Time for a few quick updates. 1. Jim Sheridan — the Irish director of My Left Foot (1989), In the Name of the Father (1993), In America (2002) and the upcoming remake of Susanne Bier’s Brothers (2004) — is looking at another possible remake: a big-screen adaptation of I, Claudius, the Robert Graves novel that was previously turned into a famous BBC mini-series in 1976. Josef von Sternberg also tried to make a big-screen version of this story starring Charles... Read more

One more note of a politics-meets-pop-culture nature, if I may. Roger Ebert did some snooping around to see what the favorite films of Joe Biden, John McCain, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin might be — and while he couldn’t find anything for either of the vice-presidential nominees, he did find some interesting stuff on the presidential ones. For McCain, Ebert found this exchange at Entertainment Weekly: We read somewhere that Viva Zapata! is your favorite movie of all time…Elia Kazan... Read more

The always interesting Camille Paglia wrote an article a couple days ago on Sarah Palin and the “frontier feminism” she embodies, and along the way, Paglia makes an historical point that I don’t recall ever hearing before: The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War — long before the... Read more

Studio Briefing says Tyler Perry‘s The Family That Preys “was not screened for critics“, but if that’s the case, how was The Screengrab able to post a review of a “screener” it received two days ago? And while Variety didn’t post its own review until a few hours after the film opened today — something they normally do when they haven’t had a chance to even see the film until opening day — this particular review was apparently based on... Read more

Christianity Today posted an article today on Bob Muzikowski, a Little League coach who works with kids from the projects in Chicago. At the bottom of that article, they link to an article that I wrote for BC Christian News seven years ago, comparing and contrasting Muzikowski’s book Safe at Home with the Keanu Reeves movie Hardball (2001), which was very, very loosely based on the league that Muzikowski co-founded. Read more

It’s been a slow week, and I’ve been getting some work done, so I haven’t blogged a whole lot lately. But in the meantime, I have also finally gotten around to watching High School Musical and its sequel — mainly because the third film is coming to theatres next month, so although I don’t watch all that much TV, I might need to familiarize myself with this franchise anyway — and two points come to mind that might be worth... Read more

Three years ago, I wrote a brief note about a fun, obscure little movie called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1981). The film starred Diane Lane and Laura Dern, then in their teens, as girl-punk rockers who tour with an all-male band that consists of Ray Winstone, then in his mid-20s, as well as three former members of the Sex Pistols and The Clash. Even better, the film was shot in Vancouver well before this city became the filmmaking... Read more

I don’t plan to make a habit of buying Disney sequels, but the kids like The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) so much, and I have fond enough memories of The Tigger Movie (2000) and Piglet’s Big Movie (2003), both of which I saw on the big screen, that I decided to buy a boxed set that includes both of these sequels as well as Pooh’s Heffalump Movie (2005), which I had not yet seen. And what do... Read more

With two months and five days to go until it opens, the new trailer for Quantum of Solace was released at Yahoo! Movies today: Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly. Coincidentally, the wife and I watched Casino Royale (2006) a few nights ago. It was the first time I had seen the film in over a year, and in the interim I happened to watch almost all of the previous James Bond films on DVD, so... Read more

Religulous had its festival premiere in Toronto the other day, so a few new reviews and interviews have popped up. Karina Longworth, SpoutBlog: Hopeful that [Bill Maher’s] feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion... Read more