Three movies you won’t see on an airplane (or starship) this year

March 25, 2013 By 1 Comment

Have you started noticing any trends in the movies coming out this spring and summer?

Consider the terrorist attacks (or worse) that hit London in the trailers for G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Star Trek into Darkness. Consider the quasi-military attacks on Washington D.C. in Olympus Has Fallen and the upcoming White House Down.

And now, thanks to a couple of recently released trailers, we have another recurring motif: holes being ripped in the sides of airplanes (or starships), and passengers flying out those holes to their (presumed) deaths.

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Could Moses have a cameo in the next Bible episode?

March 23, 2013 By 2 Comments

A thought suddenly occurred to me: If Jesus, a New Testament figure, can make two appearances, however obscured, in the Old Testament section of The Bible, is it possible that the cross-overs might go the other way? Could any Old Testament figures have a cameo or two in the New Testament section of the mini-series, which resumes this Sunday night?

It would be very easy to do this: All the mini-series would have to do is include the Transfiguration as part of its depiction of the life-story of Jesus. The Transfiguration, you may recall, is when three of Jesus’ closest apostles saw him talking to Moses and Elijah — and Moses has already played a significant role in this series.

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The Bible: third episode, first impressions

March 22, 2013 By 2 Comments

Three down, two to go! Here are my first impressions of the third episode of The Bible, which ended the Old Testament section of the mini-series and began the New Testament section.

Continuity between Bible stories, redux. For all my grumbling about the series to date, there is one thing about it that I have always appreciated, and that is the way it links the various Bible stories, whether by having characters in one story recall what their ancestors did in another, or by having the angels appear in multiple stories wearing the exact same clothes, etc. And the first half of this episode is seriously impressive on that level.

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An update on several recent/upcoming Noah’s Ark cartoons

March 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment

It can take a long time to make a film. Six years ago, an outfit called Unified Pictures announced that it was going to make a computer-animated film about Noah’s Ark, told from the point of view of the animals. One of the Unified executives even said he expected the film to be finished within two years.

Then, four years ago, the folks at Unified said they had struck a deal with a company called Rising India, which would allow the film to be finished by 2011.

And now, here we are in 2013, and the trades are reporting once again that things are starting to move on this film. But this time, the news is not about corporate deals, but involves actual animators: specifically, we are told that the film will be overseen by John Stevenson, director of Kung Fu Panda (2008), and Cameron Hood, an animator on several DreamWorks cartoons including The Prince of Egypt (1998) and How to Train Your Dragon (2010). So that bodes well, at least.

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The multiple appearances of Satan in The Bible

March 18, 2013 By 3 Comments

I fell asleep before I had a chance to watch the latest episode of The Bible last night, but when I woke up this morning, various entertainment news sites were buzzing with the news that some people think there may be a resemblance between the actor who plays Satan and the current president of the United States.

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Flashback: Reviews of yet another Bible TV series.

March 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Bible movies have been on my mind lately, for obvious reasons, ranging from the hit TV series The Bible (two episodes down, three to go!) to the recent news about certain rival Moses movies. Since this is a genre that I’ve been covering for almost 20 years, I’ve been thinking of re-posting some of the articles I’ve written about earlier Bible movies and TV shows.

And what better place to start than the Lux Vide series The Bible Collection? This 13-part series of TV movies — which, yes, started with Creation and ended with Revelation — was produced between 1993 and 2002, and I reviewed every single one of these films, in seven articles written between 1996 and 2004 as each film (or each boxed set of films) was released to home video in North America.

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He played Jesus, now he might play Moses.

March 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Yesterday I passed along the news that Exodus, Ridley Scott’s version of the life of Moses, was “gathering steam” at 20th Century Fox, even as Steven Spielberg had dropped out of directing another Moses movie over at Warner Brothers. Well, now comes word, via Deadline, that Fox and Scott are talking to Christian Bale — who landed one of his first acting gigs in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) before growing up to star in the Dark Knight trilogy (2005-2012) etc. — about playing Moses himself. This would not be Bale’s first biblical role; he previously played Jesus in the TV-movie Mary Mother of Jesus (1999), and he briefly considered taking the starring role in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah as well. Bale passed on that role in the end, and he might pass on this one too, but still, it’s another sign that the studios are very keen on making another big-screen movie about Moses — the first such live-action film in almost 60 years.

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The Bible: second episode, first impressions

March 15, 2013 By 6 Comments

Another week, another episode of the mini-series The Bible. These are my first impressions of the second episode.

The pacing, redux. The second episode is 86 minutes long, and the first six minutes consist of footage from the first episode, so that leaves only 80 minutes for the second episode to take us all the way from the spies in Jericho to the birth of King Solomon — a period that covers about two or three centuries.

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Spielberg out, Ang Lee in, for life-of-Moses movie?

March 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment

First Ang Lee won the Oscar for Best Director that many people thought Steven Spielberg would get last month; now there are rumours that Lee might direct the life-of-Moses movie that Spielberg has been attached to for over a year.

Deadline reports that Spielberg has decided not to direct Gods and Kings, the “epic-sized” Moses movie that Warner Brothers has been developing since at least 2010. Spielberg — who already alluded to the Moses story in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) before proposing that the first DreamWorks cartoon be The Prince of Egypt (1998) — was said to be “near commitment” to the project in January 2012, but apparently the deal was never finalized, and now never will be.

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Multiple movies about the Resurrection still in development

March 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Easter is on a lot of people’s minds right now — the Western churches celebrate it at the end of this month, while the Eastern churches, which are starting Lent next Monday, will celebrate Pascha, as we call it, on May 5 — so it’s not too surprising that the Hollywood Reporter posted a story last Friday noting that there at least four movies about the Resurrection of Jesus in the works. Two of them, however, have been in the works for so long that I actually blogged them years ago, and it’s open to question whether any of them will ever get made.

Take, for instance, The Resurrection, a project spearheaded by Left Behind co-author Tim LaHaye and written by Lionel Chetwynd, whose credits include Joseph (1995) and Moses (1995), two of the better movies in ‘The Bible Collection’.

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