Evan Almighty fell off the weekly top ten lists this week — indeed, if the estimates hold, it is now down at #17 — and pundits continue to ponder just why this movie failed to find an audience. Mark Joseph at FoxNews.com speculated a few weeks ago that the film’s supposed target audience smelled something phony: In its aftermath, once again the chatter from Hollywood is how, despite another earnest and sincere attempt to make a movie for “those people,”... Read more

Murray Stiller, a Vancouver-based filmmaker and the son of former Evangelical Fellowship of Canada president Brian C. Stiller, is making a documentary on religious satire called Jesus Makes Me Laugh — and he has put a promo reel up at YouTube. The interviewees include Georgia Straight cartoonist Dirk Van Stralen, Regent College professor Maxine Hancock, and at least three people associated with The Wittenburg Door — a magazine that jumped the shark ages ago, but never mind that for now.... Read more

That would seem to be what Douglas Gresham promised the fans at Comic-Con, according to the brief summary at IGN.com. UPDATE: MTV Movies Blog indicates it may have been producer Mark Johnson, and not Gresham, who made these remarks. Meanwhile, get a load of what director Andrew Adamson said: Comparing his work on “Narnia” to that OTHER long running fantasy series, Adamson insisted that future “Narnia” films will be both more consistent and more faithfully inclusive to the source than... Read more

The makers of The Ten, an upcoming comedy based on the Ten Commandments, needed a ventriloquist’s dummy for a segment in which Winona Ryder takes a stolen dummy — or “hard figure”, as those in the ventriloquism business call it — and has sex with it. Their first choice was a dummy produced by The Dummy Works in Texas. It turned out the proprietors are Christians involved in various ventriloquism ministries. The dummy makers turned the movie down. The New... Read more

One of the many news items coming out of Comic-Con yesterday was that Leonard Nimoy will reprise the role of Spock in the upcoming Star Trek XI. The part will probably be just a cameo, as it was also announced that Zachary Quinto, of the TV show Heroes, will star as the young Spock. And while the young Captain Kirk has not yet been cast, director J.J. Abrams said he also had not ruled out bringing back William Shatner as... Read more

MTV Movies Blog reports that it was announced at Comic-Con today that Karen Allen will be back as Marion Ravenwood in Indiana Jones IV — just as she predicted at a screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) over a year ago. Mind you, she also predicted at that time that Natalie Portman might be in the new movie as Indy’s daughter, and that prediction doesn’t seem to have come true — though rumours do persist that the Shia... Read more

Time for a few quick quick quickies. 1. If you saw Transformers, then you probably saw the trailer for that mysterious J.J. Abrams movie which looks like a disaster flick shot on a cheap home-movie camera. The trailer does not say what the movie is called, but early rumours said it might have the working title Cloverfield. Now comes word that the movie might be called Monstrous, and the movie might have something to do with beasts from Jewish mythology,... 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. Sicko — CDN $1,990,000 — N.AM $19,185,853 — 10.4%Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — CDN $20,800,000 — N.AM $207,866,865 — 10.0%Knocked Up — CDN $13,280,000 — N.AM $142,698,885 — 9.3%Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End — CDN $26,770,000 — N.AM $306,034,458 — 8.7%Transformers — CDN $22,610,000... Read more

Lou Lumenick at the New York Post reports that Skinwalkers, a werewolf flick that was going to open this Friday before it got bumped to August 10, will not be screened for critics. Read more