As various blogs and news sites have noted, the grandparents of a 12-year-old girl are suing the Chicago Board of Education because a substitute teacher showed Brokeback Mountain to her class. I like the approach taken by J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader: Cultural politics aside, this seems like an open-and-shut case. The movie is rated R — “under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian” — and according to the suit, the school principal permitted the viewing without consulting... Read more

Remember how Steven Spielberg was reportedly going to make a live-action version of the Tintin comic books? It turns out his plans were a little more complicated than that. Variety reports: Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are teaming to direct and produce three back-to-back features based on Georges Remi’s beloved Belgian comic-strip hero Tintin for DreamWorks. Pics will be produced in full digital 3-D using performance capture technology. The two filmmakers will each direct at least one of the movies;... Read more

Recognize the Oscar-winning actor who plays Dracula? Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly. Read more

Hollywood North Report thinks so. In fact, they claim that Zack Snyder, director of the surprisingly successful 300, and the rest of the Watchmen team will be opening their production office here as early as June, with shooting set to start in August. Then again, there were rumours at one point that 300 would be shot in Vancouver too, but then it ended up going to Montreal — so until we hear something more official, take this with a grain... 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. Hot Fuzz — CDN $2,440,000 — N.AM $18,991,668 — 12.8%Fracture — CDN $3,880,000 — N.AM $31,032,946 — 12.5%The Ex — CDN $173,708 — N.AM $1,394,229 — 12.5%Georgia Rule — CDN $691,179 — N.AM $6,773,870 — 10.2%Spider-Man 3 — CDN $22,270,000 — N.AM $240,236,828 — 9.3%Blades of Glory — CDN $10,310,000... Read more

Rod Dreher has just seen the excellent, Oscar-winning The Lives of Others, and he makes a provocative observation: What made “The Lives of Others” so astonishing was the complicated humanity of nearly all the characters. You could easily see how basically decent people could be compelled to collaborate by the secret police, who were experts at taking advantage of ordinary human weakness, and even ordinary human virtue, to compromise people. . . . I drifted off to sleep last night... Read more

I have deeply mixed feelings about The Golden Compass. The trilogy of which the book is the first part is deeply antithetical to my beliefs — just as author Philip Pullman intended it to be — and to make it worse, the trilogy gets more and more didactic as it goes. But the first book, which takes place in a parallel universe, is extremely well written, and a lot of its mystery and wonder and suspense hinges on a great... Read more

Song of the South (1946; my comments) makes the news again — this time via an article in Maclean’s magazine: . . . The ironic thing is that keeping Song of the South out of circulation may have caused Disney even more trouble. Because the company is so anxious to hide it, the legend has arisen that the film is some kind of white-supremacist movie, a suppressed example of Walt Disney’s racism. Many articles about the film claim that Uncle... Read more

The Globe and Mail has an article on Mennonite author Miriam Toews and her acting gig in Carlos Reygadas’s Luz silenciosa, AKA Silent Light, which premieres May 22 at the Cannes Film Festival: It all began when Reygadas was in Germany about a year ago, looking for actors (that is, non-actors) for his film, a love triangle set among the Mennonites of northern Mexico. A leading advocate of Plautdietsch, the archaic German dialect that originated in the country’s lowlands, gave... Read more

Some people find the films of Lars von Trier depressing. Now the director says that he himself is depressed — possibly so depressed that he will not be able to make what was supposed to be his next film, Antichrist. Reports the Associated Press: The Danish director Lars Von Trier said a period of depression has left him unable to work and he has doubts about when he will return to filmmaking. In an interview published Saturday in the Politiken... Read more