Inspired, if that’s the word, by the trailers for the new Angelina Jolie film Wanted, Christopher Campbell at SpoutBlog has compiled a list of “10 Awful Matrix ‘Bullet Time’ Spoofs”, and it covers the bases pretty well — though a few of his specimens, such as Wing Commander (released March 12, 1999) and the Gap’s ‘Khaki Swing’ commercial (debuted April 1998), actually pre-date The Matrix (released March 31, 1999) by a fair bit. In fact, the people who created this... 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. Sex and the City — CDN $13,890,000 — N.AM $132,385,000 — 10.5%The Love Guru CDN $1,400,000 — N.AM $14,000,000 — 10.0%You Don’t Mess with the Zohan — CDN $7,210,000 — N.AM $84,055,000 — 8.6%The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian — CDN $11,570,000 — N.AM $135,467,000 — 8.5%Indiana Jones and the... Read more

Demographics, as Mark Steyn likes to say, are everything — or very nearly everything, at any rate. Nine years ago, I wrote an article on the teensploitation craze for Books & Culture that began by looking even further back to a prediction that appeared to have come true at the time that I was writing that article: There was a time, not too long ago, when conservative pundits liked to argue that family-friendly movies were, from the point of view... Read more

A lot of videos for WALL*E — and for Presto, the short film that plays before it — have been popping up online in the last few days, but I’ve been avoiding them, since the movie opens six days from now and I want to watch it relatively fresh. However, I cannot help but note that, while everyone seems to love the character WALL*E, early reaction to the film WALL*E has been a little more … mixed. Oh, sure, Harry... Read more

Remember that scene in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007) where Seth Rogen somewhat counter-intuitively sings the praises of Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005) because it depicts tough Jewish protagonists who kill other people instead of being killed themselves? I say “counter-intuitively” because, of course, Spielberg’s film wasn’t exactly celebrating all the killing and it was, indeed, wracked with angst and guilt over the propriety of it all. Last month, that scene, plus the then-impending release of Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess... Read more

My review of The Love Guru is now up at CT Movies. One point I considered making in the review but didn’t, quite, is that, for all the raunchy humour on display, the film isn’t really as sexual as you might expect. This is not, in other words, The Guru of Sex, which was the original working title of the film starring Jimi Mistry, Heather Graham and Marisa Tomei that was eventually released simply as The Guru (2002). Instead of... Read more

I have not yet seen Get Smart, but in honour of that film’s release today, I am posting the following video of my daughter Elizabeth talking to her shoe. I can’t remember exactly when she and her brother began treating every object like a cell phone, but this video was shot almost exactly one year ago — on June 29, 2007, to be precise — and they still do this from time to time. Click here if the video file... Read more

The Canadian Press reports that the Senate is going to amend the controversial bits of Bill C-10 — that is, the bits that would allow the government to deny tax credits to Canadian films and TV shows if they contradict certain as-yet-undefined moral or social standards — even though the bill has already been approved by the House of Commons. This sets up an interesting situation. Most of the Senators are Liberal, and none of them are elected, and virtually... Read more

Every time the Wallace & Gromit films give Wallace, the human half of the claymation duo, a love interest of some sort, people tend to react as though there were something unusual about this, as though such a thing had never been done before. Case in point: in a recent post on the upcoming short film A Matter of Loaf and Death — which was called Trouble at Mill when it was first announced eight months ago — the sci-fi... Read more

Movies often come in twos — two Truman Capote films, two meteor- or asteroid-based disaster movies, two computer-animated movies about ants, and so on — so it’s not too surprising that Variety brings news of two different films in the works based on the polygamist sect led by Warren Jeffs, who was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 2006 and was convicted of being an accomplice to rape in 2007. First, there was an announcement regarding Stolen... Read more