My review of The King is now up at CT Movies. Read more

The Hollywood Reporter says the latest director to take a stab at adapting Alan Moore’s Watchmen is Zack Snyder, who recently finished shooting a not-yet-released adaptation of Frank Miller’s ancient battle epic 300. Alex Tse is working on the screenplay. Of course, so many directors have been involved in this project at one point or another — including Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass — that I’m not holding my breath. Not yet. Read more

If you’re like me, you’ve already got both the two-disc set and the four-disc set for each of the Lord of the Rings movies. Not only does each set come with a different version of the movie in question — the shorter versions actually have bits of footage that aren’t in the “extended” versions, including one of my favorite shots, depicted here — but each set comes with a completely unique set of extras. So there isn’t that much overlap.... Read more

This might be old news to some people, but in the handful of posts that I have made on the directors coming and going from The Golden Compass (the first installment in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy), I don’t recall ever noticing, let alone mentioning, whether the film had a release date. Well, apparently a release date has been set — despite what seems like a problematic pre-production! Ain’t It Cool News posted several pictures today from the New... Read more

Want to hear John Ottman’s Superman Returns score eight days before the movie comes out in theatres, and seven days before the CD comes out in stores? Believe it or not, you can — just click here. I have only listened to the score once so far, and I don’t intend to listen to it again until after I have seen the movie, but I like what I hear. Ottman — whose past debt to John Williams is obvious if... Read more

I’ve seen a few Billy Wilder movies in my time — Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), one or two others — but not nearly enough. Now Mark Steyn has written an article commemorating the 100th anniversary of Wilder’s birth. A few excerpts: In Vienna, he was a journalist who turned to screenwriting in the flourishing German film industry. Arriving in America, he wrote, with Charles Brackett, for Lubitsch (Ninotchka) and then began directing after... Read more

Peter Pan (1953) is not one of my most favorite Disney movies, so I don’t have much of an opinion regarding Disney’s plans to feature Tinkerbell in a new movie as part of a series of straight-to-video “Fairies” titles — but just on principle, I have to take exception to the fact that the pixie will now have a voice. To quote Reuters: The creation of author and playwright J.M. Barrie, Tinker Bell spent the last hundred years fluttering about... Read more

Four weeks ago, I wrote one last article on The Da Vinci Code for ChristianWeek, and it appeared in the paper’s June 9 issue. However, due to technical difficulties, that issue is not yet online. In the meantime, the article was reprinted in the Mennonite Brethren Herald, and you can read it here. JUN 29 UPDATE: The ChristianWeek version is now up here. 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 $24,223,055 — N.AM $198,501,000 — 12.2%The Break-Up — CDN $7,772,115 — N.AM $91,931,000 — 8.5%X-Men: The Last Stand — CDN $17,283,713 — N.AM $215,549,000 — 8.0%Over the Hedge — CDN $10,536,279 — N.AM $138,755,000 — 7.6%The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift — CDN... Read more

I like numbers, and I like trivia. So as of this weekend … Cars, which already had the lowest opening weekend of any Pixar film since Toy Story 2 (1999) despite opening on more screens than any of them, held onto the #1 spot this weekend but dropped a whopping 48% in its second weekend — not unusual for a big summer movie, but a far bigger drop than the other Pixar movies that have come out so far this... Read more