NarniaWeb.com reports that Warwick Davis — whose roles include an Ewok in Return of the Jedi (1983) and its TV spin-offs, a Hogwarts professor in the Harry Potter movies (2001-2007, so far) and the title role in Willow (1988) — is going to play Nikabrik the Black Dwarf in next year’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. The interesting thing is, Davis has already appeared in another version of Prince Caspian — i.e., the 1989 BBC version which combined this... Read more

Lou Lumenick at the New York Post writes: It wasn’t totally surprising to learn today that Sony isn’t planning to show critics “Ghost Rider,” which opens a week from Friday. The latest Marvel Comics blockbuster starring Nicolas Cage, which carries a pricetag of $120 million, may well be the most expensive event movie movie to receive this treatment, which tends to embarass the talent involved. You may recall that Nicolas Cage’s last movie, a remake of The Wicker Man, was... Read more

Last week, CT Movies posted its list of the ten “most redeeming” films of the past year. Today, we posted “The 2006 Critics’ Choice Awards” — and just for the record, I didn’t cast any votes whatsoever for the #1 film, but since last year’s list was topped by my personal favorite of that year, I won’t complain too much. Read more

Did I mention it was the twins’ birthday two days ago? Probably not. (That picture was taken over a month ago, though.) It has been a year since they were born. A whole year. And since my wife went back to work two weeks ago, I now find myself juggling the whole movie-critic thing with the parenting thing — and it’s been an interesting experience. I was telling someone the other day that the twins have been getting in the... Read more

There are many more items I would like to sift through and post here, but this tiny handful will have to do for now. 1. Jesus Camp comes out on DVD tomorrow — and I just noticed that the back of the box says the deleted scenes will include “Additional Ted Haggard Sermon Footage”. Prepare to cringe. 2. Greg Wright, of the Past the Popcorn movie site, offers his own interesting take on the Hobbit fracas at TheOneRing.net. 3. Toronto... 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. Blood Diamond — CDN $8,797,983 — N.AM $53,967,000 — 16.3%The Queen — CDN $5,776,923 — N.AM $45,522,000 — 12.7%Catch and Release — CDN $1,461,629 — N.AM $12,011,000 — 12.2%Pan’s Labyrinth — CDN $2,610,113 — N.AM $21,696,000 — 12.0%Smokin’ Aces — CDN $2,453,355 — N.AM $24,955,000 — 9.8%Epic Movie — CDN... Read more

Curiouser and curiouser. You may recall that I posted an item here two months ago complaining about the tight cropping of most of the cartoons on More Silly Symphonies: 1929 – 1938, one of the most recent entries in the ‘Walt Disney Treasures‘ series of DVDs. At the time, I noted that The Goddess of Spring (1934) was not “windowboxed” like the other films, and I assumed this was because Disney was re-using the version they had made six years... Read more

If I linked to every story out there about Hollywood’s quest for the next big fantasy franchise, I’d never get any work done. But this piece by Jamie Portman of CanWest News Service is worth citing here, if only to fact-check a couple of statements. First, a small and rather trivial matter of box-office statistics: Prince Caspian is the second of Christian academic C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia to be filmed, and Disney is promising a movie even more spectacular... Read more

So says Mark Steyn, here and especially here, commenting on this. But wait a minute, I thought Christian was the new gay. Read more

Major American studios like Fox are threatening to withhold their movies from Canadian theatres — but now the Globe and Mail reports that Canadians aren’t going to the movies all that much nowadays anyway, at least not compared to Americans: Canadian admissions have been edging downward for close to five years. The trend was brought home most recently by Telefilm Canada‘s release of data for 2006. Overall box office last year was $831-million. While not a dramatic dip from 2005’s... Read more