Some interesting developments on the ancient-Greek movie front. Variety and the Hollywood Reporter say Gianni Nunnari and Mark Canton, the producers of 300 (2006), are now collaborating on War of Gods, “a mythological tale set in war-torn ancient Greece, as the young warrior prince Theseus leads his men in a battle against evil that will see the gods fighting with soldiers against demons and titans.” The film will be directed by Tarsem Singh, director of The Cell (2000), The Fall... Read more
Arthur C. Clarke passed away a few months ago, but that’s no reason new interviews with him can’t keep popping up. SciFi.com posted one yesterday that was conducted in various installments eight or nine years ago, in which Clarke talks a fair bit about the people he has known and counted among his friends and influences. My favorite anecdote is this one: Walter Cronkite is a man I’ve always admired, since we started working together in the 1960s, I think,... Read more
The newest issue of BC Christian News is now online, and with it, my film column, which looks at the films of M. Night Shyamalan en route to a brief comment or two on The Happening. Click on the following titles for my longer reviews or comments on Wide Awake (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002) and Lady in the Water (2006). I have never seen Praying with Anger (1992) and I don’t appear to have written... 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. Cruising Bar 2 — CDN $623,946 — N.AM $623,946 — 100%The Love Guru CDN $2,700,000 — N.AM $25,322,000 — 10.7%Sex and the City — CDN $14,810,000 — N.AM $140,132,000 — 10.6%Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — CDN $25,500,000 — N.AM $299,936,000 — 8.5%The Happening — CDN... Read more
The Hollywood Reporter, via Reuters, is spreading the news: The British actress is in talks to board “Terminator Salvation,” the fourth installment in the franchise kicked off by James Cameron in 1984. Roles in the new film have been kept under wraps, but insiders described the Bonham Carter role as small but pivotal. This brings the number of Terminator 4 actors that I have interviewed up to two, now. I met Christian Bale, who plays John Connor in T4, on... Read more
IT’S a common mistake, but still worth noting: Contrary to what many people seem to think, The Sixth Sense was not M. Night Shyamalan’s first movie. It was, in fact, his third. But virtually no one had seen his first film, Praying with Anger (still not available on DVD), or his second film, Wide Awake (with Rosie O’Donnell as a nun who really likes baseball). So when The Sixth Sense came out in the summer of 1999 and wowed audiences... Read more
He’s only got two examples so far, and normally you need three to make this sort of pronouncement, but Glenn Kenny says he detects a trend anyway: In Jumper, Hayden Christensen plays a guy who can teleport to any place in the world — or at least any place that he can remember being to before — and in one of his voice-overs, he declares: “I wasn’t always like this. Once, I was a normal person. A chump, just like... Read more
Believe it or not, the newest Variety story on the comings and goings at New Line Cinema includes these sentences: There are also the two “Hobbit” films and a possible sequel to “The Golden Compass.” The question is how much Warner Bros. will get involved in those tentpoles. Has Compass been doing really well on DVD or something? Read more
WALL*E director Andrew Stanton has insisted for a while now that he never intended his film to be a political parable — that he meant to tell a love story, and all the seemingly pro-environment and anti-consumerist stuff was put there just to further it along — and critics such as Devin Faraci and Jeffrey Wells have questioned Stanton’s sincerity and honesty in reply. I have not yet seen the film for myself, so I cannot say how I would... Read more
What some intend as parody, others intend as, um, contrarian thinking, or maybe even no-really-I’m-serious analysis. Three days ago, Will Smith appeared on The Colbert Report to promote his dysfunctional-superhero movie Hancock. (Click here to watch that episode in the States, and here to watch it in Canada.) And somewhere in there, the always-ironic Stephen Colbert asked a question that left the normally chatty Smith speechless: The superhero who uses his power and people get mad at him — this... Read more
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