It has been so long since I saw Don Bluth’s The Small One (1978), I cannot remember if it was one of the good cartoons that came out between Walt Disney’s death in 1966 and the studio’s “renaissance” in the late 1980s, or if it was one of the studio’s more embarrassing ventures. But no matter; because it is one of the few Disney cartoons that deals with biblical material, I think I shall have to pick up Classic Holiday... Read more

I had forgotten all about Francis Schaeffer’s four-part “grid” — good art with a good message, good art with a bad message, bad art with a good message, bad art with a bad message — until I came across this post at Andy Whitman’s blog. He makes some very good points about the limitations of Schaeffer’s approach (does all art have a “message”? is it really all that easy to distinguish “good” art from “bad” art? etc.) and how to... Read more

The Hollywood Reporter says Gerard Butler — the star of Dear Frankie (my review), Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and the upcoming Beowulf & Grendel — will play Spartan King Leonidas I in 300, a new film about the Battle of Thermopylae. Those expecting a standard sword-and-sandals ancient-battle epic may be in for a bit of a shock, though. The film is being co-written and directed by Zack Snyder, whose only other feature film to date is last... Read more

Heads up, Vancouverites — the Italian film history education continues! Two months ago, the Pacific Cinematheque hosted an extensive Pier Paolo Pasolini retrospective. Next month, it will host a retrospective dedicated to Federico Fellini, who collaborated with Pasolini on the scripts for Nights of Cabiria (1957; my comments) and, reportedly, La Dolce Vita (1960). While I have seen those two films, and part of 8½ (1963), I have not yet seen any of Fellini’s other films, so I imagine I’ll... 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. L’Horloge Biologique — CDN $954,672 — N.AM $954,672 — 100%Broken Flowers — CDN $369,093 — N.AM $2,847,000 — 12.9%Wedding Crashers — CDN $19,162,025 — N.AM $164,051,000 — 11.7%Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo — CDN $889,319 — N.AM $9,400,000 — 9.5%The Dukes of Hazzard — CDN $5,065,793 — N.AM $57,478,000 — 8.8%Charlie... Read more

The first time I ever heard of Timothy Treadwell was when I read the opening paragraphs of Mark Steyn’s review of the Disney movie Brother Bear (2003): I was interested to see that among the technical advisors who chipped in their two bits’ worth on Brother Bear to ensure the accurate depiction of the grizzlies was Timothy Treadwell, the self-described eco-warrior from Malibu who became famous for his campaign “to promote getting close to bears to show they were not... Read more

An e-pal recently pointed me to this site, which contains a series of screen captures from a bootleg copy of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith in which Lucas’s already-stiff dialogue has been translated into Chinese and then back into English. Funny! Read more

Just a bit of horn-tooting here. Three months ago, I posted a JPEG of the cover of Scandalizing Jesus?, an upcoming book on The Last Temptation of Christ that includes an essay by yours truly. Since the editor sent me that image, I have periodically checked the book’s page at Amazon.com to see if it has been posted there yet — and today, I discovered that it finally has. Ah, joy. Read more

My review of The Great Raid is up at CT Movies. And FWIW, for my money, if you want to see a movie about war and prisoners of war that happens to co-star Connie Nielsen, you’d be better off watching the devastating Danish film Brothers. Read more

Bizarre. You know how things just waft through your brain when you wake up sometimes, for no particular reason? Today I got up and found myself thinking about The Matrix as I did my morning stuff. One of the things I thought about was how, after seeing the first film, I had always wondered, if Neo needed the help of Morpheus and the other Zion-ists to escape from the Matrix, then how did Neo’s predecessor get out so many years... Read more