Well, not really. But one thing I love about the movies — even the really bad ones — is how they can stimulate interest in subjects that we might not otherwise have looked into. For a history buff like me, it can be especially fun to fact-check movies that are set in the past. If a movie gets something right, great; and if it doesn’t, there is still educational value in figuring out where it went wrong. (See the book... Read more

Last week, I speculated that New Line’s absorption by Warner Brothers might not mean the end of the His Dark Materials trilogy, even though The Golden Compass‘s underwhelming box-office performance in North America has been widely cited as one of the reasons for New Line’s demise. Yesterday, Variety published a long-ish column by Adam Dawtrey on this subject, and his speculations dovetail with my own — while adding a few new wrinkles: After its strong start in Japan last week,... Read more

My review of 10,000 B.C. is now up at CT Movies. One detail I don’t mention there is that I found Camilla Belle’s eyebrows, and eye make-up in general, as distracting in this film as I found Raquel Welch’s eyebrows in One Million Years B.C. (1966). Read more

Billy Graham has appeared in many movies, most of them produced by his own company — I wrote an article on the subject three years ago — but as far as I can tell, no one has ever played him before, except in parodies long and short like Tricia’s Wedding (1971) and White House Madness (1975). That will soon change, however, since a movie called Billy: The Early Years is set to start shooting in Nashville later this month. The... Read more

I never did finish reading Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt last year, but I probably should get it back from the library and finish it at some point; it was a very intriguing mix of deeply traditional yet spectacularly innovative storytelling. It’s one thing to suggest what Christ might be thinking, as Mel Gibson did in The Passion of the Christ (2004), by using flashbacks and point-of-view shots, but it’s quite another to tell us what Christ... Read more

The first DVD I ever bought, on Boxing Day 2000, was The Fantasia Anthology, a three-disc boxed set containing the original Fantasia (1940), its sequel Fantasia 2000 (1999), and a third disc of bonus features. In the months that followed, I picked up a few other Disney films — films as diverse as The Black Cauldron (1985), a deeply flawed fantasy flick that I liked a lot when I was a teenager, and Pinocchio (1940; my comments), which I acquired... Read more

The Globe and Mail has two new stories on Bill C-10, the proposed revision to the Income Tax Act that would allow the government to deny tax credits to Canadian films deemed “offensive” after they have already gone into production. First, there is this comment by John Doyle: It’s news to me that Canada is a Christian Evangelical country. The other evening, while consuming a few measures of dry sherry I felt inspired to contact God and, it turns out,... Read more

Oscar season is over, but there are still a few more prizes to hand out. The Faith and Film Critics Circle — of which I am a member — announced its own awards today, and the big winners were There Will Be Blood (x4), Juno (x3), Atonement (x2), Into Great Silence (x2), No Country for Old Men (x2), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I’m Not There, Lars and the Real Girl and Ratatouille. Curiously, there... Read more

Two years ago, I linked to a website — no longer working, alas — which showed a high-speed drive through Paris from two parallel points of view: one, the short film C’était un rendez-vous (1976), shot from within the speeding vehicle itself; and two, a growing line on a Google Map. Now, I link to something more complicated in concept but simpler in execution. This site has tracked down all the places in San Francisco where the famous car chase... Read more

You saw this coming, right? ComingSoon.net reports that all three Indiana Jones movies will be coming back to DVD in brand-new “special editions” with brand-new bonus features … nine days before the newest film comes to theatres. I bought the original DVD boxed set in 2003, and I’ve been meaning to upgrade to Blu-Ray whenever those films become available in that format … so I think I’ll wait until all four films are released as a Blu-Ray set. (But will... Read more