My friend Jeff Overstreet has just posted some thoughts on Sin City that another friend of his gave him — and somewhere in there, his friend says: The guy who created -and continues to create- Sin City, Frank Miller, works in a style that can best be described as “camp noir”. He utilises all the sensibility of Chandler with his “knights in dirty armor”, and he surrounds these driven individuals with an absurd universe in which a lot of humor... Read more

Took in an Orson Welles double-bill at the Pacific Cinematheque last night. F for Fake (1976) — which comes out as a Criterion DVD next month — was one of the last films Welles finished, and it’s a remarkable blend of fact and fiction, a very mid-1970s and early post-modern rumination on the relationship between reality and illusion. Welles begins and ends the film by flaunting his flair for magic tricks, and in between, he ponders the significance of art... Read more

Interesting Vancouver Sun article here on the intimate relationship between Mennonites and music, and on the changes that have taken place in Mennonite churches over the past 20 years as worship bands and marketing terms like “seeker-sensitive churches” have taken precedence over traditional musical forms. While I never got past Grade 5 piano myself, my own family has been profoundly involved in music — my mother has played in worship groups and recently started selling harps; my sister is currently... Read more

Beauty Shop opens today, so I might as well toss my own two bits out there. The wife and I caught it a couple nights ago and we both really enjoyed it. I remember liking Barbershop a few years ago and being disappointed in its sequel, so I was happy to find that its spin-off was closer to the spirit of the first film than the second one. In fact, I just might like the new film best of the... Read more

In addition to writing film-related articles, I also write news stories and features, many of them about religion. (I have won a few awards for my news and feature items, but nothing for my reviews — presumably, I would guess, partly because Christian community papers don’t write enough about the arts to make it worth their while to hand out awards in that category.) Two such stories have gone online in the past week — one is a feature for... Read more

Caught a press screening of Country of My Skull (or, as it is known in North America, In My Country) this morning. It’s good to see a film about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission — especially one that acknowledges the positive religious tenor of the whole thing — but whatever social or political impact this film might have had is seriously watered down by the time it spends on a rather trite love affair between two journalists, one... Read more

Speaking of Kingdom of Heaven, there was an article in the New York Times today about a lawsuit alleging that the film stole its story from a recent history book, Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade, by James Reston Jr. Given that history is a public-domain kind of thing, it may be difficult to prove that the filmmakers stole any particular author’s reconstruction of history, but the response offered by director Ridley Scott is... Read more

Looks like I might get a chance to see Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott’s upcoming film about the Crusades, next week. So I’ve been looking around for other Crusade-themed films, just to see how this subject has been handled in the past, and, uh, there don’t seem to be all that many of them. George MacDonald Fraser’s The Hollywood History of the World mentions only two, both of which happen to be available on VHS — Cecil B. DeMille’s The... Read more

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between real-life crimes and the movies lately. A couple days ago, I finally got around to seeing documentarian Nick Broomfield’s Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), his follow-up to Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992), and it is interesting to see how his new film looks at the effect that his last film had on the lives of some of the people it portrays; the new film begins,... Read more

As per last week’s introductory post, 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 $3,530,706 — N.AM $26,201,432 — 13.5%Million Dollar Baby — CDN $9,659,554 — N.AM $94,133,278 — 10.3%Be Cool — CDN $5,022,065 — N.AM $52,336,105 — 9.6%Hitch — CDN $15,852,542 — N.AM $166,444,518 — 9.5%Ice Princess — CDN $1,151,415 — N.AM $13,342,028 —... Read more