The Hollywood Reporter says Casey Affleck, the Oscar-nominated younger brother of Ben, pitched an animated film called Aardvark Art’s Ark two years ago and is still developing it at Warner Brothers, though a new screenwriter has been brought in to do the rewrites while Affleck takes care of his busy acting career. The paper says the film concerns “a group of animals who are stranded when they are not chosen to go on Noah’s ark.” That brings the number of... Read more

My interview with Michael and Christine Swanson, the producer and writer-director respectively of All About You (2001) and All About Us (2007), is now up at CT Movies. Read more

CT Movies has an update on Billy: The Early Years, the Billy Graham biopic coming out in October, including a link to the film’s official website, which includes a trailer. Bits of it seem kind of over-the-top, and the photo below would seem to confirm suspicions that the film will give Charles Templeton, the evangelist-turned-agnostic played by Martin Landau, something of a non-historically happy ending. But we’ll see. I do get a kick out of the scenes of young Graham... Read more

Variety reports that John Boorman is preparing a movie about the Roman emperor Hadrian, who reigned AD 117 to 138 and is most famous now for building a fortified wall across the northern part of England. Boorman’s films have ranged anywhere from great to awful, so it’s impossible to say what will become of this particular project. But it’s a handy excuse to post the picture above, taken when I visited Hadrian’s Wall on August 3, 1994. Interestingly, Boorman tells... 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. Journey to the Center of the Earth — CDN $5,930,000 — N.AM $60,185,000 — 9.9%Mamma Mia! — CDN $5,920,000 — N.AM $62,714,000 — 9.4%Wanted — CDN $11,250,000 — N.AM $128,616,000 — 8.7%Hellboy II: The Golden Army — CDN $5,710,000 — N.AM $65,894,000 — 8.7%Get Smart — CDN $10,740,000 — N.AM... Read more

Several outlets, journalists and websites — including SpoutBlog, Entertainment Weekly, Nikki Finke, Anne Thompson, ComingSoon.net and the Associated Press — have covered the Terminator Salvation panel at Comic-Con in some detail by now. Among other things, we have learned that Warner Brothers is deliberately spreading misinformation about the film to keep spoiler hounds off the scent, and Kyle Reese will get to say the immortal line “Come with me if you want to live” to John Connor, and the filmmakers... Read more

Three years ago, I noted an interesting visual parallel between two scenes in William Wyler’s version of Ben-Hur (1959). In one, we see Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd linking arms as they share a drink, in the early part of the film when they are friends; in the other, we see their chariot wheels overlapping in a similar manner, in the later part of the film when they are enemies: Two days ago, I finally got around to seeing Anthony... Read more

Following yesterday’s official announcement that Darren Aronofsky will direct the “reinvention” of the RoboCop franchise, a couple extra thoughts occurred to me. One. For years now, I have taken a perverse pride in being able to say that “I have two X-rated movies in my DVD collection.” It’s only half-true, technically speaking. Maybe even only a quarter-true. But one of the films in question is RoboCop (1987; my comments), the director’s cut of which (first released on Criterion, now available... Read more

Time for another batch of newsbitey goodness. 1. The Hollywood Reporter says Darren Aronofsky has signed on to direct the “reinvention” of RoboCop (1987; my comments). Variety reports that “MGM is keeping the logline under wraps”. However, last week, Bloody-Disgusting claimed that it had learned the new film would be more of a sequel than a remake; supposedly, it will take place about two decades after the earlier films and be kind of a next-generation thing, similar perhaps to the... Read more

Just a few quick items with a biblical connection of some sort. 1. At last, Mervyn LeRoy’s adaptation of Quo Vadis (1951), starring Deborah Kerr and Peter Ustinov, is going to get a proper release on DVD — and on Blu-Ray, too. The Warner Home Video press release indicates the film will come with all the usual bonus features, and while the two-disc DVD is due to come out in November, the Blu-Ray will not be available until just before... Read more