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... Read more
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... Read more
From creation to Joshua, how did The History Channel do portraying the Good Book? Read more
Cinephilia & Beyond has found what it claims is Harrison Ford’s copy of the original shooting script for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), complete with Ford’s hand-written notes. The site has posted only a few pages from the script so far, but the bits they have revealed are certainly interesting. One page, for example, includes some extra dialogue regarding the fate of Abner Ravenwood, the former mentor to Indiana Jones and the father of Indy’s on-and-off girlfriend Marion Ravenwood.... Read more
If you haven’t seen the Oscar-nominated animated short Adam and Dog yet, you really should. It’s a beautiful, inspired and, in its own way, challenging take on the story of the Garden of Eden, as seen from the limited — but still keenly felt — perspective of the world’s first domesticated canine. I loved it from the moment it was first posted online two weeks ago, and I saw it again a couple days later, this time on the big... Read more
British filmmaker Mike Leigh turns 70 today. To mark the occasion, I have re-posted all of my articles on him and his films, starting with a phone interview that I did with him for the UBC student newspaper back in 1996. The occasion for that interview was the release of Secrets & Lies, which I quickly came to regard as my favorite film of the 1990s. Alas, the interview itself did not go as well as I might have hoped,... Read more
The first daytime press screening I can remember attending took place at the Varsity Theatre in February 1994. It was for a British film called The Summer House — one of Lena Headey’s earliest starring roles — and the theatre in question was, at that time, run by a local outfit called Festival Cinemas. A few years later, one of my first writing gigs, outside of the campus newspapers, was a series of articles that ran in Festival Magazine, one... Read more
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Arts & Faith community — which I’ve been a member of since before the A&F website was created ten years ago — has released a list of the Top 25 Films on Marriage. This is the third Top 25 list that the A&F community has produced in the last few years, as a supplement to our occasional Top 100 films-of-all-time lists — but it is the first Top 25 that I myself took... Read more
No real news here, per se. We still don’t know who will play the Antichrist — or, come to that, whether the Antichrist will even appear in this reboot. (See Batman Begins, Casino Royale and The Amazing Spider-Man for examples of how franchise reboots sometimes put off re-introducing certain key characters until they get their own sequels.) But, thanks to ComingSoon.net, we do have a poster that shows Nicolas Cage standing next to a downed airplane (not the one flown... Read more
I just came across a few more videos from The Bible, the mini-series that premieres on the History Channel next month. In one, the actress who plays Samson’s mother describes her character as “a woman who’s been given a gift from God of a very special child who’s predestined to do very special things, and I guess that’s a little connection to another story that we all know very well.” She goes on to say, “I guess I found it... Read more
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