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. Pan’s Labyrinth — CDN $4,873,293 — N.AM $34,215,000 — 14.2%The Number 23 — CDN $3,062,697 — N.AM $24,684,000 — 12.4%Zodiac — CDN $1,227,761 — N.AM $13,100,000 — 9.4%Music and Lyrics — CDN $3,245,415 — N.AM $38,680,000 — 8.4%Ghost Rider — CDN $7,350,957 — N.AM $94,757,000 — 7.8%Bridge to Terabithia —... Read more

It’s been almost a year since it was first announced that Legendary Pictures and Scott Derrickson were developing a movie version of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. There hasn’t been much news since — but the New York Times did post this story today: “AS soon as you started talking about a battle in Heaven, he just couldn’t relate,” the screenwriter Philip de Blasi recalled. It was a particularly demoralizing pitch meeting, explained his writing partner, Byron Willinger, because... Read more

The newest issue of BC Christian News is now online, and with it, my film column, which looks mainly at Bridge to Terabithia — this section was posted a few days earlier at ChristianWeek — but also touches on the DVD release of Conversations with God and the upcoming theatrical releases of the Fox Faith films The Ultimate Gift and The Inquiry. The paper also includes an edited version of my interview with Terabithia author Katherine Paterson. Read more

Given all the casting rumours surrounding the next Star Trek film, I have begun to have my doubts that it will, in fact, concern the Starfleet Academy days of Kirk and Spock. Not only are all the rumoured actors at least as old as the original actors were when the TV series began, but it hardly seems likely that so many members of the Enterprise‘s bridge crew would have worked together ten, twelve, however many years in advance. Now IGN.com... Read more

In all the news stories and blog posts that I have seen this week on James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici‘s documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, I don’t believe I have yet seen anyone make a reference to Jonas McCord’s The Body (2001), which starred Antonio Banderas as a priest who investigates the possibility that a recently discovered skeleton may be the bones of Christ. Then again, considering almost nobody saw that film, and the few who did didn’t care... Read more

I almost forgot to mention this one. Lou Lumenick and others have noted that the horror film The Abandoned opened south of the border last Friday without advance critics screenings — which is kind of odd, since the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and it was seen around the United States in November as one of eight films on the After Dark Horrorfest ticket. As another blogger asked: If, after showing the film in public... Read more

What if Bob Dylan recorded the works of Dr Seuss? Click here. Read more

The kids are asleep, so it’s time for more newsbites! 1. Do you want a sneak peek of the storyline for WALL-E, the next film from Pixar (after this summer’s Ratatouille, that is) and director Andrew Stanton (2003’s Finding Nemo)? Jim Hill has the spoiler-filled details. FWIW, I’m cautiously optimistic; as one of the comments puts it, the film sounds like “E.T. meets A.I.“ Meanwhile, Variety has an interesting story on the “Pixar-ization” of Disney since the two companies merged... Read more

Growing up, my favorite Bob Hope movie by far was Son of Paleface (1952) — which, as I discovered years later, was directed by Frank Tashlin, a former animator at Looney Toons. I wasn’t too surprised when I found out about that. The film is sort of a sequel to The Paleface (1948), but it’s also something of a lampoon of the earlier film, and of westerns in general. The first film was a straightforward comedy that happens to be... Read more

Much has been said about how Amazing Grace has tweaked history to make William Wilberforce more palatable to modern, even liberal, audiences. Some have also pointed out that the film was originally written by Colin Welland, writer of Chariots of Fire (1981), before Steven Knight was brought on board to write a script that focused more on politics and less on religion. Thinking about these two things together, I was reminded of the following passages from Margaret R. Miles’s Seeing... Read more