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
In recent years, audiences have paid good money to see new, expanded versions of classic 1970s movies such as Star Wars and The Exorcist, so it was probably only a matter of time before Francis Ford Coppola restored roughly 49 minutes of deleted footage to his sprawling Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now. Coppola spent nearly three years of his life making the original film, which came out in 1979, and he has not produced anything all that noteworthy since, so you... Read more
There are any number of reasons to expect the worst from Jurassic Park III. It’s the second sequel to the original Jurassic Park, and sequels, as a rule, are supposed to get progressively worse. In addition, it has been eight years since the first film came out, and the computer-generated lizards that seemed so ground-breaking back then have become all too common; thanks to Godzilla, Dinosaur, Evolution and similar films, the presence of larger-than-life reptiles virtually guarantees a film’s mediocrity.... Read more
• Richard Abanes: Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick, Horizon, 2001. • Connie Neal: What’s a Christian to Do With Harry Potter?, WaterBrook, 2001. YEARS AGO, as a teen, I heard a man at a church speak on the evils of popular culture. I expected him to rail against the usual suspects — rock and roll, Star Wars, Disney cartoons with grey-bearded magicians in pointed hats — but I was entirely unprepared for when he turned... Read more
It’s clear from the trailers and posters for Evolution that director Ivan Reitman wanted to recapture some of the magic that made Ghostbusters, one of his earlier films, one of the most successful comedies of all time. The heroes in his new film do battle with alien lifeforms, rather than supernatural spooks, but otherwise, the mix of carefree humour and oversized special effects, combined with an outrageous product placement at the film’s climax, has a familiar feel. Dan Aykroyd even... Read more
MANY FILMMAKERS have turned to the Good Book for story ideas, but they haven’t always turned those ideas into good movies. The genre’s highs and lows are both on full display in The Bible Collection, an ambitious series of TV-movies that has been produced over the past eight years, and isn’t quite finished yet. The first four films covered the Book of Genesis in warts-and-all detail, and dealt matter-of-factly with some of the racier episodes that Sunday School classes tend... Read more
The Mummy, a tongue-in-cheek, late-1990s remake of a 1930s classic, wasn’t a great movie, but it was a fun movie. More of a comedy than a horror story or even an action flick, it overcame the conventions of its genre by treating them all as one big joke, and no one had more fun with this than Brendan Fraser. As Rick O’Connell, a brawny but not so brainy legionnaire who battles bugs and monsters after some amateur archaeologists unwittingly bring... Read more
Quidditch Through the Ages / Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them J.K. Rowling Raincoast Books To the great disappointment of her many young fans, J.K. Rowling has admitted that there will be no new Harry Potter novels this year. Between consulting on the movie version of her first book, due later this year, and promoting her last book, the massive Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, she just hasn’t had time to finish the next installment. But to... Read more
Memento is a gimmicky movie, but in the best possible sense of the word. The film begins with a shot of a hand holding a Polaroid; in the picture, and behind it, we see what looks like a dead body, lying against a blood-splattered wall. Then the hand shakes the picture, and we realize the image is fading to white — time is going backwards. Then, sure enough, the blank Polaroid is sucked back into a camera, the blood runs... Read more
These days, war movies waste no time plunging the viewer into the miserable, savage, bloody midst of combat, and Enemy at the Gates is no exception. The grime splashed on the lens, the stark and chaotic cinematography, the way the sounds of battle are toned down so we can take in the sorrowful music and pause to wonder why people do these things to each other — all the tricks that seemed so innovative in Saving Private Ryan and Gladiator... Read more
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