Just got home from the Gospel According to St. Matthew double-bill at the Cinematheque. Yowzah. I’m a little tired right now, but I’ll have to blog it tomorrow. In the meantime, my review of Batman Begins for BC Christian News is now online, and most of it is taken from the thoughts I posted here last week. Speaking of which, I’ve updated my original blog post on that film a few times since I first wrote it, too. Read more

Until last night, the only film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini that I had ever seen was The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), though I had also seen Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957; my comments), to which Pasolini contributed some dialogue. Obviously, since I have made a point of seeing the non-Jesus films made by other directors who have made Jesus films, my lack of exposure to Pasolini’s other work is a problem. So, last night, as part... Read more

Been in a bit of a ’40s mode lately. First, in keeping with my recent efforts to catch up on films that were directed by David Lean or that starred John Mills and/or Alec Guinness, I finally got around to checking out the Criterion editions of Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). These were the first films Lean made after his four-film collaboration with Noel Coward, and I can’t help but think that Lean was playing it safe by... Read more

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) was easily one of the most inconsequential films in the entire Star Trek franchise, and, oddly enough, the new “collector’s edition” DVD makes it seem like even less of an event. For one thing, this is the first two-disc set in the entire series that has no audio commentary track whatsoever — not by the writers, not by the director, not by anybody; instead, all it’s got is the requisite snarky text commentary by Michael and... Read more

I have been a fan of Terry Scott Taylor ever since I won Vox Humana, an LP by his band Daniel Amos, through a radio station’s trivia contest 20 years ago. Since then he has also fronted the Swirling Eddies and has been the most prolific composer for Lost Dogs. In the meantime, he has also written the music for a number of projects overseen by animator Douglas TenNapel, beginning with the CD-ROM game The Neverhood (1996), and continuing with... Read more

There has been much chatter of late about alleged abuses at Gitmo and sundry other places, and much debate about whether the Geneva Conventions ought to apply to the prisoners there. Andrew Coyne, for one, argues that the Conventions were intended to give combatants an incentive for playing within the rules, so once they play outside the rules, insisting on treating them as regular prisoners of war is to “subvert” the Conventions. And I can’t say it bothers me if... Read more

Time for another round-up. (Updated late Wednesday night.) 1. Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf & Grendel isn’t the only adaptation of that famous poem in the works. Variety reports that Columbia Pictures is talking to Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Brendan Gleeson and Robin Wright Penn about starring in a “performance capture film” directed by Robert Zemeckis (The Polar Express) and written by Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) and Neil Gaiman. 2. Jeffrey Overstreet has posted some comments on the news that a new... Read more

Agence France-Presse reports that the Greek Orthodox Church is including actors among the professions that would make unsuitable candidates for the clergy. Apparently the Greeks regard acting as a “most soul-corrupting and harmful” vocation. Hmmm. If the Roman Catholics had followed this rule, they would have deprived themselves of one of their best Popes. FWIW, other professions barred from the Greek Orthodox clergy include “wine-shop keepers, members of the armed forces and, given a recent embarrassing series of corruption scandals,... Read more

Finally, a Batman movie that understands the character! I have seen Batman Begins twice, now, but I am still mulling it over and, as my deadline is still a few days off, I haven’t written a proper review; in the meantime, here are some of my early impressions. In 1989, a lot of people went ga-ga for Tim Burton’s film because it was dark and moody and a change of pace from the campy 1960s TV show — but I... Read more

It took a while, but I finally finished watching Firefly today. I watched the first disc at a friend’s place late last year, then watched the second disc two or three months ago, and I wasn’t as impressed as I might have wanted to be, partly for the reasons I got into here. But a few days ago I finally got the third and fourth discs from the library, and whaddayaknow, the show has grown on me. This is partly... Read more