There was much chatter a few months ago about how the Academy had “snubbed” The Passion of the Christ by failing to nominate it in more than three categories (even though two, cinematography and music, are mighty significant from a filmmaking point of view and arguably matter more than the celebrity contests that are the acting awards). Interestingly, pretty much no pundit noted the fact that the Academy also nominated Sister Rose’s Passion, Oren Jacoby’s documentary short about a nun... Read more

I have lived in downtown Vancouver for a bit more than five and a half years, now, and I continue to be amazed at the fact that I can live so closely to all the important theatres. Now, thanks to Google, it is possible to trace my routes via satellite imaging! So, just in case anybody’s interested … … this is the exact path I walk whenever I go to the Fifth Avenue Cinema (except I don’t walk around the... Read more

I caught a preview screening of Dear Frankie tonight, and I just might have liked it more the second time around than I did when I saw it at last year’s festival. I’m working on a full review at the moment, but for now, I just want to amend one of my earlier comments. I said before that the film’s climax is “a bit of a cheat,” but now that I have seen the film again, knowing what all the... Read more

Just noticed an article by Don King at the Matthews House Project which speculates that C.S. Lewis may have patterned the seven books in the Narnia series after the seven deadly sins. Personally, I like Michael Ward’s theory that the books were patterned after the seven planets recognized by medieval astrologers, and the characteristics of the deities associated with them: the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. FWIW, I list them in this order because that is... Read more

Jeff Overstreet has just linked to this article by Ken Morefield on the possibility that the Left Behind series of books might constitute a form of “evangelical pornography”. As Morefield writes, “I would argue that the success of these books is largely because they serve a Kaplanesque pornographic function — they allow readers to simultaneously gratify and hide a desire.” He adds, “I would argue, however, prior to the ascent of Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition in the 1980s and 1990s,... 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. Hostage — CDN $4,693,762 — N.AM $32,219,000 — 14.6%Sin City — CDN $5,687,893 — N.AM $50,723,000 — 11.2%Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous — CDN $3,338,357 — N.AM $37,473,000 — 8.9%Robots — CDN $9,358,431 — N.AM $111,038,000 — 8.4%Guess Who — CDN $4,202,314 — N.AM $51,103,000 — 8.2%Sahara — CDN... Read more

Only two weeks left until the public premiere of Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Here’s the blurb (and ticket-buying info): As a young hippie, Lonnie Frisbee was fully immersed in the 1960’s counterculture scene when he claimed to encounter God while on an acid trip. This event so transformed him, Lonnie became a roaming Christian evangelist — something of a John the Baptist for Southern California. His strength of conviction... Read more

This weekend, Disney’s The Pacifier passed the $100 million mark in domestic box-office receipts. Why do I make note of this? Because I have not yet seen the film. And it has been several years since I last let a movie get this popular without seeing it for myself. So … just on a whim, I decided to check the lists for each year going back to 1994, when I first began to see movies for free as a student... Read more

Let’s see if I’ve figured out how to capture DVD images yet … aha, it works! I recently watched the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments again for one of my various writing assignments. This was the first time I had watched the film itself in a while (I had to review the special edition DVD with the commentary track about a year ago, but I can’t remember when I last watched it with the regular audio track), and it... Read more

Saving Private Ryan is another one of those films that I have always had mixed feelings about. As a Mennonite who was attending an Anglican church at the time, I didn’t know what to make of the relationship between church and state, or the church’s complicity in state-sanctioned violence, through stained-glass war memorials and so on — and I still don’t know what to make of these things, really. That ambivalence has spilled over into my reactions to a film... Read more