According to Michael Drosnin, author of the bestselling book The Bible Code, there are secret messages lurking in the Torah that only a computer can detect. And thanks largely to his claim to have warned Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin of his impending assassination, Drosnin’s 15 minutes of fame have stretched out to three months and beyond, while his book continues to sit high atop the bestseller list. But Drosnin has his detractors, and they have begun to speak out.... Read more
THE CRITICS are hailing Contact as Hollywood’s sole voice of reason in a summer filled with dumb, mass-marketed duds, and they’re not far wrong. The film, adapted by Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump) from the novel by Carl Sagan, is this year’s most nakedly thought-provoking movie, and it does raise significant questions about the search for truth and the relationship between religion and science within that search. (more…) Read more
Anyone who still thinks Hollywood doesn’t care about the family hasn’t been going to the movies lately. The big-budget blockbusters this summer are about little else, and even religion’s been getting a reprieve. The Lost World: Jurassic Park demonstrates that dinosaurs can be the most loving parents of all. Speed 2: Cruise Control trades in the original film’s punchline — in which two strangers spoke of basing their relationship on sex — for a marriage proposal and talk of raising... Read more
Atheism may be in vogue among people who like to read, but movie audiences still need something to believe in. That, at least, is one way to interpret the implicit pantheism Steven Spielberg has injected into The Lost World and its predecessor Jurassic Park, both of which he adapted from the considerably more sophisticated novels of Michael Crichton. Crichton’s original story was a cautionary tale about the dangers of commercialized science, but he also took an explicit stand, through the... Read more
“Does the print look really beat up? Or does it look like a nice, clean print?” Lynne Stopkewich, on the phone from her New York hotel, can be forgiven for sounding a mite anxious. In the seven months since her film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Kissed, the Vancouver filmmaker’s mesmerizing study of sex, death, and the lusty space in between, has toured the festival circuit to almost unanimous praise. Among other prizes, Kissed has won a special... Read more
When Muhammad Ali met George Foreman in Zaire back in 1974, it wasn’t to shake his hand. Leon Gast captured their bout on film and, after a 21-year delay, got an Oscar for his patience. It’s a story so good, they couldn’t have made it up. Muhammad Ali, stripped of his heavyweight championship in 1967 when he refused to fight in Vietnam, had a chance to win it back from current champ George Foreman when Don King masterminded the Rumble... Read more
There have been many films about the life of Jesus, and a handful of high-profile movies from The Sign of the Cross to Quo Vadis? have detailed the persecution of Christians in Rome some 35 years later. But the dramatic transition Christianity made between those two points — from a marginal Jewish sect to a thriving, if persecuted, community in the seat of Gentile power — has received scant attention even from Christian filmmakers. Into this void steps Acts, the... Read more
For Dan Ireland, directing The Whole Wide World is a dream come true. More than three decades after he first fell in love with film, Ireland is bringing his first feature, about the frustrated love life of Conan the Barbarian author Robert E. Howard, to Vancouver. “I don’t think Howard ever had a choice in his life of what he would be,” says the 46-year-old Vancouver native, who says he felt a bond of sorts with Howard. “He was a... Read more
Date: January 10, 1997 Place: Hotel Vancouver, Vancouver, BC This interview was conducted when Kenneth Branagh was in Vancouver to promote his four-hour movie version of Hamlet. It was a joint interview with two other student reporters; Robin Yeatman and I represented The Ubyssey, and Marci Drimer represented The Campus Times. Branagh had to catch a plane right after the interview, and he tended to speak really fast, lowering his voice sometimes as he did so, so it’s hard to... Read more
In one early scene in Star Trek: First Contact, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart), who has travelled back in time to stop the Borg from conquering the Earth in the 21st century, strokes a nuclear missile from his planet’s past. Data (Brent Spiner), the android, follows suit but says he cannot feel anything, so he tries again. Then Counselor Troi (Deanna Sirtis) walks in, sees them fondle the tall, hard, erect explosive device, and asks, “Would you three like to be... Read more
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