Ingmar Bergman died yesterday at the age of 89. I have seen quite a few of his films but none of them often enough or recent enough to comment on them in any detail. (Though I did jot a few notes here on 1973’s Scenes from a Marriage and 2003’s Saraband a couple years ago.) However, Bergman did represent an interesting point in the history of the relationship between film and faith — by encouraging filmmakers to engage in theological... Read more

Oh, what hath The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) wrought. Last year I noted that an adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s forthcoming novel The Abstinence Teacher is in the works. Now Variety reports that Screen Gems and Maxim are developing a film called Virginity Rocks, which will be written by Melissa Carter: Story revolves around a gorgeous transfer student who clings to her virginity and gets all the promiscuous girls in school to abstain from sex; in response, the popular guys ask the... Read more

I forgot to mention last week that Who’s Your Caddy? was not screened for critics prior to its release. I probably overlooked the film because it hasn’t been released at all in Canada. Meanwhile, it is beginning to look like Underdog, which opens this Friday, is also giving critics the cold shoulder. The only local screening that I know of is on Thursday night — and as we all know, night-before-release-date screenings “don’t count”. I also know of at least... Read more

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. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — CDN $25,310,000 — N.AM $241,771,000 — 10.5%Sunshine — CDN $143,805 — N.AM $1,628,000 — 8.8%Transformers — CDN $24,990,000 — N.AM $284,558,000 — 8.8%Hairspray — CDN $5,170,000 — N.AM $59,307,000 — 8.7%Live Free or Die Hard — CDN $10,860,000 — N.AM $125,128,000... Read more

Here’s a little more info about Pixar’s next film WALL-E, courtesy of ComingSoon.net and its coverage of this year’s Comic-Con: In the future, humans have completely trashed the planet with rampant commercialism. They then leave the planet on space liners while robots are left behind to clean up the planet. Unfortunately, 700 years go by and they never return. Eventually one robot, WALL•E, develops a personality. As he roams the planet, he eventually finds a way to get off the... Read more

Evan Almighty fell off the weekly top ten lists this week — indeed, if the estimates hold, it is now down at #17 — and pundits continue to ponder just why this movie failed to find an audience. Mark Joseph at FoxNews.com speculated a few weeks ago that the film’s supposed target audience smelled something phony: In its aftermath, once again the chatter from Hollywood is how, despite another earnest and sincere attempt to make a movie for “those people,”... Read more

Murray Stiller, a Vancouver-based filmmaker and the son of former Evangelical Fellowship of Canada president Brian C. Stiller, is making a documentary on religious satire called Jesus Makes Me Laugh — and he has put a promo reel up at YouTube. The interviewees include Georgia Straight cartoonist Dirk Van Stralen, Regent College professor Maxine Hancock, and at least three people associated with The Wittenburg Door — a magazine that jumped the shark ages ago, but never mind that for now.... Read more

That would seem to be what Douglas Gresham promised the fans at Comic-Con, according to the brief summary at IGN.com. UPDATE: MTV Movies Blog indicates it may have been producer Mark Johnson, and not Gresham, who made these remarks. Meanwhile, get a load of what director Andrew Adamson said: Comparing his work on “Narnia” to that OTHER long running fantasy series, Adamson insisted that future “Narnia” films will be both more consistent and more faithfully inclusive to the source than... Read more

The makers of The Ten, an upcoming comedy based on the Ten Commandments, needed a ventriloquist’s dummy for a segment in which Winona Ryder takes a stolen dummy — or “hard figure”, as those in the ventriloquism business call it — and has sex with it. Their first choice was a dummy produced by The Dummy Works in Texas. It turned out the proprietors are Christians involved in various ventriloquism ministries. The dummy makers turned the movie down. The New... Read more