Last Thursday, Anne Thompson of Variety wrote the following in an item describing her visit the previous week to Lucasfilm headquarters at the Presidio in San Francisco: At the party I got a kick out of watching Lucas, Robin Williams, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Staunton and Brad Bird whooping it up and making each other laugh. (Coppola was on a wine tour.) “I’m a big proponent of regional filmmaking,” Lucas told me. (He told me that for the first... Read more

Everyone else is talking about the curious difference between the regular poster for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix vs. the IMAX 3-D poster, so I might as well mention it here too. FWIW, Melissa Anelli of LeakyNews.com has a few things to say about this. (Hat tip to Lou Lumenick at the New York Post.) Read more

Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the screenwriters on the upcoming The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, have just posted the following comments at the film’s official blog: . . . As writers, the biggest challenge we faced was connecting the Pevensies’ story to that of Prince Caspian. In C. S. Lewis’ book, they’re essentially two separate narratives which only come together near the end. While this is perfectly entertaining to read, it makes for a strangely structured movie where your... Read more

Due to the lag between the print and online publishing schedules at one of the papers that I write for, my review of the new Spider-Man movie won’t be up for a while. But suffice to say the movie is an over-stuffed let-down. In the meantime, consider this interview that Sam Raimi did with Entertainment Weekly: You also seem very suspicious of superhero motives in this movie.Peter Parker is really still acting on very immature impulses. He’s dressing up in... Read more

The newest issue of BC Christian News is now online, and with it, my film column, which looks mainly at Year of the Dog, but also touches on the DVD release of The Nativity Story as well as recent news bits on Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Dudleytown. Read more

Variety reports that Saved! (2004; my article), the comedy about a Christian high school student who gets pregnant by her gay boyfriend, is coming to Broadway in 2008. Maybe this time they’ll get some Christian rock bands to contribute some music! Read more

There’s a rumour going around that Live Free or Die Hard, known overseas as Die Hard 4.0, will be rated PG-13. This might mean that John McClane’s trademark “Yippie-ki-yay” line will have to be cut, or trimmed down a little. The MPAA allows one or two f-words in a PG-13 movie, but never if they are used to indicate actual sexual behaviour; then again, I don’t know where a word like “motherf—er” — which, like the f-word itself, is rarely... Read more

True story. Exactly nine days ago, my friend Trent sent me a link to this story from Wired magazine, and said he wished he was a bigwig Hollywood producer “cuz this would make a great movie”: How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran Then, last night, the lead story in Variety began like so: George Clooney and his Smoke House partner Grant Heslov will co-write a dramedy for Warner Bros. Pictures detailing how the... Read more

First Evan Almighty went into production, then Darren Aronofsky said he was working on a script … and now this, via Variety: Columbia Pictures has paired with Original Films’ Neal Moritz to bring “The Ark” to the bigscreen. Tale marring the story of Noah’s Ark with a UFO crash first appeared in the anthology series “Dark Horse Presents,” the comicbook that launched Frank Miller’s “Sin City.” Mark Verheiden, creator of the Dark Horse story upon which it will be based,... Read more

My preview article on summer blockbusters for Faith & Friends is now up at Salvationist.ca. Read more