ComingSoon.net reports that Rambo IV — which went by titles like Rambo IV: In the Serpent’s Eye and Rambo IV: Pearl of the Cobra before it was re-named John Rambo, following the success that Sylvester Stallone had had by calling the latest entry in his other major franchise Rocky Balboa instead of Rocky VI — has been re-named again. Its new title is Rambo to Hell and Back. It has been common knowledge for a while now that Rambo comes... Read more

Variety reports that Simon Pegg — the co-writer and co-star of the genre spoofs Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz — has been hired to play Scotty in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie. Pegg has worked with Abrams before, on Mission: Impossible III (2006) — and that was rather amusing at the time, because several months before he took the role, a reporter asked Pegg if England had become too small for him, following the success of Shaun... Read more

I have now cashed an American cheque and received in Canadian currency less, rather than more, than the amount that was written on that cheque. The US$300 that I received today turned out to be worth CDN$285.03 — and it probably would have been worth even less if I had waited to cash it in another day or three. The American dollar has definitely fallen below parity, now. On a semi-related tangent, I recently bought the two-disc edition of Disney’s... Read more

The Hollywood Reporter, via Reuters, has caught on to the fact that Lars and the Real Girl — the movie starring Ryan Gosling and a blow-up doll — is being marketed to church groups: How do you market a wholesome, old-fashioned film about a churchgoer who falls in love with his sex doll? Grass-roots screenings with religious groups, maybe? That’s one of the novel approaches being taken with the marketing campaign for director Craig Gillespie’s unexpectedly poignant comedy “Lars and... Read more

CT Movies has a new article on the state of things at Fox Faith, and near the end, it mentions that The Final Inquiry — which was simply The Inquiry when it premiered at an Italian film festival in late 2006, and was slated for an April 2007 release in the United States at one point — will now come to theatres in January 2008 and then to video by the following Easter. FWIW, I also spoke to someone recently... Read more

And, in the tradition of “Judgment Day”, the next movie just might have the most religious-sounding title yet. Variety reports: Warner Bros. has acquired North American distrib rights to “Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins,” triggering an early 2008 production start for a film that seeks to reinvent the cyborg saga with a storyline to be told over a three-pic span. WB plans to distribute “Terminator Salvation” in summer 2009. The Warner deal dashes MGM’s hopes of corralling distribution rights to... Read more

Two months ago, it was rumoured that Russell Crowe had been approached about playing the bad guy in the new Star Trek movie. Now comes word, via Variety magazine, that Eric Bana has signed for the part — a character named Nero. “Plot details and even character descriptions . . . are being kept under wraps,” reports the trade paper, but if there is one thing we can say about this villain, it is that he apparently needed to be... Read more

That has been my attitude towards The Golden Compass for some time now; the book is a wonderfully imaginative and suspenseful story, and I would love to see it actualized on screen, but it is also the first part of a trilogy that turns increasingly anti-theistic, and preachily so, as the sequels progress, and so I would be quite happy if the rest of the trilogy were never filmed at all. But I didn’t realize how much I really meant... Read more

Nothing film-related here. Just a quick note to say that my sister Monica was quoted and depicted in the local daily paper The Province this morning, in a story about the strike that has seen garbage collectors, library workers, community centre employees and many other people on the picket lines for almost three months now. FWIW, my wife also works at the library — or would, if it weren’t for the strike — and it was my sister who introduced... Read more