Longtime readers of this blog might remember Kingdom Come, a movie about the life of Jesus that was going to be filmed in New Zealand nearly four years ago. Sets were built, extras were hired, and then… suddenly… everything was put on hold. Little bits of news have popped up since then — my friend Matt Page noted a few at his Bible Films Blog in 2009 and 2010 — but for the most part, the project appeared to be... Read more
My interview with Kevin Miller, the writer-director of the documentary Hellbound? (and a fellow former panelist on the Kindlings Muse Canada West podcasts), is now up at The Georgia Straight. The film opened in various American cities a few weeks ago, but is only making its Canadian debut this weekend, in the Vancouver area. It will move east to other Canadian cities in the weeks to come. I was given a fairly tight word count, so I never figured out... Read more
Kevin Miller is no stranger to controversy. The Abbotsford-based writer, who has worked on a number of documentaries (as well as an independent feature or two), butted heads with atheists and evolutionary scientists four years ago as one of the cowriters of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a locally produced film starring Ben Stein that advocated a form of creationism known as “intelligent design”. Expelled was celebrated by many figures on the right, but some of Miller’s subsequent films have fallen... Read more
Three months ago, the producers behind Mary Mother of Christ — a sort of “prequel” to The Passion of the Christ co-written by that film’s Benedict Fitzgerald and my fellow Patheos Movies blogger Barbara Nicolosi — said they were thinking of casting “one of England’s most famous Academy Award winners” as King Herod. At the time, I noted that there are currently nine actors alive who are both (a) British and (b) Academy Award winners — and although I didn’t... Read more
That line was originally spoken by Indiana Jones as he went looking for the Ark of the Covenant. But I’m quoting it now because of a very different kind of Ark, namely Noah’s Ark. Today, Matthew Libatique, the cinematographer on Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming Noah, tweeted the picture below, with a caption that said “Pre lighting on the holiest day of the year” — a reference to the fact that today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on the Jewish... Read more
We can’t let more than a few weeks go by here without posting something about Darren Aronosky’s Noah, so here’s a link to some photos from the New York set that were posted at On Location Vacations a couple weeks ago. In these pictures, you can see, among other things, co-stars Logan Lerman (who plays Noah’s son Ham) and Madison Davenport (who plays Ham’s wife Na’el) dressed in somewhat raggedy clothes and covered in a thin layer of dirt. Even... Read more
Two months ago, I noted that there were no less than four movies in development that dealt in some way with the birth of Jesus — and, at the time, it looked like the one that would get made first was Black Nativity. It was based on a popular musical, and it had actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett and Jennifer Hudson lined up for a story about a young black teen who spends Christmas with his grandparents, one... Read more
Nobody just releases trailers for movies any more; now, thanks to the Twilight franchise (and others, perhaps), we’re starting to see trailers for trailers — and the latest trailer-for-a-trailer to hit the interwebs is this 44-second clip from Steven Spielberg’s film about Abraham Lincoln. There’s not a whole lot to comment on here, but I did think this would be as good a time as any to re-post an article I wrote for Books & Culture back in 1998 on... Read more
Incidentally, speaking of Books & Culture articles about 30-plus-year-old franchises whose slide towards mediocrity was capped recently by a film that owed a little too much to Chariots of the Gods, I recently wrote another article for B&C — my first since stay-at-home daddyhood took over my life three years ago! — on Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to the Alien movies. Most of the article is behind a paywall right now, but if you don’t already subscribe to B&C, you... Read more
The Indiana Jones tetralogy comes out on Blu-Ray in a couple weeks, and to mark the occasion, an IMAX-sized version of Raiders of the Lost Ark is coming to certain cities this weekend. My own city, alas, is not one of them, but I figured this would be as good a time as any to re-post the article that I wrote on the Indiana Jones franchise for Books & Culture some four years ago — and, in this version of... Read more
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