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 $4,693,762 — N.AM $32,219,000 — 14.6%Sin City — CDN $5,687,893 — N.AM $50,723,000 — 11.2%Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous — CDN $3,338,357 — N.AM $37,473,000 — 8.9%Robots — CDN $9,358,431 — N.AM $111,038,000 — 8.4%Guess Who — CDN $4,202,314 — N.AM $51,103,000 — 8.2%Sahara — CDN... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more

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... Read more