There are many more items I would like to sift through and post here, but this tiny handful will have to do for now.
1. Jesus Camp comes out on DVD tomorrow — and I just noticed that the back of the box says the deleted scenes will include “Additional Ted Haggard Sermon Footage”. Prepare to cringe.
2. Greg Wright, of the Past the Popcorn movie site, offers his own interesting take on the Hobbit fracas at TheOneRing.net.
3. Toronto Star columnist Michael Geist shreds the recent claims of American movie studios that Canada is uniquely plagued with camcording pirates and therefore deserves to be punished.
UPDATE: Variety now has its own report on the piracy situation.
4. Terry Mattingly profiles Doug TenNapel, the animator, graphic novelist, and videogame creator who has often hired one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Terry Scott Taylor, to write the music for projects of his like the Nickelodeon TV show Catscratch.
Mattingly mentions that Regency Enterprises, a production outfit affiliated with 20th Century Fox, has bought the film rights to TenNapel’s graphic novel Creature Tech, but that happened five years ago and it sounds like not much has happened yet:
Part of the challenge, admitted TenNapel, is capturing his blend of fantasy and Christian faith. Some critics wish he would quit weaving sin, redemption, politics and science into his plots. Then there are church people who think he should be drawing evangelistic, “Christian comics” and avoiding his occasional blasts of sci-fi potty humor.
5. Ecumenical News International reports that recent Sundance entry Ostrov won some awards in its native Russia this week:
A feature film about repentance – as embodied by a Russian Orthodox monk tormented by his wartime past – has swept top prizes at Russia’s main film awards ceremony. “Ostrov,” or “Island,” took six Zolotoi Oryol, or Golden Eagle awards, including best film, director and actor at a ceremony on 27 January.
The film stars Pyotr Mamonov, a Soviet-era underground rock star who has become a devout Orthodox believer and now lives in an isolated village. It was directed by Pavel Lungin, previously most famous for “Taxi Blues”, a perestroika-era film also starring Mamonov, and “Tycoon: A New Russian,” a fictionalised take on the rise of Boris Berezovsky, a controversial magnate now living in British exile.
In his acceptance speech, compared by some Russian media to a sermon, Mamonov condemned his own popularity as idolatry and called on Russian women to stop having abortions. . . .
I have not yet seen this film, but the story behind it reminds me of Ushpizin (2005), the Israeli film about devout Orthodox Jews which starred a former actor who had, himself, become a devout Orthodox Jew. Both films seem to exist in a sort of tense meeting place between the former and current lives of their stars.
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