Just got home from Sin City, Robert Rodriguez’s film adaptation of the comics by Frank Miller. Still processing it. And since my official review won’t be up for over a week, I have time to process it some more. In a way, I shouldn’t have to process it. I have never read this particular series, but I did read a number of Miller’s other graphic novels back in the day, and he’s got a pulpy style that is interesting and... Read more

Give me time, and I could be a fairly big fan of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (a.k.a. “the Archers”). I already love 49th Parallel (1941) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), quite possibly the best and most self-critical war-time propaganda movies ever made — I devoted a few paragraphs to them in an article on war movies for Books & Culture — and I am intrigued by the spiritual implications of Black Narcissus... Read more

Came across two articles on Millions today, via CT’s Weblog. The Washington Times‘ Scott Galupo suggests that the film — which has been receiving good buzz and even raves from Christian critics — will “split” the audience that made The Passion a hit, because “conservative Protestants” will “find suspect” the film’s Catholic “message of deeds-based charity”. I haven’t a clue what Galupo means by this, as I grew up in a thoroughly evangelical environment — churches, private schools, Bible camps,... Read more

Mark Steyn is both a political pundit and an arts critic, so his review of The Passion of the Christ — re-posted on his website to coincide with the release of The Passion Recut — starts with a typical conservative denunciation of the forces that rallied against Mel Gibson’s movie. But, unlike most other conservative commentators, Steyn does not quite go on from there to sing the movie’s praises — instead, he actually puts on his film-critic hat and makes... Read more

Thanks to Betty Ragan for tipping me off to this speech by Neil Gaiman on growing up with the stories of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton. Two bits about Lewis’s Narnia books jump out at me in particular: For good or ill the religious allegory, such as it was, went entirely over my head, and it was not until I was about twelve that I found myself realising that there were Certain Parallels. . . . I was... Read more

I like numbers, and I like comparing and contrasting different cultures, and last summer I discovered a website that posts the weekend box-office figures for both Canada in particular and North America in general. So, naturally, I began keeping tabs on this site and noting which films appeared to be more or less popular in Canada than they were in the States. I actually first started thinking about this around the time I read a news report to the effect... Read more

Political punditry aside, one of the reasons I like Mark Steyn so much is that he is one of the funnier and more entertaining columnists around, and, unusually for a right-wing kind of guy, his sense of humour is deeply influenced by his love of show tunes. P.J. O’Rourke may be up-to-date on the latest pop-culture fads, and Dennis Miller may love to flaunt his encyclopedic knowledge of every trivial thing under the sun, but Steyn has a uniquely passionate... Read more

I happen to have a soft spot for Bible movies, so I am glad to discover today that some of the better entries in ‘The Bible Collection’, a series of TV-movies produced between 1994 and 2002, will be coming out on DVD in a couple months. Because the series’ producers struck different production and distribution deals for different films in that series, part of the series is actually already on DVD — Trimark released a boxed set a few years... Read more

I was just reminded that a couple of good films that I caught at last year’s film festival are opening in Canada this coming Friday. Here are the rather informal blurbs — not reviews, as such — that I wrote about them at the time: Dear Frankie (UK, 105 min.) is a modest but charming film about a woman (Emily Mortimer) who hires a man to pose as the father of her 9.5-year-old son. The son, you see, has been... Read more

Just got home from Granville Chapel, where Ron Reed (of Pacific Theatre fame) did a mini-lecture on film. I happen to be doing a mini-lecture on film there myself in four weeks — Sunday April 17, 6pm, includes dinner, dessert, and a trivia game — so I was curious to see what Ron had to say, partly because Ron always has interesting things to say, but also because I wanted to make sure I didn’t repeat too much of what... Read more