Here’s another story on companies that “clean up” DVDs, courtesy of the Washington Post. The part that boggles my mind the most is in the opening paragraph: apparently Alexander Payne’s Sideways is one of the films that has been “sanitized” for family-friendly viewing. This, remember, is a film about two guys on a wine-tasting road trip, one of whom is getting married in a few days and therefore wants to cheat on his wife-to-be with a few different women before... Read more

The wife and I just got home from Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Wowzers. It’s one of those films about the corporate culture that makes me glad I’m a work-at-home freelancer. And it’s one of those films that makes you wonder, If the powers that be are so good at lying through their teeth to us, then how can we separate the truth-tellers from the liars? I also wonder about the worldview, for lack of a better word,... Read more

Jeff Overstreet recently posted a news item regarding Left Behind co-author Jerry Jenkins’ new contract with Tyndale; apparently he’s going to write 15 new novels for them in the next five to six years — that’s a rate of roughly three novels per year. One thing Jeff does not mention is that Jenkins has apparently already begun cranking out prequels to the Left Behind series, which we all thought — apparently mistakenly — had ended last year with The Glorious... 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. Hostage — CDN $4,992,240 — N.AM $33,408,000 — 14.9%Sin City — CDN $7,279,578 — N.AM $61,300,000 — 11.9%Sahara — CDN $3,332,830 — N.AM $36,446,000 — 9.1%Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous — CDN $3,756,657 — N.AM $41,561,000 — 9.0%Robots — CDN $9,754,977 — N.AM $115,704,000 — 8.4%Guess Who — CDN... Read more

I just realized something. I think I bought my first-ever non-English DVD today. I know, I know, it’s awful that a cinephile like me should have gone without any foreign-language films for so long. But I have always tended to shy away from bare-bones DVDs of any language, just in case the films are re-issued some day with all the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect; and the handful of foreign-language special-edition DVDs that I have been interested in... Read more

Here’s a groaner that had somehow never occurred to me before. Jeff Overstreet’s blog includes a link to this interview with Douglas Gresham, the stepson of C.S. Lewis who is overseeing the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, hopefully the first of several Narnia movies. And somewhere on that page, the interviewer asks this question about the film’s director: What has it been like working with Son of Adam (Andrew Adamson) and the rest of the... Read more

I happen to be in the middle of researching a story on the arrival in Canada of video services that edit films to make them more “family friendly” — and lo and behold, there just happens to be an editoral on the subject in today’s Wall Street Journal. I am, as often happens, of two minds on this particular topic. In general, I oppose the impulse to make all films “family friendly,” and I agree with Pop Culture Wars author... Read more

Just a quick link to the OC Weekly‘s latest story on the soon-to-be-premiered Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher; this time it’s basically an interview with Lonnie’s ex-wife Connie and director David Di Sabatino. BTW, FWIW, I think that longer Q&A; I keep promising will be up some time early next week, but I’ll post the link when it comes. Read more

Just a note to say my review of the new version of The Amityville Horror is up at CT Movies. I had not realized until a couple days ago that the film was directed by the same man, Andrew Douglas, who made Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003), a documentary that I almost saw at last year’s festival, but missed. Now I wish I had seen it, of course. For some reason, this reminds me of how Joe Berlinger —... Read more