Is it just me, or do the cartoons on the Walt Disney Treasures and Looney Tunes Golden Collection sets seem a little too tightly framed at times to any other collectors out there? I mean, for starters, here are a few of the title cards from the brand new Disney set, More Silly Symphonies: 1929 – 1938 — and note how the MPAA logo is sometimes cropped at the bottom, and how there is sometimes almost no space between the... Read more
My review of Rocky Balboa is now up at CT Movies. And since this is one of those rare cases of a PG-rated film that is not primarily aimed at families or children, now is as good a time as any to update the list of PG-rated releases begun here and continued here. Plus, since we know what the wide releases will be this week and next, this post will wrap up this topic for the year. Quite a few... Read more
It’s no secret that the Rocky movies have, in some sense, mirrored the career of the man who wrote and starred in them all. In the 1970s, Sylvester Stallone was a struggling actor who got his shot at the big time by writing, on spec, a screenplay about a struggling boxer who gets his shot at the big time — starting with the original Rocky, which won an Oscar for Best Picture in 1976. In the 1980s, as Stallone was... Read more
The Hollywood Reporter says CBS is going ahead with a pilot for Demons, a dramatic series, produced by Joan of Arcadia‘s Barbara Hall and Revolution Studios chief Joe Roth, that “centers on an ex-Jesuit priest/psychologist who performs exorcisms.” So, um, what happened to the plan, reported here four months ago, to base this show on “the real-life experiences of Bob Larson”? Is this another case of fictitious and real-life evangelicals getting displaced onscreen by re-written or newly invented Catholic characters?... Read more
I picked up two of the new ‘Walt Disney Treasures‘ sets today — specifically, I got More Silly Symphonies and The Complete Pluto Vol. 2 — so, now that I know what these sets contain, I figured I would update my inventory of animated Disney shorts on DVD. It ends with a list of cartoons that I don’t have, and most of those are gleaned from a list of Disney cartoons that I found online years ago, when I first... Read more
… and am more convinced than ever that I am right and all those other people are wrong. I have added a few extra comments and a key quote from the film to my most recent post on this subject. 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. Casino Royale — CDN $18,520,481 — N.AM $137,574,000 — 13.5%The Holiday — CDN $2,784,292 — N.AM $25,310,000 — 11.0%Blood Diamond — CDN $1,982,045 — N.AM $18,390,000 — 10.8%Deja Vu — CDN $3,891,695 — N.AM $57,777,000 — 6.7%The Nativity Story — CDN $1,518,241 — N.AM $23,056,000 — 6.6%Happy Feet — CDN... Read more
Remember how Peter O’Toole played King Henry II in two movies that came out only a few years apart but had so little to do with each other, apart from O’Toole, that you couldn’t quite say the second film was a “sequel” to the first film? I was reminded of that today when I discovered that Hristo Shopov, who played Pontius Pilate in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), has apparently reprised the role in L’Inchiesta, AKA The... Read more
Here’s another bit of cultural detritus that I’ve had lying around for months, this time scooped from a McDonald’s tray liner: Now did you ever think you’d see that word at Mickey D’s? Read more
Anne Thompson just posted this under the headline “Most Impressive IMDB Page“; and to judge from the IMDB’s message board for this person, this was one of those things that got turned into a short-lived internet meme about eight months ago: The bizarre thing is, just seeing this IMDB page reminds me of how I watched the film on TV with my sister more than 20 years ago — probably while the parents were out — and while I haven’t... Read more
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