The Hollywood Reporter says Ron Howard’s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code “will open the 59th Cannes Film Festival on May 17, two days before the film is released worldwide.” It goes on to say that Howard “first came to Cannes in 1988 with ‘Willow.’ His other Cannes screenings have included ‘Far and Away’ in 1992 and ‘Ed TV‘ in 1999.” Um, I just have to ask: Of all the Ron Howard films that The Da Vinci Code could be... Read more
Someone apparently thought I was one of his pseudonyms. Read more
My junket report on The New World — part review, part interview with producer Sarah Green and co-stars Q’Orianka Kilcher and Christian Bale — is now up at CanadianChristianity.com. UPDATE: It occurs to me that there were lots of good quotes in those roundtable interviews that, for various reasons, I did not get to use in my article. So hey, why not toss some of ’em off here. First up, Kilcher on the vast changes that took place between the... Read more
My review of Woody Allen’s Match Point is now up at CT Movies. Read more
LOS ANGELES — Terrence Malick movies take a long time to gestate. Malick typically shoots hours and hours of footage, much of it improvised, and he then spends months editing it together. And in a career that goes back 33 years, he has directed only four films: Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and, now, his version of the Pocahontas legend, The New World. Sometimes the editing continues long after the film has been screened for critics. The... Read more
The Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah has a page up for Son of Man, the modernized South African adaptation of the gospels that will be screened there four times between this coming Sunday and the Sunday after. The blurb states, among other things: Shot against the backdrop of a violence-riddled township and with text updated to modern time, Son of Man delivers one indelible impression after another. Mary conceives the Christ child during a militia attack on a... Read more
Just a heads-up for those in the Vancouver area this weekend — the Moving Pictures Canadian Film Festival will be on at the Cinemark Tinseltown theatre from tonight to Sunday. The opening film, a documentary on the B.C. film industry called Inventing Grace, Touching Glory, didn’t exactly get the best review in today’s Georgia Straight, but one film I would definitely recommend is La Neuvaine, which I reviewed here when it played at last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival. Incidentally,... Read more
Mark Steyn reviews Brokeback Mountain, and echoes my query regarding whether the film is really all that pro-gay anyway: I like Ms Proulx’s books not because of the characters or the plots but because she’s spent much of her life roaming the same turf I have – Vermont, Quebec, Newfoundland – and she’s got a tremendous ability to capture the essence of the land, and in particular the way a harsh land shapes the character of its people. She began... Read more
I mentioned in my review of Munich that George Jonas’s 1984 book Vengeance, on which Steven Spielberg’s film is based, had been adapted once before, as a 1986 TV-movie called Sword of Gideon. Now, in today’s National Post, the producer of that film calls Spielberg’s film a “remake”: Robert Lantos, the Canadian film producer, yesterday said Munich, the new film by Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg, is a “remake” of Mr. Lantos’s film of 20 years ago, Sword of Gideon. And... Read more
I saw Terrence Malick’s The New World twice last month, and my report on the film’s junket should be online before the film goes into wide release this Friday. A few weeks ago, however, it was revealed that the version opening across the continent this weekend will be about 16 minutes shorter than the version which played for one week in L.A. at the end of the year. So, in writing on this film, I have had to be somewhat... Read more
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