Disney recently abandoned traditional hand-drawn animation in favour of the CGI kind. They thought this would increase their share of the increasingly competitive animation market. And last year, the release of Chicken Little, which they promoted like crazy for months in advance, seemed to vindicate their decision. True, the film’s ultimate gross of $135.4 million was less than that of every computer-animated Pixar or DreamWorks or Blue Sky cartoon ever made except for Antz (1998; $90.8 million) and Robots (2005;... Read more

The twins are getting baptized next week, and so am I. I have been baptized before, back when I was an 11-year-old Mennonite, but I’m entering the Orthodox church next week — so, ironically, to bring the Anabaptist (i.e. “baptized again“) phase of my life to a close, I will be baptized again. We’ll be one big soggy family. And FWIW, the ceremony will take place right before our church’s midnight Pascha service (i.e. our midnight Easter service; we’re on... Read more

Mark Steyn has a hilarious piece on Peggy Lee, and the faltering efforts of music biographers to tell her story, in the latest Maclean’s magazine. He begins like so: “Writing about music is, as they say, like dancing about architecture. To be honest, I’d like to see more of the latter, as I’d find it hard to believe Dame Margot Fonteyn interpreting the CN Tower could be worse than the average music biography.” And it just gets better from there. Read more

Never mind my top ten list and Matt Page’s top ten list — Entertainment Weekly has posted its own list of twelve “favorite TV and movie Jesuses”, which presumably is not quite the same thing as favorite Jesus movies, but there is some overlap. Five of the performances cited come from the past decade, and all but two of them come from my lifetime (i.e. post-1970). EW makes the usual mildly snarky comments about the actors’ pre- and post-Christ careers,... Read more

Time for another round of heads-ups. 1. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt reviews Coming Attractions, “a one-of-a-kind documentary about the history and methodology of making trailers, produced by the Andrew J. Kuehn Jr. Foundation. Strictly speaking, this is an archival and educational film. Legal clearance makes showing the film in theaters or on television far too expensive. Which is a pity since the movie’s entertainment value is every bit as high as its instructional value.” I wonder what its own... Read more

Matt Page has responded to my top ten Jesus movies list by posting a list of his own at his Bible Films Blog. Six movies appear on both of our lists, and I would add that two of his “honourable mentions” are on my nine-year-old all-time top-ten list. Incidentally, for those of you who live in Britain, Matt will be one of the interviewees in The Passion: Films, Faith and Fury, a documentary airing Saturday, April 15 at 7pm on... Read more

My review of The Wild, a film which makes me want to revisit last year’s superior Madagascar, is now up at CT Movies, as is my review of Friends with Money. Read more

I still haven’t seen the short version of The New World, which comes out on DVD next month. I believe it’s showing at a theatre in town right now, but it looks like I’ll have to go to Japan for the truly fullest experience of this film. Reports the Associated Press: A theater audience in Japan will be sniffing their noses — literally — at a new Hollywood adventure film when it opens here later this month. A new service... Read more

Just a few quick news items here. 1. Reuters reports that thousands of girls auditioned today for the part of Lyra Belacqua in The Golden Compass, the first film in the ‘His Dark Materials‘ trilogy. “The girls were asked about what they thought their ‘daemons’ — best described as animal-shaped creatures that correspond with each character’s personality — would be.” Sounds like the perfect approach, to me. 2. Reuters and the New York Daily News both have items up on... Read more