Happy New Year! I ended the year — almost — on a fun and interesting note, as a guest speaker at the first “annual gathering” hosted by Hollywood Jesus; I am told that video clips of the speakers’ presentations, including my own, may end up online in the near future. The event took place in Renton, Washington, only three hours’ drive or so from my home in Vancouver, and it was fun to meet the various people there — a... Read more

Mark Steyn has posted a profile of Jule Styne — producer of the Broadway musicals Gypsy and Funny Girl, and the composer of ‘I’ve Heard That Song Before’ (one of my all-time favorites), ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’, ‘People’, ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time’, ‘Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!’ and many others — on his website. It’s a nice companion to the earlier profiles he posted on Irving Berlin, Ernest Lehman, Stephen Sondheim and... Read more

Variety has an article up now on “quiet noisemakers” — films like The Constant Gardener, Broken Flowers, Pride & Prejudice and others that have done a lot more business overseas than they have in North America. The article also includes this interesting paragraph: Only a few major releases managed the same sort of long-lasting run. Warner’s “Batman Begins,” New Line’s “Wedding Crashers,” U’s “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” Sony’s “Are We There Yet?,” Disney’s “Herbie: Fully Loaded” and its “Sky High” were... Read more

Robert Fulford, one of the more consistently cogent and readable columnists at the National Post, writes today that Steven Spielberg’s Munich is not only based on the dubious evidence offered by an anonymous source in George Jonas’s book Vengeance, but it is also a “banal” movie that “has further diluted the ‘facts’ with gallons of basic Hollywood soup stock, swamping whatever hunks of truth were available.” There is merit to some of Fulford’s criticisms; however, others are themselves at variance... Read more

Today marks the end of our traditional four-day Christmas holiday weekend, and despite all the free time, I’m still catching up on my newspaper reading. For example, I recently read Lynne McNamara’s column from Saturday’s Vancouver Sun, in which she announces that local outfit Brightlight Pictures has given the green light to White Noise 2: The Light — and that’s a lot of light, no? The film is a sequel to White Noise (my review), a surprisingly scary horror film... 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. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — CDN $30,376,438 — N.AM $260,635,000 — 11.7%Memoirs of a Geisha — CDN $984,859 — N.AM $9,889,000 — 10.0%Syriana — CDN $2,497,398 — N.AM $28,830,000 — 8.7%King Kong — CDN $8,363,739 — N.AM $108,617,000 — 7.7%The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch... Read more

My computer’s in for repairs, and the laptop I’m borrowing in its place is rather old and ridiculously slow, and it just froze up on me as I was putting the finishing touches on a post about the Brokeback Mountain controversy — a post that had already taken much, much longer to write than it normally would have. So, in its place, I now post these newsbite quickies: 1. The New York Times notes that conservative Christian film critics —... Read more

…Philip Glass is coming to town! It was recently brought to my attention that the Philip Glass Ensemble is coming to Vancouver in February for a live concert screening of Koyaanisqatsi (1983), one of my five favorite films of all time — so of course, I had to buy a ticket, plus I gave tickets to my brother and sister for Christmas today. Oh, and of course, Merry Christmas to one and all! Christ is born! Read more