What is it with Nicole Kidman and sci-fi remakes? Especially remakes of films about odd behaviour in seemingly normal small towns? Last year it was the surprisingly enjoyably campy The Stepford Wives (my CT Movies review; my B&C; essay). Now, ComingSoon.net reports that she’ll be starring in the upcoming fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The new film will be directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, the German director who made Das Experiment (2001; my comments), one of the more... Read more

Oh, man. Forget Google Maps. Check out this. I’ve been playing with this program for the past hour or two, and the picture above is what I got after I took an aerial “tour” following the route I take whenever I drive from my apartment to my church. (In the interests of privacy, I am not going to depict the addresses of any friends or families that I typed into the program.) Once I “arrived” at my church, I “tilted... Read more

Time for another news round-up. 1. Yesterday’s National Post has an item on Un dimanche à Kigali, a Canadian film currently in production that is based on a book by Gil Courtemanche about the Rwanda massacre. Could make an interesting double-bill with Hotel Rwanda (my review). 2. Reuters reports that March of the Penguins, with over $12 million in the till already, is well on its way to becoming the 2nd-highest-grossing documentary of all time in North America. The highest... Read more

My review of Sky High, the latest in a batch of superhero hybrid movies (see item #6 here), is now up at CT Movies. Read more

Heads up, Vancouverites — I have just received word that Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé will open at the Park Theatre on August 19. The film concerns female circumcision and the relationship between Islam, African custom, and modernity in Senegal, and I blogged it here four months ago when it premiered at the Pacific Cinematheque as part of their DiverCiné series. And FWIW, now that it’s getting a proper theatrical release in Vancouver, it’s a contender for my end-of-the-year top-ten list, which... Read more

I’ve been writing about life-of-Jesus films in one forum or another for about a decade now, and one film I have always wanted to see is Julien Duvivier’s Golgotha (1935) — quite probably the first Jesus film made during the sound era, and thus quite probably the first “talkie” about the life of Christ. My interest was particularly piqued when I discovered that Franco Zeffirelli, director of Jesus of Nazareth (1977), had said in a book on the making of... Read more

Just a few quick new links re: upcoming releases. 1. FilmStew.com reports that ThinkFilm will distribute The King — which stars Willam Hurt as a married pastor and Gael Garcia Bernal as his illegitimate son — in early 2006. 2. Reuters reports that the producers of The Aristocrats didn’t even bother to get the film rated by the MPAA, because they figured it would get an NC-17. Having seen the film, which has no nudity and no violence but a... Read more

Last month I blitzed through the Billy Graham movies of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s — and now it’s time to catch up on the films that followed. To judge from their website, World Wide Pictures produced a string of documentaries and the like over the course of the 1980s, but they made only three feature films — all of which I remember seeing on the big screen when I was in high school. I haven’t seen The Prodigal (1983/1983)... Read more

The editor of Scandalizing Jesus? just sent all the contributors a flier with a list of that book’s essays. And here they are, in the hope that this might whet your appetite as it does mine: Essays on the Kazantzakis novel: Peter Bien, “Renan’s Vie de Jésus as a Primary Source for The Last Temptation“W. Barnes Tatum, “The Novel, the Four Gospels, and the Continuing Historical Quest”Lewis Owens, “Pontius Pilate: Modern Man in Search of a Soul”Daniel A. Dombrowski, “Kazantzakis,... Read more

No, don’t worry, this photo isn’t from a movie — though it is a picture of the man who would become famous for a career that included the Dracula movies (1931ff) as well as the early films of Ed Wood (from 1953’s Glen or Glenda to 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, the latter of which was shot almost entirely after Lugosi died). Instead, this is one of several photos that were taken while Bela Lugosi played Jesus in a... Read more