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. The Queen — CDN $3,239,243 — N.AM $17,291,000 — 18.7%Babel — CDN $1,710,232 — N.AM $12,013,000 — 14.2%Casino Royale — CDN $5,236,603 — N.AM $40,600,000 — 12.9%Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan — CDN $11,386,270 — N.AM $90,504,000 — 12.6%The Prestige — CDN $5,763,562... Read more

I saw Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan about a month before it opened, and I spent that entire month resisting the urge to give away some of the movie’s bigger surprises, and telling people little more than, “I wonder why there haven’t been any lawsuits!” Well, the movie’s been out for two weeks now, and as you may have heard, the lawsuits have begun. I don’t care to rehash all the details here,... Read more

Readers of this blog with long memories and an inordinate fondness for Bible movies may remember that, a year and a half ago, I mentioned in passing that Val Kilmer — the voice of Moses (and God) in The Prince of Egypt (1998) — had also starred in a stage musical called The Ten Commandments. If you missed your chance to see this production live at the Kodak Theatre, then have no fear, it is apparently coming out on DVD... Read more

My review of Fast Food Nation is now up at CT Movies. UPDATE: On re-reading this review, it occurs to me that there are at least two points I could have gotten into, but didn’t. First, my review does allude briefly to the link the film makes between the commodification of meat and the exploitation of sex (more specifically, the exploitation of women’s bodies), but I could have been more explicit about that; apart from the meat supplier checking out... Read more

Just a few more quickies before I go to bed. 1. Yet another movie is going into wide release now without being screened for critics! I refer, of course, to Let’s Go to Prison. 2. Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher (2005) is now available for sale on DVD. Director David Di Sabatino writes: The movie is a sleek and fast-paced 60 minutes, but almost everything that was in the longer version is jam packed into another... Read more

Remember that item I posted here in June, when Nacho Libre and The Lake House opened in the same week — thus presenting us with the highly unusual spectacle of not one, but two, brand new PG-rated movies for grown-ups? At the time, I noted: Of the 23 weekends so far this year, the #1 movie has been PG-13 or R-rated almost every time, the sole exceptions being last week’s G-rated Cars and five earlier PG-rated films (Glory Road, Eight... Read more

Just a few more quickies, before I forget about ’em. 1. Terry Mattingly at GetReligion.org responds to a recent Variety story which said the film industry “has embraced an ever-growing set of guidelines described by some as the Passion Playbook.” 2. Variety reports that the Kolkata Film Festival in West Bengal opened last Friday with Adam’s Apples (2005), a Danish film written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen: Ivan is an insanely optimistic preacher who takes in convicts to help... Read more

I can honestly say it never occurred to me to ask any questions about Keisha Castle-Hughes’s pregnancy at the junket for The Nativity Story last weekend. True, on the night of the screening, I did quip to a couple of colleagues that she had been kept away from the junket because the studio had decided to “divorce her quietly“. But for all I know, the decision to skip the junket might have been hers, not the studio’s. And when the... Read more

Picked up Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 4 yesterday. Figured I’d count all the cartoons listed in the index at the back of Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons, which was published in 1989. I counted 1049. Then I figured I’d count all the Looney Tunes cartoons in my VHS and DVD collections. I counted 371 that date to 1988 or earlier. Gadzooks. All these videotapes and... Read more

Lately, my wife and I have been looking at copying the contents of our VHS tapes to DVD, and whenever I suggest that we should hold on to the old tapes in case we ever need to record anything on them, she looks at me like I’m crazy and says we should just toss them out because they take up too much space. Today, as if to confirm her point, Variety posted a eulogy for the VHS format: The format... Read more