Barry Pepper is going back to the battlefield. The 32-year-old actor, who grew up in the Gulf Islands after sailing the South Seas with his family for five years, and who got his start working in Vancouver’s film and TV scene, became internationally famous four years ago when Steven Spielberg cast him as a Bible-quoting sniper in Saving Private Ryan. Pepper’s career since then has included some box-office hits (Enemy of the State, The Green Mile) and one huge flop... Read more
The folks who brought you Pearl Harbor are now bringing you Black Hawk Down, and despite the fact that both war movies feature Josh Hartnett and Tom Sizemore in key military roles, the films are very different. Where Pearl Harbor was full of saccharine romance, nostalgic production design and eye-popping special effects, Black Hawk Down is a decidedly grim and realistic account of a botched military operation that resulted in the deaths of 18 Americans and more than 1,000 Somalis... Read more
In some Christian circles many people still wonder what to make of the young wizard Harry Potter, whose supernatural adventures have sold more than 100 million novels in 46 languages and set opening-attendance records at the movie theatres. What is the spiritual impact on children? Harry is an orphan whose parents, a witch named Lily and a wizard named James, died defending him from the evil Lord Voldemort. Harry grows up with hostile relatives who scorn magic and hide the... Read more
In her latest romantic comedy Kate & Leopold, Meg Ryan plays Kate McKay, a driven marketing executive with no love life who spends all her time looking for ways to sell things, from creamy butter to motion pictures. The first time we see her — well, sort of the first time we see her, but more on that below — she is at a test screening for a ridiculously saccharine movie bearing the all-too-obvious title Love For Sale. At one... Read more
Is life but a dream? Several recent movies have raised that question, and while it’s tempting to write off Vanilla Sky as the latest film to hop on the bandwagon, its roots go back a bit further. Before Waking Life asked whether our day-to-day lives might be just a dream from which we have yet to wake up, and before The Matrix suggested that the world was an illusion fed to our minds by an evil computer network, there was... Read more
MAGIC is everywhere you look these days. From bookstores to movie theatres, stories about wizards, witches and mythological beasts are all the rage; and for a person like me, who grew up with hobbits, aliens, flying horses and Jedi Knights, the current fantasy craze — and the various Christian responses to it — bring back a lot of memories. How popular is fantasy right now? The most successful movie of the year (so far) is Shrek, a cheeky parody of... Read more
If there is one thing the movie adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone may prove, it’s that fidelity to the original text isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. For over a year, director Chris Columbus has assured followers of the young orphan wizard that he intends to stay as true to J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally popular novels as possible — he has repeated this mantra so often he probably says it in his sleep — and to be... Read more
IF THERE is one thing the movie adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone may prove, it’s that being faithful to the original text can be both a strength and a weakness. For over a year, director Chris Columbus has assured fans of the young orphan wizard that he intends to stay as true to J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally popular novels as possible, and to be sure, his film gets many details right. But Steve Kloves’ script tries so hard... Read more
• The Simpsons: The Complete First Season, Fox Video, 2001.• William Irwin, Mark T. Conard, and Aeon J. Skoble, eds.: The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer, Open Court, 2001.• Mark I. Pinsky: The Gospel According to the Simpsons, Westminster John Knox, 2001. I DON’T watch a lot of television, but I have always been a fan of The Simpsons. Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie made their debut in the late 1980s, in a series of short animated... Read more
Forget Charlton Heston. And for that matter, forget Krzysztof Kieslowski, too. One of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s special presentations this year is a series of short documentaries based on the Ten Commandments, and unlike past films, which have explored this material through the eyes of Protestant melodrama and Catholic mysticism, this series, which was produced for Dutch television, has a more skeptical, even secular, sensibility. (more…) Read more
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