 -- N.AM $115,395,560 -- 7.3%
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader -- CDN $1,730,000 -- N.AM $24,005,069 -- 7.2%

A couple of discrepancies: Faster was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Unstoppable was #5 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).

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

Lance et compte: le film -- CDN $1,430,000 -- N.AM $1,430,000 -- 100%
Due Date -- CDN $9,050,000 -- N.AM $90,882,138 -- 9.9%
Burlesque -- CDN $2,530,000 -- N.AM $26,986,656 -- 9.4%
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I -- CDN $22,580,000 -- N.AM $244,519,116 -- 9.2%
Faster -- CDN $1,610,000 -- N.AM $18,217,730 -- 8.8%
Megamind -- CDN $11,890,000 -- N.AM $136,611,161 -- 8.7%
The Next Three Days -- CDN $1,480,000 -- N.AM $18,301,917 -- 8.1%
Love and Other Drugs -- CDN $1,780,000 -- N.AM $22,574,887 -- 7.9%
Tangled -- CDN $6,510,000 -- N.AM $96,570,812 -- 6.7%
Unstoppable -- CDN $4,100,000 -- N.AM $68,762,864 -- 6.0%

A couple of discrepancies: Lance et compte: le film was #8 on the Canadian chart (it wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #18), while The Warrior's Way was #9 on the North American chart (it wasn't released at all in Canada).

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

Lance et compte: le film -- CDN $687,700 -- N.AM $687,700 -- 100%
Due Date -- CDN $8,340,000 -- N.AM $84,861,008 -- 9.8%
Megamind -- CDN $11,130,000 -- N.AM $130,218,934 -- 8.5%
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I -- CDN $18,380,000 -- N.AM $219,056,129 -- 8.4%
Burlesque -- CDN $1,300,000 -- N.AM $17,300,213 -- 7.5%
The Next Three Days -- CDN $1,030,000 -- N.AM $14,392,072 -- 7.2%
Faster -- CDN $798,689 -- N.AM $12,002,840 -- 6.7%
Love and Other Drugs -- CDN $860,823 -- N.AM $13,901,532 -- 6.2%
Unstoppable -- CDN $3,550,000 -- N.AM $60,442,621 -- 5.9%
Tangled -- CDN $3,490,000 -- N.AM $68,706,298 -- 5.1%

A couple of discrepancies: Lance et compte: le film was #6 on the Canadian chart (it wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #17), while Morning Glory was #10 on the North American chart (it was #11 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- November 14 & 21

2010-11-23T00:49:00.000-08:00

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.

The Social Network -- CDN $10,740,000 -- N.AM $89,244,464 -- 12.0%
Fair Game -- CDN $446,914 -- N.AM $3,724,546 -- 12.0%
Due Date -- CDN $7,380,000 -- N.AM $72,431,594 -- 10.2%
RED -- CDN $8,510,000 -- N.AM $83,589,965 -- 10.2%
Morning Glory -- CDN $1,950,000 -- N.AM $19,823,136 -- 9.8%
Megamind -- CDN $9,930,000 -- N.AM $109,313,429 -- 9.1%
Skyline -- CDN $1,600,000 -- N.AM $17,772,760 -- 9.0%
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I -- CDN $10,240,000 -- N.AM $125,017,372 -- 8.2%
The Next Three Days -- CDN $480,350 -- N.AM $6,542,779 -- 7.3%
Unstoppable -- CDN $2,770,000 -- N.AM $41,867,769 -- 6.6%

A couple of discrepancies: The Social Network was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #13 in North America as a whole), while For Colored Girls was #9 on the North American chart, respectively (it was #17 in Canada).

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

The Social Network -- CDN $10,550,000 -- N.AM $87,807,502 -- 12.0%
Jackass 3D -- CDN $12,080,000 -- N.AM $114,643,266 -- 10.5%
RED -- CDN $8,070,000 -- N.AM $79,677,396 -- 10.1%
Saw 3D -- CDN $4,330,000 -- N.AM $43,580,310 -- 9.9%
Due Date -- CDN $5,760,000 -- N.AM $58,897,308 -- 9.8%
Morning Glory -- CDN $1,110,000 -- N.AM $11,809,321 -- 9.4%
Megamind -- CDN $7,660,000 -- N.AM $88,822,635 -- 8.6%
Paranormal Activity 2 -- CDN $6,900,000 -- N.AM $81,930,657 -- 8.4%
Skyline -- CDN $983,474 -- N.AM $11,692,415 -- 8.4%
Unstoppable -- CDN $1,350,000 -- N.AM $22,688,457 -- 5.9%

A couple of discrepancies: The Social Network was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #12 in North America as a whole), while For Colored Girls was #6 on the North American chart, respectively (it was #16 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- October 31 & November 7

2010-11-09T07:20:00.002-08:00

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.

Life as We Know It -- CDN $5,910,000 -- N.AM $48,506,252 -- 12.2%
Conviction -- CDN $581,289 -- N.AM $4,794,930 -- 12.1%
The Social Network -- CDN $10,160,000 -- N.AM $84,871,492 -- 11.9%
Jackass 3D -- CDN $11,460,000 -- N.AM $110,668,357 -- 10.4%
RED -- CDN $7,120,000 -- N.AM $71,664,962 -- 9.9%
Hereafter -- CDN $2,820,000 -- N.AM $28,721,066 -- 9.8%
Saw 3D -- CDN $3,580,000 -- N.AM $38,331,783 -- 9.3%
Due Date -- CDN $2,680,000 -- N.AM $32,689,406 -- 8.2%
Paranormal Activity 2 -- CDN $6,220,000 -- N.AM $76,959,864 -- 8.0%
Megamind -- CDN $3,410,000 -- N.AM $46,016,833 -- 7.4%

A couple of discrepancies: Life as We Know It and Conviction were #8 and #10 on the Canadian chart, respectively (they were #11 and #12 in North America as a whole), while For Colored Girls and Secretariat were #3 and #8 on the North American chart, respectively (they were #14 and #11 in Canada).

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

The Social Network -- CDN $9,520,000 -- N.AM $79,520,984 -- 11.9%
Life as We Know It -- CDN $5,210,000 -- N.AM $43,533,312 -- 11.9%
Conviction -- CDN $254,116 -- N.AM $2,383,725 -- 10.7%
The Town -- CDN $9,080,000 -- N.AM $87,626,867 -- 10.4%
Jackass 3D -- CDN $10,250,000 -- N.AM $101,657,558 -- 10.0%
RED -- CDN $5,800,000 -- N.AM $58,823,430 -- 9.9%
Hereafter -- CDN $2,100,000 -- N.AM $22,263,797 -- 9.4%
Paranormal Activity 2 -- CDN $4,920,000 -- N.AM $65,665,972 -- 7.5%
Saw 3D -- CDN $1,800,000 -- N.AM $24,230,123 -- 7.4%
Secretariat -- CDN $2,940,000 -- N.AM $44,708,804 -- 6.6%

Canadian box-office stats -- October 10 & 17 & 24

2010-10-25T10:29:00.002-07:00

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.

Easy A -- CDN $7,110,000 -- N.AM $54,785,000 -- 13.0%
The Social Network -- CDN $8,680,000 -- N.AM $72,931,000 -- 11.9%
Life as We Know It -- CDN $4,400,000 -- N.AM $37,615,000 -- 11.7%
The Town -- CDN $8,680,000 -- N.AM $84,653,000 -- 10.3%
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole -- CDN $4,860,000 -- N.AM $50,172,000 -- 9.7%
RED -- CDN $4,170,000 -- N.AM $43,483,000 -- 9.6%
Jackass 3D -- CDN $8,260,000 -- N.AM $87,147,000 -- 9.5%
Hereafter -- CDN $1,060,000 -- N.AM $12,320,000 -- 8.6%
Secretariat -- CDN $2,460,000 -- N.AM $37,360,000 -- 6.6%
Paranormal Activity 2 -- CDN $2,460,000 -- N.AM $41,500,000 -- 5.9%

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

Easy A -- CDN $6,790,000 -- N.AM $52,317,481 -- 13.0%
The Social Network -- CDN $7,330,000 -- N.AM $62,436,364 -- 11.7%
Life as We Know It -- CDN $3,170,000 -- N.AM $28,620,147 -- 11.1%
The Town -- CDN $8,120,000 -- N.AM $80,510,629 -- 10.1%
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole -- CDN $4,370,000 -- N.AM $45,994,776 -- 9.5%
RED -- CDN $1,930,000 -- N.AM $21,761,408 -- 8.9%
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -- CDN $4,120,000 -- N.AM $47,894,896 -- 8.6%
Jackass 3D -- CDN $3,850,000 -- N.AM $50,353,641 -- 7.6%
My Soul to Take -- CDN $804,629 -- N.AM $11,915,595 -- 6.8%
Secretariat -- CDN $1,750,000 -- N.AM $27,332,941 -- 6.4%

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

StreetDance 3D -- CDN $736,718 -- N.AM $736,718 -- 100%
Easy A -- CDN $6,180,000 -- N.AM $48,228,201 -- 12.8%
The Social Network -- CDN $5,100,000 -- N.AM $46,021,161 -- 11.1%
You Again -- CDN $2,030,000 -- N.AM $20,769,995 -- 9.8%
The Town -- CDN $7,160,000 -- N.AM $73,847,527 -- 9.7%
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole -- CDN $3,610,000 -- N.AM $39,273,984 -- 9.2%
Life as We Know It -- CDN $1,310,000 -- N.AM $14,506,464 -- 9.0%
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -- CDN $3,670,000 -- N.AM $43,644,701 -- 8.4%
My Soul to Take -- CDN $385,355 -- N.AM $6,842,220 -- 5.6%
Secretariat -- CDN $687,489 -- N.AM $12,694,770 -- 5.4%

A couple of discrepancies: StreetDance 3D was #9 on the Canadian chart (it wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #24), while Case 39 was #9 on the North American chart (it was #13 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- October 3

2010-10-04T13:33:00.002-07:00

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.

StreetDance 3D -- CDN $359,620 -- N.AM $359,620 -- 100%
Easy A -- CDN $5,350,000 -- N.AM $42,176,967 -- 12.7%
Alpha and Omega -- CDN $1,950,000 -- N.AM $18,949,437 -- 10.3%
The Social Network -- CDN $2,220,000 -- N.AM $22,445,653 -- 9.9%
You Again -- CDN $1,570,000 -- N.AM $16,607,633 -- 9.5%
The Town -- CDN $6,000,000 -- N.AM $64,056,752 -- 9.4%
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole -- CDN $2,700,000 -- N.AM $30,079,298 -- 9.0%
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -- CDN $2,950,000 -- N.AM $35,778,429 -- 8.2%
Let Me in -- CDN $385,414 -- N.AM $5,147,479 -- 7.5%
Case 39 -- CDN $375,605 -- N.AM $5,350,570 -- 7.0%

A couple of discrepancies: StreetDance 3D was #9 on the Canadian chart (it wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #18), while Devil was #9 on the North American chart (it was #14 in Canada).

Tony Curtis and voting with coloured beads.

2010-10-01T13:23:00.006-07:00

New Testament scholar Marcus Borg once observed that no public speaker ever uses a good line only once. (Actually, Borg has probably observed this more than once -- that's kind of his point!)

Borg made this comment while discussing the fact that there are different versions of some of Jesus' sayings spread across the gospels. Scholars tend to assume that the differences are due to changes that were put there by one or more of the people who wrote these gospels, and they tend to want to trace these sayings back to some sort of "original" version that was spoken by Jesus himself; but, as Borg hinted, it stands to reason that Jesus spoke many original versions of these sayings as he traveled from town to town, and even that he modified these sayings on occasion to reflect some local or recent circumstance. So, some of the differences may indeed be due to editorial tweaks made by the evangelists, but some of them may also go back to Jesus himself.

I was reminded of that this week when some journalists began digging up their old interviews with Tony Curtis, who died two days ago at the age of 85.

Over on his Facebook page, Roger Ebert pointed readers to this 1985 interview, which he said was his favorite of the ones he did with Curtis. And near the end of that article, there is this bit:

" . . . Let me tell you a story, sort of a parable. One day in 1948 I went to Hollywood. My name was Bernie Schwartz. I signed a contract at Universal, and I bought a house in the hills. It had a swimming pool. Unheated, but it had water in it. One night I came home late, I jumped in the pool, I swam a few laps, I got out, I dried myself off, I put on my clothes, and I walked directly into this room and sat down and started to talk to you. Do you see what I'm saying? Thirty-eight years, I don't know where they went. Gone like that."

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wells re-posted part of this 2000 interview, which ends with this bit:

'Can I tell you a story, Jeffrey?' he said, about halfway through our talk. 'In 1948, when I was 23 or 24, when I first came out here I lived in a house on Fountain Avenue. I rented a room there. And they had a swimming pool. I had an appointment and I got on a trolley car...they were running right down the middle of the freeway back then.

'Then I got back, I jumped into the pool, I took a shower, got dressed and got into the car, and drove up here to meet you. That's how quick these 50-fucking-two years have gone...quick as that.'

It's fascinating to see how these two versions of the story begin and end on such similar notes, and how they vary quite a bit in the middle.

It's also interesting to see how they contradict each other: in one, Curtis tells Ebert he bought the house with the swimming pool, whereas in the other, he tells Wells that he rented the house -- or, rather, that he rented a room in that house. (Of course, this assumes that both Ebert and Wells transcribed their respective interviews accurately.)

In any case, I can't help imagining that, somewhere, a scholar like John Dominic Crossan might some day compile a book called The Essential Tony Curtis that will feature an ur-version of this story that lends itself to multiple formulations without committing itself to any of them.

Canadian box-office stats -- September 26

2010-09-28T13:06:00.002-07:00

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.

Incendies -- CDN $548,073 -- N.AM $548,073 -- 100%
Easy A -- CDN $4,030,000 -- N.AM $32,714,215 -- 12.3%
Inception -- CDN $32,520,000 -- N.AM $287,053,292 -- 11.3%
Resident Evil: Afterlife -- CDN $5,860,000 -- N.AM $52,073,588 -- 11.3%
Alpha and Omega -- CDN $1,540,000 -- N.AM $15,164,944 -- 10.2%
The Town -- CDN $4,370,000 -- N.AM $48,692,072 -- 9.0%
You Again -- CDN $741,316 -- N.AM $8,407,513 -- 8.8%
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole -- CDN $1,340,000 -- N.AM $16,112,211 -- 8.3%
Devil -- CDN $1,770,000 -- N.AM $21,859,425 -- 8.1%
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -- CDN $1,470,000 -- N.AM $19,011,188 -- 7.7%

A couple of discrepancies: Incendies was #9 on the Canadian chart (it wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #27), while Takers was #9 on the North American chart (it was #16 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- September 19

2010-09-21T10:48:00.001-07:00

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.

Eat Pray Love -- CDN $10,850,000 -- N.AM $77,600,235 -- 14.0%
The Expendables -- CDN $12,850,000 -- N.AM $101,020,533 -- 12.7%
Inception -- CDN $32,120,000 -- N.AM $285,129,855 -- 11.3%
Easy A -- CDN $1,970,000 -- N.AM $17,734,040 -- 11.1%
Resident Evil: Afterlife -- CDN $4,780,000 -- N.AM $43,893,958 -- 10.9%
The American -- CDN $3,520,000 -- N.AM $32,772,475 -- 10.7%
The Other Guys -- CDN $11,080,000 -- N.AM $115,403,440 -- 9.6%
Alpha and Omega -- CDN $768,986 -- N.AM $9,106,906 -- 8.4%
The Town -- CDN $1,910,000 -- N.AM $23,808,032 -- 8.0%
Devil -- CDN $894,049 -- N.AM $12,289,375 -- 7.3%

A couple of discrepancies: Eat Pray Love and The Expendables were #8 and #9 on the Canadian chart, respectively (they were #11 and #12 in North America as a whole), while Takers and Machete were #6 and #10 on the North American chart, respectively (they were #14 and #16 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- September 12

2010-09-15T10:58:00.002-07:00

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.

The Switch -- CDN $3,560,000 -- N.AM $25,005,832 -- 14.2%
Eat Pray Love -- CDN $10,230,000 -- N.AM $74,660,964 -- 13.7%
The Expendables -- CDN $12,410,000 -- N.AM $98,466,264 -- 12.6%
Going the Distance -- CDN $1,600,000 -- N.AM $13,952,322 -- 11.5%
Inception -- CDN $31,580,000 -- N.AM $282,211,978 -- 11.2%
The American -- CDN $2,930,000 -- N.AM $28,111,358 -- 10.4%
Resident Evil: Afterlife -- CDN $2,560,000 -- N.AM $26,650,264 -- 9.6%
The Other Guys -- CDN $10,730,000 -- N.AM $112,442,408 -- 9.5%
Machete -- CDN $1,750,000 -- N.AM $20,916,709 -- 8.4%
Takers -- CDN $2,730,000 -- N.AM $47,680,783 -- 5.7%

A couple of discrepancies: The Switch was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #12 in North America as a whole), while The Last Exorcism was #7 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- September 5

2010-09-07T22:26:00.001-07:00

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.

Eat Pray Love -- CDN $9,180,000 -- N.AM $68,904,792 -- 13.3%
The Expendables -- CDN $11,460,000 -- N.AM $92,187,903 -- 12.4%
Nanny McPhee Returns -- CDN $2,700,000 -- N.AM $22,399,900 -- 12.1%
Inception -- CDN $30,740,000 -- N.AM $277,145,503 -- 11.1%
Going the Distance -- CDN $691,357 -- N.AM $6,884,964 -- 10.0%
The American -- CDN $1,620,000 -- N.AM $16,321,575 -- 9.9%
The Other Guys -- CDN $10,110,000 -- N.AM $106,754,100 -- 9.5%
The Last Exorcism -- CDN $2,580,000 -- N.AM $32,114,360 -- 8.0%
Machete -- CDN $814,240 -- N.AM $11,416,164 -- 7.1%
Takers -- CDN $2,010,000 -- N.AM $37,327,557 -- 5.4%

Canadian box-office stats -- August 15 & 22 & 29

2010-08-31T08:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Piranha 3D -- CDN $2,650,000 -- N.AM $18,266,889 -- 14.5%
The Switch -- CDN $2,130,000 -- N.AM $16,410,009 -- 12.9%
Eat Pray Love -- CDN $7,610,000 -- N.AM $60,531,326 -- 12.6%
The Expendables -- CDN $9,720,000 -- N.AM $82,040,183 -- 11.8%
Nanny McPhee Returns -- CDN $1,860,000 -- N.AM $16,991,285 -- 10.9%
Inception -- CDN $29,570,000 -- N.AM $270,519,920 -- 10.9%
Vampires Suck -- CDN $2,760,000 -- N.AM $27,834,256 -- 9.9%
The Other Guys -- CDN $9,090,000 -- N.AM $99,018,172 -- 9.2%
The Last Exorcism -- CDN $1,210,000 -- N.AM $20,366,613 -- 5.9%
Takers -- CDN $829,748 -- N.AM $20,512,304 -- 4.0%

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

Step Up 3D -- CDN $6,230,000 -- N.AM $36,868,951 -- 16.9%
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World -- CDN $2,550,000 -- N.AM $20,898,255 -- 12.2%
Piranha 3D -- CDN $1,230,000 -- N.AM $10,106,872 -- 12.2%
Eat Pray Love -- CDN $5,480,000 -- N.AM $47,214,078 -- 11.6%
The Expendables -- CDN $7,270,000 -- N.AM $65,357,117 -- 11.1%
Inception -- CDN $28,290,000 -- N.AM $262,031,594 -- 10.8%
The Switch -- CDN $910,475 -- N.AM $8,436,713 -- 10.8%
Nanny McPhee Returns -- CDN $794,544 -- N.AM $8,407,685 -- 9.5%
The Other Guys -- CDN $7,770,000 -- N.AM $88,253,482 -- 8.8%
Vampires Suck -- CDN $1,470,000 -- N.AM $18,566,733 -- 7.9%

A couple of discrepancies: Step Up 3D was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #14 in North America as a whole), while Lottery Ticket was #4 on the North American chart (it was #17 in Canada).

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

Step Up 3D -- CDN $4,540,000 -- N.AM $29,844,422 -- 15.2%
Salt -- CDN $12,210,000 -- N.AM $103,438,273 -- 11.8%
Inception -- CDN $26,340,000 -- N.AM $248,469,482 -- 10.6%
Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore -- CDN $3,710,000 -- N.AM $35,218,937 -- 10.5%
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World -- CDN $1,050,000 -- N.AM $10,609,795 -- 9.9%
Dinner for Schmucks -- CDN $5,800,000 -- N.AM $58,785,547 -- 9.9%
Eat Pray Love -- CDN $2,140,000 -- N.AM $23,104,523 -- 9.3%
The Expendables -- CDN $3,140,000 -- N.AM $34,825,135 -- 9.0%
The Other Guys -- CDN $5,760,000 -- N.AM $69,951,822 -- 8.2%
Despicable Me -- CDN $18,120,000 -- N.AM $222,197,390 -- 8.2%

Canadian box-office stats -- August 8

2010-08-11T09:24:00.002-07:00

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.

Filière 13 -- CDN $623,187 -- N.AM $623,187 -- 100%
Step Up 3D -- CDN $1,910,000 -- N.AM $15,812,311 -- 12.1%
Salt -- CDN $10,570,000 -- N.AM $91,788,345 -- 11.5%
Inception -- CDN $23,610,000 -- N.AM $227,637,569 -- 10.4%
Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore -- CDN $2,680,000 -- N.AM $26,428,266 -- 10.1%
Charlie St. Cloud -- CDN $2,340,000 -- N.AM $23,496,620 -- 9.9%
Dinner for Schmucks -- CDN $4,420,000 -- N.AM $46,620,949 -- 9.5%
Despicable Me -- CDN $16,750,000 -- N.AM $209,287,345 -- 8.0%
Toy Story 3 -- CDN $31,410,000 -- N.AM $396,387,342 -- 7.9%
The Other Guys -- CDN $2,570,000 -- N.AM $35,543,162 -- 7.2%

A couple of discrepancies: Filière 13 was #9 on the Canadian chart (it wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #20), while The Kids Are All Right was #10 on the North American chart (it was #14 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- July 25 & August 1

2010-08-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Salt -- CDN $7,520,000 -- N.AM $71,033,711 -- 10.6%
The Sorcerer's Apprentice -- CDN $5,270,000 -- N.AM $52,026,528 -- 10.1%
Inception -- CDN $18,890,000 -- N.AM $193,313,741 -- 9.8%
Grown Ups -- CDN $14,400,000 -- N.AM $150,761,385 -- 9.6%
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse -- CDN $25,410,000 -- N.AM $288,199,907 -- 8.8%
Charlie St. Cloud -- CDN $983,277 -- N.AM $12,381,585 -- 7.9%
Toy Story 3 -- CDN $30,440,000 -- N.AM $389,761,491 -- 7.8%
Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore -- CDN $939,984 -- N.AM $12,279,363 -- 7.7%
Despicable Me -- CDN $14,550,000 -- N.AM $190,330,425 -- 7.6%
Dinner for Schmucks -- CDN $1,780,000 -- N.AM $23,527,839 -- 7.6%

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

The Sorcerer's Apprentice -- CDN $4,110,000 -- N.AM $42,609,020 -- 9.6%
Grown Ups -- CDN $13,290,000 -- N.AM $142,240,828 -- 9.3%
Inception -- CDN $13,120,000 -- N.AM $142,883,424 -- 9.2%
Salt -- CDN $3,240,000 -- N.AM $36,011,243 -- 9.0%
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse -- CDN $24,210,000 -- N.AM $279,827,262 -- 8.7%
Predators -- CDN $3,900,000 -- N.AM $46,839,081 -- 8.3%
Toy Story 3 -- CDN $29,140,000 -- N.AM $379,416,551 -- 7.7%
Despicable Me -- CDN $11,870,000 -- N.AM $161,289,905 -- 7.4%
The Last Airbender -- CDN $8,310,000 -- N.AM $123,308,790 -- 6.7%
Ramona and Beezus -- CDN $466,420 -- N.AM $7,810,481 -- 6.0%

Canadian box-office stats -- July 18

2010-07-19T22:37:00.002-07:00

The Voldemort gallery -- a quick update.

2010-07-17T21:19:00.004-07:00

Just a quick note to say that I finally picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) the other day, and I have now updated my earlier post with the pictures of all the actors who have played Tom Marvolo Riddle, AKA the Dark Lord Voldemort, in the various Harry Potter movies.

The Arts & Faith Top 100 -- a couple of blurbs

2010-07-17T14:08:00.006-07:00

As some of you know, I've been an active member of the Arts & Faith discussion board since it was created seven years ago -- and I happened to start this blog during a period of some, uh, political upheaval there about five years ago.

Last year, however, the board was sold to the good folks at Image magazine, and they've been doing some great things with the site -- the most notable of which is that they brought back the Arts & Faith Top 100, a list of favorite films that the A&F community votes on from time to time.

This year's selection is a bit artier than previous versions of the list, but there's still a lot to appreciate, and on a design level, the webpages dedicated to each film are a definite step up from what we had before.

Among other things, each entry has its own special blurb, written by a member of the A&F community -- and yes, I wrote two of them myself, namely the ones for Jesus of Montreal and Crimes and Misdemeanors. (The fact that both films came out in 1989 is purely coincidental, I swear.)

Check 'em out, and while you're at it, feel free to join the board itself and take part in the conversation there.

The Brave Little Toy-ster?

2010-07-13T10:42:00.006-07:00

Tim Jones, one of the bloggers at JimmyAkin.org, notes that there are several striking parallels between Toy Story 3 and The Brave Little Toaster, a children's story that was first published in 1980 and then became an animated film in 1987.

The most interesting thing about Jones's observation is that Pixar chief John Lasseter, who personally directed the first two Toy Storys (1995-1999), actually pitched a computer-animated version of The Brave Little Toaster to the powers-that-be at Disney when he was an animator there in the early 1980s -- and he was promptly fired for his efforts. Lasseter himself describes the experience in the following clip from The Pixar Story (2007), starting at the 1:38 mark:

Of course, as Jim Hill noted a few years ago, if Lasseter hadn't been fired, he might have missed his chance to join Pixar in its early days, and he might not have gotten around to revolutionizing the industry so thoroughly that Disney ended up buying Pixar outright and putting Lasseter in charge of its animation division. (Add to this the Oscar that Lasseter won for 1988's Tin Toy, and the nominations he got for a few other computer-animated films, and his story brings to mind a great line from Francis Ford Coppola to the effect that "the things you're fired for when young are often the same things you're given awards for later in life.")

So it's striking that Toy Story 3 -- the first Pixar film that was conceived after the company's merger with Disney -- might be an homage of sorts to the story that caused the original rift between Lasseter and Disney nearly 30 years ago. The animator and the studio have come full circle, as it were.

Of course, this also raises, once again, the question of whether Pixar movies, despite their reputation for originality, tend to recycle the plots of other movies, especially those produced in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Canadian box-office stats -- July 4 & 11

2010-07-12T10:55:00.001-07:00

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.

Piché: Entre ciel et terre -- CDN $854,313 -- N.AM $854,313 -- 100%
The A-Team -- CDN $6,950,000 -- N.AM $73,971,000 -- 9.4%
Knight and Day -- CDN $5,570,000 -- N.AM $61,939,000 -- 9.0%
Grown Ups -- CDN $9,680,000 -- N.AM $111,315,000 -- 8.7%
The Karate Kid -- CDN $13,200,000 -- N.AM $164,600,000 -- 8.0%
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse -- CDN $18,440,000 -- N.AM $237,000,000 -- 7.8%
Toy Story 3 -- CDN $24,360,000 -- N.AM $340,200,000 -- 7.2%
Predators -- CDN $1,730,000 -- N.AM $25,300,000 -- 6.8%
The Last Airbender -- CDN $6,080,000 -- N.AM $100,227,000 -- 6.1%
Despicable Me -- CDN $3,010,000 -- N.AM $60,117,000 -- 5.0%

A couple of discrepancies: Piché: Entre ciel et terre was #8 on the Canadian chart (it wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #13), while Cyrus was #10 on the North American chart (it was #16 in Canada).

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

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time -- CDN $9,790,000 -- N.AM $88,144,671 -- 11.1%
Get Him to the Greek -- CDN $6,380,000 -- N.AM $57,474,815 -- 11.1%
Shrek Forever After -- CDN $23,240,000 -- N.AM $232,278,641 -- 10.0%
The A-Team -- CDN $6,500,000 -- N.AM $69,280,974 -- 9.4%
Knight and Day -- CDN $4,220,000 -- N.AM $45,751,847 -- 9.2%
Grown Ups -- CDN $6,920,000 -- N.AM $77,631,117 -- 8.9%
The Karate Kid -- CDN $12,090,000 -- N.AM $151,523,517 -- 8.0%
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse -- CDN $11,190,000 -- N.AM $157,577,169 -- 7.1%
Toy Story 3 -- CDN $20,380,000 -- N.AM $289,106,193 -- 7.0%
The Last Airbender -- CDN $3,370,000 -- N.AM $57,836,116 -- 5.8%

A couple of discrepancies: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was #9 on the Canadian chart (it was #12 in North America as a whole), while Letters to Juliet was #10 on the North American chart (it was #11 in Canada).

Star Trek sequel -- please, no Khan!

2010-06-29T21:47:00.009-07:00

Anthony Pascale at TrekMovie.com notes that we are now exactly two years away from June 29, 2012 -- the intended release date for the next Star Trek movie. This is kind of remarkable, when you think about it, because the last Star Trek movie came out over a year ago, and gaps of three years or more are almost unheard of in this franchise; indeed, the only longer gaps on record are the four years between Insurrection (1998) and Nemesis (2002) and the six and a half years between Nemesis and last year's reboot.

Anyway. Along the way, Pascale once again floats the possibility that the sequel might bring back Khan Noonien Singh, the villain who was played oh-so-memorably by Ricardo Montalban in an episode of the original TV series and then again, 15 years later, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). And this, I think, would be a bad idea, for several reasons.

First: The new movies are taking place on an alternate timeline that branches off from shortly before the birth of James T. Kirk. And when Khan was first introduced in the original series, he was drifting in space in suspended animation and had been doing so for over two centuries. So that means Khan, in this new timeline, would have to be drifting in space in suspended animation right now, and Kirk-Pine would have to find Khan in pretty much the exact same condition that Kirk-Shatner found him in. Among other things, this means that Khan will not be the vengeful Captain Ahab that he was in Wrath of Khan; he simply doesn't have any of that history yet, i.e. the history of being resuscitated by Kirk, seducing one of Kirk's crewmembers, trying to take over the Enterprise, being left on Ceti Alpha V by Kirk, witnessing the death of his wife and many other followers when Ceti Alpha VI explodes, and nursing his hatred of Kirk for years afterwards. The Khan of the original series may have been a noteworthy villain on some level, but he was not yet what most people think of nowadays when they think of "Khaaaaaaan!" -- so anyone who goes to the next movie expecting a remake of Wrath of Khan will be sorely disappointed. Or at least, they should be -- and if they aren't, it will almost certainly be because the filmmakers have ignored the continuity issues that they themselves wrote into the reboot, and thus, some other group will end up being disappointed.

Second: Spock-Nimoy actually died because of Khan. (And then he was brought back to life by the Genesis Wave.) Spock-Nimoy has now come back in time and knows where all these future threats lie (and not just Khan, but V'Ger, the Whale Probe, the Borg, etc.). So if Spock-Nimoy doesn't warn Starfleet or Spock-Quinto about all these various threats, then that, in a nutshell, would be lame. Very, very lame. At any rate, there is no reason why anybody should be "surprised" when they come across Khan on this new timeline, the way they were when they came across him on the original timeline. There would be no need to get acquainted with the man, to figure out whether he really is the Khan of history, to take time sussing out whether he really is a villain like the history books seem to indicate and, if so, what he is capable of; instead, thanks to Spock-Nimoy's encounters with Khan, the people of this timeline should know in advance exactly who he is and just how careful they ought to be around him.

Third: The whole point of Khan, originally, was that he came from the 20th century. I repeat: He came from the 20th century. Not the 21st century, which is where we are now, but the 20th century. Back in the 1960s, when the character was invented, it was established that Khan had been a genetically-engineered super-human who ruled a vast swath of the Earth's population for several years in the 1990s ... and then, when he and his followers were deposed, they fled our planet in one of those large "sleeper" ships that we use to get from planet to planet within our solar system. ...Oh, wait, what's that? We didn't use sleeper ships in the 1990s, and we didn't use them in the 2000s either, and now that we're in the 2010s we still don't have any plans to use them in the immediate future? Oops. Now, of course, no one expected the Star Trek franchise to last this long, and to keep on churning out new stories nearly 50 years after the series first began. And back in the 1960s, the 1990s must have sounded pretty futuristic (but without being too futuristic; like I say, the whole point of Khan, originally, was that he came from the 20th century, i.e. our century). So I don't hold any of this against the original episode. But details like these have created anomalies that the other Star Trek shows have had to steer around (e.g., when the cast of Star Trek: Voyager was sent back in time to North America in 1996, they never mentioned that Khan is supposed to be ruling a huge section of Asia at that time). Do the makers of the new movie actually want to open this can of worms, either by acknowledging the continuity problems or by ignoring the existing continuity altogether?

Fourth: Does the new movie series want to be its own thing, or is it forever going to be aping the original series? Granted, this is a problem that has plagued other branches of this franchise; when Star Trek: The Next Generation made the jump to the big screen, its first two movies were tied to the original series and used time-travel to make this connection (Generations featured Kirk, Scotty and Chekov, as played by the original actors; while First Contact featured Zefram Cochrane, as played by a brand-new actor), but its next two movies were not connected to the original series, and they are generally regarded as two of the weakest and least successful Star Trek movies ever made. So keeping the new movies tethered to the original series makes a certain sense, on that level; it keeps things within a certain "safety zone". But then, if all Abrams and company are doing is a sort of karaoke version of the original series, can we really say the series is boldly going anywhere any more?

Fifth, and on a related note: The J.J. Abrams movie has already borrowed several elements from Wrath of Khan, from the Centaurian slugs (which look and function a lot like Ceti eels) to the vengeful-widower villain to the Kobayashi Maru subplot to the closing Leonard Nimoy voice-over. The next movie should probably find a new well to drink from.

Anyway. There are probably other reasons I could mention, but these are the first that come to mind. Can you think of any others? Or, conversely, can you think of any reasons why adding Khan to the mix would be a good thing?

Twilight -- bad for wives, good for dads?

2010-06-29T13:44:00.015-07:00

Another year, another Twilight movie -- and with that movie, another round of articles on the franchise and its merits (or the lack thereof). Consider the following two items, which I came across almost simultaneously yesterday -- and which seem to pull in opposite directions, regarding the effect this franchise is having on family life:

When 'Twilight' fandom becomes addiction
Chrystal Johnson didn't think there was anything unhealthy about her all-consuming fixation with "The Twilight Saga" — until she discovered it was sucking the life out of her marriage.
Los Angeles Times, June 27

Twi-Dads: Hooked on Twilight, but don’t tell their friends
They may be the film franchise’s most unlikely fan base, but they say the rewards are worth it for the father-daughter bonding
Globe and Mail, June 28

Just for the record, as for me and my house, my daughter is still learning how to read and won't be going anywhere near these books for years, while my wife has zero interest in the franchise whatsoever.

I, on the other hand, must admit that I am looking forward to seeing The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, which opens at midnight tonight, if only because the following trailer had me weeping with laughter when it first came out a couple months ago:

Canadian box-office stats -- June 27

2010-06-29T13:27:00.002-07:00

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.

Sex and the City 2 -- CDN $11,180,000 -- N.AM $93,072,615 -- 12.0%
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time -- CDN $9,330,000 -- N.AM $86,221,879 -- 10.8%
Get Him to the Greek -- CDN $5,780,000 -- N.AM $54,616,495 -- 10.6%
Shrek Forever After -- CDN $22,780,000 -- N.AM $229,539,089 -- 9.9%
Iron Man 2 -- CDN $27,580,000 -- N.AM $306,943,647 -- 9.0%
The A-Team -- CDN $5,630,000 -- N.AM $63,047,432 -- 8.9%
Knight and Day -- CDN $2,220,000 -- N.AM $27,428,513 -- 8.1%
The Karate Kid -- CDN $10,070,000 -- N.AM $135,788,721 -- 7.4%
Grown Ups -- CDN $2,960,000 -- N.AM $40,506,562 -- 7.3%
Toy Story 3 -- CDN $13,970,000 -- N.AM $226,889,351 -- 6.2%

A couple of discrepancies: Sex and the City 2 and Iron Man 2 were #9 and #10 on the Canadian chart, respectively (they were #12 and #11 in North America as a whole), while Killers and Jonah Hex were #9 and #10 on the North American chart, respectively (they were #11 and #12 in Canada).

Jane Russell -- a brief interview

2010-06-23T22:53:00.009-07:00

Jason Apuzzo at the newly-revived Libertas website noted that it was Jane Russell's 89th birthday a couple days ago -- and this, in turn, reminded me that I had never gotten around to posting the interview that I did with her about a year and a half ago. So here it is. (And just for the record, while I don't share Russell's particular mixture of faith and politics, I did grow up watching a few of her films, and my sisters and I still sing some of the songs that Russell sang in those films, so hearing that voice sing a few lines over the phone to me was one of the highlights of my journalistic career to date.)

- - -

By Peter T. Chattaway

She was one of the most celebrated sex symbols of the 1940s -- and she was also a born-again Christian who hosted Bible studies in her home.

Jane Russell was only 19 years old when she signed a seven-year contract with legendary movie mogul Howard Hughes -- and she spent most of those seven years waiting for her first film to be released. The Outlaw was produced in 1941 and had a limited release in 1943, but it didn't play to a wide audience until 1946 -- largely because of a controversy over the way the film drew attention to Russell's figure.

Russell's second film, Young Widow, also came out in 1946, and after that, she stayed fairly busy on the big screen until the late 1950s, co-starring with the likes of Bob Hope (The Paleface), Roy Rogers (Son of Paleface) and Marilyn Monroe (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) in movies that capitalized not only on her appearance, but on her tough-gal persona.

Russell hasn't acted in a movie since 1970, but she still grants interviews for documentaries and TV shows. Her latest appearance is in Hollywood on Fire, a documentary about Christians working in the movie industry; for the most part, the film focuses on current filmmakers, but Russell helps to keep the film rooted in Hollywood's past, as well.

She spoke to me by phone from her home in the Santa Maria Valley in California.

What sort of religious background did you have, if any?

Jane Russell: I gave my heart to the Lord when I was five. And my mother, who had been an actress -- a stage actress -- became one of the best Bible teachers I ever heard, and I had four brothers, and we heard a Bible story every day. Things happened later in my life where I thought I knew what I was going to do, but instead of that, these things happened -- I call them the Lord's accidents. They're not accidents to him at all, he's got it all planned, but it turns you around and you're doing something you didn't think you were going to.

Would you say it was part of God's plan for you to be in the movie industry, then?

Russell: Yes, I guess so, because he sure got me in there.

Over the years, churches and Christians have very often been skeptical about Hollywood or concerned about it or opposed to it, even. How was it, as a Christian getting into Hollywood back then?

Russell: Well it wasn't difficult in those days to be a Christian. In fact, most of the studio heads and everything were Republicans, not Democrats, and today, Hollywood is nothing like it was, when I was in there. It's just turned around. I used to go, with the chaplain of California, to Republican things, and people would say, "You're from Hollywood, what are you doing here?" And I said, "Listen, when I was in Hollywood, everything was absolutely different." And I have a funny saying that what I am is a mean-spirited narrow-minded right-wing conservative Christian bigot -- and I'm not bigoted about race at all, I am bigoted about those idiots that are trying to take the Ten Commandments off the wall [in courtrooms], the Bible out of school, and prayer even out of football games. So they just laugh and say, "Oh, well, you're one of us."

I was thinking partly about one of your first films, The Outlaw, which was held up for a few years. Wasn't there some controversy over that?

Russell: Oh yeah, there was a big fuss. There was a big fuss.

That seems like the sort of thing that churches might have had a problem with. As a Christian in the middle of that, how did you see that?

Russell: Well, I knew there was absolutely nothing wrong with the picture. The guys had gotten me on location, and I was just trying to help keep things going and do whatever it is that they needed, so a whole bunch of them were on location, and it was a little bit of a hillside coming down, and they had two pails put down, and they said, "Now Janie, you come down and pick up the pails." Well, I had the normal costume thing on, so I leaned down and picked up the pails; I had no idea what they were doing, and I sure found out.

And I went to the director, Howard Hawks, in tears, and he said, "Now listen, you're a big girl now, and you've got to take care of yourself. And when anybody asks you to do something that makes you nervous, you say 'No,' loud and clear." Well that was the best thing anybody ever said to me. And after that, the photographers would get up on a balcony or something, and they would ask, "Now Janie, walk under here," and I would stand there with my hands on my hips and say "No," and they would pack up their gear and go. It was an amazing time. But all it was about was some cleavage! Today they're doing cleavage in the back.

Did anybody at home or anybody at church ask you about that? Did they ever say, "Jane, why are you doing this kind of movie if you're a believer?"

Russell: Well, fortunately, we never belonged to a denomination. It was always Bible, Bible, Bible. And the fact that my mother had been an actress was very helpful. She knew that acting was not of the devil, which some of the churches thought. You weren't supposed to go to movies, in some churches, and we never belonged to one, and my mom knew better. So fortunately, I was not invited out of a church.

How many of your fellow actors or filmmakers were Christians like you?

Russell: In those days we had what we called the Hollywood Christian Group. It was from the Presbyterian church in Hollywood, there was a woman that was absolutely so smart. She said "I want the president of USC and the president of UCLA in my Bible class," and she got them both, and then the kids from both of those universities were coming together, even if it was just the boys checking out the girls and vice versa. But she ended up with about five ministers that came out of that group. One of them ended up going into Washington, and it was just amazing. So that's the kind of thing she planned.

And she gathered Connie Haines the singer, and myself, and Rhonda Fleming and Della Russell, and she said, "If you girls would invite stars who have come from other states into your home and have a minister come and give them a talk, they would all come." So we started doing that, and we'd have it at my house or at Connie's house, different houses, and it was always actors and it got bigger and bigger and finally it got so big that you couldn't use a home any more, so they started having it in theatres or Sunday classes or something. Roy Rogers and Dale, they both were coming after it got bigger and bigger. They were mostly actors in it, you see, and they didn't feel strange going to a new church, and they would all come, every time. That's why it got so big. It was very popular.

When you worked with Roy Rogers on Son of Paleface, did you ever talk about your faith on the set? Was it a subject that ever came up?

Russell: Well, there was nothing about anybody being against being a Christian in those days. It was not at all like it is today. We could talk about anything we wanted to, sure. And Dale ended up having a class of her own.

Was the Bible study already happening when you made that movie, or did that come later?

Russell: It was in the early '40s that we started the class, and then, after we were all working -- Beryl Davis was a singer, and her church was Episcopalian, and they were having a fundraiser, so she had invited us, Connie Haines and myself, to come to the fundraiser and make an appearance. And we were standing backstage, and I said, "Well Connie's going to sing, what are we going to do, sit there with egg on our face?" And Connie said, "I've been thinking, we might be able to teach these two" -- one was Catholic and one was Episcopal, and Connie had come from a Baptist church, and I didn't belong to a particular church but I knew all the hand-clapping spirituals that the other two didn't know -- so she said, "Maybe we can teach them a chorus of 'Do lord, o do Lord, o do remember me.'"

So we did, we taught them a chorus of that, and Connie went out and sang, and then she invited us out, and we all did 'Do Lord,' and then we came backstage and we said, "I guess that was okay, it was pretty good, it was fun." There's a knock on the door, it's a man from Coral Records, and he wants to know if we would record that for Coral Records. Now that's what I call the Lord's accident. He had been in the audience, they had never done anything spiritual on Coral Records or on any of the other record companies -- there were religious record companies and they did it but not the regular ones that were doing just normal singing -- so we said, "Well sure." We were shocked, and we ended up doing it, and it sold so many copies that they couldn't believe it. And then they wanted to know if we'd do an album, and we did.

And we ended up travelling to Las Vegas, and we were in Mr. Blackwell gowns, sequins, and it was absolutely amazing. We're going to Vegas, we're going to Chicago, we're going to New York, they just had us going all over the place, and we ended up with another album from Capitol. And it was all kind of hand-clapping spiritual songs. "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho..." All those songs that a lot of people, the Episcopals and the Catholics, never did. So they liked it, and we just ended up doing it, and it was a lot of fun, because instead of just traveling by yourself, you've got your buddies.

I have also heard that you're something of a pro-life advocate. Can you talk about that at all?

Russell: Yes. I [had an abortion] before I was married, and I almost died, and there was a real judgment on there, and I thought, "Well, if I can't have any children, I'm going to adopt them." So I got involved in adoption, and it was like the Lord just led me around by the nose to the right people, and we finally got an organization called WAIF [World Adoption International Fund] going, because a waif is a child without a home, and I got totally involved with that, and it was just wonderful. And Mom would say things like, "There's a path the Lord wants you to go on, and if you fall off, he will rub your nose in it, and then you'll know what's wrong with that situation, and he'll try to help fix it." And she said that's the way all the charities have gotten started: it's always somebody has had their nose rubbed in that problem, and that's what it was, and we just started working on adoption. We got lives changed, we got children coming in from other countries, and it was amazing.

If a Christian were looking at getting into the film industry today, what sort of advice would you give them?

Russell: Good luck, honey!

And if they still wanted to get involved?

Russell: Well go ahead and do it, for heaven's sakes. But you don't have to break the Lord's rules in it.

Canadian box-office stats -- June 20

2010-06-23T22:29:00.002-07:00

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.

Sex and the City 2 -- CDN $10,640,000 -- N.AM $90,170,101 -- 11.8%
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time -- CDN $8,500,000 -- N.AM $80,800,574 -- 10.5%
Get Him to the Greek -- CDN $4,810,000 -- N.AM $47,844,275 -- 10.1%
Shrek Forever After -- CDN $21,900,000 -- N.AM $223,076,925 -- 9.8%
Iron Man 2 -- CDN $27,320,000 -- N.AM $304,210,329 -- 9.0%
The A-Team -- CDN $4,200,000 -- N.AM $50,427,588 -- 8.3%
Killers -- CDN $2,910,000 -- N.AM $39,302,411 -- 7.4%
Jonah Hex -- CDN $373,400 -- N.AM $5,379,365 -- 6.9%
The Karate Kid -- CDN $7,330,000 -- N.AM $107,130,239 -- 6.8%
Toy Story 3 -- CDN $5,640,000 -- N.AM $110,307,189 -- 5.1%

A couple of discrepancies: Sex and the City 2 was #7 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Marmaduke was #10 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader -- the first trailer!

2010-06-16T20:59:00.004-07:00

I haven't read the book version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in a few years now, so I don't know quite how to pick this trailer apart just yet -- but I'm sure the true Narnia fans out there will be chiming in pretty soon. In the meantime, behold:

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Oh that end-times religion ...

2010-06-15T23:16:00.035-07:00

I've had Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth on the brain these last few weeks, so I figured now was as good a time as any to note that the film version of Lindsey's book, narrated by Orson Welles, is currently available for viewing on YouTube.

My essay on the film, which I wrote for a course on documentary films in 1996, is still available here -- though a number of the links have died since I last updated the page nine years ago. (Among other things, you can no longer download the Daniel Amos album Shotgun Angel from mp3.com.)

It's funny, and kind of cool, that this film exists on YouTube now. It was originally produced in the late 1970s, and it's full of dire predictions for the 1980s, none of which came true. My parents taped it off TV at some point back then, and I watched it more often than I care to remember. (Part of the appeal was that the film concludes with a lengthy, and arguably gratuitous, montage of nuclear explosions; when you're a preteen or teenaged boy, you kind of go for that sort of thing.) The film remained pretty obscure, though, so when I pitched an essay on it to my film instructor at UBC, he agreed but only on the condition that I would be able to lend him a copy of the film itself. So imagine my surprise when I saw that the film was available on DVD just a few years later; apparently there was still a market for this film in the late 1990s, even though its predictions for the 1980s had all turned out to be wrong. And now, here it is on YouTube, and in much better quality than the VHS copy I lent to my instructor.

Quick footnote to my UBC story: Shortly after I finished the essay, my class watched a film called Sherman's March (1986), in which director Ross McElwee tours the southern states (the so-called "Bible Belt") and profiles some of the women in his life -- and one of them, at one point, begins talking about the Rapture and the Second Coming. At this point, my instructor and I gave each other a look, and I had the delightful feeling that I had helped to put this small moment into a much bigger context for him.

Anyway. Why, you ask, have I had The Late Great Planet Earth on the brain lately? Four reasons, all of them unrelated:

First, Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen wrote a column on May 30 comparing the doom-and-gloom "experts" of the current era to the doom-and-gloom "experts" of the 1970s -- and although he doesn't get into the religious side of that phenomenon, the fact is, people like Lindsey capitalized on the paranoia and pessimism of their times and are no doubt trying to do so again, now.

Second, I took part in another Kindlings Muse podcast two weeks ago, this time on the topic 'Is There Life after Fundamentalism?', and I found it impossible to discuss this subject -- which was originally going to be called 'Growing Up Fundamentalist' in honour of Stefan Ulstein's book of that name -- without discussing the role that Lindsey and his fellow dispensationalists played in shaping the evangelical culture of my own youth.

Third, Dana Key of the Christian rock band DeGarmo & Key died of a ruptured blood clot on June 6. DeGarmo & Key occupy a significant footnote in pop-music history as the first Christian band to get a music video on MTV, back in 1985 -- and, as it happens, the video in question was for an end-times flavoured song called 'Six Six Six'. Ironically, however, the song was pulled from rotation because its depiction of the death of the Antichrist was deemed too violent -- and so the first Christian music video to get significant secular airplay ran afoul of the same anti-sex-and-violence fervour that was propelling the Parents Music Resource Centre and similar conservative groups at that time. In the end, a slightly censored version of the music video was admitted back into MTV rotation; you can watch the before and after versions at YouTube.

Finally, Fred "Slacktivist" Clark interrupted his weekly page-by-page evisceration of the Left Behind books last week to take a deeper look at the similarities and differences between Lindsey's take on the end times and the novels that Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins began writing in the mid-1990s -- right around the time I wrote my essay on Lindsey's film, as it happens.

Oh, and for the Trekkies out there: Yes, I do believe that the cliff from which the false prophet falls in the clip above -- shortly after the 3:15 mark -- is the famous "Gorn Rock" that has appeared in several of the Star Trek episodes and movies.

The White Witch returns to the big screen, again.

2010-06-15T14:56:00.015-07:00

Aslan may have killed her in the first Narnia movie, but that hasn't stopped the White Witch from showing up in all of the sequels. First some dissident Narnians tried to bring her back from the dead in Prince Caspian. Then, a few weeks ago, her face showed up on the newest display ad for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And now, reports The Torch Online, the possibility that she might have a role, however small, in all of the remaining sequels is "under consideration." (Within the original novels, she appeared in only one of the six sequels, namely The Magician's Nephew, and that one hasn't been turned into a film yet.)

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader doesn't come to theatres until December, and the first trailer won't premiere online until tomorrow night, so if you're wondering just what the White Witch is doing in this latest installment of the franchise, there isn't a lot of information to go by just yet. But for what it's worth, executive producer Perry Moore tells The Torch Online, cryptically: "She appears right where you think she would when you read the book — in a surprising way you could never guess that is at the same time true to the core of the book." So we'd "think" it but we'd never "guess" it? How does that work? Meanwhile, Paul Martin at Narnia Fans says the White Witch will return "for a dream sequence and nothing more," and that her appearance in the current sequel will likely be "shorter" than it was in the previous sequel.

Canadian box-office stats -- June 13

2010-06-15T07:18:00.004-07:00

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.

Robin Hood -- CDN $12,300,000 -- N.AM $99,463,670 -- 12.4%
Sex and the City 2 -- CDN $9,760,000 -- N.AM $84,658,826 -- 11.5%
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time -- CDN $7,440,000 -- N.AM $72,228,302 -- 10.3%
Shrek Forever After -- CDN $20,600,000 -- N.AM $210,022,557 -- 9.8%
Get Him to the Greek -- CDN $3,540,000 -- N.AM $36,400,720 -- 9.7%
Iron Man 2 -- CDN $26,890,000 -- N.AM $299,282,390 -- 9.0%
The A-Team -- CDN $1,970,000 -- N.AM $25,669,455 -- 7.7%
Killers -- CDN $2,180,000 -- N.AM $30,261,624 -- 7.2%
Marmaduke -- CDN $1,510,000 -- N.AM $22,285,540 -- 6.8%
The Karate Kid -- CDN $3,580,000 -- N.AM $55,665,805 -- 6.4%

A couple of discrepancies: Robin Hood was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Splice was #10 on the North American chart (it was #11 in Canada).

Toy Story 3 -- "welcome yet nonessential"?

2010-06-08T15:00:00.018-07:00

Remember what I said a few months ago about the three phases of Pixar's history, and how this newest sequel-filled phase seems to represent a retreat of sorts from the artistic ambitions of the second phase?

The reviews of Toy Story 3 have started to trickle out, ten days before the movie's release, and some of them are echoing these concerns. Take, for example, Peter Debruge at Variety magazine:

Andy outgrows his anthropomorphic amigos Buzz and Woody in "Toy Story 3," the franchise's third (and final?) installment -- and as it turns out, 15 years after launching the computer-animated toon revolution, Pixar has outgrown them, too. Whereas "Toy Story 2" treated auds to a character-based sequel that handily justified its existence, this tertiary adventure delivers welcome yet nonessential fun, landing well after its creators have grown up and succeeded toying with more sophisticated stories. . . .

Pixar has essentially set an impossible standard for itself, having previously delivered the rare sequel that improves on the original, then followed that up with a run of exceptional work. This latest script, written by "Little Miss Sunshine's" Michael Arndt from a story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Unkrich, feels more gag-driven than the studio's previous efforts -- essentially borrowing a page from DreamWorks Animation, chasing snappy humor over heart-on-their-sleeve sentimentality, within a few months of DreamWorks going the Pixar route with the sincere storytelling of "How to Train Your Dragon." . . .

That last comment is especially interesting, given that How to Train Your Dragon was co-directed by a former Disney animator who basically left the company after running into creative differences with Pixar chief John Lasseter (over the film that ended up becoming Bolt).

UPDATE: Steven D. Greydanus also links to Debruge's review, and puts Toy Story 3 within the broader context of what seems likely to be a rather lacklustre summer, as far as family films go ("It might be second-string Pixar, but given Pixar’s overall track record of excellence even second-string Pixar is likely to equal, and probably to surpass, the very best the competition has to offer").

Canadian box-office stats -- June 6

2010-06-07T17:00:00.002-07:00

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.

Robin Hood -- CDN $11,590,000 -- N.AM $94,496,010 -- 12.3%
Sex and the City 2 -- CDN $8,010,000 -- N.AM $73,128,387 -- 10.9%
Shrek Forever After -- CDN $17,990,000 -- N.AM $183,229,453 -- 9.8%
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time -- CDN $5,850,000 -- N.AM $59,621,721 -- 9.8%
Splice -- CDN $715,780 -- N.AM $7,385,277 -- 9.7%
Iron Man 2 -- CDN $26,160,000 -- N.AM $291,429,870 -- 8.9%
Get Him to the Greek -- CDN $1,560,000 -- N.AM $17,570,955 -- 8.9%
Letters to Juliet -- CDN $3,660,000 -- N.AM $43,337,836 -- 8.4%
Marmaduke -- CDN $876,575 -- N.AM $11,599,661 -- 7.6%
Killers -- CDN $1,050,000 -- N.AM $15,837,266 -- 6.6%

Sex and the Agora.

2010-06-05T21:34:00.016-07:00

Steven D. Greydanus has done such a thorough job deconstructing Agora -- which opened in the U.S. last week and opens in Canada next week -- that I have little to add. (Maybe later, though.)

One of the many good points he makes is that the film goes out of its way to make its heroine, Hypatia, a modern woman, or a woman that modern audiences can easily identify with, to the point that it obscures or ignores what the historical Hypatia actually stood for. For example:

Agora offers no insight into Hypatia’s neoplatonic asceticism. It prominently depicts, but does not understand, the famous episode in in which she rebuffs a would-be suitor by presenting him with her menstrual rags as graphic evidence of the manifest error of his attraction. No attempt is made to illuminate this distasteful episode for viewers, to explore the distance between Hypatia’s neoplatonic sensibilities and our own “sex-positive” milieu.

Instead, Hypatia’s disinterest in marriage is presented solely in terms readily accessible to modern feminism: Marriage in ancient Alexandria would mean subservience to a husband, the end of her independence and her career. The idea that the biological realities of human reproduction were considered unworthy of a soul seeking the highest good isn’t even on the radar.

With all that in mind, consider this excerpt from an interview with Rachel Weisz, the actress who plays Hypatia in the movie, that appeared in the New York Times two weeks ago:

Ms. Weisz, who in 2006 won an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her role in “The Constant Gardener,” describes herself as “extremely passionate about what I do” and initially found Hypatia’s cool rationality hard to fathom. Early on, she said, she “half-jokingly” suggested a masturbation scene for Hypatia to Mr. Amenábar, who demurred.

“My fear was that she would be a brain on legs, and that is not interesting to watch,” Ms. Weisz explained. “My hope was that she would be passionate and emotional and full of feeling, even though it was not being channeled into the sexual, personal, human realm. She is in love with science, with learning. It turned her on; that was the only way I could think of it.”

Make of that what you will.

Canadian box-office stats -- May 23 & 30

2010-06-01T22:29:00.006-07:00

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.

The Child Prodigy -- CDN $138,546 -- N.AM $138,546 -- 100%
Robin Hood -- CDN $10,150,000 -- N.AM $83,125,570 -- 12.2%
MacGruber -- CDN $758,584 -- N.AM $7,216,320 -- 10.5%
Shrek Forever After -- CDN $13,220,000 -- N.AM $133,061,414 -- 9.9%
Date Night -- CDN $9,140,000 -- N.AM $93,515,463 -- 9.8%
Sex and the City 2 -- CDN $4,350,000 -- N.AM $45,209,967 -- 9.6%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $20,280,000 -- N.AM $212,755,053 -- 9.5%
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time -- CDN $2,740,000 -- N.AM $30,095,259 -- 9.1%
Iron Man 2 -- CDN $24,700,000 -- N.AM $275,035,900 -- 8.9%
Letters to Juliet -- CDN $3,200,000 -- N.AM $36,537,190 -- 8.8%

A couple of discrepancies: The Child Prodigy was #9 on the Canadian chart (it wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #30), while Just Wright was #7 on the North American chart (it was nowhere in the Canadian Top 20).

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

Kites -- CDN $188,487 -- N.AM $959,329 -- 19.6%
She's Out of My League -- CDN $4,410,000 -- N.AM $31,628,317 -- 13.9%
Robin Hood -- CDN $7,570,000 -- N.AM $66,165,690 -- 11.4%
Date Night -- CDN $8,840,000 -- N.AM $90,748,818 -- 9.7%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $19,970,000 -- N.AM $210,990,918 -- 9.5%
Iron Man 2 -- CDN $21,810,000 -- N.AM $251,026,061 -- 8.7%
MacGruber -- CDN $336,204 -- N.AM $4,043,495 -- 8.3%
Shrek Forever After -- CDN $5,860,000 -- N.AM $70,838,207 -- 8.3%
Letters to Juliet -- CDN $2,260,000 -- N.AM $27,332,507 -- 8.3%
A Nightmare on Elm Street -- CDN $4,350,000 -- N.AM $59,967,500 -- 7.3%

A couple of discrepancies: She's Out of My League was #9 on the Canadian chart (it wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #30), while Just Wright was #5 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).

The Toy Story movies in dog years.

2010-05-22T11:20:00.008-07:00

In the beginning, it was just a punchline, a gag. The original Toy Story (1995) ended with a scene in which Woody and Buzz, having patched over their differences, sit in Andy's room on Christmas Day, waiting to find out what the newest additions to the household will be. Woody, seeing that Buzz is nervous, teases him by saying, "Now Buzz, what could Andy possibly get that is worse than you?" Suddenly they hear a dog bark, as Andy's voice comes from downstairs: "Wow, a puppy!" Woody and Buzz give each other startled looks, and the film cuts to black. Roll credits.

Toy Story 2 (1999) played with this final-act twist by introducing the puppy -- now named Buster -- as the sort of mess-maker that you'd expect, based on the first film's closing lines. But then we learn that the dog is actually friendly with the toys, and that he has even been trained to obey Woody's commands.

Jump ahead a decade or so to Toy Story 3. Andy is about ten years older than he was when we first met him, and the toys must cope with the fact that the boy they've known and loved has quite possibly outgrown them. But what about Buster? Well, a TV spot released just yesterday answers that question: Buster, like everyone else, is ten years older too. But unlike Andy, who is still very much a student or "young man" -- and unlike the toys, who are eternally youthful provided they don't get damaged too much (Woody, after all, was created back in the 1950s) -- Buster is now old and tired. He's on his last legs. He's a senior citizen, as dogs go.

I don't know where the filmmakers are going to go with this, exactly, but it occurs to me that this could be one of the film's more poignant elements. Death comes to us all in the end -- a fact that was hinted at in Toy Story 2 -- but for some, such as Buster, it may come a whole lot more quickly, and inevitably.

Canadian box-office stats -- May 16

2010-05-21T14:12:00.002-07:00

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.

The Back-Up Plan -- CDN $4,340,000 -- N.AM $34,124,782 -- 12.7%
Furry Vengeance -- CDN $1,620,000 -- N.AM $15,089,070 -- 10.7%
Robin Hood -- CDN $3,720,000 -- N.AM $36,063,385 -- 10.3%
Clash of the Titans -- CDN $15,890,000 -- N.AM $160,127,747 -- 9.9%
Date Night -- CDN $8,370,000 -- N.AM $86,522,622 -- 9.7%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $19,520,000 -- N.AM $207,647,696 -- 9.4%
Iron Man 2 -- CDN $17,520,000 -- N.AM $211,200,876 -- 8.3%
Letters to Juliet -- CDN $998,340 -- N.AM $13,540,486 -- 7.4%
A Nightmare on Elm Street -- CDN $4,030,000 -- N.AM $56,066,595 -- 7.2%
Just Wright -- CDN $143,461 -- N.AM $8,284,989 -- 1.7%

Canadian box-office stats -- May 9

2010-05-10T21:58:00.002-07:00

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.

Millenium 3 -- CDN $564,012 -- N.AM $564,012 -- 100%
The Back-Up Plan -- CDN $3,780,000 -- N.AM $30,103,940 -- 12.6%
Oceans -- CDN $1,860,000 -- N.AM $16,131,584 -- 11.5%
Furry Vengeance -- CDN $1,330,000 -- N.AM $12,100,064 -- 11.0%
The Losers -- CDN $2,290,000 -- N.AM $21,496,907 -- 10.7%
Clash of the Titans -- CDN $15,670,000 -- N.AM $158,006,277 -- 9.9%
Date Night -- CDN $7,850,000 -- N.AM $81,002,725 -- 9.7%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $18,740,000 -- N.AM $201,013,867 -- 9.3%
Iron Man 2 -- CDN $9,620,000 -- N.AM $128,122,480 -- 7.5%
A Nightmare on Elm Street -- CDN $3,350,000 -- N.AM $48,479,560 -- 6.9%

A couple of discrepancies: Oceans and Millenium 3 were #8 and #9 on the Canadian chart, respectively (the former film was #11 in North America as a whole, while the latter film wasn't on the North American chart at all, though if it were, it would be #30), while Death at a Funeral and Babies were #8 and #9 on the North American chart, respectively (the former film was #16 in Canada, while the latter film was nowhere in the Canadian Top 20).

Dragons, adolescence, and loss of control

2010-05-05T10:54:00.009-07:00

How to Train Your Dragon -- considered such a disappointment when it opened over a month ago that shares in DreamWorks Animation dropped 9.2% -- has shown remarkable staying power.

While the film's grosses have dropped every week, as is standard for wide releases these days, they have dropped slower than usual -- and since most of the past month's films have done rather poorly, Dragon even "rose" back to #1 on the weekly box-office charts two weekends ago. In fact, the $15.3 million that it earned at the time now ranks as the seventh-best box-office haul that any film has had in its fifth weekend.

This must come as sweet vindication to co-director Chris Sanders, who was fired by Disney a few years ago when John Lasseter decided he didn't like what Sanders was doing with a film called American Dog. Lasseter gave Sanders' project to a couple other directors, and they turned it into the "Pixar Lite" movie Bolt (2008), which earned a disappointing $114.1 million in North America -- but Sanders jumped to Disney's arch-rival DreamWorks and got involved with their Dragon adaptation, and now, with $192.8 million in the till and more to come, it looks like that film could very well become DreamWorks' top-grossing cartoon outside of the Shrek franchise.

Why has the film been such a success? Part of the answer lies with the fact that Dragon, unlike a lot of other DreamWorks productions, "embraces sincerity over satire", to quote Variety's critic -- and one of the reasons the filmmakers could deviate from the studio's formula like this is because the studio brought them in so late in the game that there was no time to second-guess their decisions, at least not to the extent that the studio normally would.

But as much as Dragon may represent a step forward for DreamWorks, there are still some critics who felt the film was a little too DreamWorksy; one such critic is animation expert Michael Barrier, who recently linked to an interesting interview with co-director Dean DeBlois and then made the following observation:

I was most intrigued by what DeBlois says about DreamWorks' abhorrence of the "juvenile." I've always thought of the DreamWorks features as jejune, but they're not so much juvenile as adolescent. There is a much greater gulf between the juvenile and the adolescent than there is between the juvenile and the adult. Good children's films and books deal with serious subjects as seriously as good adult films and books, but from a different perspective (particularly where relations between the sexes are concerned). Films that pander to the adolescent sensibility, like most of the DreamWorks features and all too many of today's other movies, can't afford to take anything seriously, except the panic that's always threatening to erupt in the adolescent mind and that the movies treat with the soothing balm of a pervasive flipness. Carl Barks said that he thought of his readers as being around twelve years old—on the cusp of adolescence, but still children. Once children enter adolescence, with its anxieties and insecurities and consuming self-consciousness, they pass beyond the reach of artists like Barks; they're incapable of hearing what those artists are saying until the glandular din subsides and they become adults.

The sad thing, of course, is that our culture insists on pushing the threshold of adolescence to an ever lower age. Today's twelve-year-olds are like the fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds of the past, and children under ten are as sexualized and knowing (they think) as the teenagers of a few decades ago. Given those circumstances, it's probably best to be grateful for what is real and honestly felt in How to Train Your Dragon, and to accept the phony bluster at the end as the price that must be paid for the remarkable few minutes when Hiccup and Toothless bridge the gap between their species.

Reading Barrier's comments, I was reminded of two things: One, the opening paragraphs of Steven D. Greydanus's review of Shark Tale (2004), which noted that all of the computer-animated films released by DreamWorks up to that point were like "adolescent" versions of the Pixar films of that era, sharing themes and settings but being worlds apart in terms of their attitude or, for that matter, their durability; and two, the dedication at the beginning of C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

My Dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be
your affectionate Godfather,
C.S. Lewis

That might not be quite the same thing Barrier is talking about, perhaps, but I think it dovetails nicely with his remark that "There is a much greater gulf between the juvenile and the adolescent than there is between the juvenile and the adult."

One last thought:

Anne Thompson recently noted that DreamWorks Animation got off to a rather rocky start, until a little film called Shrek (2001) came along and blew the competition away. Prior to that, every DreamWorks cartoon had done so-so business at best or had outright flopped, but Shrek surprised everyone by becoming the second-highest-grossing animated movie of all time, behind only The Lion King (1994).

The success of Shrek set the template that has dominated DreamWorks ever since, and it must be said that the "adolescent" films produced in its wake have been much, much better to DreamWorks' bottom line than the films that came before. But here's the interesting thing: according to Thompson, Shrek turned out the way it did partly because it was produced at another company, PDI, rather than in-house at DreamWorks. DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg "supervised" the production, writes Thompson, "but was not all over the animators 24/7."

So it turns out DreamWorks Animation may owe two of its biggest successes -- both the one that set the "adolescent" tone for years to come and the one that marked the first significant break away from that tone -- to the fact that the studio bigwigs had less control over those films than they normally do.

There might be a lesson in that for someone, somewhere.

Canadian box-office stats -- May 2

2010-05-04T20:40:00.002-07:00

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.

The Back-Up Plan -- CDN $2,760,000 -- N.AM $22,963,517 -- 12.0%
Oceans -- CDN $1,490,000 -- N.AM $13,460,115 -- 11.1%
The Losers -- CDN $1,800,000 -- N.AM $18,013,781 -- 10.0%
Clash of the Titans -- CDN $15,160,000 -- N.AM $153,911,073 -- 9.8%
Furry Vengeance -- CDN $642,447 -- N.AM $6,627,564 -- 9.7%
Kick-Ass -- CDN $4,030,000 -- N.AM $42,228,273 -- 9.5%
Date Night -- CDN $7,000,000 -- N.AM $73,604,361 -- 9.5%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $17,500,000 -- N.AM $192,173,750 -- 9.1%
Death at a Funeral -- CDN $2,150,000 -- N.AM $34,900,278 -- 6.2%
A Nightmare on Elm Street -- CDN $1,860,000 -- N.AM $32,902,299 -- 5.7%

Before there was Avatar, there was ...

2010-04-29T10:13:00.005-07:00

Many people, including myself, have noted that the armoured "amp suits" in Avatar bear a striking resemblance to the load-lifting mechanism that Ripley used to defeat the Queen Alien in Aliens (1986). But James Cameron's love of mechanized extensions to the human body goes back even further -- to his low-budget short film Xenogenesis (1978). Watch it below, and note what happens at the 7:12 mark in particular:

Avatar and religion -- a few thoughts.

2010-04-29T01:18:00.004-07:00

Avatar came out on Blu-Ray and DVD last week, so now is as good a time as any to post the following article, which I wrote for the March issue of the Anglican Planet after they asked me to expand on some ideas that I had hinted at in my review for the January issue of BC Christian News:

- - -

By Peter T. Chattaway

James Cameron has given many interviews over the past few months, promoting Avatar and discussing the ground-breaking technology that went into it. He has even defended the film from those who take issue with its politics or its depiction of the military.

But I have yet to see an interview in which anyone encourages Cameron to talk about his religious influences.

This is a shame, as Cameron's films have often been peppered with religious names, symbols and story elements, and Avatar -- which quickly became the top-grossing film of all time worldwide since opening in mid-December and is now nominated for nine Oscars including Best Picture -- represents his most explicitly religious film to date.

This is not to say that the film advocates a specific religion, per se, but it does raise questions that are essentially religious in nature, about our relationship to Creation, to one another, and ultimately to some sort of spiritual reality that is higher than us.

The film, which takes place in the year 2154, concerns a crippled former marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) who takes part in a program on an alien moon called Pandora. A human corporation has set up a mining operation there, and a team of scientists have created hybrid bodies called "avatars" -- half human, half alien -- that allow them to move around in the planet's atmosphere, which would otherwise be poisonous to them.

The scientists operate these "avatars" by a sort of remote control, projecting their minds into these genetically-engineered bodies -- and Jake is initially drawn to the project because it means he will be able to use his legs again, or at least the legs of his "avatar".

In theory, Jake is supposed to be working for the scientists, whose team leader bears the interesting name Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver). But the "colonel" who leads the corporation's team of mercenary soldiers -- a man by the name of Quaritch (Stephen Lang) -- is gearing up for war, and so he gets Jake to spy on the native aliens for him.

In turn, one of these aliens -- a race of blue, ten-foot-tall humanoids called the Na'vi -- is on the verge of killing Jake when a signal from their deity persuades her not only to let Jake live but to save his life from some predatory animals. Before long, this woman, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), is teaching Jake about the ways of her people; and Jake, for his part, not only falls in love with her but begins to defend her people against the corporation that hired him.

One of the movie's central conceits is that the Na'vi are "connected" to their planet -- and to each other -- in a very literal way, through tendrils that emerge from the back of their heads. Through these tendrils, the Na'vi form bonds with the animals they ride and with the luminescent trees that are said to contain the memories of their ancestors.

And one of the key points of the film is that Jake eventually tries to defend Pandora and its natural environment against the mechanized assault of the humans -- but he doesn't do it alone. Instead, he prays to Eywa, the "mother" deity of Pandora, for help -- and just when Jake's efforts seem to have come to nothing, the planet itself rises up and fights back.

The fact that Mother Nature herself becomes Jake's ally has led some people, such as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, to say that Avatar is a long "apologia for pantheism". But I think that line of interpretation may be pushing things just a tad.

Certainly the movie's title and the fact that the Na'vi are coloured blue would seem to be suggestive of Hinduism, as Cameron himself has admitted. But rather than promote any particular religion, it seems to me that Cameron is using a generic sort of sci-fi mysticism as an allegory for a much broader idea, namely that we need to be stewards of Creation.

Avatar also raises some interesting questions that Christians can appreciate, about the difference between objective study of a belief system and the subjective experience of it.

In one scene, Grace Augustine declares that Na'vi spirituality is "real" and not some sort of "pagan voodoo" because, she says, it can be "measured". But later on, Grace has an experience that transcends her measurements and makes Eywa real to her.

"I need to take some samples," she says, almost out of habit, but we know she's found something better now. Watching this scene, I was reminded of how Thomas Aquinas abandoned his work on the Summa Theologica and said his scholarly work now seemed like "straw" to him, after a mystical experience that he had near the end of his life.

In addition -- spoiler alert! -- the film even suggests that Grace, like the canonized saint for whom she was named, intervenes with Eywa on behalf of the Na'vi after her death. Yet Eywa remains sovereign; it was her intervention, after all, that drew Jake into the Na'vi community in the first place, thus paving the way for Grace to join them too.

These are just a few of the spiritual mysteries that can be teased out of Avatar, and it is worth noting that, unlike many films in which a member of the establishment finds spirituality among the natives and turns against his former allies, Avatar does not take any shots at "organized religion". Instead, the film finds common ground between pre-modern and post-modern kinds of belief and pits them against modern materialistic skepticism.

For those who can approach the film on its own allegorical level, and with the right kind of discernment, there is definitely something we Christians can work with here.

Canadian box-office stats -- April 25

2010-04-27T10:45:00.002-07:00

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.

Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $35,660,000 -- N.AM $327,537,023 -- 10.9%
The Last Song -- CDN $5,880,000 -- N.AM $55,459,487 -- 10.6%
The Back-Up Plan -- CDN $1,280,000 -- N.AM $12,201,710 -- 10.5%
Oceans -- CDN $887,175 -- N.AM $8,525,488 -- 10.4%
Clash of the Titans -- CDN $14,180,000 -- N.AM $145,563,557 -- 9.7%
Date Night -- CDN $5,820,000 -- N.AM $63,332,819 -- 9.2%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $15,880,000 -- N.AM $178,345,927 -- 8.9%
Kick-Ass -- CDN $3,070,000 -- N.AM $34,708,222 -- 8.8%
The Losers -- CDN $815,740 -- N.AM $9,406,348 -- 8.7%
Death at a Funeral -- CDN $1,660,000 -- N.AM $28,471,939 -- 5.8%

Canadian box-office stats -- April 18

2010-04-23T06:03:00.002-07:00

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.

The Bounty Hunter -- CDN $7,050,000 -- N.AM $60,261,888 -- 11.7%
Hot Tub Time Machine -- CDN $4,610,000 -- N.AM $42,449,935 -- 10.9%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $35,090,000 -- N.AM $324,131,301 -- 10.8%
The Last Song -- CDN $5,220,000 -- N.AM $50,187,855 -- 10.4%
Clash of the Titans -- CDN $12,750,000 -- N.AM $132,600,220 -- 9.6%
Date Night -- CDN $4,310,000 -- N.AM $48,666,799 -- 8.9%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $13,960,000 -- N.AM $158,251,066 -- 8.8%
Kick-Ass -- CDN $1,480,000 -- N.AM $19,828,687 -- 7.5%
Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- CDN $4,240,000 -- N.AM $57,090,186 -- 7.4%
Death at a Funeral -- CDN $852,172 -- N.AM $16,217,540 -- 5.3%

A couple of discrepancies: Diary of a Wimpy Kid was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? was #7 on the North American chart (it was #18 in Canada).

Verhoeven on The Surrogate.

2010-04-17T12:37:00.093-07:00

Paul Verhoeven has been making the rounds the last few weeks, promoting his book Jesus of Nazareth. (It was a big hit in the Netherlands when it first came out a couple years ago, but it didn't come out in the United States until earlier this month.)

The MTV Movies Blog has now posted several snippets from their interview with Verhoeven, and none of them are particularly newsy -- certainly not their "exclusive" report that Verhoeven put Christ-figure imagery in his sci-fi classic RoboCop (1987), which is old news to anyone who has listened to the DVDs' audio commentaries or read the summaries thereof.

But one of the clips did jump out at me, namely this one, in which Verhoeven discusses the status of an in-development thriller called The Surrogate. It has been nearly a year since it was first announced that Verhoeven would direct this film, based on a book by Christian novelist Kathryn Mackel. But this interview marks the first time I have seen Verhoeven himself discuss his take on the project, however briefly.

True to form, he says the film will be "kind of provocative and basically sexual", and he then goes into his standard spiel about the lack of eroticism in current Hollywood movies. But while the MTV write-up that accompanies this video interprets these two statements as a sign that Verhoeven intends to push the envelope with this film just like he used to do in the '90s, I am not convinced that this is, in fact, what Verhoeven was suggesting.

Rather, it seems to me that Verhoeven was trying to describe the film in a way that suited his aesthetic, but without giving too much away -- and then the interviewer jumped in with a comment about Verhoeven's reputation for salacious fare, which prompted Verhoeven to go off on one of his favorite tangents.

At any rate, this interview makes me just that much more curious to see what sort of film this will turn out to be in the end -- assuming the filmmakers (one of whom, producer Ralph Winter, is one of the better-known Christians working in Hollywood) can find the $30 million in financing that Verhoeven says the project will require before the cameras can start rolling.

Newsbites: The C.S. Lewis edition!

2010-04-12T23:18:00.029-07:00

Just a few quick updates, if I may -- belated though one or two of them might be.

1. Eagle Eye co-writer Travis Adam Wright has been hired to write the script for Warner Brothers' adaptation of Here, There Be Dragons, a novel that casts real-life authors C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams as heroes in a fantasy adventure of their own. When I first mentioned this project nearly four years ago, it was going to be produced by Harry Potter producer David Heyman and The Dark Knight scribe David Goyer, but the only producer named in the current news story is Rick Porras, a co-producer and second-unit director on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaptation (2001-2003).

2. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is hopping on the 3D bandwagon. The film, which was shot in two dimensions, is one of at least two that 20th Century Fox will convert to 3D before their release in December. (The other such film is Gulliver's Travels, starring Jack Black.)

In other news, CT Movies ran a curious story last month that gave the makers of Dawn Treader several opportunities to assert that they had learned their lesson and would be more faithful to Lewis's novels following the box-office disappointment that was Prince Caspian (2008). The thing is, no less an authority on these films than co-producer Douglas Gresham had said only a few months earlier that the changes to Prince Caspian were justified but the changes to Dawn Treader might not be so justified. If CT Movies was aware that the filmmakers have been sending out mixed signals like this, they didn't bother to pursue that angle.

Other films still can't hold a candle to this!

2010-04-12T22:15:00.006-07:00

One of my favorite discoveries at last year's VIFF was an animated short called Lightheaded. At the time, the five-minute film itself was not online, so all I could post was a 40-second trailer. But now, at long last, the film itself has been posted in its entirety up at YouTube. Thanks to Jerry Beck at Cartoon Brew for the tip.

Canadian box-office stats -- April 11

2010-04-12T11:35:00.003-07:00

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 $93,100,000 -- N.AM $743,688,973 -- 12.5%
The Bounty Hunter -- CDN $6,410,000 -- N.AM $55,916,622 -- 11.5%
Hot Tub Time Machine -- CDN $3,990,000 -- N.AM $36,969,649 -- 10.8%
Shutter Island -- CDN $13,440,000 -- N.AM $125,001,481 -- 10.8%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $34,220,000 -- N.AM $319,009,518 -- 10.7%
The Last Song -- CDN $4,200,000 -- N.AM $42,255,196 -- 9.9%
Clash of the Titans -- CDN $10,260,000 -- N.AM $110,226,524 -- 9.3%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $11,480,000 -- N.AM $133,404,438 -- 8.6%
Date Night -- CDN $2,000,000 -- N.AM $25,207,599 -- 7.9%
Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- CDN $3,940,000 -- N.AM $53,636,368 -- 7.3%

A couple of discrepancies: Avatar and Shutter Island were #9 and #10 on the Canadian chart, respectively (they were #12 and #11 in North America as a whole), while Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? and Letters to God were #4 and #10 on the North American chart, respectively (the former film was #15 in Canada, while the latter film was nowhere in the Canadian Top 20).

Rome producer tackles the Pharaohs

2010-04-10T21:53:00.031-07:00

Variety reports that John Milius, co-creator of the HBO series Rome (a feature-film version of which is still in active development, by the way), has signed on to produce another ancient-history series called Pharaoh:

Like "Rome," "Pharaoh" homes in on one dramatic period: the New Kingdom that began in 1479 B.C. with the reign of Queen Hatshepsut, a rare female pharaoh, who ruled as regent until her nephew, Thutmosis III, took the throne.

The mighty warrior pharaoh created the largest empire ancient Egypt had ever seen, an international super-power sprawling from southern Syria to northern Sudan.

This is very interesting to me, as I read quite a bit about Hatshepsut (pictured above) and Thutmose III when I was 14 years old, as research for a "novel" that I wrote back then about the early years of Moses' life. Most fictionalizations of Moses' life have linked it to the reign of Rameses II, who lived in the 1200s BC; but at the time, I was persuaded that Moses had lived a couple hundred years earlier than that, and I even toyed with the idea that Hatshepsut herself had been Moses' adoptive mother.

I don't subscribe to those theories any more, and I certainly don't expect this new series to go in that direction, but I am still kind of excited by the possibility that this rather obscure part of Egyptian history (obscure from a pop-culture perspective, that is) may finally be getting some dramatic attention.

For a better sense of what the series will be about, here is another excerpt from the Variety story:

"Pharaoh," like "Rome," will mix "characters at all levels of life," says Milius, historical and fictional figures, common people with which audiences can identify.

One will be a tomb-robber, Milius suggests, others a priest, soldiers and merchants, says Sichler.

Milius believes today's auds will identify with much of the ancient Egyptian lifestyle.

"Egyptian civilization is remakarbly modern. Egypt's dealings with other powers, the Syrians, Metannites, Babylonian civilizations, are strikingly contemporary in their arguments, their distrust for each other, their building up of separate cultures," he says.

"Pharaoh" stands apart in some ways from "Rome," however.

"What's important in Egypt compared to Rome is the mysticism, the relationship to death, mummification, to life after death," says Sichler.

Sounds fascinating. I'm already looking forward to the DVD and all the inevitable history-oriented bonus features.

Pixar and its toys come full circle.

2010-04-08T13:50:00.019-07:00

In the first Toy Story (1995), the big threat faced by the toys was an abusive boy next door who blew toys up and scrambled their identities with malicious glee.

In Toy Story 2 (1999), the big threat was... Well, there were two threats, actually. On the one hand, there was a collector who valued certain toys so much that he never really played with them; instead of allowing the toys to live and move and have their being in the hands of the children for whom they were made, he reduced the toys to commodities suspended in a state of perpetual perfection. On the other hand, there was also the looming likelihood that entropy would one day overtake these toys, and that those who didn't benefit from the protection of a collector would end up falling apart and rotting away in some landfill.

Come to think of it, the dilemma posed by Toy Story 2 is somewhat reminiscent of the opening lines to Woody Allen's famous 'Speech to the Graduates': "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." But I digress.

Based on the trailers for Toy Story 3, which comes out in June, it seems the big threat this time -- or one of them, at least -- will be children who are neither overly hostile to the toys nor overly protective of them. The big threat, in other words, will not be little gods who are too loving or too cruel, but little gods who, being toddlers, are little more than blind forces of nature: happy, careless and utterly ignorant of the effect that they are having on these vintage playthings.

On one level, being putty in the hands of these preschoolers could fulfill the toys' purpose in a way that sitting on a collector's shelf never would; if nothing else, it would give the toys something to do. But then, how much "purpose" can a rampaging toddler really give his playthings in the first place? Is the unthinking chaos of the daycare centre really preferable to the more tranquil desolation of the landfill? It seems to me that neither of these things, ultimately, can bring rhyme or reason to the lives of Woody, Buzz and their friends.

Anyway. If Toy Story 3 really does play up the children-as-happy-monsters angle, then it seems Pixar will have come full circle in its treatment of the toy world. And no, I do not mean that Pixar will have returned to the themes of the original Toy Story. Instead, I mean that Pixar will have gone, in spirit, all the way back to the short film Tin Toy (1988), which was heralded at the time as the first computer-animated film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

Tin Toy, as you can see in the clip above, concerns a toy one-man band (hmmm, shades of another Pixar short) who is fresh out of the box and chased all over the living room by a drooling infant or toddler -- and the child in question is often shot from low angles to emphasize how he must appear to his toys, as a looming, threatening, Godzilla-like monster. Which is not unlike how the children at Sunnyside Daycare seem to be portrayed in the trailer for Toy Story 3.

As it happens, the link between Tin Toy and the Toy Story franchise runs a little deeper than the fact that they both concern toys. As Jim Hill has explained at some length, Tin Toy was originally going to be turned into a Christmas-themed TV special, but the concept was shelved because it would have cost too much to produce; a year or two later, however, an opportunity arose for Pixar to make its first feature film, so the concept was dusted off and gradually transformed into the Toy Story that we now all know and love.

So, whenever my kids and I watch the Toy Story movies, I like to start with Tin Toy -- partly because I have very fond memories of seeing it on the big screen at animation festivals back in the late '80s, but also partly because I have a theory that the baby in Tin Toy is identical to the boy named Andy that we see in the Toy Story movies.

True, we do not see any of the other Toy Story characters in Tin Toy, but given how incredibly young the baby is here, there would certainly be time for him to accumulate new playthings by the time Toy Story takes place. In fact, even though Toy Story 2 revealed that Woody is an heirloom or hand-me-down who has been around since the 1950s (which begs the question of when and how Woody's memory got wiped, but that's a subject for another post), the original Toy Story specifies that Woody has only been Andy's favorite toy "since kindergarten". So presumably Woody and many of the other toys wouldn't have been a part of Andy's life just yet.

In any case, Toy Story 3, as you can see from the trailer above, is partly about how Andy has grown up and is about to go to college; it is, in other words, about how Andy, the boy from the previous films, is now on the verge of manhood. So I like to think that Tin Toy takes us back to his earliest days and gives us an even better look at how the child -- the infant -- has become the man. The movies have played very strongly on the notion that Andy loves his toys, but it is worth remembering that even he, too, was no doubt a threat to them once. Things change. People change. And the love that people have for things changes as they grow.

Robin Hood and the Magna Carta, redux.

2010-04-05T21:46:00.020-07:00

Two months ago, I wondered if the new Robin Hood movie might turn its hero into one of the barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. Today, I discovered that director Ridley Scott has directly touched on this point, and the answer is, well, maybe, but not quite yet. To quote the Sunday Times:

For this Robin Hood, Crowe and Scott reach back across history to the earliest written sources, long before Ivanhoe and then the Victorians sprinkled Robin’s legend with their own romantic garnish, to cook up a character that is closer to the vigorous outlaw of the early ballads. Theirs is an origins tale (think Batman Begins), carrying Robin up until the point that he is outlawed. “It is the beginnings of how the man becomes known as Robin the Hood,” explains Scott. “You don’t really get that until the last few minutes. When you realise that ‘Ah, this is who he is’.” Scott smiles. “Let’s say we might presume there’s a sequel.” (Again, think Batman Begins, which launched a monster franchise). “Honestly, I thought why not have the potential for a sequel, particularly if it is a genre that you absolutely love and has never been fully explored? If there were to be a sequel to Robin Hood, you would have a constant enemy throughout, King John, and you would follow his reign of 17 years, and the signing of Magna Carta could be Robin’s final act.”

It's difficult to tell how serious Scott is about the sequel because he has never actually made one before -- at least not to one of his own movies. He did direct Hannibal (2001), the sequel to Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991); and there has been some talk lately to the effect that he might make a prequel to his own sci-fi classic Alien (1979) -- but for now that's just one of several projects that Scott has in development. And that's about it.

Then again, the fact that other people have made sequels to Alien over the years does raise the possibility that other filmmakers could follow in Scott's footsteps here, too.

In any case, the Times has many other details about the film as well, such as what it does with King Richard. Check it out.

Canadian box-office stats -- April 4

2010-04-05T21:32:00.002-07:00

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.

She's Out of My League -- CDN $3,680,000 -- N.AM $28,712,974 -- 12.8%
Avatar -- CDN $92,690,000 -- N.AM $742,332,678 -- 12.5%
The Bounty Hunter -- CDN $5,400,000 -- N.AM $48,853,453 -- 11.1%
Shutter Island -- CDN $13,110,000 -- N.AM $123,440,937 -- 10.6%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $32,810,000 -- N.AM $309,733,753 -- 10.6%
Hot Tub Time Machine -- CDN $2,840,000 -- N.AM $27,910,213 -- 10.2%
The Last Song -- CDN $2,230,000 -- N.AM $25,395,041 -- 8.8%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $7,590,000 -- N.AM $92,135,916 -- 8.2%
Clash of the Titans -- CDN $5,250,000 -- N.AM $63,890,110 -- 8.2%
Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- CDN $3,370,000 -- N.AM $46,013,347 -- 7.3%

A couple of discrepancies: Avatar was #8 on the Canadian chart (it was #13 in North America as a whole), while Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too? was #2 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).

Does Junior always know best?

2010-04-02T15:06:00.019-07:00

There are many reasons to like the work of Steven D. Greydanus, film critic for the National Catholic Register, DecentFilms.com and various other outlets. For me, one of the most enjoyable is his ability to take two contemporaneous movies and set up a dialectic between them, noting the various things they have in common or, alternatively, the radically different approaches they sometimes take to the same basic premises.

I first remember seeing him do this back in 2003, when he compared and contrasted The Fighting Temptations and The School of Rock, noting how the film that was marketed to churches at that time was not the film that espoused the better values, for lack of a better word. More recently, in his review of 2012, he compared and contrasted the filmographies of Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich going back to the mid-1990s.

And now he's done it again, with a fascinating piece on "Junior Knows Best" movies such as How to Train Your Dragon and The Secret of Kells, both of which are currently in theatres, at least south of the border. He also finds a way to bring Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, possibly my favorite animated film last year, into the picture as a sort of counterpoint. Check it out.

P.S.: The promo screening for How to Train Your Dragon marked the first time I took one of my kids to a sneak preview. (They have seen several movies at the neighbourhood theatres, but until now, none of them had never seen their dad "at work", as it were.) And for the record, my four-year-old daughter loved the film and has been drawing pictures of fire-breathing dragons ever since.

Ben-Hur mini-series -- the actors speak!

2010-04-01T16:22:00.034-07:00

I was beginning to wonder why I hadn't seen any local coverage of the new mini-series version of Ben-Hur, the first part of which premieres this Sunday on CBC. But then a couple of interviews popped up in my news feed.

The first, from the Globe and Mail, revolves around Joseph Morgan, who plays the title character -- and in his intro, writer R.M. Vaughan describes the mini-series by saying that it

offers lots of sex, manly, bare-chested combat, a spectacular Roman battleship sequence, more sex, lepers and centurions, underdressed lady pagans, a murderous chariot race, and Christ Himself (looking suspiciously like Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski).

Oh-kay. The interview itself is fairly quick and superficial, but it does include one noteworthy aside about the possible religious implications of this new adaptation of Lew Wallace's story:

Is Judah Ben-Hur a Jewish hero, or an early-adaptor Christian?

That’s interesting. I think he undergoes a change. In our version, the reason why he forgives [his enemy] Messala, and understands forgiveness, is because of Jesus Christ. So I guess you could say he is maybe a Jew turned Christian, in the space of the story.

It will be interesting to see how that last bit plays out. The two major big-screen versions of Ben-Hur have also made Jesus a key part of Judah's enlightenment, so to speak, but they have differed on what sort of influence, exactly, Jesus had on him. The 1925 version (which also had a bit of nudity, for whatever that's worth) ultimately emphasized Judah's religious belief, but the 1959 version made him more of a humanist or pacifist in the end than a Christian, per se. (For more on this topic, see my review of the four-disc DVD set that came out five years ago.)

It is also interesting to hear Morgan say that Judah "forgives" Messala, and not just the Romans in general, in the end -- since I'm not sure that that's quite what happens in the existing films. Will the mini-series place a greater emphasis on reconciliation than the other adaptations did? We shall see.

In the meantime, the Canadian Press has an interview of its own with Emily VanCamp, who plays Judah's wife Esther -- though she doesn't say a whole lot about the mini-series itself. Instead, she talks about her career in general and how hot it was to shoot Ben Hur in Morocco and various other things of that nature.

APR 4 UPDATE: The Montreal Gazette also interviews Morgan.

Ben-Hur mini-series premieres this Sunday!

2010-04-01T09:55:00.006-07:00

Remember that new version of Ben-Hur that was being produced as a four-hour mini-series? I last mentioned it here almost a year ago, but since then I hadn't heard much about it. Now, however, Matt Page and a few of his readers have discovered that the CBC is showing the first part of the mini-series this Sunday at 8:00pm (or 8:30pm in Newfoundland). As far as Matt can tell, the mini-series hasn't been shown or scheduled in any other country (though a trailer that was apparently shown on Spanish TV can still be seen here), so the Canadian broadcast could be a world premiere.

Hoodwinked Too! goes to court.

2010-03-30T20:26:00.015-07:00

First the release date came and went. Then the Burger King promo came and went. But still there is no sign of the movie itself.

Now, reports the Los Angeles Times, the production company behind Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil and its 2005 predecessor has gone to court to force the distributor "to begin arbitration proceedings to resolve disputes between the two companies over the production and release of" the animated sequel.

Hoodwinked Too!, which has had a PG rating since July of last year (and is thus presumably more-or-less complete), was originally slated to come out January 15, but its release was delayed indefinitely in December, and the film was conspicuously absent from the list of upcoming films released by the Weinstein Company just last week.

However, the film was reportedly included in a DVD distribution deal that the Weinsteins signed with Sony last month.

Kanbar Entertainment, the company that got the first Hoodwinked! going before it even had a distributor, "charges that Weinstein is in breach of its joint-production agreement" for the sequel "because it never presented a plan to market and distribute the film or make a trailer for it, per the agreement," reports the Times.

Presumably the film will be released to the public in some form or other eventually. But for now it's an open question, even more so than before, as to when and how that will happen.

Incidentally, the original Hoodwinked! is currently the Weinstein Company's third-highest-grossing movie ever, behind Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Scary Movie 4 (2006).

APR 3 UPDATE: Variety has some more details. And someone has posted an intriguing but anonymous comment at The Playlist to the effect that: "After the way Kanbar treated the creators of this franchise, a little phrase about karma comes to mind..."

Canadian box-office stats -- March 28

2010-03-30T19:39:00.002-07:00

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.

She's Out of My League -- CDN $3,190,000 -- N.AM $25,586,560 -- 12.5%
Avatar -- CDN $92,150,000 -- N.AM $740,440,529 -- 12.4%
Green Zone -- CDN $3,650,000 -- N.AM $30,475,005 -- 12.0%
The Bounty Hunter -- CDN $4,030,000 -- N.AM $38,418,433 -- 10.5%
Shutter Island -- CDN $12,630,000 -- N.AM $120,612,552 -- 10.5%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $30,660,000 -- N.AM $293,534,935 -- 10.4%
Repo Men -- CDN $1,030,000 -- N.AM $11,304,730 -- 9.1%
Hot Tub Time Machine -- CDN $1,190,000 -- N.AM $14,020,502 -- 8.5%
How to Train Your Dragon -- CDN $3,430,000 -- N.AM $43,732,319 -- 7.8%
Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- CDN $2,670,000 -- N.AM $35,898,390 -- 7.4%

A couple of discrepancies: Avatar was #6 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Our Family Wedding was #10 on the North American chart (it was nowhere in the Canadian Top 20).

Being one with a machine for all eternity.

2010-03-28T20:35:00.019-07:00

The other day I came across a segment on Trailers from Hell in which Edgar Wright talks about growing up with the Disney sci-fi movie The Black Hole (1979). Like Wright, I too saw the film when it first came out in theatres, and like Wright, I too used to play with Black Hole action figures. But unlike Wright, I haven't revisited the film at all in the past 31 years, so I was a bit surprised when he mentioned that the movie ends with the bad guy going to Hell and the good guys going to Heaven. I didn't have any memory of that bit, and it certainly isn't in the comic book adaptation that I own.

So I ran a quick search on YouTube to see if the ending of The Black Hole might be on there -- and, sure enough, it is. (I have embedded it at the end of this post, so feel free to watch it below.) And truth be told, once I saw the footage with my own two eyes, it did begin to feel somewhat familiar. I now have a vague recollection that my nine-year-old self might have found it all a bit strange or confusing, and that I might have tried to figure it out with my dad on the drive home from the theatre.

But one thing that struck me on seeing the footage again just now was how it kind of, sort of, has something in common with the climax to Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which came out in theatres only two weeks before The Black Hole did. And it was the first image above, of the evil red robot leaning in towards Dr. Reinhardt -- while Dr. Reinhardt grabs the robot's arms in a sort of desperate embrace -- that particularly brought the Star Trek movie to mind.

Here is the common element: Both of these films end with a man being joined to a machine for all eternity, but in one film this is portrayed as a bad thing while in the other film it is portrayed as a good thing.

In The Black Hole, Dr. Reinhardt is ultimately imprisoned within the body of the robot that had once been his servant, and the robot, in turn, is lost in a dark and fiery world that looks rather like certain medieval depictions of Hell.

In Star Trek, on the other hand, Captain Decker bonds with the space probe V'Ger partly to save planet Earth from V'Ger's assault, but also because this will reunite him, on some level, with a former lover of his who has since been turned into a robot by V'Ger -- a robot that is such a perfect replica of Decker's lover that it even seems to have retained some of her feelings for him. (That's Decker and the robot facing each other in the second picture above.)

And the coup de grace? When Kirk and Spock return to the Enterprise and ponder what it is that just transpired between Decker and V'Ger, Spock states: "We witnessed a birth. Possibly a next step in our evolution."

So the two films share a certain climactic plot element, but what the two films do with this element couldn't be more different. In one, it's tied to a punishment straight out of an old-fashioned religious sensibility, while in the other, it's tied to a humanist belief in progress, progress, progress!

I wonder if anybody back in 1979 noticed this parallel. Like I say, the films came out only two weeks apart, so it wouldn't have been hard to do. And hey, V'Ger traveled through a black hole, too!

Canadian box-office stats -- March 21

2010-03-22T10:13:00.002-07:00

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 $91,300,000 -- N.AM $736,881,000 -- 12.4%
She's Out of My League -- CDN $2,410,000 -- N.AM $19,954,000 -- 12.1%
Green Zone -- CDN $2,890,000 -- N.AM $24,702,000 -- 11.7%
Remember Me -- CDN $1,510,000 -- N.AM $13,900,000 -- 10.9%
Shutter Island -- CDN $11,980,000 -- N.AM $115,770,000 -- 10.3%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $27,130,000 -- N.AM $265,800,000 -- 10.2%
The Bounty Hunter -- CDN $2,020,000 -- N.AM $21,000,000 -- 9.6%
Repo Men -- CDN $517,530 -- N.AM $6,151,000 -- 8.4%
Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- CDN $1,650,000 -- N.AM $21,800,000 -- 7.6%
The Ghost Writer -- CDN $432,647 -- N.AM $6,800,000 -- 6.4%

A couple of discrepancies: The Ghost Writer was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Our Family Wedding was #9 on the North American chart (it was #17 in Canada).

Pixar shorts and the grooming of new talent.

2010-03-22T00:03:00.015-07:00

I seem to be on a bit of a Pixar kick this week, but oh well.

Jim Hill reports that John Lasseter gave a presentation at ShoWest last week in which he said that Pixar's short films would serve as a proving ground for new directors who could one day take the reins of Pixar's feature films -- and I have to admit that, on reading that, my first reaction was a skeptical one.

I don't deny that short films can be a rite of passage, of sorts, for up-and-coming auteurs. And I think it would be good for Pixar to maintain a separate identity of sorts while it passes the baton to a new generation of filmmakers, instead of simply letting the company be folded into the rest of the Disney empire the way that, say, Miramax was. But so far, Pixar's own track record in this area is, well, not so good.

At least twice now, Pixar has given one of its short-film directors the opportunity to direct a feature film, and on both occasions, the director in question never got to finish the job. In the case of Ratatouille (2007), Pixar took the project away from original director Jan Pinkava, who had previously directed the short film Geri's Game (1997); and in the case of Newt -- which was going to be directed by Gary Rydstrom, director of the short film Lifted (2006) -- Pixar has simply let the film die altogether.

The simple fact is that nearly every feature film released by Pixar to date has been directed by Lasseter or by one of the co-writers or co-directors who worked with him on the first two Toy Story movies (1995-1999). The only exceptions to this are The Incredibles (2004) and the final version of Ratatouille, which were both directed by Brad Bird, a former classmate of Lasseter's who had already established himself as a director of animated features by making The Iron Giant (1999) for Warner Brothers.

And what of Pixar's upcoming roster? Of the three films that have been officially announced and are still in production:

Toy Story 3 is being directed by Lee Unkrich, who was a co-director on three previous Pixar films including Toy Story 2;
The Bear and the Bow (which may or may not be retitled Brave) is being directed by Brenda Chapman, who has already established herself as a director of animated features by making The Prince of Egypt (1998) for DreamWorks; and
Cars 2 is being directed by Brad Lewis, who has no previous directorial credits at the IMDb whatsoever, apart from a making-of featurette -- but, interestingly enough, he was a producer on Antz (1998), the DreamWorks film that coincided with Pixar's A Bug's Life (1998), thereby prompting people at Pixar to accuse DreamWorks of stealing their idea.

So there you go. With the exception of Lasseter, who built the company's reputation over the course of several short films before directing the original Toy Story, not a single one of Pixar's past, present or future features is the work of one of their short-film directors; and whenever Pixar has turned to someone who didn't work on the original Toy Story movies, it has turned to a filmmaker who had already directed or produced a feature film for someone else. It may be that Pixar will promote one of its own short-film makers to the big leagues some day, but so far, this is not that day.

And for what it's worth, it should be noted that Lasseter is said to be heavily involved in rewriting Cars 2 right now, to the point where it is even being said that he has become that film's de facto co-director, regardless of whether he will be credited as such when the film is complete.

Make of all that what you will.

From an ancient city to a modern(ish) town.

2010-03-20T21:42:00.010-07:00

Peter Brosnan was 30 years old when he first heard about the Egyptian city buried under the sands near Guadalupe, California. Cecil B. DeMille had built this city for the silent version of The Ten Commandments (1923) and then, rather than let rival filmmakers use the set, he had it bulldozed into a trench. Brosnan decided to find these buried ruins, dig them out of the sand, and make a film documenting his discovery.

That was in 1982. Brosnan was still raising funds for his project when I interviewed him for Bible Review in 1998, for a sidebar to an article I had written on cinematic depictions of the Exodus. (If memory serves, I chanced upon a story about one of Brosnan's fundraisers while browsing Variety magazine's headlines. I had been online for only four years myself at that point, and I was scouring the internet for obscure stories even then.)

And now it is 2010. It has been nearly 28 years since Brosnan first heard about DeMille's Egyptian city, and after spending nearly half of his life on this project, Brosnan is no closer to unearthing those monuments than he ever was. He has, however, amassed a lot of material on the town of Guadalupe over the years, and he now hopes to turn this material into a documentary about the town itself and the residents who often got involved in the Hollywood projects that came their way back then. He hasn't quite got the funding for that yet, though, and he is still talking to Paramount about using footage from The Ten Commandments itself.

See the Los Angeles Times for the full story.

The detached eye sees everything.

2010-03-19T23:50:00.032-07:00

Today, the makers of Clash of the Titans unveiled a brand-new clip from their upcoming film -- and it reminded me, of all things, of the most recent trailer for Toy Story 3.

Why did it remind me of this? Because both of these videos include point-of-view shots taken from the perspective of a detached eye; in Clash of the Titans, it is the eye shared by the three Stygian witches, while in Toy Story 3, it is one of the eyes that belong to Mrs. Potato Head.

Now, if only there were a third example of this out there right now, we'd have an official trend on our hands.

Anyway, speaking of Clash of the Titans, there have been a few more updates to pass along since the last time I mentioned that film here. So, in no particular order:

-- The filmmakers are already talking about turning this remake into a trilogy. (MTV Movies Blog)

-- The last-minute conversion of this film from 2D to 3D has been getting some pretty mixed reviews. (Matt Holmes, Patrick Goldstein)

-- Harry Hamlin, who starred in the original Clash of the Titans back in 1981, says he's "sure" the new version will be "better", at least on a technical level. (Los Angeles Times)

-- The filmmakers knew what it would take to ensure that their film got a PG-13 rating in the United States, rather than an R: "It's fine to kill monsters. It's harder to kill real people . . . The blood can't be red. If it's black, it's OK." (Variety)

The three phases of Pixar history, redux.

2010-03-18T09:46:00.018-07:00

Steven D. Greydanus has posted an excellent follow-up to my post yesterday on the three phases of Pixar history. The term, "three phases", is Steve's, though it does articulate what I was getting at -- and it isn't the only area where he improves on what I was trying to say. I particularly appreciate this bit:

I’m not sure it’s entirely persuasive to say, as Peter does, that the three phase 2 films, initiated when Pixar was likely thinking outside the Disney box, necessarily “aim higher” than the seven films of phase 1. In particular, I think The Incredibles aims as high as any film in Pixar’s oeuvre.

I would put it this way: The basic premise of each of Pixar’s first seven films fits comfortably within mainstream expectations for Hollywood animated family films. Anthropomorphic toys, bugs or cars; friendly monsters saddled with a human child; a father-and-son fish story; even a family of incognito super heroes — these are all concepts that could easily be pitched to Disney execs without making anyone blink or sweat. Pixar might take these concepts in brilliant directions, but there’s nothing about the basic concept of any of these films that especially pushes the envelope of family entertainment.

With the next three films, on the other hand, there is something audacious and outside-the-box about the premise itself, in terms of family-film expectations. A talky picture about a French rat who wants to be a chef? A substantially dialogue-free slapstick adventure about a lone robot in a post-apocalyptic world of trash? An elderly widower absconding with his house via balloon to South America? None of these hits you over the head as a ready-made idea for an animated family film. There is something counter-intuitive about each of them. Here is where Pixar pushes the envelope, not just in terms of how to make a animated family film, but even what it is possible for an animated Hollywood family film to be.

Phrases like "pushes the envelope" and "something audacious and outside-the-box" are precisely the kind of thing I was thinking of when I used the phrase "aims higher". I certainly never meant to suggest that Pixar hadn't aimed for excellence with any of its previous films!

Perhaps -- to steal an idea from Daniel Thomas MacInnes at The Ghibli Blog -- it would help to draw an analogy to, say, the Beatles. When the band started out, they were basically writing and performing the same kind of love songs as most other rock bands of their era -- but they aimed to be the best in their field, to the point where they could even cover someone else's song and it is their version, rather than the original, that everybody knows today (cf. 'Twist and Shout'). Then they began to push the envelope by broadening their horizons and using the sort of music and lyrics that nobody had really used in a pop song before.

And so it was that MacInnes argued a couple years ago, based on Ratatouille (2007) and WALL•E (2008), that Pixar was now in its "Rubber Soul phase", pushing the boundaries of animation just as the Beatles once pushed the boundaries of pop music. But MacInnes didn't think Pixar had quite arrived at its big breakthrough yet, and so he wrote:

. . . when Pixar finally breaks the barriers imposed upon American animation, the new paradigm will prove a surprise. It will be different. How? In what way? I can't say. They must be willing to push themselves further than ever before, and push the audiences further than ever before.

Alas, that does not seem to have happened. Even as MacInnes wrote this, Pixar had already announced plans to make Toy Story 3 and Cars 2; and since then, word has leaked out about their plans for Monsters Inc. 2. It is, you could argue, as though the Beatles had decided to abandon their plans for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and had gone back to covering songs that had already been covered by the Isley Brothers.

As Steve notes:

Pixar’s roster of coming films are all well within the “Disney box.” They may turn out to be excellent films and worthy successors to their predecessors, but there’s nothing envelope-pushing about any of them.

To this I would add that Pixar's slate of upcoming films is, if anything, even more Disney than Disney. And what I mean by that is this: Disney has produced any number of animated sequels and spin-offs over the years, but nearly every single one of them has been made for TV or the straight-to-video market. Of the 50 films produced by Disney's feature-film division, only two have been sequels, namely The Rescuers Down Under (1990) and Fantasia 2000 (1999) -- but Pixar will have already made three sequels, with another reportedly on the way, by the time its 12th movie, Cars 2, comes out next year.

Anyway. That was more than I was going to say, but one thought led to another, and there you go. I do want to respond to two other minor points in Steve's post, though.

First, he describes The Princess and the Frog, the first Disney cartoon to be made from scratch since John Lasseter took the reins at that studio, as "pure Disney, competent but not elevated." Ironically, though, The Princess and the Frog is very much a Lasseter production, from the Randy Newman score to the A113 Easter egg; what's more, in an audio commentary on the DVD that came out this week, one of the directors states that Pixar had already toyed with making its own version of the "frog prince" story set in New Orleans, because New Orleans is "John Lasseter's favorite city in the world." So just as Lasseter brought a Pixar sensibility to Disney's Bolt (2008), which was already being developed under the title American Dog before Lasseter came along and ordered massive rewrites, so too Lasseter's influence can be felt on key aspects of The Princess and the Frog.

Second, Steve asks if anyone is talking about making a sequel to The Incredibles (2004) -- and, well, as a matter of fact, they are, at least according to a blog post that Jim Hill wrote just over a year ago. But Hill says there's no chance of that talk becoming action until director Brad Bird has gotten 1906, his movie about the San Francisco earthquake, off the ground. Uh, no pun intended.

Toy Story 3 and its place in Pixar's legacy.

2010-03-17T09:06:00.007-07:00

A rough cut of Toy Story 3 was shown at the ShoWest event in Las Vegas yesterday, and the buzz so far is pretty ecstatic -- especially with regard to the film's final 30 minutes, which, as Jeffrey Overstreet has noted, is a nice change of pace from the last few Pixar films, where everyone agreed that the first 30 minutes were really good but opinions varied on the remainder of those stories.

Katey Rich at CinemaBlend.com does have one question, though, about this film and its place in Pixar's filmography:

The print of the film we saw was not finished, and it's likely that there will be some tweaks before the June 18 release. But when we get there I think we'll be having a conversation about the Pixar legacy, about how groundbreaking their work has become in the last few years and whether or not revisiting the movie where it all began was the right step for a company that, at its best, can legitimately be called avant garde. As much as I loved seeing all the toys again, I'm not 100% sure that this adventure-- as entertaining and lovely as it was-- was the right one for Pixar at this moment. Toy Story 3 takes many big risks, and twists your heart around as much as Wall-E and Up, but at times it felt far safer than what we've come to expect from them.

This seems like as good a time as any to dust off a brief note on Pixar's recent history that I posted at the Arts & Faith discussion board in June of last year, when Up was only a few weeks old:

- - -

Peter Suderman has openly wondered if Pixar will ever ditch the kiddie elements and make a movie that targets adults, full stop. I don't think this is likely to happen, partly because Andrew Stanton has already gone on record to the effect that Pixar films are meant to be "family films", and therefore any grown-up films developed at Pixar (such as Stanton's own John Carter of Mars, or Brad Bird's 1906) will be released by Disney under one of its other labels.

But another reason I don't think it is likely to happen is because of the upcoming roster listed near the top of this thread: of the four films that Pixar currently has in development, three are sequels to some of their kiddier hits (Toy Story 3, Cars 2, Monsters Inc. 2), and one is being billed as Pixar's "first fairy tale" (The Bear and the Bow). These films might very well rise above mere kids' fare, as Pixar's earliest films did, but they do seem to be starting and staying within that realm (as opposed to some of Pixar's more recent films, which, as Suderman suggests, have started as grown-up projects and then had kiddie elements "grafted on").

Thinking about this further, it occurs to me that the last three Pixar films -- Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up -- were probably all put into production at a time when Pixar had every reason to believe that it would no longer be tied to Disney's corporate business plan.

The original contract between Disney and Pixar (which gave Disney full ownership of the characters created under that contract) expired with Cars, and there was a famous period of a few years there where Steve Jobs was making a lot of noise about taking Pixar's future films to some other distributor; in return, Disney created Circle 7, a whole new animation department that existed purely to create sequels to Pixar films, sequels that would presumably have been sub-par and would presumably have competed with the films that Pixar made independently.

It is not too hard to imagine that the folks at Pixar decided to "raise the bar" a little with their independent films, and so Ratatouille, WALL-E (the first story reel of which was created in 2003) and Up (the writing of which began in 2004) aimed higher -- though they still kept enough "kiddie elements" so as not to lose their core audience.

But then, in January 2006, only five months before the release of Cars, Disney and Pixar shocked everyone (including, it is said, many people at Pixar itself) by announcing that Disney had not only renewed its contract with Pixar -- rather, Disney had actually bought Pixar outright. Yes, one of the terms of the deal was that Steve Jobs took a place on the Disney board of directors, and that John Lasseter took charge of Disney's homegrown feature animation (thus resulting in "Pixar lite" films like Bolt). But what sort of films did Pixar itself decide to make after that?

Well, for one thing, Disney shut down Circle 7, which had been working on a Toy Story 3 ... and then Pixar announced that it was making Toy Story 3 itself. And then Pixar announced it was making Cars 2. And now Pixar has announced it is making Monsters Inc. 2. (And somewhere in there, Pixar has decided to produce its first-ever "fairy tale".) So Pixar is now doing to its earlier films what Disney would have done with or without Pixar.

We can only imagine what stories Pixar would have told if they had allowed their Disney contract to lapse and had sailed ahead into full-blown independence. But as it stands right now, stories with primarily grown-up themes seem to be taking a back-seat to the kiddie fare.

Canadian box-office stats -- March 14

2010-03-16T11:24:00.002-07:00

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 $89,650,000 -- N.AM $730,270,443 -- 12.3%
She's Out of My League -- CDN $1,040,000 -- N.AM $9,775,278 -- 10.6%
Green Zone -- CDN $1,470,000 -- N.AM $14,309,295 -- 10.3%
Shutter Island -- CDN $10,820,000 -- N.AM $108,011,645 -- 10.0%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $18,820,000 -- N.AM $209,339,432 -- 9.0%
Cop Out -- CDN $3,510,000 -- N.AM $39,480,734 -- 8.9%
Remember Me -- CDN $693,141 -- N.AM $8,089,139 -- 8.6%
The Crazies -- CDN $2,690,000 -- N.AM $33,389,308 -- 8.1%
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief -- CDN $6,190,000 -- N.AM $82,270,631 -- 7.5%
Brooklyn's Finest -- CDN $1,280,000 -- N.AM $21,533,404 -- 5.9%

A couple of discrepancies: Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Our Family Wedding was #6 on the North American chart (it was #15 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- March 7

2010-03-11T16:36:00.002-08:00

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 $87,770,000 -- N.AM $720,607,444 -- 12.2%
Tooth Fairy -- CDN $5,680,000 -- N.AM $56,240,055 -- 10.1%
Shutter Island -- CDN $9,190,000 -- N.AM $95,750,005 -- 9.6%
Dear John -- CDN $7,010,000 -- N.AM $76,626,086 -- 9.1%
Valentine's Day -- CDN $9,050,000 -- N.AM $106,303,870 -- 8.5%
Cop Out -- CDN $2,690,000 -- N.AM $32,504,610 -- 8.3%
The Crazies -- CDN $2,150,000 -- N.AM $27,472,164 -- 7.8%
Alice in Wonderland -- CDN $8,630,000 -- N.AM $116,101,023 -- 7.4%
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief -- CDN $5,730,000 -- N.AM $78,057,749 -- 7.3%
Brooklyn's Finest -- CDN $696,266 -- N.AM $13,350,299 -- 5.2%

A couple of discrepancies: Tooth Fairy was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Crazy Heart was #9 on the North American chart (it was #11 in Canada).

Oscar winners slipping at the box office -- 2009

2010-03-07T02:53:00.017-08:00

I devoted posts to this subject in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 -- so I might as well whip one up for 2009, as well.

First, a recap:

2005 marked the first time since 1996 that the Best Picture winner did not gross at least $100 million, the first time since 1985 that not one of the Best Picture nominees grossed at least $100 million, and the first time in living memory that the Best Picture winner was not one of the Top 25 grossing films of its year. In fact, the winner that year -- Crash -- grossed a mere $54.6 million and ranked way, way down at #49.

2006 brought a return to Hollywood form with the Best Picture victory of The Departed, which grossed $132.4 million and ranked #15 for the year.

Then, in 2007, the Oscars went "arthouse" again, by giving the top prize to No Country for Old Men, which grossed $74.3 million and ranked #36 for the year. Ironically, the only nominee that year to gross over $100 million was also an "independent" film, namely Juno.

And then, in 2008, the Oscars went "popular" again, by giving the top prize to Slumdog Millionaire, which, despite being an "independent" film and a quasi-foreign one to boot, wound up grossing $141.3 million and ranking #16 for the year.

And now, it is time for the nominees of 2009 -- and for the first time since the 1940s, there are ten nominees rather than five, precisely because the Academy wanted to make more room in this category for "popular", audience-friendly films. Here are their current grosses and box-office rankings, as of yesterday:

Avatar -- $714,464,000 -- 1st
Up -- $293,004,164 -- 5th
The Blind Side -- $249,550,000 -- 8th
Inglourious Basterds -- $120,540,719 -- 25th
District 9 -- $115,646,235 -- 27th
Up in the Air -- $82,403,758 -- 38th
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire -- $47,213,987 -- 65th
The Hurt Locker -- $12,671,105 -- 131st
An Education -- $11,679,616 -- 135th
A Serious Man -- $9,228,768 -- 145th

Of course, these totals can and will change, and the rankings of at least a few of these films will no doubt slide up a bit.

I'll copy the list that I compiled four years ago below, and I'll add this year's winner after it is announced tonight.

2009 -- 126 -- $14.7 million -- The Hurt Locker
2008 -- 16 -- $141.3 million -- Slumdog Millionaire
2007 -- 36 -- $74.3 million -- No Country for Old Men
2006 -- 15 -- $132.4 million -- The Departed
2005 -- 49 -- $54.6 million -- Crash
2004 -- 24 -- $100.5 million -- Million Dollar Baby
2003 -- 1 -- $377.0 million -- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2002 -- 10 -- $170.7 million -- Chicago
2001 -- 11 -- $170.7 million -- A Beautiful Mind
2000 -- 4 -- $187.7 million -- Gladiator
1999 -- 13 -- $130.1 million -- American Beauty
1998 -- 18 -- $100.3 million -- Shakespeare in Love
1997 -- 1 -- $600.8 million -- Titanic
1996 -- 19 -- $78.7 million -- The English Patient
1995 -- 18 -- $75.6 million -- Braveheart
1994 -- 1 -- $329.7 million -- Forrest Gump
1993 -- 9 -- $96.1 million -- Schindler's List
1992 -- 11 -- $101.2 million -- Unforgiven
1991 -- 4 -- $130.7 million -- Silence of the Lambs
1990 -- 3 -- $184.2 million -- Dances with Wolves
1989 -- 8 -- $106.6 million -- Driving Miss Daisy
1988 -- 1 -- $172.8 million -- Rain Man
1987 -- 25 -- $44.0 million -- The Last Emperor
1986 -- 3 -- $138.5 million -- Platoon
1985 -- 5 -- $87.1 million -- Out of Africa
1984 -- 12 -- $52.0 million -- Amadeus
1983 -- 2 -- $108.4 million -- Terms of Endearment
1982 -- 12 -- $52.8 million -- Gandhi
1981 -- 7 -- $59.0 million -- Chariots of Fire
1980 -- 11 -- $54.8 million -- Ordinary People
1979 -- xx -- $106.3 million -- Kramer Vs. Kramer
1978 -- xx -- $49.0 million -- The Deer Hunter
1977 -- xx -- $38.3 million -- Annie Hall
1976 -- xx -- $117.2 million -- Rocky
1975 -- xx -- $109.0 million -- One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
1974 -- xx -- $47.5 million -- The Godfather Part II
1973 -- xx -- $156.0 million -- The Sting
1972 -- xx -- $133.7 million -- The Godfather
1971 -- xx -- $51.7 million -- The French Connection
1970 -- xx -- $61.7 million -- Patton

MAR 10 UPDATE: Updated to include the winner for 2009.

Oscar nominations -- better late than never!

2010-03-07T01:06:00.010-08:00

I am way, way behind on this, but the winners of this year's Oscars will be announced tonight (i.e. Sunday night), so I might as well slip this in under the wire, as it were, while I still can.

I don't have a whole lot to say about this year's nominees that I haven't already said in the current Kindlings Muse podcast or in the Academy Awards forum at the Arts & Faith discussion board (which will be hosting a live chat during the ceremony, incidentally, so feel free to join in).

But -- to repeat something that I wrote in an e-mail to a couple of discussion lists over a month ago -- I think Best Picture will probably go to either The Hurt Locker or Inglourious Basterds (my review).

That's right, I don't think Avatar's chances are very good. And here's why:

First, it wasn't nominated for its screenplay or for any of its actors, and you have to go all the way back to the earliest days of the Academy Awards -- all the way back to 1932's Grand Hotel, in fact -- to find a film that won Best Picture without having nominations in either of those departments.

Second, it's science-fiction, a genre that the Academy is not particularly fond of. In fact, it is one of only five sci-fi movies that have ever been nominated for Best Picture -- along with 1971's A Clockwork Orange, 1977's Star Wars, 1982's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and this year's District 9 -- and none of the other films have won.

Third, it has too much money. In my lifetime, pretty much all of the films that conquered the all-time box-office chart have been nominated for Best Picture, but almost none of them have won -- partly, I suspect, because they were perceived as mere genre fare, whether they were sci-fi flicks like Star Wars and E.T. or horror movies like 1975's Jaws. The one major exception to this rule is 1997's Titanic, which had just a whiff of "historical epic" about it, enough to win the Academy's respect at any rate.

In contrast, the one major hurdle that The Hurt Locker has to face is that it might not have made enough money to feel like Best Picture material to the Academy. The film has been scooping up awards left, right and centre over the past few months, so it would seem to have all the momentum working in its favour -- but if it does win Best Picture, then it will be the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in my lifetime, by far, and quite possibly the least-seen Best Picture winner in the history of the awards.

Of course, commercial considerations shouldn't play any part at all when judging a movie's artistic merit; but the Oscars are handed out by the industry, not by critics, so the film's tepid performance at the box office is not an irrelevant factor. Hence, there are some people, such as myself, who think that Inglourious Basterds stands a chance of sneaking in there and taking the top prize when the envelopes are opened tonight.

But of course, anything is possible, even more so this year than in previous years. There are ten nominees for Best Picture, not five, and the voters are using a new "preferential voting" system that allows them to name a second, third, fourth, etc. choice if their first pick doesn't win on the first ballot. So the winner this year will not necessarily be the film with the most passionate following, but the film that has the broadest support within the Academy. All the old rules of thumb may go out the window. Or not. We shall see.

One last thought, before I post my annual list of all the Oscar nominated films: As an animation buff, I am intrigued by the fact that only one of the five Best Animated Feature nominees this year -- namely Pixar's Up -- is a completely computer-generated movie. Two of the remaining nominees are old-fashioned, hand-drawn exercises, and two are stop-motion. That's pretty cool.

And now, without further ado, here are the films that have been nominated for this year's Oscars, ranked from those with the most nominations to those with only one. The titles of those I have seen are in bold:

9 nominations:

Avatar -- Picture, director (James Cameron), cinematography, film editing, art direction, original score, sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects
The Hurt Locker -- Picture, director (Kathryn Bigelow), original screenplay, cinematography, film editing, actor (Jeremy Renner), original score, sound editing, sound mixing

8 nominations:

Inglourious Basterds -- Picture, director (Quentin Tarantino), original screenplay, cinematography, film editing, supporting actor (Christoph Waltz), sound editing, sound mixing

6 nominations:

Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire -- Picture, director (Lee Daniels), adapted screenplay, film editing, actress (Gabourey Sidibe), supporting actress (Mo'Nique)

6 nominations in 5 categories:

Up in the Air -- Picture, director (Jason Reitman), adapted screenplay, actor (George Clooney), supporting actress (Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick)

5 nominations:

Up -- Picture, animated feature, original screenplay, original score, sound editing

4 nominations:

District 9 -- Picture, adapted screenplay, film editing, visual effects
Nine -- Supporting actress (Penelope Cruz), art direction, costume design, original song
Star Trek -- Makeup, sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects

3 nominations:

Crazy Heart -- Actor (Jeff Bridges), supporting actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal), original song
An Education -- Picture, adapted screenplay, actress (Carey Mulligan)
The Young Victoria -- Art direction, costume design, makeup

3 nominations in 2 categories:

The Princess and the Frog -- Animated feature, original song (x2)

2 nominations:

The Blind Side -- Picture, actress (Sandra Bullock)
Fantastic Mr. Fox -- Animated feature, original score
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus -- Art direction, costume design
Invictus -- Actor (Morgan Freeman), supporting actor (Matt Damon)
The Last Station -- Actress (Helen Mirren), supporting actor (Christopher Plummer)
The Messenger -- Original screenplay, supporting actor (Woody Harrelson)
A Serious Man -- Picture, original screenplay
Sherlock Holmes -- Art direction, original score
The White Ribbon -- Foreign language film, cinematography

1 nomination:

Ajami -- Foreign language film
Bright Star -- Costume design
Burma VJ -- Documentary feature
China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province -- Documentary short subject
Coco before Chanel -- Costume design
Coraline -- Animated feature
The Cove -- Documentary feature
The Door -- live action short film
El Secreto de Sus Ojos -- Foreign language film
Food, Inc. -- Documentary feature
French Roast -- Animated short film
Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty -- Animated short film
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince -- Cinematography
Il Divo -- Makeup
In the Loop -- Adapted screenplay
Instead of Abracadabra -- live action short film
Julie & Julia -- Actress (Meryl Streep)
Kavi -- live action short film
The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte) -- Animated short film
The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner -- Documentary short subject
The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant -- Documentary short subject
Logorama -- Animated short film
The Lovely Bones -- Supporting actor (Stanley Tucci)
A Matter of Loaf and Death -- Animated short film
The Milk of Sorrow -- Foreign language film
Miracle Fish -- live action short film
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers -- Documentary feature
Music by Prudence -- Documentary short subject
The New Tenants -- live action short film
Paris 36 -- Original song
Rabbit à la Berlin -- Documentary short subject
The Secret of Kells -- Animated feature
A Single Man -- Actor (Colin Firth)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen -- Sound mixing
Un Prophète -- Foreign language film
Which Way Home -- Documentary feature

Is the Egyptian life-of-Jesus movie a go, now?

2010-03-06T20:43:00.012-08:00

Here's one more Jesus-movie newsbite to add to the batch that I posted earlier today.

Four years ago, as longtime readers of this blog might recall, a Coptic Orthodox Christian screenwriter and a Muslim movie producer announced that they were going to make a movie about Jesus in their native Egypt -- and this proved somewhat controversial, because Jesus is considered a prophet by Muslims and certain strains of Sunni Islam forbid the depiction of the prophets. (Shi'ite Islam, on the other hand, does not forbid such things; hence entire movies have been made about Jesus and the Virgin Mary in Iran.)

That was the last I heard of that project ... until today, when Matt Page linked to an article that ran in the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram nearly two months ago. The article features an interview with Ahmed Maher, the recently appointed Muslim director of the film, and it states that the film will pay particular attention to the fact that Mary, Joseph and the young Jesus stayed in Egypt when Jesus was little more than a toddler.

Maher, who says he wants to make "a modern film about Christ", and that he intends "to present a religious story in a secular way", had this to say about the film's current subtext:

"The timing is good for two reasons. First, there is the local dimension; Egypt used to be a strong state, an empire, yet it never implemented its power with extremism and never oppressed others in an imperial way, but now that we are witnessing a historical moment containing so much extremism and sectarianism we should be concerned about our future all through the third millennium. It is therefore important to present a film in which the tolerant perspective of Egypt in the first millennium is given due credit. To my mind a free society is one in which the majority practises its right to choose, but modern democracy does not deprive minorities of their rights no matter what the choice of the majority is.

"Secondly, on the international level, it seems religious extremism has spread and become more powerful nine years after 9/11, regardless of its underlying creed. Such extremism exercises a strong influence in many parts of the world, and it is important for the West to understand that Egypt, which produced Ayman El-Zawahri and Mohamed Atta, is itself the country that embraced Christ the infant when no one else would. This is the principal issue on which the film is based."

Incidentally, this isn't the only Arabic movie about Jesus that is currently in the works. Last year, I noted that a Lebanese film called The Resurrected was being prepped with an eye towards a release date sometime around Easter 2010 ... which is now only a few weeks away. I haven't heard anything about that movie lately either, though, so I don't know how far they got with it.

Newsbites: The Jesus-movie edition!

2010-03-06T00:12:00.021-08:00

1. Paul Currie, an Australian filmmaker and co-founder of Lightstream Pictures, is planning to direct a 3D animated movie called The Fourth Wise Man. There seems to be very little information out there about this project, but it stands to reason that this film will somehow concern the Nativity; who knows, it may even be based on the Henry Van Dyke short story that has been made for TV a few times now, most notably in 1985 with Martin Sheen and Alan Arkin. -- Variety

2. Spanish animation outfit Dygra Films has hired Madagascar writer Billy Frolick to work on the English-language version of Holy Night!, an upcoming cartoon that, if I have read the various sources correctly, seems to concern a clash between secular and religious Christmas decorations that takes place after Santa's sleigh and the Baby Jesus go missing. -- Variety

3. Graphic novelist Mark Millar says he's had difficulty persuading a studio to make American Jesus, an irreverent comic-book adaptation that he describes as a "sequel" to The Passion of the Christ (2004) because it concerns the Second Coming:

"People were sniffing around 'American Jesus' and everybody wanted to do it, but they were really nervous about the subject matter," continued Millar. "And genuinely, somebody [said] to me 'Is there anyway we can do 'American Jesus', but maybe take Jesus out of it?'"

"I loved that," laughed Millar. "It had to be the most brilliantly Hollywood thing I've ever heard [because] Jesus is in every scene in that book and its about the second coming. And they were saying 'can we make it some kind of analogy of Jesus? Or maybe call him David?' I was like 'No, it's got to be 'American Jesus.'' They said ' I just don't know if anybody would go and see a movie with Jesus in it.' And I [said] 'Well, 'The Passion' made $650 million!'"

4. Not The Messiah: He's A Very Naughty Boy, an oratorio based on Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), may be coming out on video in the near future; with any luck, it may get a limited theatrical release, too. I say this because it just received a PG rating "for suggestive material and language" from the MPAA. The original movie, incidentally, was rated R.

5. A couple of Jesus movies are being re-issued on DVD. Roger Young's Jesus (1999; my review), starring Jeremy Sisto as Jesus and Gary Oldman as Pontius Pilate, was released this week, along with Raffaele Mertes' Esther (1999; my review) -- just a couple days late for Purim, but oh well. (Both films were originally produced as part of The Bible Collection.)

Meanwhile, Bruce Marchiano, who played Jesus in a couple of Visual Bible productions in the mid-1990s -- and will do so again in the upcoming cartoon The Lion of Judah -- has released a 15th anniversary edition of Matthew with new bonus features, including a two-disc audio book in which Marchiano describes the making of the movie from his point of view.

Incidentally, Marchiano is currently soliciting donations to support the making of a new word-for-word adaptation of John's gospel called Jesus ... No Greater Love. I was reminded of that recently when I came across this interview with Kevin Smith in which he says he thought about letting his fans put up the money for one of his movies, too:

We got some lawyers to look at it, and it's a f*****g nightmare to accept donations to make a movie. A tax nightmare, it sounded so good in theory. And we were like, 'A people's studio!' And a people's studio could work, but you can't get money from the people, it has to start with this nut, and then work from there.

I wonder what Marchiano's lawyers would say? Maybe the rules are different if the film can be classified as a non-profit ministry tool, rather than as something made to sell tickets.

Newsbites: The random quick updates edition!

2010-03-05T23:29:00.012-08:00

No major comments here, just noting a few items that happen to tie in to things that I have written here or elsewhere in the past.

1. Anthony Hopkins will star in The Rite, based on the book about real-life exorcists written by Matt Baglio. The movie will centre "on a disillusioned American seminary student who attends exorcism school at the Vatican and ultimately finds his faith through encounters with demonic forces. Hopkins will play a priest who is an expert in exorcisms and whose methods are not necessarily traditional." -- Hollywood Reporter

2. Universal has spent two years looking for someone to turn Sascha Rothchild's book How to Get Divorced by 30 into a romantic comedy about "starter marriages". Now, after courting many strangers, the studio has come back to Rothchild and asked her to write the script herself. -- Variety

3. The makers of East Is East (1999) -- which concerns a British family led by a Pakistani father and his English wife in the early '70s -- are now planning a sequel called West Is West, which will be set in Pakistan about five years later. They are even talking about making a third film to round out the "trilogy", which begs the question: What will they call it? -- Hollywood Reporter

4. Seann William Scott, who has appeared in a number of R-rated comedies over the past decade or so, says he used to watch his language, but his career-making turn as Stifler in American Pie (1999) marked "the first time [I] ever swore." This fits with what he told Rolling Stone at the time, regarding how his nickname in junior high school used to be "Church Boy". -- WENN

Canadian box-office stats -- February 28

2010-03-02T09:29:00.002-08:00

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 $84,730,000 -- N.AM $706,560,068 -- 12.0%
When in Rome -- CDN $3,510,000 -- N.AM $30,861,655 -- 11.4%
Tooth Fairy -- CDN $5,190,000 -- N.AM $53,841,454 -- 9.6%
Dear John -- CDN $6,470,000 -- N.AM $72,432,096 -- 8.9%
Shutter Island -- CDN $6,360,000 -- N.AM $75,541,571 -- 8.4%
Valentine's Day -- CDN $8,220,000 -- N.AM $99,916,240 -- 8.2%
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief -- CDN $4,780,000 -- N.AM $70,998,280 -- 6.7%
The Wolfman -- CDN $3,760,000 -- N.AM $57,380,125 -- 6.6%
Cop Out -- CDN $1,110,000 -- N.AM $18,211,126 -- 6.1%
The Crazies -- CDN $954,592 -- N.AM $16,067,552 -- 5.9%

A couple of discrepancies: When in Rome was #10 on the Canadian chart (it was #15 in North America as a whole), while Crazy Heart was #10 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).

Canadian box-office stats -- February 21

2010-02-23T11:14:00.002-08:00

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."

2010-02-18T13:43:00.044-08:00

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.

2010-02-16T11:28:00.008-08:00

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

2010-02-15T09:31:00.003-08:00

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

2010-02-12T01:07:00.007-08:00

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

2010-02-12T00:33:00.009-08:00

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

2010-02-08T23:36:00.003-08:00

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!"

2010-02-07T17:28:00.026-08:00

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.

2010-02-05T12:15:00.006-08:00

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?

2010-02-03T10:31:00.007-08:00

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.

2010-02-03T09:31:00.016-08:00

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

2010-02-02T00:01:00.002-08:00

Whip It and the Stryper T-shirt, redux.

2010-01-28T08:59:00.008-08:00

I never did follow up my earlier post on Whip It and the Stryper T-shirt depicted therein -- but since Drew Barrymore's directorial debut came out on DVD this week, I figure now is as good a time as any to say that I loved the film, I wish it had done better at the box office, and I am intrigued by the fact that the Stryper T-shirt seems to be even more significant in the film than it was in the original book, at least based on the excerpts that I have read.

I can't say why it is more significant without giving away a spoiler of sorts, but suffice it to say that what the film does with this plot element underscores one of several reasons why I like this film: it does have genuine affection for, and try to "understand", all of its characters -- even the ones who would have been very easy to dismiss in a lesser film with the same basic premise.

Hoodwinked! comings and goings.

2010-01-28T06:55:00.026-08:00

The companies behind Hoodwinked! giveth, and the companies behind Hoodwinked! taketh away.

First, the bad news. Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil was originally going to come out two weeks ago, similar to how the original film came out in mid-January four years ago, but late last year it was put on indefinite hold. This has put certain promotional partners -- notably Burger King, which is already selling toys and running contests in the United States and Great Britain -- in a bit of an odd spot. The British Burger King site says it is possible to watch the trailer for the new film here, but I have been unable to find it anywhere, and Cory Edwards, who directed the original film and co-wrote the sequel, wrote in a recent blog post that he has "no idea" when the new film will come out.

Presumably, one reason for the film's delay is that its distributor, the Weinstein Company, has been hard up for cash in recent months, not least because their Oscar-bait musical Nine flopped in a big way when it came out several weeks ago. The original Hoodwinked! was one of their biggest hits, so you'd think they might be eager to get the sequel out there soon, but they may not be able to afford the prints and advertising right now.

Not all recent Hoodwinked! news has been bad, though. Edwards also recently announced that the soundtrack to the original film, which has long been out of print, is now available for download via iTunes. So if you've been looking for a more "legit" copy of the soundtrack than the bootleg version that composer-producers Fleming & John made available at their MySpace page some time ago, well, there ya go.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence -- a visual study

2010-01-27T19:37:00.003-08:00

You can count me among those who think A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) is one of the more underrated movies of the past decade. And as such a person, I was glad to come across this two-part video essay by Benjamin Sampson last night (via The House Next Door). It may only scratch the surface of what makes this semi-posthumous collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Speilberg so interesting, but the surface is a perfect place to start, and this video essay scratches it so well:

Bernard Émond on faith, hope and charity

2010-01-27T13:58:00.005-08:00

I have seen only two of Bernard Émond's films so far -- La neuvaine aka The Novena (2005), which he wrote and directed, and Ce qu'il faut pour vivre aka The Necessities of Life (2008), which he simply wrote -- but what I have seen, I have liked.

He's an admittedly secular filmmaker, not a religious one, but he is sensitive to the role of religion in people's lives, and I am especially interested in his other films now that I hear La neuvaine was conceived as the first part of a "trilogy" on faith, hope and love. Quoth today's Globe and Mail:

La Donation, which opened last fall in Quebec, completes the Montreal writer-director’s trilogy exploring the theological virtues of faith (La Neuvaine, 2005), hope (Contre toute espérance, 2006) and, now, charity through stories of personal and cultural loss. If it all sounds heavy, be assured there is nothing heavy-handed about Émond’s deft, emotionally rich observational filmmaking, which has been lauded by festivals, critics and award juries since he turned from documentary to features with La Femme qui boit in 2001.

La Donation revolves around Jeanne (Élise Guilbault), a Montreal emergency-room doctor who was also the central character in the trilogy’s first film. Here, she arrives in the small Abitibi town of Normétal as the temporary replacement for the local doctor (Jacques Godin), who is nearing retirement and planning a short vacation. When he unexpectedly dies, Jeanne must tend to the community while considering her own future. “In the first film, Jeanne witnesses an assassination, holds herself responsible and is saved from killing herself because of a stranger’s kindness,” Émond explained during the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. “After that I wondered, what can be her life? What is a meaningful life?”

The “totally secular answer,” the self-described “non-believer” said, can be found in La Donation and its small-town setting. “We live in a society motivated by the logic of greed and I think we must reconnect ourselves with the logic of giving, which is so pervasive in traditional societies,” said Émond, a trained anthropologist who worked for Inuit television in the Arctic earlier in his career. “We live in a system of exchange. I give you 10 bucks, you give me pair of shoes; after that, if you die, I don’t care. Whereas in a traditional society, I give you something and maybe you don’t give me something right now but you owe me. Maybe your descendants will give something to my descendants. The added benefit of giving is that it creates ties.”

Remembering Gilles Groulx’s 1960 National Film Board documentary Normétal, Émond decided to scout the town as a possible location. “When I stopped my car in front of the church, I was completely overtaken by a feeling of melancholy because the town I had seen in the film was no more,” he recalled. “Abitibi is one of the great chapters of Quebec history and one of the saddest. These are places where people created new communities, but these villages and their way of life are disappearing.

“Since my films explore different facets of loss and grief, Normétal was a very cinematographic place just waiting for its film – waiting for my film,” he added with a laugh.

La donation opens in Toronto this coming Friday; I do not know whether, or when, it will be coming to Vancouver.

Canadian box-office stats -- January 24

2010-01-27T10:15:00.002-08:00

Newsbites: The Bible movie edition!

2010-01-25T19:26:00.011-08:00

Further to my previous post, here are some Bible-themed movie news bits that I've been meaning to blog for a while, a few of which I discovered via Matt Page's invaluable Bible Films Blog.

1. It has been at least five years since the folks behind the Visual Bible announced their intention to make a word-for-word adaptation of The Gospel of Mark. Some of us had given it up for dead -- but now Mark Goodacre notes that a comment from Philip Saville, director of the Visual Bible's previous effort The Gospel of John (2003), was recently posted at YouTube, which seems to indicate that the film might still be in development.

2. Spanish filmmaker Emilio Ruiz Barrachina has made, or is in the middle of making, a feature-length film that depicts Jesus as a political zealot who leads an armed revolt against the Temple in Jerusalem, among other things. The website for the film gives its English title as The Disciple: Jesus, the Undisclosed Story and says the film is still currently in production, but Matt Page says the film already premiered at the Malaga Film Festival way back in April. The producers of this film are also working on a documentary called Jesus 2.0 which will argue that the New Testament has it all wrong and the true meaning of Jesus' teaching was preserved by a group called "the knowledgeables", which I'm guessing is a translation of "the Gnostics".

3. The Maltese Times reported a couple years ago that a "wholly Maltese" movie about the life of Jesus had been shown on the big screen there with the blessing of the local Catholic bishop. Anno Domini XXXIII was originally going to be a 17-part TV series, but the producers decided to re-write it for the big screen -- though it would seem, based on the trailer at YouTube, that the "film" was shot on video and still has a certain made-for-TV quality.

4. Carman, a Christian pop star whose efforts to make Christianity macho and "relevant" have been mocked even by his fellow Christian musicians, is now starring as Boaz in the straight-to-DVD effort The Book of Ruth: Journey of Faith, which is described on the movie's website, somewhat ludicrously, as "a Biblical Cinderella story from the archives of the royal Jewish bloodline". Where to begin? For one thing, Ruth was not some virginal maiden waiting to be swept off her feet by Prince Charming; she was a widow whose method for finding a second husband may have been somewhat sexually aggressive, depending on what you make of the original Hebrew version of this story. For another, while the Book of Ruth does say that one of her great-grandsons turned out to be King David, there was nothing "royal" about Ruth or her family during her lifetime; indeed, the Israelites didn't even have a king at that time. The basic point of the story is not that a woman found true love, or whatever, but that foreign women and their offspring were not necessarily harmful to the people of Israel despite what some of Israel's leaders, such as Moses and Nehemiah, tended to claim. It will be interesting to see if the film gets into that on any level, but I'm not holding my breath.

Samuel Goldwyn tackles The Resurrection

2010-01-18T20:56:00.039-08:00

Variety magazine reports that cameras will start rolling on a new movie about the Resurrection of Jesus sometime in July, and it sounds like the key creative personnel may be a somewhat eclectic lot.

The key figure behind the film seems to be producer Bill McKay, who has been talking publicly about this project since at least October 2008. Back then, he said he had been brought onto the picture by Sony, which prompted me to wonder if this was the same Resurrection movie that Sony's Screen Gems division had been developing with Tim LaHaye. But Variety says the current film will be released next year by Samuel Goldwyn, the secular distributor that has handled such evangelical hits as Facing the Giants (2006) and Fireproof (2008), and there is no mention of LaHaye or Sony or Screen Gems anywhere in the article.

Also involved in the new movie is executive producer J. David Williams, who was head of Providence Entertainment when they released the first-ever evangelical Christian movie to earn a place in the nation's weekly box-office top ten list. I refer, of course, to the end-times thriller The Omega Code (1999).

But perhaps the most interesting name associated with the new movie -- which goes by the title The Resurrection of the Christ -- is director Jonas McCord, whose credits include The Body (2001), which starred Antonio Banderas as a priest who investigates the possibility that an archaeologist may have discovered the bones of Jesus and thus disproved the Resurrection.

Variety says Dan Gordon, whose credits include The Hurricane (1999) and The Celestine Prophecy (2006), is writing the script "with a focus on the power, greed and ambition of those involved in the crucifixion -- Pontius Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas and Judas."

This raises an interesting question: How much of the movie will take place before the Resurrection and how much of it will take place after the Resurrection? Most films about Jesus have not paid a lot of attention to the Resurrection itself, and with perhaps some justification, since the gospels don't necessarily go into a whole lot of detail about it either; in Mark's version, some women find an empty tomb and a man who gives them a message, and that's pretty much it. But a film that bills itself as being specifically about the Resurrection -- indeed, McKay has even called this film "kind of a sequel" to The Passion of the Christ (2004), which ended with the risen Jesus stepping out of the tomb -- would presumably have to focus more heavily on the the stuff that happened afterwards. The stuff that happened before the Resurrection has already been done to death (uh, so to speak) in countless other films.

Incidentally, McKay's most significant screen credit to date is the Billy Graham biopic Billy: The Early Years (2008), which he co-wrote and produced. Make of that what you will.

Canadian box-office stats -- January 17

2010-01-18T20:31:00.000-08:00

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 $51,940,000 -- N.AM $493,267,000 -- 10.5%
Leap Year -- CDN $1,760,000 -- N.AM $17,529,000 -- 10.0%
Daybreakers -- CDN $2,280,000 -- N.AM $24,088,000 -- 9.5%
Sherlock Holmes -- CDN $17,010,000 -- N.AM $180,073,000 -- 9.4%
Up in the Air -- CDN $5,910,000 -- N.AM $62,831,000 -- 9.4%
It's Complicated -- CDN $7,120,000 -- N.AM $88,224,000 -- 8.1%
The Spy Next Door -- CDN $666,332 -- N.AM $9,600,000 -- 6.9%
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel -- CDN $13,360,000 -- N.AM $192,742,000 -- 6.9%
The Lovely Bones -- CDN $1,140,000 -- N.AM $17,487,000 -- 6.5%
The Book of Eli -- CDN $1,890,000 -- N.AM $32,770,000 -- 5.8%

A couple of discrepancies: Daybreakers was #9 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while The Blind Side was #9 on the North American chart (it was #12 in Canada).

Dawn Treader -- more gratuitous battles!

2010-01-14T06:47:00.005-08:00

It has been evident for some time that the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader will make major, major changes to its source material.

Last month, producer Doug Gresham hinted that he was "ambivalent" about the changes on this film in a way that he hadn't been on the previous two films, and a press release issued last summer suggested that King Caspian and the other characters will now be embarking on their journey not simply to find the seven lost Lords of Narnia, as they did in the book, but to "save Narnia, and all the astonishing creatures in it, from an unfathomable fate."

Now, director Michael Apted has revealed another development that is giving some Narnia fans pause. In a recent interview with the Australian version of Empire magazine, he stated:

“This is a lot more psychological; it’s not a big action movie. There are a lot of different locations and adventures but, apart from a huge battle at the end with a sea serpent and a dragon, this is a character story. The quality of the book, and the appeal of the book, is that it’s more of an emotional than a swashbuckling adventure.”

NarniaWeb.com responds:

There are definitely a lot of positive lines here, like “not a big action movie” and “a character story.” But I’m sure that the bit that will leave everybody talking is the line “a huge battle at the end with a sea serpent and a dragon.” Is this dragon Eustace? If so, did they move Dragon Island to the end of the movie? Or just the bit where Eustace turns back into a boy? Only 11 months of speculating to go!

Meanwhile, in other news, the Washington Times ran a story on New Year's Eve quoting someone who quoted a former script adviser who said the film was "drifting" from C.S. Lewis's original vision. It's hearsay, sure, but where there's smoke, there tends to be fire, and right now it seems like there's a lot of smoke.

The Vancouver Film Critics Circle awards.

2010-01-13T23:29:00.005-08:00

Here's another one for the better-late-than-never file. Two nights ago, the Vancouver Film Critics Circle announced the winners of its tenth annual awards -- has it been ten years already!? -- and this year, it was my turn to announce who won Best Director.

In addition to the winners listed below, lifetime achievement awards were given to Nettie Wild, a documentary filmmaker who happens to be the subject of a career retrospective at the Pacific Cinematheque this coming weekend, and Leonard Schein, who founded the current version of the Vancouver International Film Festival some 28 years ago and currently runs the arthouse theatre chain Festival Cinemas.

And the nominees were (with winners in orange):

CANADIAN FILMS

BEST CANADIAN FILM
J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother)
Polytechnique
The Young Victoria

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A CANADIAN FILM
Xavier Dolan, J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother)
Sébastien Huberdeau, Polytechnique
Stephen McHattie, Pontypool

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A CANADIAN FILM
Emily Blunt, The Young Victoria
Anne Dorval, J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother)
Nisreen Faour, Amreeka

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A CANADIAN FILM
François Arnaud, J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother)
Daniel J. Gordon, Nurse.Fighter.Boy
John Paul Tremblay, Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A CANADIAN FILM
Lisa Houle, Pontypool
Miranda Richardson, The Young Victoria
Gabrielle Rose, Excited

BEST DIRECTOR OF A CANADIAN FILM
Cherien Dabis, Amreeka
Xavier Dolan, J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother)
Denis Villeneuve, Polytechnique

BEST BRITISH COLUMBIA FILM
A Shine of Rainbows
Excited
Facing Ali

INTERNATIONAL FILMS

BEST FILM
A Serious Man
The Hurt Locker
Up in the Air

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEAD ROLE
George Clooney, Up in the Air
Colin Firth, A Single Man
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEAD ROLE
Carey Mulligan, An Education
Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Alfred Molina, An Education
Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
Mo'Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

BEST DIRECTOR
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Jason Reitman, Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

BEST SCREENPLAY
Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker
Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

BEST DOCUMENTARY
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
The Cove
Food Inc.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Broken Embraces, Spain
The Headless Woman, Argentina
Summer Hours, France

For what it's worth, my own choices won in eight of the sixteen categories, but just to keep a little mystery, I won't say which categories they were, or what I would have picked in them.