Last summer, Mark Burnett, producer of the upcoming mini-series The Bible, made a surprisingly candid remark at an event called the Family Entertainment and Faith-Based Summit. Speaking of his passion for the subject matter and emphasizing that The Bible was more to him than just another TV project (his other shows include Survivor and Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?), he said: “I couldn’t give a shit about the business model. This was about love and faith.” Needless to... Read more
1. Brett Ratner isn’t the only director working on a movie about Hercules. Renny Harlin, whose credits include Die Hard 2 (1990) and Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), plans to start shooting Hercules 3D three months from now, and to release the film in March 2014 — or about five months before Ratner’s film. Harlin says his film will be “not a comic book, cartoony fantasy thing. It’s closer to Gladiator than flying horses.” Interestingly, Ratner himself was once attached to... Read more
Errol Morris — the Oscar-winning documentarian whose first film Gates of Heaven (1978) made Roger Ebert’s all-time top-ten list, and whose later films The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) rank among my own all-time favorites — turned 65 yesterday. So, to mark the occasion, I have re-posted all the articles I’ve written on his films over the last decade and a half. These include my phone interview with Morris in November 1997, my... Read more
Two weeks ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger scored one of the worst opening weekends of his career, as The Last Stand — the first film to star him in the lead since he became Governor of California a decade ago — opened to a mere $6.3 million. It was the lowest opening for any of his films since 1986, when Raw Deal opened to $5.4 million on a bit more than half the screens that The Last Stand had. Then, this past... Read more
This post is a little late, but my life has been so busy this past week — hosting one birthday party, planning another, dealing with school cancellations and the like, etc. — that I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write, until now. Anyway. A week and a half ago, I had the great privilege of speaking at the Reel Religion Film Festival hosted by Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. I was one of two guests at... Read more
For just over a month now, the History Channel has been releasing a series of clips and trailers to promote their mini-series The Bible, which premieres March 3. The promotional campaign started, appropriately enough for mid-December, with a couple of Christmas-themed ads, and it has since moved on to clips and images from other parts of the Good Book. Today my fellow Patheos blogger Rebecca Cusey posted one of the first images of Samson, who is played by British actor... Read more
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the Jerusalem Film Fund, which supports films and TV shows that take place within Israel’s capital city, has given some money to an animated film called Being Solomon, which is described as “a Hungarian-British-Israeli production that imagines the biblical King Solomon joining forces with the Queen of Sheba and an Arab queen, Na’ama, to fight the king of demons, who is seeking to take over their kingdoms.” (more…) Read more
Horror filmmakers such as Marcus Nispel and Alexandre Aja have talked in the past about making movies in which someone clones Jesus from the DNA in his blood, but as far as I can tell, those projects never got off the ground. Writer-director Leone Marucci, on the other hand, has a film on this very topic coming out next month, starring Christopher Walken, Christian Slater, Larry King and that girl who played Pocahontas in The New World. The film in... Read more
I may have written my post on possible upcoming Greco-Roman movies too soon. Today, MGM (the studio that is currently pondering a remake of Ben-Hur) and Paramount (the studio that is currently making Noah — which admittedly has nothing to do with Greece or Rome, but it does take place within a similar sort of ancient mythic context) announced that their adaptation of Steve Moore’s Hercules comics will come out next year. The film, which has been in development for... Read more
The big news yesterday was that MGM is thinking of making yet another film version of Ben-Hur — and that was just one week after it was reported that Brad Pitt was thinking of starring in a movie called Pontius Pilate. But there have been a few other reports over the last few days about films in development with a Greco-Roman theme. First, last Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter said Ang Lee, the Oscar-winning director of Brokeback Mountain and Life of... Read more
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