Only two weeks left until the public premiere of Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Here’s the blurb (and ticket-buying info):

As a young hippie, Lonnie Frisbee was fully immersed in the 1960′s counterculture scene when he claimed to encounter God while on an acid trip. This event so transformed him, Lonnie became a roaming Christian evangelist — something of a John the Baptist for Southern California. His strength of conviction compelled thousands to make a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. In addition to his caring influence, what’s most fascinating is Lonnie’s call to the ministry came while he was deeply involved in the Laguna Beach homosexual scene. Eventually dying of AIDS in 1993, the men whom he helped establish treated him with contempt and Lonnie has been written out of history.

There’s a link to an article of mine at that earlier blog post from a month or so back. The Q&A; I promised is still forthcoming; my editor wants to run it closer to the film’s premiere.

This weekend, Disney’s The Pacifier passed the $100 million mark in domestic box-office receipts. Why do I make note of this? Because I have not yet seen the film. And it has been several years since I last let a movie get this popular without seeing it for myself. So … just on a whim, I decided to check the lists for each year going back to 1994, when I first began to see movies for free as a student newspaper editor, to see what the most popular movies I did not see happened to be. Here is what I found:

2004 (25th) $95.2m The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (G)
2003 (35th) $82.6m Freddy Vs. Jason (R)
2002 (27th) $93.4m Two Weeks Notice (PG-13)
2001 (60th) $40.3m Heartbreakers (PG-13)
2000 (58th) $43.8m Pokemon: The Movie 2000 (G)
1999 (25th) $85.7m Pokemon: The First Movie (G)
1998 (22th) $87.2m Everest (IMAX)
1997 (13th) $105.3m George of the Jungle (PG)
1996 (6th) $136.2m 101 Dalmatians (G)
1995 (5th) $108.4m Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (PG-13)
1994 (4th) $144.8m The Santa Clause (PG)

I also have never seen The First Wives Club (1996, 11th, $105.5m) or Dumb and Dumber (1994, 6th, $127.2m) or Maverick (1994, 12th, $101.6m), and I didn’t see Casper (1995, 8th, $100.3m) or The Flintstones (1994, 5th, $130.5m) until video.

An interesting pattern emerges here, I think. I allowed a number of blockbusters to slip through my fingers while I was a student newspaper editor (’94-’97), partly because I was so happy to discover all sorts of other, artier films; and partly because I was so busy; and partly because a lot of the films in question just looked so dumb (note the early Jim Carrey films and the live-action cartoons). Then, once school came to an end and I floundered about looking for work, I took advantage of my free time to check out more of the bigger films and to pitch articles on them (’97-’99). Then, around the time I moved downtown, I had apparently proved myself as a freelancer enough to get a pass to one of the major Canadian theatre chains, and suddenly I could see any movie for free at any time — and so I made a point of seeing anything remotely big, whether at press screenings or after the films had opened (’99-’01). But then the theatre chain changed its policy (mere freelancers don’t qualify for the passes any more, apparently) and I began to allow more big films to slip through my fingers (’02-now), to the point where the top-grossing films I have not yet seen from the past two years are, once again, live-action Disney films (The Princess Diaries 2, The Pacifier).

Let’s see if I’ve figured out how to capture DVD images yet … aha, it works!

I recently watched the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments again for one of my various writing assignments. This was the first time I had watched the film itself in a while (I had to review the special edition DVD with the commentary track about a year ago, but I can’t remember when I last watched it with the regular audio track), and it was amusing to see this film so soon after getting married — especially scenes like the one where Princess Nefertiri (the very vampy Anne Baxter) holds up a very transparent little slip of a dress and says, “And this … is for my wedding night…” I think I am watching scenes like this a little differently nowadays than when I watched them 20 or even 2 years ago.

I have also been reminded, on a few occasions, of how influential Anne Baxter’s breasts were on my nascent adolescent sexual sensibility. IIRC, Cecil B. DeMille wanted Audrey Hepburn for the role at first but passed her over because she didn’t have the figure he wanted (it’s kind of like how he hired Charlton Heston because his nose resembled that of the nose on Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of Moses — DeMille was more interested in statuary than in thespian skill). Well, Baxter’s figure is certainly nice. But there’s also something about the very loose, filmy, translucent cloth DeMille drapes so tightly around her bosom — especially in, say, the scene above, where she plays a board game with Pharaoh Sethi, and then has a highly antagonistic and sexually charged conversation with Rameses — that, um, I remember finding very appealing. And still do, to be quite honest.

And Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who plays Sethi, is an absolute delight in every single scene in which he appears. I still laugh out loud whenever I hear him say to the priest, “You don’t look any leaner!” Or when he does that double take after Baxter says, “And such a beautiful enemy!” His performance is simply wonderful.

I know, I know, these aspects of the film are not as spiritually or historically or politically enlightening as the stuff that I talk about in my articles on these films. But that’s why we have blogs! And I know some people hate this film because it’s camp. But dudes, that’s one of the film’s best features!

Saving Private Ryan is another one of those films that I have always had mixed feelings about. As a Mennonite who was attending an Anglican church at the time, I didn’t know what to make of the relationship between church and state, or the church’s complicity in state-sanctioned violence, through stained-glass war memorials and so on — and I still don’t know what to make of these things, really. That ambivalence has spilled over into my reactions to a film that is basically pro-war and anti-war in roughly equal measure.

My first review of the film was generally appreciative, apart from some passing remark about the film’s “grudging, and caricatured, affirmation of Christianity” in which the gospel is turned into “a domesticated civil religion, where faith is fine so long as it follows the flag.” It is interesting to see that I placed this film on a continuum between the Crucifixion and Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, considering some of the remarks I have made more recently about The Passion of the Christ (e.g. here). And I still stand by my Philip Yancey-ish take on the film as a parable that messes with our common-sense mathematics (sacrifice an entire platoon to save one man? abandon ninety-nine sheep to save just one?).

But not long afterwards, I wrote a more critical article for The Crossing, a zine edited by Jeff Overstreet, in which I zeroed in on the “sentimentality” that is typical of Spielberg’s films, and how, in films like this and Amistad, “he uses it to sanctify violence.”

I finally brought my pro and con feelings about the film together in yet another article, this time for Christianity Today, in which I looked at the film alongside the other two WW2-themed films (Life Is Beautiful, The Thin Red Line) that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar that year, and I threw in a paragraph or two about older WW2 films, too. Truth be told, I think I may have been trying to say too much in too tight a space, but oh well.

More recently, I addressed certain aspects of Saving Private Ryan in a paper that I presented at a meeting of historians in Seattle in January, in which I contextualized the increasing violence of Jesus films by putting it alongside the increasing violence of war movies; an excerpt from that paper is here.

I bring that all up now because Mark Steyn has just re-posted his own review of Saving Private Ryan for the Spectator from way back when, and he offers an angle on the film that I don’t think I’ve encountered before — and I do like contrarian reviews when they are well-argued. I don’t know that it will unseat Jonathan Rosenbaum‘s piece for the Chicago Reader as my favorite truly critical review of the film — though they do share a certain cynicism about the aimlessness of Spielberg’s motives and mixed messages — but I will be holding onto it for a while.

I will say, though, that I agree with this particular point of Steyn’s:

So much has been written about the unprecedented ‘realism’ of this film’s war scenes that the equally unprecedented unrealism of its thinking has passed virtually unnoticed. You’ve probably seen a zillion articles about the film’s prologue — a recreation of D-Day which lasts almost as long and doubtless cost a lot more — so I’ll say only this: yes, it’s impressive; yes, every shot of blood and tissue and body parts is underlined by adroit effects; yes, every moment is a testament to Spielberg’s command of cinematic technique; but that’s the problem — you react to it as technique, as showmanship. There’s one perfect shot after another: the silence underwater, with its dangerous illusion of respite; the pitterpatter of rain on leaves gradually blurring into rifle fire. The whole thing is oddly pointless: you’re not engaged by the predicament of the troops because you’re so busy admiring the great film-maker behind them. A film cannot really be ‘authentic’ if all you notice is the authenticity.

As I wrote in the paper that I presented three months ago:

At a certain point, though, one begins to wonder if the depiction of “realistic” violence has become an end in itself, and one has to wonder what is gained by dwelling on it in such riveting, up-close detail. Every viewer will have his or her own response to a film, but for me, the most horrifying moment in Saving Private Ryan was one of the least reliant on blood and gore; the scene that brought home the horror of death, the sheer wrongness of it, was the scene in which a Jewish-American soldier — a well-rounded character that we have had time to come to know and like — is about to be knifed by a Nazi soldier, and he suddenly, desperately realizes that this is the spontaneous and unanticipated moment in which his life will be snuffed out. By comparison, the opening D-Day sequence is little more than an impressive flurry of special effects.

In my more provocative moments, I have told people that I went back to see the film a second time for the “eye candy” of the D-Day sequence — it may be sour candy, but candy it is, and as Steyn puts it, I went back and saw the film again just to bask in the technique one more time. However, I have also told people that the scene of Adam Goldberg’s death was just as painful and harrowing to watch the second time as it was the first — and that was a scene in which the death mattered because we were not just watching a bunch of squib-covered extras, but we were, for all intents and purposes, watching an actual person die.

Here’s a random thought, spurred by that Crusades movie.

On the flight to L.A., I brought with me a copy of the book by that author who is suing the makers of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. There are only ten pages scattered throughout the book that refer to Balian, the character played by Orlando Bloom, and it seems to me that author James Reston Jr. is basically just repeating what has long been available in the medieval sources, but Reston apparently thinks this film owes enough to these ten pages that it’s worth a legal battle on his part.

Well, whatever. The thing that strikes me is how Reston alludes to the fact that the Crusaders were motivated by Bible passages such as Joshua 23:10 (“One man of you shall chase a thousand: for the Lord your God, He it is that fighteth for you, as He hath promised you”). Never mind that Joshua was addressing the Hebrews over 2,000 years prior to the Crusades; this passage was apparently interpreted as a promise that God had made to the Templars.

Thing is, I find myself remembering how, when I was a boy, I used to wonder about all the Israelites who must have died in battle, all those times that they were granted miraculous victories here or there. I was a huge Star Wars fan, as most preteen boys were at that time, and I vividly remember being struck by the images of X-wing pilots being showered with sparks in their cockpits just before their fighters exploded, and I remember wondering what it would be like to die in a battle and never know whether it had been worth it. Y’know, Luke’s best friend Biggs died in Episode IV, but did he ever know that his sacrifice had made the ultimate defeat of the Empire in Episode VI possible? Heck, did he ever find out whether Luke succeeded in destroying the Death Star?

So, anyway, with Star Wars on my brain, I turned to the Bible and read the stories of Israelites winning battles here and there, and it didn’t seem plausible to me that they had won these battles without suffering any casualties. So, y’know, whenever I would read about God granting victory here or there, I often wondered what the individual soldiers or their families made of all that. I often wondered what it would be like to be one of those bit players who never came close to seeing the whole narrative.

Like I say, just a random thought. Though it does kind of tie in to one of the key themes of Kingdom of Heaven, which is whether God is willing things behind the scenes even though some of the players don’t know whether to believe in him.

Looks like I missed a day for the first time since starting this blog just over three weeks ago! Ah well, I was in Los Angeles and busy with the junket for Kingdom of Heaven, which comes out in four weeks. The hotel was teeming with shields, banners and other medieval decorations, and an early-music group serenaded us journalists during the cocktail party after the screening, and Orlando Bloom brought his dog “Siddy” to the roundtable interview, so I had two reasons for wishing my wife (a dog-loving, SCA-inclined kind of gal) had been there. (Well, three, if we count the fact that I had a bed to myself for the first time since I got married.) It’s a bit early to post my thoughts on the film itself right now, but I’ll have a review and some other items up on various websites by the time it comes out May 6. In the meantime, I also hope to post my thoughts here about the handful of thematically related films I watched prior to visiting L.A. Stay tuned!

Jeff Overstreet beat me to it, but yeah, like he says:

Doesn’t it take some of the fun out of OPENING DAY to know that the novelization of Star Wars, Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith is already available at your local bookstore?

Jeff asks rhetorically whether the Academy will honour the climax of Lucas’s trilogy after snubbing the first two films, the same way they honoured the climax of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings after doing the same to his first two films. Except the parallel there isn’t all that exact, really. The Academy did, in fact, honour Jackson’s first two films with Oscars for cinematography, music, makeup, sound editing and — of course — visual effects, before they finally decided to bestow even more awards on the third film. And then there were all the other nominations that never turned into actual awards, such as the acting nod for Sir Ian McKellen.

In contrast, The Phantom Menace (1999) and Attack of the Clones (2002) had only four nominations between them, all of which were in the sound or visual effects departments, and they lost three of those to The Matrix (1999) — gosh it feels so long since that film was considered the cutting-edge mythology of a new generation, doesn’t it? — while the other one went to The Two Towers (2002). (FWIW, I have always been disappointed that the Matrix sequels, which came out the same year as The Return of the King, were never even eligible for the visual effects awards; I was hoping to see a showdown between the two trilogies that had beat George Lucas at his own game, but alas, it was not to be.)

Of course, with the Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies out of the way, and with the Spider-Man trilogy on hiatus (the second film won the Oscar for visual effects in 2004), the way could be clear for Revenge of the Sith to claim the prize that has eluded Lucas’s earlier prequels. But it would be very interesting indeed if Lucas were snubbed yet again.

Incidentally, I saw the Sith trailer on the big screen for the first time on Monday, and didn’t like the look of it. As a download, it’s fine, but on the big screen, you can really, really tell that it was shot on video — and call me a film snob, but I think the video look sucks. I actually have nothing against digital video when it’s done right — Robert LePage’s The Far Side of the Moon is an especially bee-yoo-tee-ful example of what can be done in this regard — but these Star Wars prequels just don’t look right. Maybe it’s just another sign of how they suffer from over-tweaking.

Oh, and check out this Variety story on how certain Star Wars fans are insisting on lining up outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre even though Sith appears to be the first of the six Star Wars films that will be opening at some other theatre. The emperor has moved his capitol to Constantinople, and the true believers still insist that Rome is the centre of the universe. It is especially interesting how some fans “have discovered that standing in a ‘Star Wars’ line is actually more important than seeing a ‘Star Wars’ film.” There’s some comment to be made here about the parallels between cult followings and certain religious trends, but I haven’t got the time to come up with something appropriately clever.

I’ve got to catch a plane in a couple hours, but I just have to post a link to this press release for a documentary called The Big V, which will be airing on Vision TV in Canada on Wednesday, May 18. It’s about virginity, and I was brought in as the “pop culture expert” who, if everything was edited together the way I was told it would be, is revealed at the end to be a virgin himself.

The producers first contacted me after they saw an article I wrote on 40 Days and 40 Nights, Crossroads and other sex- and virginity-themed films in the Vancouver Sun three years ago (it was based in part on an article I wrote on page 7 of The Ubyssey‘s annual sex issue ten years ago, and it morphed into this article for Books & Culture); that was before my wife and I had even heard of each other. And they filmed my interview in July of last year; that was before my wife and I were officially engaged.

So, I am curious to see how my oh-so-inexperienced statements about sex and celibacy have been incorporated into this film. All I can say is I’m glad they didn’t broadcast this until after the wedding, which took place almost two months ago; I would have hated it if anything I had said in this film had been spliced into any of the slideshows, etc.!

Woo-hoo! Three classic films by one of my favorite documentarians are coming to DVD later this summer. MGM/UA is releasing a boxed set of Errol Morris’s first three films: 1978′s Gates of Heaven (one of Roger Ebert’s all-time top ten); 1981′s Vernon, Florida; and 1988′s The Thin Blue Line (one of my own all-time top ten).

One question Morris fans may ask is, will Les Blank’s short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) be included as an extra on the Gates of Heaven DVD? The story goes that Herzog swore he would eat his own shoe if Morris ever got around to finishing his film, so when Morris did, Herzog did. Blank’s film even includes some out-takes from the Gates of Heaven interviews that are not in the film itself, IIRC.

Alas, the set will not include 1991′s A Brief History of Time, the Stephen Hawking biography and meditation on cosmology which remains unavailable on DVD; there is something wrong with the world when a high-profile, much-heralded film like that can remain unreleased while 1991′s The Dark Wind, Morris’s only fictional film and an obscure project that was taken out of his hands, has been available for some time.

Morris’s other, later feature films — 1997′s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (my review), 1999′s Mr. Death (my article) and 2003′s The Fog of War — all came out after the invention of the DVD, so they have all been available in that format from the get-go.

FWIW, I interviewed Morris over the phone back when Fast, Cheap came out — you can read that interview here.

ADDENDUM: I don’t watch TV, so this had not even occurred to me, but apparently MGM/UA is also going to release the complete set of Errol Morris’s First Person series on July 26, the same day as his boxed set. Thanks to M. Dale for reminding me of that.

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 $4,287,895 — N.AM $30,288,870 — 14.2%
Sin City — CDN $2,793,385 — N.AM $29,120,273 — 9.6%
Hitch — CDN $16,463,045 — N.AM $171,266,743 — 9.6%
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous — CDN $2,729,762 — N.AM $31,127,190 — 8.8%
Robots — CDN $8,827,551 — N.AM $104,420,872 — 8.5%
Guess Who — CDN $3,286,275 — N.AM $41,040,531 — 8.0%
The Ring Two — CDN $5,318,426 — N.AM $68,046,127 — 7.8%
The Pacifier — CDN $7,336,816 — N.AM $96,117,665 — 7.6%
The Upside of Anger — CDN $496,425 — N.AM $8,603,771 — 5.8%
Beauty Shop — CDN $300,340 — N.AM $16,647,604 — 1.8%

A couple of discrepancies: Hostage was #7 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Ice Princess was #10 on the North American chart. Note also that Beauty Shop was #2 in “North America” but #10 in Canada — and its 1.8% rate is the lowest I have seen in the nine months or so that I’ve been following this stuff, with the possible exception of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which never made the Canadian top ten list at all.