My review of You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is now up at CT Movies. There are several points I toyed with making in this review but never got around to, either for word-count reasons or because my writing just got into a certain groove and I didn’t feel I could shoehorn them in. These include: The sheer abundance of hummus. The fact that Zohan has posters of KISS frontman Gene Simmons, who was born in Israel, and eyepatched Israeli... Read more

I tend not to get too political here, but this comment from Ezra Klein, via Ross Douthat, seems worthy of mention here: Towards the end of the 1967 movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Dr. John Wane Prentice, played by Sydney Poitier, sits down with his fiance’s white father, played by Spencer Tracy. “Have you given any thought to the problems your children will have?” Tracy asks. “Yes, and they’ll have some…[But] Joey feels that all of our children will... Read more

Just catching up on a few items I’ve had sitting around for a while, plus one new item that surfaced today. 1. Carolyn Arends has written an article for CT Movies on Magdalena: Released from Shame, the latest film to mix brand-new, demographically-targeted footage with footage from the Campus Crusade for Christ movie Jesus (1979). The interesting thing about this film — unlike, say, The Story of Jesus for Children (2000) — is that the new footage features at least... Read more

After obsessing over The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep for the past few weeks, my daughter has developed an interest in Davey and Goliath — and for some reason she laughs every single time the logo at the beginning and end of each episode dissolves from the image on the left to the image on the right. Does anyone with a better understanding of child psychology than I have a clue why my two-year-old daughter might find this segue... Read more

My second Reel News column is now up at CT Movies, and it mainly concerns the box-office woes of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, in addition to the usual news links. Read more

The newest issue of BC Christian News is now online, and with it, my film column, which includes brief notes on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Silent Light and Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The paper also reports that my column for them on Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials trilogy placed 2nd among editorials in the Fellowship of Christian Newspapers’ recent awards. Yay me! 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. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay — CDN $7,220,000 — N.AM $36,955,000 — 19.5%What Happens in Vegas — CDN $6,460,000 — N.AM $66,074,000 — 9.8%Made of Honor — CDN $4,190,000 — N.AM $42,965,000 — 9.8%Forgetting Sarah Marshall — CDN $5,880,000 — N.AM $60,471,000 — 9.7%Sex and the City —... Read more

Kate Brewster, the future wife of John Connor, was first played by Claire Danes in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003). Then it was announced ten days ago that she would be played by Charlotte Gainsbourg in Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, which has already been shooting for a few weeks. Now, tonight, the Hollywood Reporter says Gainsbourg is being replaced by Ron Howard’s daughter Bryce Dallas, who was last seen playing Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man 3 (2007). Apparently... Read more

I’m not exactly a big Joss Whedon fan, though I do like aspects of Firefly (2002-2003) and Serenity (2005), both of which my wife really likes. But I am a big fan of stories about amnesia and various other kinds of memory loss, and the questions such things raise regarding the nature of identity and the relationship between the body and the soul, etc. So now I’m wondering if I should check out Whedon’s newest series, Dollhouse, when it premieres... Read more

Lou Lumenick notes that the phenomenally successful Sex and the City has at least one thing in common with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the film it is poised to knock down to 2nd place at the box office this weekend: namely, both films feature romantically active leading ladies in their 50s. This gets me thinking. One of the things people praised Iron Man for was the fact that its leading man was an actual man,... Read more