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Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest.

The Shaggy Dog — CDN $4,041,121 — N.AM $35,882,000 — 11.3%
Eight Below — CDN $8,074,203 — N.AM $73,147,000 — 11.0%
She’s the Man — CDN $1,155,204 — N.AM $11,012,000 — 10.5%
The Pink Panther — CDN $7,740,127 — N.AM $78,611,000 — 9.8%
16 Blocks — CDN $2,861,060 — N.AM $30,175,000 — 9.5%
Curious George — CDN $5,018,369 — N.AM $55,465,000 — 9.0%
Aquamarine — CDN $1,415,795 — N.AM $15,688,000 — 9.0%
V for Vendetta — CDN $2,078,213 — N.AM $26,135,000 — 8.0%
Failure to Launch — CDN $3,851,218 — N.AM $48,458,000 — 7.9%
The Hills Have Eyes — CDN $2,149,583 — N.AM $28,782,000 — 7.5%

A couple of discrepancies: Curious George was #9 on the Canadian chart (it was #11 in North America as a whole), while Madea’s Family Reunion was #8 on the North American chart.

Time magazine has an interesting article up now on Mel Gibson’s mysterious upcoming movie Apocalypto — and given how Gibson’s previous movie, The Passion of the Christ, was promoted heavily through the right-wing media, it is interesting to see Gibson take aim at both sides of the political fence, here:

The Passion experience–especially the part in which critics hurled anti-Semitism charges at Gibson, an ultraconservative Roman Catholic whose father has questioned whether the Holocaust happened–thickened Gibson’s hide along with his wallet. So if there are complaints about Apocalypto’s portrayal of human sacrifice by the Maya, whose mostly impoverished descendants today are a cause célèbre for liberals, Gibson says he won’t care. “After what I experienced with The Passion, I frankly don’t give a flying f___ about much of what those critics think.”

Still, he likes to confound expectations–he wears a cross containing relics of martyred saints, but he can swear like a Quentin Tarantino character–and those who peg him as a reactionary may be surprised to learn that his new film sounds warnings straight out of liberal Hollywood’s bible. Apocalypto, which Gibson loosely translates from the Greek as “a new beginning,” was inspired in large part by his work with the Mirador Basin Project, an effort to preserve a large swath of the Guatemalan rain forest and its Maya ruins. Gibson and his rookie cowriter on Apocalypto, Farhad Safinia, were captivated by the ancient Maya, one of the hemisphere’s first great civilizations, which reached its zenith about A.D. 600 in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala. The two began poring over Maya myths of creation and destruction, including the Popol Vuh, and research suggesting that ecological abuse and war-mongering were major contributors to the Maya’s sudden collapse, some 500 years before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

Those apocalyptic strains haunt Apocalypto, which takes place in an opulent but decaying Maya kingdom, whose leaders insist that if the gods are not appeased by more temples and human sacrifices, the crops will die. But the writers hope that the larger themes of decline will be a wake-up call. “The parallels between the environmental imbalance and corruption of values that doomed the Maya and what’s happening to our own civilization are eerie,” says Safinia. Gibson, who insists ideology matters less to him than stories of “penitential hardship” like his Oscar-winning Braveheart, puts it more bluntly: “The fearmongering we depict in this film reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys.”

Thanks, as ever, to Jeffrey Overstreet for the link.

I’ve been interviewing actors and directors for years, but it wasn’t until just over a year ago that I went on my first-ever press junket — for a talking-zebra movie called Racing Stripes (2005; my review). And possibly the first person to be interviewed in “the God room” (Peter Jackson’s name for the room where all the religious-media reporters congregate) was comedian Steve Harvey. I had first come across his work when he was one of the four stand-up comics profiled in Spike Lee’s The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), and given the profane nature of his humour, I was intrigued when Harvey began to talk about his religious beliefs; you can read Phil Boatwright’s transcript of that round-table interview here.

In that interview, Harvey talked about his desire to clean up his act; and now it looks like he’s made a significant step in that direction with Don’t Trip … He Ain’t Through with Me Yet, a comedy concert film recorded before a gathering of church folk assembled by Bishop T.D. Jakes. Reports the Asbury Park Press:

For two decades, comedian Steve Harvey had been known for delivering foul-mouthed, hilarious dialogues on life, including many in the smash comedy concert film “The Original Kings of Comedy.”

But he was ready to switch gears, become closer to God and do away with his otherwise un-Christian-like devices.

He decided he wanted to become a better man.

So last summer in Atlanta, he stepped onstage in front of 16,000 churchgoing folks at the Bishop T.D. Jakes annual MegaFest conference.

“You can’t be any more scared than that. I’ve had some traumatic stuff in my life, but I’ve never been more nervous, more jittery, more anxious about anything. It was tough,” says Harvey, who can be heard in select markets on his weekday “The Steve Harvey Morning Show” or online at www.steveharvey.com.

“I was thinking, ‘This could go bad for me. This could just not work.’ A lot of these jokes, I’d never done anywhere before. I’d just wrote the stuff for that night. But it was church stuff. It was stuff I knew. Then I took some jokes about subjects I want to get into, but keep it clean and not offend these people.”

He originally filmed the 74-minute comedy concert with hopes of putting it out on DVD. But his show went over so well, it’s getting a studio release and is set to open in select markets today. . . .

The reviews, as sometimes happens, are divided on the film’s merits. The Park Press itself says the film is too short, it’s so good, and the New York Times is more positive than not, saying:

Anyone who thinks that Christian America’s sense of humor maxes out at “Father Knows Best” reruns needs to hear Mr. Harvey on Michael Jackson, whom he dismantles far more effectively than Jay Leno ever did. They need to hear him make fun of churchgoers themselves — the ones who can’t control their bratty children, the ones who get up in midservice to go to the bathroom, the ones who feel compelled to “testify” about perfectly ordinary events. And, more to the point, those who think they have the Christian crowd pegged ought to hear Mr. Harvey’s audiences roar with laughter at all this.

However, the Star-Ledger is not impressed: “He manages to avoid using four-letter words, but this feat would be more impressive if his kinder, gentler jokes were as funny and real as his blue work.”

Time for a few more quickies!

1. The Hollywood Reporter says Keisha Castle-Hughes, the now-15-year-old star of Whale Rider (2002), has been cast as the Virgin Mary in Catherine Hardwicke’s Nativity.

2. The Hollywood Reporter also says Lauren Graham and John Goodman are joining Steve Carell in Evan Almighty.

3. FilmStew.com reports that Tina Turner may record the theme song for Casino Royale. Turner earlier recorded the Bono- and Edge-written theme song for Goldeneye (1995), so if this rumour pans out, this would make her the only singer apart from Shirley Bassey (1964’s Goldfinger, 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, 1979’s Moonraker) to record more than one James Bond theme.

Remember Amazing Grace? That’s the William Wilberforce biopic being produced by Walden Media, with Ioan Gruffudd as the abolitionist Wilberforce and Albert Finney as his fellow anti-slavery activist John Newton.

Well, it turns out there’s going to be another movie about Newton, according to Variety — and since that Wilberforce movie has already claimed the title of Newton’s popular hymn, this new movie has to be called something else:

Mandalay Integrated Media Entertainment and Prelude Pictures have launched development of “The Heart of Man,” centered on 18th century antislavery crusader John Newton.

Mime and Prelude have optioned Lisa and Eric Rice’s script about Newton, who’s best known for writing the song “Amazing Grace.” He was shanghaied into the British Royal Navy, went AWOL, was captured, became a slave himself and took over a slave ship before beginning to campaign for the abolition of slavery.

Prelude execs first came across “The Heart of Man” script several years ago but had not been able to move forward on development because the front page with the authors’ names had been removed and the script hadn’t been registered with the Writers Guild of America. The shingle credited Walden Media president Michael Flaherty for helping track down the writers, following a recent discussion about Walden’s “Amazing Grace” biopic about another antislavery figure, William Wilberforce.

The article goes on to say that Prelude was involved in the marketing of The Passion of the Christ (2004) “via advance sales to faith-based orgs”, while noting that these two companies are also developing a movie about St. Paul called Rabbi Paul.

Thanks to Jeffrey Overstreet for the link.

A colleague pointed me to “Dr.” Ted Baehr’s latest column for WorldNetDaily.com today, with a note saying that Baehr reads this blog — “AND IT MAKES HIM REALLY ANGRY!”

Naturally, I had to check it out for myself — but I was disappointed to see that my name does not appear anywhere on the page. And even though I am “a reviewer for a well-known Christian magazine”, I cannot be absolutely certain that Baehr is responding to my earlier post on The Last Temptation of Christ, because he says this reviewer “alleged that the movie was made for around $5 million”, whereas I clearly said it was made for about $6 million.

Other little oddities that suggest to me that Baehr either was not responding to me at all, or was simply muddled in his thinking and missing the point entirely (the reader may decide for himself or herself which of these two options is the more likely):

Baehr says this reviewer didn’t bother “checking [his] facts”, but my earlier post actually included links to Amazon.com pages from two different books, one of which gives the film’s budget as “six million” (page 180 in the 2nd edition), the other of which gives it as “$6.8 million” (page 14) and says the total cost to the studio was “closer to $10 million” (page 32) as opposed to the $15 million alleged by conservative protestors at that time. So, I not only checked my facts, I footnoted ‘em. (BTW, one small caveat: If you don’t have hard copies of those books, you will have to be a registered user of Amazon.com to read those links, and you will probably have to re-do the word-search in those books.)

And if Baehr is responding to my earlier post, then he completely ignores the key point I made (and which I originally gleaned from Baehr’s fellow conservative Michael Medved), which is that The Last Temptation was part of a three-picture deal, and Universal Studios planned to make its real profits off of the other two movies that Martin Scorsese would direct for them. The Last Temptation was just the low-budget dream project they agreed to finance for a pittance, in return for Scorsese’s work on those other two films.

Baehr also claims that, “at the time it was released by Universal Studios, the president of distribution said it was produced and distributed for over $50 million, including the extra security and excessive advertising that the studio invested in the movie, hoping that they would make a tremendous amount of money on the film.” But there is no evidence of this in the books on this subject that I have read, and Baehr neglects to provide his own set of footnotes, or even a name for this Universal executive.

In the absence of a documented quote (as opposed to anonymous hearsay), my hunch is that Baehr remembers the erroneous $15 million figure claimed by his fellow conservatives at the time, and his memory has morphed it from fifteen million to fifty million.

A few more quick responses to bits of his column. He writes:

So, this reviewer got his facts wrong, but, for his benefit, let’s assume that it was made for $5 million. To earn money at that amount, it would’ve had to make $12.5 million, and it only made $8.3 million.

The film made only $8.3 million in North American theatres, yes. However, as one of those books explains, the film also made another $4 million overseas, and there was even more revenue afterwards when the film came out on video.

Since he has neither the facts nor law to bolster his liberal opinion, he will have to resort to slander and malice.

“Neither the facts nor law”? What does that mean? And since when is honest reporting of financial matters a “liberal opinion”? Who is it, “Dr.” Ted Baehr, who is resorting to “slander and malice” here?

Of course, his allegations hold no water because he was not there at the time “The Last Temptation Of Christ” was produced. He misrepresents the history of the production and misrepresents the players involved. Even if he had common “cents,” one would have to challenge his argument with the age-old question: Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Ha! In point of fact, I believe the first item of mine that was ever printed in BC Christian News — the newspaper for which I now write a column that has won multiple awards — was a letter to the editor that I wrote at the tender age of 17, when The Last Temptation of Christ first came out. I followed that controversy fairly closely, and made a point of seeing the film for myself because I knew that it was the only way I could honestly take part in the discussion around it. And thus, a film critic was born.

So, yeah, I would say “I was there”, in some sense. For me, this movie is not just film history; it’s part of my personal biography.

Now, obviously, I was not rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood elite at that time. And I have almost certainly forgotten some of the details that I read about at that time. But if anyone from Universal openly said that this film cost the studio $50 million, then it shouldn’t be too hard to produce that quote.

How about it, “Dr.” Baehr? Produce the documented quote, and I will defer to the knowledge and experience of the person at Universal who provided it. I might even share it with the authors of the books that I cited in my earlier blog post.

But if you cannot produce it, you’re just full of hot air. Again.

A colleague pointed me to “Dr.” Ted Baehr’s latest column for WorldNetDaily.com today, with a note saying that Baehr reads this blog — “AND IT MAKES HIM REALLY ANGRY!”

Naturally, I had to check it out for myself — but I was disappointed to see that my name does not appear anywhere on the page. And even though I am “a reviewer for a well-known Christian magazine”, I cannot be absolutely certain that Baehr is responding to my earlier post on The Last Temptation of Christ, because he says this reviewer “alleged that the movie was made for around $5 million”, whereas I clearly said it was made for about $6 million.

Other little oddities that suggest to me that Baehr either was not responding to me at all, or was simply muddled in his thinking and missing the point entirely (the reader may decide for himself or herself which of these two options is the more likely):

Baehr says this reviewer didn’t bother “checking [his] facts”, but my earlier post actually included links to Amazon.com pages from two different books, one of which gives the film’s budget as “six million” (page 180 in the 2nd edition), the other of which gives it as “$6.8 million” (page 14) and says the total cost to the studio was “closer to $10 million” (page 32) as opposed to the $15 million alleged by conservative protestors at that time. So, I not only checked my facts, I footnoted ‘em. (BTW, one small caveat: If you don’t have hard copies of those books, you will have to be a registered user of Amazon.com to read those links, and you will probably have to re-do the word-search in those books.)

And if Baehr is responding to my earlier post, then he completely ignores the key point I made (and which I originally gleaned from Baehr’s fellow conservative Michael Medved), which is that The Last Temptation was part of a three-picture deal, and Universal Studios planned to make its real profits off of the other two movies that Martin Scorsese would direct for them. The Last Temptation was just the low-budget dream project they agreed to finance for a pittance, in return for Scorsese’s work on those other two films.

Baehr also claims that, “at the time it was released by Universal Studios, the president of distribution said it was produced and distributed for over $50 million, including the extra security and excessive advertising that the studio invested in the movie, hoping that they would make a tremendous amount of money on the film.” But there is no evidence of this in the books on this subject that I have read, and Baehr neglects to provide his own set of footnotes, or even a name for this Universal executive.

In the absence of a documented quote (as opposed to anonymous hearsay), my hunch is that Baehr remembers the erroneous $15 million figure claimed by his fellow conservatives at the time, and his memory has morphed it from fifteen million to fifty million.

A few more quick responses to bits of his column. He writes:

So, this reviewer got his facts wrong, but, for his benefit, let’s assume that it was made for $5 million. To earn money at that amount, it would’ve had to make $12.5 million, and it only made $8.3 million.

The film made only $8.3 million in North American theatres, yes. However, as one of those books explains, the film also made another $4 million overseas, and there was even more revenue afterwards when the film came out on video.

Since he has neither the facts nor law to bolster his liberal opinion, he will have to resort to slander and malice.

“Neither the facts nor law”? What does that mean? And since when is honest reporting of financial matters a “liberal opinion”? Who is it, “Dr.” Ted Baehr, who is resorting to “slander and malice” here?

Of course, his allegations hold no water because he was not there at the time “The Last Temptation Of Christ” was produced. He misrepresents the history of the production and misrepresents the players involved. Even if he had common “cents,” one would have to challenge his argument with the age-old question: Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Ha! In point of fact, I believe the first item of mine that was ever printed in BC Christian News — the newspaper for which I now write a column that has won multiple awards — was a letter to the editor that I wrote at the tender age of 17, when The Last Temptation of Christ first came out. I followed that controversy fairly closely, and made a point of seeing the film for myself because I knew that it was the only way I could honestly take part in the discussion around it. And thus, a film critic was born.

So, yeah, I would say “I was there”, in some sense. For me, this movie is not just film history; it’s part of my personal biography.

Now, obviously, I was not rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood elite at that time. And I have almost certainly forgotten some of the details that I read about at that time. But if anyone from Universal openly said that this film cost the studio $50 million, then it shouldn’t be too hard to produce that quote.

How about it, “Dr.” Baehr? Produce the documented quote, and I will defer to the knowledge and experience of the person at Universal who provided it. I might even share it with the authors of the books that I cited in my earlier blog post.

But if you cannot produce it, you’re just full of hot air. Again.

As you may have heard by now, Isaac Hayes will no longer be providing the voice of Chef on South Park, apparently due to the show’s recent episode ‘The Great Scientology Secret‘.

Hayes’s official reason, according to a statement: “There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins. . . . Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored. . . . As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.”

South Park co-creator Matt Stone’s response, according to the Associated Press: “This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology. . . . He has no problem — and he’s cashed plenty of checks — with our show making fun of Christians. . . . [We] never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin.” Zing!

MAR 17 UPDATE: Oops, turns out the actual name of the episode was ‘Trapped in the Closet‘ — or at least I think so. My bad!

As you may have heard by now, Isaac Hayes will no longer be providing the voice of Chef on South Park, apparently due to the show’s recent episode ‘The Great Scientology Secret‘.

Hayes’s official reason, according to a statement: “There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins. . . . Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored. . . . As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.”

South Park co-creator Matt Stone’s response, according to the Associated Press: “This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology. . . . He has no problem — and he’s cashed plenty of checks — with our show making fun of Christians. . . . [We] never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin.” Zing!

MAR 17 UPDATE: Oops, turns out the actual name of the episode was ‘Trapped in the Closet‘ — or at least I think so. My bad!