Many people have commented on the nihilism in The Dark Knight — note that I do not say the nihilism of The Dark Knight — but very few of them have literally written the book on nihilism in popular culture, as Thomas Hibbs has. So I was particularly interested to read his thoughts on the film at First Things today. Some choice quotes: What makes Nolan’s latest film such a success is not, however, Ledger’s compelling presentation of evil, on... Read more

The Clinton News-Record posted an interview the other day with Roland Kickinger, an Austrian bodybuilder turned actor who is apparently going to play the T-800 — the Terminator made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger — in the upcoming Terminator Salvation. Here is a picture of Kickinger from his website: Around the same time, Warner Brothers released this image of Christian Bale as John Connor, apparently pinning a Terminator to the ground with a helicopter: Is the Terminator under Connor’s helicopter a... 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 $3,940,000 — N.AM $43,074,000 — 9.1%Wanted — CDN $10,630,000 — N.AM $123,347,000 — 8.6%Get Smart — CDN $10,120,000 — N.AM $119,569,000 — 8.5%Hellboy II: The Golden Army — CDN $4,720,000 — N.AM $56,447,000 — 8.4%Kung Fu Panda — CDN $16,130,000 —... Read more

I’m something of a pack rat myself — I still have pretty much every e-mail I have sent or received since 1994, and I only recently began tossing out some of the press kits that I acquired back in my student days — so I can certainly relate to this, on some level: Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly. Hat tip to Jeffrey Wells. Read more

My review of The Dark Knight is now up at BC Christian News. And believe me, there is a lot, lot, lot more I could say about this film, but time and word limits got in the way. Plus I think I’d need to see the film a second time to really process it properly. In the meantime, a few coincidences for your reading pleasure: Heath Ledger got frisky with Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (2005). Now, as one critic... Read more

My review of Space Chimps is now up at CT Movies. Read more

Whatever I might think of the film, I have always thought that the character WALL•E was as cute and charming as they come. And if my kids were just a little older, I’m sure we’d have fun putting this paper model of him together. Ah well, I’ll just have to do it for them, I guess, and hog all the fun to myself. You can download the necessary graphics here. Hat tip to the Upcoming Pixar blog. Read more

I have mentioned it here before, but until tonight I had never seen Harrison Ford’s fourth appearance as Indiana Jones, in the bookends to the ‘Mystery of the Blues’ episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-1993). Although it was filmed only a few years after his third appearance as Indy, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), this fourth appearance takes place quite a bit later in the official Indy chronology; the first three films all take place... Read more

The teaser for Terminator Salvation went online today, and while it doesn’t give you a chance to look at anything very clearly or for very long, the QuickTime format thankfully allows you to go through it almost frame-by-frame, if you so choose. So, first of all, the teaser gives us our first good look at Christian Bale as John Connor — and for what it’s worth, I have added the image above to my John Connor gallery so that Bale... Read more