Warning: There be comic-book spoilers here. IGN.com has posted the newest video journal for Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons — and around the 1:49 mark, there is a brief glimpse of a theatre that is showing The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). This detail happens to come from the graphic novel itself, but I had forgotten it was in there, so my initial reaction to this part of the video... Read more

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. Death Race — CDN $3,920,000 — N.AM $29,909,125 — 13.1%Mamma Mia! — CDN $17,260,000 — N.AM $136,440,050 — 12.7%Tropic Thunder — CDN $10,160,000 — N.AM $96,541,629 — 10.5%Bangkok Dangerous — CDN $802,454 — N.AM $7,783,266 — 10.3%The House Bunny — CDN $3,730,000 — N.AM $36,611,667 — 10.2%Pineapple Express — CDN... Read more

Jim Hill says Disney is thinking of re-making The Black Hole (1979) — but first, to test the waters, they’re thinking of releasing a brand new graphic-novel adaptation of the original film. Hill goes on to suggest that what comic-book fans might really want is not a new graphic novel, but a collection of the Sunday strips that were drawn back then by comic-book legend Jack Kirby, whose serialization of The Black Hole was apparently the only movie adaptation of... Read more

Barry Lyndon (1975; my comments) is easily one of Stanley Kubrick‘s most under-rated films — it was even excluded from that recent DVD boxed set which included all of Kubrick’s other films from the past four decades — so it’s always nice to come across a new appreciation of the film, especially one that is written by someone who has just seen it for the first time. The most recent example that I’ve come across is this post by J.... Read more

Six months ago, I mentioned that Will Smith was hoping to star in a movie about Taharqa, one of the last Pharaohs of the 25th Dynasty, which is also known as the Nubian Dynasty because its members were of Ethiopian descent and were not quite native Egyptians. (Other foreigners who ruled as Pharaohs at one point or another include the apparently Semitic Hyksos, of the 15th Dynasty, and the Greeks who ruled Egypt for three centuries, from the conquest of... Read more

The Vancouver International Film Festival, which takes place this year between September 25 and October 10, posted its online film guide today, and suffice it to say that I have only begun to figure out which films I will make a point of seeing and when. (Matters are complicated by the fact that I do not yet know which films I will be able to see before the festival begins.) However, since I am a Bible-movie buff, I will note... Read more

Time for some news about movies based in reality, sort of. 1. Real-life spouses Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly will play Charles Darwin and his wife Emma in Creation, a film based on Randal Keynes’ book Annie’s Box. (Keynes is the great-great-grandson of the Darwins, and he is also the father of Skandar, who plays Edmund in the Narnia movies.) The film will portray Charles as “a man torn between his love for his deeply religious wife and his own... Read more

The newest issue of BC Christian News is now online, and with it, my film column, which looks at the documentary Man on Wire and includes brief notes on Billy: The Early Years, W, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Kings. Read more

Remember how I said Bangkok Dangerous was not going to be screened for the media? Well, in a sense, it was, but in a sense, it wasn’t. I and other critics were eventually invited to a promotional screening last night, which was nice, but as I have mentioned here before, screenings that take place the night before the release date “don’t count” as proper press screenings, because they take place too late for the newspaper critics to file their reviews... Read more

Just a few items to help pass the time as we wait for the future. 1. Denzel Washington is going to star in The Book of Eli, a “post-apocalyptic drama” that “focuses on the not-so-distant future where America is a wasteland and a lone warrior . . . fights to bring society the knowledge that is key to its redemption.” The film will be directed by Albert and Allen Hughes, whose last big-screen project was the Jack the Ripper comic-book... Read more