Time for another quick batch. 1. Yo ho ho, indeed. According to current estimates, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest raked in $55.5 million on Friday, thus breaking the record for biggest single day at the box office set last year by Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. 2. The story’s a little old now, so you’ll have to pay to read it in its entirety, but the New York Times reports that Kevin Smith is... Read more

Lately I have been ranting about the tendency among some of my fellow Christians to go ga-ga over the Christ-like elements in the Superman movies without paying any attention to the other mythic references in the films. So I figure it’s only fair to point out that Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, a Catholic priest and columnist for the National Post, does pay attention to those other elements in a column that he ran today on Superman Returns. He begins:... Read more

Today, the twins turned 5 months and 1 day old. And today, they went to see their first movie — and I missed it! Alas, I was stuck working at home, but Deanna took them with her to their first-ever Movies for Mommies event at the Fifth Avenue theatre, a short walk across the bridge from where we live. The movie they saw? The Devil Wears Prada. (I caught it at a press screening last week. Loved Streep and Tucci,... Read more

Stephen Skelton is at it again. The man who said Christians can use the Superman movies to evangelize because we don’t need to “interpret” them has now written an article on Superman Returns for Beliefnet, in which he makes even more off-the-wall claims. For example — and be warned, there are SPOILERS here: Moments later, we learn that Superman–our Christ figure–left Earth five years ago and ascended to the heavens, returning to his home planet Krypton to confirm that it... Read more

I finally got around to seeing Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005) today. I liked it a lot, and maybe even loved it, though it would take further viewings to say for sure. I could say a fair bit more about the film (and I already have, here), but for now one point of utter trivia catches my eye. In this movie, Jeff Daniels plays a professor who may or may not be sexually interested in a student... Read more

Miles Jupp of BBC Radio’s Silverscreen Beats is hosting a series of 15-minute audio documentaries on Jesus movie soundtracks this week. You can listen to today’s show, on Miklos Rosza’s score for King of Kings (1961), here. Future installments include: Godspell (July 4)Composer Stephen Schwartz reveals that he took five weeks to write the classic songs such as Day By Day. Another song, Beautiful City, became the unofficial anthem of the World Trade Centre disaster, and virtually all the words... 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. The Da Vinci Code — CDN $25,860,054 — N.AM $209,793,000 — 12.3%The Break-Up — CDN $9,543,696 — N.AM $110,069,000 — 8.7%The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift — CDN $4,465,511 — N.AM $51,666,000 — 8.6%X-Men: The Last Stand — CDN $18,724,059 — N.AM $228,533,000 — 8.2%Click — CDN $6,186,312 —... Read more

The newest issue of BC Christian News is now online, and with it, my film column, which is basically my commentary on the Superman movies with some brief notes about The Da Vinci Code, The Resurrection and the upcoming Malick retrospective. Read more

The controversy over Facing the Giants — the Christian football movie that received a PG rating (gasp!) for its “thematic elements” (double gasp!) — is now officially out of control. On June 21, the Los Angeles Times reported that the MPAA had received over 15,000 e-mails protesting the film’s PG rating during the previous week alone — a figure that may be ten times bigger than any previous reaction to a ratings decision. And now the federal government’s throwing its... Read more

The second Pirates of the Caribbean movie comes out next week — and FWIW, no, I have not seen it yet. The third Pirates of the Caribbean movie comes out next year — according to the IMDB, on May 25, 2007. But the fact that virtually no one has seen these movies yet evidently hasn’t stopped someone from already writing an entire book about the hidden Christian meanings lurking within this “series”. According to the blurb for Tim Wesemann’s Swashbuckling... Read more