The news from George Lucas at ShoWest gets weirder. Quoth The Hollywood Reporter: George Lucas is such a fan of the latest 3-D technology that he is planning to remaster all of the “Star Wars” films for rerelease in 3-D. Appearing as part of a sextet of high-profile directors promoting 3-D and digital cinema at film industry convention ShoWest on Thursday, Lucas said he hadn’t yet committed to a precise schedule but hoped to have the first film ready for... Read more

Just received word that See Grace Fly, an independent, Vancouver-made film that has some interesting spiritual elements, will be showing on Movie Central this coming Tuesday and beyond. The movie was inspired partly by the experiences of star Gina Chiarelli’s father and schizophrenic aunt; I interviewed Chiarelli about it here. There are links to a handful of reviews here, my favorite of which is probably the one by Ron Reed — who, not incidentally, runs the theatre which put on... Read more

Reuters reports that George Lucas is calling the upcoming Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith “a real tearjerker” and “more emotional” than “the first one” (I assume he means Episode I, not Episode IV — although it wouldn’t make much difference). He also compares Episode III to the chart-topping blockbuster of all time, Titanic, which I guess is his way of taking back everything he once said about how Episode III would make the least money because... Read more

Just finished watching the extras on the Incredibles DVD with the missus. Wow. I always thought of storyboards as these hasty little sketches that weren’t really all that interesting in their own right. But for this cartoon, they created some darn fine animatics that are just about as exciting as anything in the finished film. In fact, because these animatics combine 2D drawings with 3D backgrounds and objects so expertly, they are a lot more interesting than the animatics for,... Read more

I just skimmed through my friend and colleague Steve Greydanus’s review of Millions, the delightful new fable by Danny Boyle. (How can you tell it’s by Danny Boyle? Because, like Shallow Grave and Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary and perhaps some of his other films as well, a fair chunk of the story involves a bag stuffed full of money.) In his final paragraph, he states: Millions is a rare and special family film: a moral parable rather than... Read more

Michael Coren had a piece in the National Post a couple days ago about C.S. Lewis, motivated in part by the upcoming film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He describes the story as “a delicious mingling of childhood fantasy, Christian metaphor and sublime story telling,” and goes on to say: “As pure literary fantasy, the books are an unrivalled success. Yet they also succeed as Christian metaphor. Neither clumsy nor didactic, Lewis colours secular magic with... Read more

Barbara Kay has just written an interesting column in response to Maureen Dowd‘s call for more female op/ed writers. Dowd notes that “Men enjoy verbal dueling,” while she, “As a woman,” wants “to be liked — not attacked.” Whether she means to or not, Dowd implicitly acknowledges that the problem may not be editorial hiring policies so much as the fact that there are just far, far more men willing to debate the contents of columns such as hers than... Read more

Just in case anybody didn’t notice — and you probably didn’t — The Passion Recut, a.k.a. Mel Gibson’s attempt to milk just a little more money out of his death-of-Jesus movie by trimming out some of the more gratuitous violence, was a flop this past weekend, grossing only $223,789 in all of North America, for a ranking of #28 and a per-screen average of $234. At, say, seven bucks a ticket, spread out over three days, with at least four... Read more

I don’t subscribe to the Victoria Times-Colonist, so I am not absolutely 100% sure that this is the right article to link to, but my sister, who studies music at the University of Victoria, tells me one of her performances has just been reviewed in a newspaper for the first time ever. The pertinent paragraph, from a review of a concert last Friday night, runs like so: Two pieces by John Cage — Bacchanale for prepared piano and Ophelia for... Read more

I caught The Upside of Anger a few nights ago, and I know this is an absolutely trivial thing to mention, but something about the opening scene caught my eye and tainted my view of everything that followed. The film begins at a funeral that takes place on a rainy day, with a crane shot coming towards the circle of people sitting and standing around the gravesite. Then we get a series of close-ups and/or medium shots. And then we... Read more