Because it was a big Hollywood movie with a serious message, the publicity campaign for Evan Almighty included a number of do-good projects. One of them was the Almighty Forest, whereby fans could sponsor the planting of a tree and get their names on the DVD. At the junket for Evan Almighty, we journalists were told that the studio had already planted trees in our names — and therefore our names would be on the DVD, too. So when I... Read more

Another day, another handful of news and blog links. 1. Variety reports that Sönke Wortmann has been tapped to direct Pope Joan, now that Volker Schlöndorff is out of the picture. 2. The Scotsman reports that Rich Swingle has written a sequel to Chariots of Fire (1981) called Beyond the Chariots and hopes to have trailers ready for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Both films concern Olympic runners Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, the former of whom went on to... Read more

I just got off the phone from an interview on Ave Maria Radio regarding the movie September Dawn. If anyone wants to hear it, an audio file should be available here in the next day or two. Read more

And now it’s time for yet another batch of news quickies. 1. The New York Times looks at why Mr. Bean’s Holiday failed to get a bigger audience in the United States, while the Globe and Mail looks at why Mr. Bean’s Holiday was the #1 movie in Canada this past weekend. Incidentally, Mr. Bean’s Holiday has already earned over $189 million overseas, which currently makes it #9 on the overseas chart for the year and, once the North American... Read more

A few months ago, I took out a library copy of Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, mainly to see what sort of material the filmmakers hired by George Barna’s Good News Holdings would be working with. I have only read about two-thirds of it so far, but I was pretty impressed with the book and its mixture of canonical, traditional and apocryphal material; I was also impressed by Rice’s testimony and her commitment to the historical study... Read more

Just a few more quick items. 1. Variety reports that Intrepid Pictures, one of the producers of the upcoming Balls of Fury, is making an apocalyptic thriller: Intrepid Pictures has acquired supernatural thriller “The Fourth Horseman,” penned by Marshall Uzzle and Perry Fair, and set it up with Intrepid partners Marc D. Evans and Trevor Macy along with Mike Karz. The banner has brought in the writing team of Paul Benz & Steve Tomlin (“Snowblind”) to rewrite. “Horseman” centers on... 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. Mr. Bean’s Holiday — CDN $1,870,000 — N.AM $9,889,780 — 18.9%Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — CDN $31,270,000 — N.AM $283,230,934 — 11.0%The Simpsons Movie — CDN $18,930,000 — N.AM $173,354,858 — 10.9%Stardust — CDN $2,800,000 — N.AM $26,374,432 — 10.6%Hairspray — CDN $10,990,000 — N.AM $107,271,846... Read more

Variety is reporting that Keanu Reeves will play the alien Klaatu in Scott Derrickson‘s remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951; my comments). I haven’t got time to comment on this at the moment, but I wanted to get that out there while it’s still news. Read more

Terry Mattingly’s latest column for the Scripps Howard News Service looks at what happened to The Ultimate Gift, which came to theatres back in March and is now out on DVD: There were other reviews, good and bad. Still, the nastiness in strategic corners of the media caught veteran producer Rick Eldridge off guard, in large part because he thought that he was producing a mainstream movie, with mainstream talent, that was going to have a chance to reach a... Read more

Ben Stein, the former speechwriter for Richard Nixon who became famous for his cameo as a droning high-school teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), is starring in a new documentary called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed — which, to judge from the film’s official website, will tackle Darwinian evolutionary theory and promote the so-called Intelligent Design theory. The trailers play up the idea that Stein is a “rebel” and make heavy use of George Thorogood’s ‘Bad to the Bone’; the... Read more