My review of The Bourne Ultimatum is now up at CT Movies. One angle I don’t pursue in this review is the comparison or contrast that some have made between Jason Bourne and James Bond. Matt Damon himself told the Associated Press: Bond is “an imperialist and he’s a misogynist. He kills people and laughs and sips martinis and wisecracks about it,” Damon, 36, told The Associated Press in an interview. . . . “Bourne is this paranoid guy. He’s... Read more

If you had made a film based on Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, and you had rushed it into production, and you had already released a lame trailer, and you were only two months away from releasing the film itself, what do you think you would do? If you were Fox-Walden, you would change the title! That’s right, The Dark Is Rising — the title of both the book on which this film is based, and the five-book series... Read more

The Simpsons Movie broke a few records this past weekend. With over $74 million in the till as of Sunday, it had the third-biggest opening weekend of any animated film ever; it lags behind only the two Shrek sequels. That means it had a bigger opening than any film by Pixar (The Incredibles, 2004, $70.5 million), Disney (The Lion King, 1994, $40.9 million), Fox / Blue Sky (Ice Age: The Meltdown, 2006, $68 million), Warner (Happy Feet, 2006, $41.5 million),... Read more

A.O. Scott of the New York Times comments on the passing of Bergman and Antonioni, and the era they represented: There was, among certain filmgoers in the 1960s, an appetite for difficulty, a conviction that symbolic obscurity and psychological alienation were authentic responses to the state of the world. More than that, the idea that a difficult work had special value — that being challenged was a distinct form of pleasure — enjoyed a prestige, at the time, that is... Read more

Ingmar Bergman died yesterday at the age of 89. I have seen quite a few of his films but none of them often enough or recent enough to comment on them in any detail. (Though I did jot a few notes here on 1973’s Scenes from a Marriage and 2003’s Saraband a couple years ago.) However, Bergman did represent an interesting point in the history of the relationship between film and faith — by encouraging filmmakers to engage in theological... Read more

Oh, what hath The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) wrought. Last year I noted that an adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s forthcoming novel The Abstinence Teacher is in the works. Now Variety reports that Screen Gems and Maxim are developing a film called Virginity Rocks, which will be written by Melissa Carter: Story revolves around a gorgeous transfer student who clings to her virginity and gets all the promiscuous girls in school to abstain from sex; in response, the popular guys ask the... Read more

I forgot to mention last week that Who’s Your Caddy? was not screened for critics prior to its release. I probably overlooked the film because it hasn’t been released at all in Canada. Meanwhile, it is beginning to look like Underdog, which opens this Friday, is also giving critics the cold shoulder. The only local screening that I know of is on Thursday night — and as we all know, night-before-release-date screenings “don’t count”. I also know of at least... 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. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — CDN $25,310,000 — N.AM $241,771,000 — 10.5%Sunshine — CDN $143,805 — N.AM $1,628,000 — 8.8%Transformers — CDN $24,990,000 — N.AM $284,558,000 — 8.8%Hairspray — CDN $5,170,000 — N.AM $59,307,000 — 8.7%Live Free or Die Hard — CDN $10,860,000 — N.AM $125,128,000... Read more

Here’s a little more info about Pixar’s next film WALL-E, courtesy of ComingSoon.net and its coverage of this year’s Comic-Con: In the future, humans have completely trashed the planet with rampant commercialism. They then leave the planet on space liners while robots are left behind to clean up the planet. Unfortunately, 700 years go by and they never return. Eventually one robot, WALL•E, develops a personality. As he roams the planet, he eventually finds a way to get off the... Read more