Wanda Sykes is on Late Night with Conan O’Brien right now, as I type this, talking about how she was interviewed by a bunch of religious reporters, including a nun, at the press junket for Evan Almighty. This is funny to me, because I was sitting next to the nun in question at the time, and I remember certain aspects of the conversation that Sykes is riffing on. I even have it on mp3. Read more

My first report from the junket for Evan Almighty is now up at CT Movies. Two more are in the pipeline… Read more

Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood Daily has some interesting comments on the box-office prospects for Evan Almighty, which opens this Friday. Given that this is rumoured to be the most expensive comedy ever made, it sounds like the studio has good reason to be concerned it might not make its money back. It’s an interesting read, and you can make what you will of it, but one paragraph leaves me scratching my head: Universal moguls have convinced themselves that religious... Read more

The Hollywood Reporter, via Reuters, reports that Italian state attorneys have launched a criminal investigation into The Da Vinci Code (2006), following a complaint filed earlier this year by Catholic clergy who allege that the film violates an Italian law forbidding “obscene” treatments of religion in film. Ten people, including director Ron Howard and author Dan Brown, are named in the complaint, and could in theory be fined or sent to jail. The authorities say they have no idea why... Read more

Last week, some e-pals and I were discussing ‘Religion for the Robots,’ a recent Sightings column by Robert M. Geraci. One of the topics that came up was whether robots would be directly responsible to God or, rather, to their human creators — or both. Then, on Saturday night, I went and saw the sneak preview of the new Pixar film Ratatouille, and before it, there was a teaser for WALL-E, which comes out next year. I have embedded a... 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. Spider-Man 3 — CDN $30,570,000 — N.AM $330,016,000 — 9.2%Shrek the Third — CDN $25,510,000 — N.AM $297,249,000 — 8.6%Ocean’s Thirteen — CDN $5,990,000 — N.AM $69,810,000 — 8.6%Knocked Up — CDN $7,710,000 — N.AM $90,482,000 — 8.5%Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End — CDN $22,350,000 — N.AM $273,757,000... Read more

Variety reports that at least three “horror” films produced by Val Lewton in the 1940s might be remade in the near future: Evolution Entertainment’s horror division Twisted Pictures has formed a joint venture with RKO Pictures and plans to remake four genre pics from the RKO library. The companies will co-finance development and production of “The Body Snatcher,” a 1945 Robert Wise-directed thriller that starred Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff; the 1943 pic “I Walked With a Zombie”; and the... Read more

Yikes. Universal Studios has gone out of its way to let people know that the PG-rated Evan Almighty is way, way more family-friendly than its PG-13 predecessor Bruce Almighty. So what happened when Entertainment Weekly‘s Carey Bell dialed the 1-800 number that God, played by Morgan Freeman, uses in the film…? Oops. Read more

Last year, I noted that French-language films made in Quebec are sometimes shown with subtitles even when they are shown in France — because the dialects in the two countries can be very different. Now comes this item via the National Post: Like children all over North America, pint-size Quebecers have been flocking to theatres recently to see the animated film Shrek the Third, or Shrek le Troisieme as it is known here. The only problem is they are leaving... Read more