Here’s a random thought, spurred by that Crusades movie. On the flight to L.A., I brought with me a copy of the book by that author who is suing the makers of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. There are only ten pages scattered throughout the book that refer to Balian, the character played by Orlando Bloom, and it seems to me that author James Reston Jr. is basically just repeating what has long been available in the medieval sources, but... Read more

Looks like I missed a day for the first time since starting this blog just over three weeks ago! Ah well, I was in Los Angeles and busy with the junket for Kingdom of Heaven, which comes out in four weeks. The hotel was teeming with shields, banners and other medieval decorations, and an early-music group serenaded us journalists during the cocktail party after the screening, and Orlando Bloom brought his dog “Siddy” to the roundtable interview, so I had... Read more

Jeff Overstreet beat me to it, but yeah, like he says: Doesn’t it take some of the fun out of OPENING DAY to know that the novelization of Star Wars, Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith is already available at your local bookstore? Jeff asks rhetorically whether the Academy will honour the climax of Lucas’s trilogy after snubbing the first two films, the same way they honoured the climax of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings after doing the same... Read more

I’ve got to catch a plane in a couple hours, but I just have to post a link to this press release for a documentary called The Big V, which will be airing on Vision TV in Canada on Wednesday, May 18. It’s about virginity, and I was brought in as the “pop culture expert” who, if everything was edited together the way I was told it would be, is revealed at the end to be a virgin himself. The... Read more

Woo-hoo! Three classic films by one of my favorite documentarians are coming to DVD later this summer. MGM/UA is releasing a boxed set of Errol Morris’s first three films: 1978’s Gates of Heaven (one of Roger Ebert’s all-time top ten); 1981’s Vernon, Florida; and 1988’s The Thin Blue Line (one of my own all-time top ten). One question Morris fans may ask is, will Les Blank’s short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) be included as an extra on... 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 $4,287,895 — N.AM $30,288,870 — 14.2%Sin City — CDN $2,793,385 — N.AM $29,120,273 — 9.6%Hitch — CDN $16,463,045 — N.AM $171,266,743 — 9.6%Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous — CDN $2,729,762 — N.AM $31,127,190 — 8.8%Robots — CDN $8,827,551 — N.AM $104,420,872 — 8.5%Guess Who — CDN... Read more

Mark Steyn has a lovely column up now on the way British rock stars take themselves so seriously, and how the Queen “is, in fact, making a profound cultural statement” by “pretending never to have heard of any of these alleged cultural icons” — and then he segues to this comment about this year’s Academy Awards: In America, of course, there’s no Queen, so you have to make do with Chris Rock, who isn’t head of state but played one... Read more

Caught a press screening of the Farrelly brothers’ remake of Fever Pitch this morning. In a nutshell, the film reminded me of how Jimmy Fallon started out on Saturday Night Live as something of an Adam Sandler wanna-be; and how a couple of Sandler’s best movies are the ones in which he has co-starred with Drew Barrymore, namely The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates (my first impressions); and how one of Sandler’s more recent disappointments (namely Anger Management, which... Read more

Just got home from seeing Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967). Gad, I love living three blocks from the Cinematheque. Anyway, it was lots of fun. It’s not the sort of film I am inclined to analyze, at least not after seeing it only once, so I won’t say all that much about it, but it was clearly the work of a director who was very much in control of his material — big sets, a cast of hundreds, carefully arranged details... Read more

Inch by inch, little by little, I am gradually making my way onto the bookshelves. I write mainly for websites and periodicals, but occasionally I have been cited in the footnotes of some book or other, and my sister once bought me a second copy of The Gospel According to the Simpsons — I already had a much-marked review copy — because the new editions were quoting my review of it in their opening pages. Then, last year, I contributed... Read more