The wife and I have been talking about doing a Lord of the Rings extended-edition marathon for so long, it’s kind of hard to believe we’ve actually done it now. But yesterday, do it, we did. Our apartment isn’t very big, so we only had about half-a-dozen friends and family over for the occasion. But it was fun nonetheless. To make things even more interesting, my wife served up food before each and every disc — each batch named for... Read more

That post about the possible gay-Jesus-movie hoax last week got me thinking… I have never really tried to narrow down, in any methodical way, which of the films mentioned in Harry and Michael Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards might be the “complete hoax” they dare us to find, hidden somewhere in the book’s pages. The book was first published in 1980 (my paperback was published by Berkley in 1981), back in the days before Internet search engines and the like,... Read more

At the risk of repeating too much of what I’ve already posted here, one of my editors has just handed me an assignment to write an article in the next month or so on the history of World Wide Pictures, the motion-picture arm of Billy Graham’s ministry. Among other things, I’ve got to come up with testimonies from people whose lives have been affected by the films, and I also have to write a sidebar on WWP’s “top five films”,... Read more

George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith ain’t the only controversial prequel about a guy going over to the Dark Side directed by a former darling of 1970s cinema that opens this weekend! There is also Paul Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, and my review of it is up at CT Movies today. This is the film that was shelved when the studio decided not only to send it back for reshoots, but to remake it virtually from scratch; that... Read more

I like to make lists, and I like cartoons, and I like classic films, and I sometimes go a little nuts. Hence, when I discovered that Disney is now putting out a series of “Classic Cartoon Favorites” (four discs released so far, three more coming out in two weeks), which recycle a small number of the cartoons already available in the limited edition “Walt Disney Treasures” but also go beyond the contents of those sets, I just had to go... Read more

Here’s a very interesting paragraph from Jeffrey Overstreet’s ‘Film Forum‘ at CT Movies today, which links to my review, among others, of the new Star Wars film: Could it be that George Lucas is somewhat responsible for the current surge in Christian media film coverage? A decade ago, there weren’t many Christian press film critics writing regularly. Now they’re everywhere. A colleague of mine speculated that, since many of this new crowd of Christian critics are in a similar age... Read more

Two new items for CanadianChristianity.com are up now. 1. My review of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, which may or may not be tweaked as the days go by and I see the film again. The strange thing about writing these reviews is that you feel like a geek for wanting to point out all the odd thematic or dramatic ways the new films do or don’t fit with the previous ones — you want to... Read more

1. I know it’s been out for a while now, but I finally caught up with the latest Batman Begins trailer. I’m excited. It brings back fond memories of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, but it also looks like it will be very much its own thing. And, as one who was disappointed by all of the big-screen Batman movies — except for the animated Mask of the Phantasm (1993) — I sincerely hope that Christopher Nolan, whose earlier films... Read more