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

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Keisha Castle-Hughes gave birth to a daughter, Felicity-Amore, last Wednesday. You may recall that Castle-Hughes became pregnant last year at the age of 16, shortly after she finished playing the Virgin Mary in The Nativity Story — but before the film was released in theatres. Some journalists evidently hoped that this would cause a great religious controversy, but it never happened. Castle-Hughes did, however, face a strong backlash in her native New Zealand. Shortly... Read more

If you have not yet seen the trailer for Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) — John Boorman’s mind-bogglingly awful sequel to William Friedkin’s mind-blowingly good The Exorcist (1973), a sequel so terrible that it came a narrow second to Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) in the Medved brothers’ bad-movie book The Golden Turkey Awards — then here, at last, is your chance: Exorcist II: The Heretic essentially tries to pull a Godfather Part II (1974) on us by going... Read more

Speaking of nudity and ratings, check out this bit of hyperbole from a recent Newsweek story on The Simpsons Movie: To make it on the big screen, you have to give people something spectacular. Something extraordinary. Something like Bart Simpson—full frontal. It happens early in “The Simpsons Movie,” when the animated 10-year-old takes a dare from his goofball father, Homer, to skateboard naked through the streets of Springfield. Hidden by plants and picket fences, he whizzes along, past kids, down... Read more

Many thanks to the folks at Fox Faith for sending me review copies of Beyond the Gates of Splendor (2002) and End of the Spear (2005), two films that I had heard much about but had never had the chance to see before. The former film is a documentary about five American missionaries who were killed by Ecuadorian natives in 1956, and how both sides of that incident came to be reconciled in the end, while the latter film is... Read more