Category: Film and TV

EISNER’S OUT AT DISNEY.

Or going out, anyway.

I guess we’ll see if their anti-family manner of doing business starts to modify in any degree.

I’m stunned! I can’t believe it!! It’s HORRIBLE!!!

Actress Bitty Shramm, who plays the long-suffering, tough-as-nails psychiactric nurse Sharona, is leaving Monk!

For those who haven’t yet caught Monk fever, the program stars Tony Shalhoub and is an absolutely hilarious, intelligent, and life-affirming program about a detective who suffers from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It airs on USA Network and is WELL worth your time.

But now Bitty Shramm–the ideal sidekick and sparring partner for Tony Shalhoub–is leaving the show!

It’ll be like Holmes without Watson!–only Holmes didn’t need Watson to give him handy-wipes to control his germophobia!

GET THE SAD, SAD, SAD STORY.

Whatever is Monk going to do without Sharona???

I just know I’m going to obsess about this.

UPDATE: Welcome Google visitors! More information has been revealed about the Sharona situation since the time this post was written. Basically, Sharona and her son, Benjy, moved back to the East Coast to reunite with her former husband. (This was not shown on screen but was talked about.) Subsequently, Monk hired a new assistant, a former bartender named Natalie Teeger (Traylor Howard), who has a daughter. Thus far, Natalie seems to be doing as good a job at standing up to Monk as Sharona did, but we’ll always have a special place in our hearts for Sharona. Hopefully she’ll guest star in the future.

Go out and buy a copy!

Or ORDER IT HERE

(I’m hoping that it has a “Subtitles OFF” feature so that I can focus on the Latin and Aramaic without being distracted by the English subtitles. Can’t wait to see if it does. 🙂

Go out and buy a copy!

Or ORDER IT HERE

(I’m hoping that it has a “Subtitles OFF” feature so that I can focus on the Latin and Aramaic without being distracted by the English subtitles. Can’t wait to see if it does. 🙂

SDG here. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings tour de force turned out so brilliantly that one could almost forget how different it could have been. It’s entirely possible that a significant part of the reason the films are as true to the books as they are is due to enormous fan pressure online and elsewhere. (Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the issues and controversy before the release of the first film.)

Now that Walden Media is at work on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Narnia fans are understandably wary. For one thing, as well-loved as these books are both inside and outside the church, they don’t have nearly the huge following of the Lord of the Rings books. For another, the Christian themes in Lewis’s books are so much more blatant than those of Tolkien’s books that the risk of Hollywood subversion and the stakes in the event of such subversion are higher.

By the way, recent news from the set of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe includes the recent casting of the four Pevensie children. So, if I need an excuse to be musing about this subject just now, here from the set (courtesy of the New Zealand Herald) are pictures of:

Nine-year-old Georgie Henley, from Yorkshire, as Lucy:

17-year-old William Moseley, from Gloucestershire, as Peter:

15-year-old Anna Popplewell and 12-year-old Skandar Keynes, both of London, as Susan and Edmund:

The big question, of course, is: Do the people in charge of this thing have any idea what they’re doing?

And the answer, so far, is: Hard to say.

On the encouraging side, the people at Walden Media are apparently Christians, and Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham, who is co-producing, seems committed to preserving Lewis’s vision. Plus, Walden Media produced Holes, a wonderful — and wonderfully faithful — adaptation of a delightful children’s book. (Of course they also produced the Jackie Chan parody of Around the World in 80 Days, but I choose to believe that doesn’t count as an adaptation at all.)

On the down side, director Andrew Adamson (Shrek, Shrek 2) at the very least hasn’t yet learned like Peter Jackson to talk the talk. Following massive interest by the Christian press and moviegoing public during the phenomenon of the first film, Jackson became trippingly familiar with variations on this theme:

“Of course Professor Tolkien was a very religious man, and his religious ideas did play a part in his novels, and while we have not set out to make a religious film, from the outset we were determined to honor Tolkien’s vision and not to put any of our own baggage into this film. So while we brought no religious intentions to this project, Tolkien’s beliefs did shape the story he told and some of that is evident in our films.”

This respectful and nuanced speech, which I read and heard in various versions from Jackson on a number of occasions, was reassuring to Tolkien’s Christian fans while at the same time not alarming non-Christian Tolkien lovers with worries that they were in for a ten-hour serial sermon.

When it comes to The Chronicles of Narnia, of course, Lewis’s Christian beliefs are even more emphatically important. Unfortunately, published remarks from Adamson so far don’t evince the same kind of respect for the integrity of Lewis’s vision or the same level of awareness of its religious dimension. Instead, Adamson has made such remarks as these:

“I don’t want to make the book as much as my memory of the book.”

and

“So I’ve really tried to make the story about a family which is disenfranchised and disempowered in World War II, that on entering Narnia, through their unity as a family become empowered at the end of the story. It’s really bringing the humanity of the characters into what is effectively a symbolic story.”

Other signs have also been mixed. Early reports indicated that the creature effects for Aslan, Tumnus, and others would be handled by the two companies who did the effects for The Lord of the Rings, Weta (which was responsible for most of the film effects) and RGB XYZ (which did the very best digital creature work in the final film, and was responsible for the oliphants looking so much better in The Return of the King than they did in The Two Towers).

But later reports indicated that in fact creature effects would be handled by a company called Rhythm & Hues, best known for the (hardly awe-inspiring) digital work on Daredevil, Scooby-Doo, The Cat in the Hat, and Garfield. Not encouraging.

Now, a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless but who works in the industry and is a Christian, assures me that the project is in good hands. Regarding Adamson’s off-putting comments, he cites PR concerns and the desire to avoid appearing as if they’re making a religious picture.

That’s fine, I guess. But somehow Peter Jackson managed to let religious fans know that their beloved author’s themes would be respected without coming across like Mel Gibson making The Passion of the Christ. From a PR perspective, there’s no reason why Adamson can’t learn to do the same — assuming he does know what he’s doing and does want to respect Lewis’s themes and intentions.

Walden Media, don’t let us down!

SDG here. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings tour de force turned out so brilliantly that one could almost forget how different it could have been. It’s entirely possible that a significant part of the reason the films are as true to the books as they are is due to enormous fan pressure online and elsewhere. (Here’s a link to an article I wrote about the issues and controversy before the release of the first film.)

Now that Walden Media is at work on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Narnia fans are understandably wary. For one thing, as well-loved as these books are both inside and outside the church, they don’t have nearly the huge following of the Lord of the Rings books. For another, the Christian themes in Lewis’s books are so much more blatant than those of Tolkien’s books that the risk of Hollywood subversion and the stakes in the event of such subversion are higher.

By the way, recent news from the set of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe includes the recent casting of the four Pevensie children. So, if I need an excuse to be musing about this subject just now, here from the set (courtesy of the New Zealand Herald) are pictures of:

Nine-year-old Georgie Henley, from Yorkshire, as Lucy:

17-year-old William Moseley, from Gloucestershire, as Peter:

15-year-old Anna Popplewell and 12-year-old Skandar Keynes, both of London, as Susan and Edmund:

The big question, of course, is: Do the people in charge of this thing have any idea what they’re doing?

And the answer, so far, is: Hard to say.

On the encouraging side, the people at Walden Media are apparently Christians, and Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham, who is co-producing, seems committed to preserving Lewis’s vision. Plus, Walden Media produced Holes, a wonderful — and wonderfully faithful — adaptation of a delightful children’s book. (Of course they also produced the Jackie Chan parody of Around the World in 80 Days, but I choose to believe that doesn’t count as an adaptation at all.)

On the down side, director Andrew Adamson (Shrek, Shrek 2) at the very least hasn’t yet learned like Peter Jackson to talk the talk. Following massive interest by the Christian press and moviegoing public during the phenomenon of the first film, Jackson became trippingly familiar with variations on this theme:

“Of course Professor Tolkien was a very religious man, and his religious ideas did play a part in his novels, and while we have not set out to make a religious film, from the outset we were determined to honor Tolkien’s vision and not to put any of our own baggage into this film. So while we brought no religious intentions to this project, Tolkien’s beliefs did shape the story he told and some of that is evident in our films.”

This respectful and nuanced speech, which I read and heard in various versions from Jackson on a number of occasions, was reassuring to Tolkien’s Christian fans while at the same time not alarming non-Christian Tolkien lovers with worries that they were in for a ten-hour serial sermon.

When it comes to The Chronicles of Narnia, of course, Lewis’s Christian beliefs are even more emphatically important. Unfortunately, published remarks from Adamson so far don’t evince the same kind of respect for the integrity of Lewis’s vision or the same level of awareness of its religious dimension. Instead, Adamson has made such remarks as these:

“I don’t want to make the book as much as my memory of the book.”

and

“So I’ve really tried to make the story about a family which is disenfranchised and disempowered in World War II, that on entering Narnia, through their unity as a family become empowered at the end of the story. It’s really bringing the humanity of the characters into what is effectively a symbolic story.”

Other signs have also been mixed. Early reports indicated that the creature effects for Aslan, Tumnus, and others would be handled by the two companies who did the effects for The Lord of the Rings, Weta (which was responsible for most of the film effects) and RGB XYZ (which did the very best digital creature work in the final film, and was responsible for the oliphants looking so much better in The Return of the King than they did in The Two Towers).

But later reports indicated that in fact creature effects would be handled by a company called Rhythm & Hues, best known for the (hardly awe-inspiring) digital work on Daredevil, Scooby-Doo, The Cat in the Hat, and Garfield. Not encouraging.

Now, a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless but who works in the industry and is a Christian, assures me that the project is in good hands. Regarding Adamson’s off-putting comments, he cites PR concerns and the desire to avoid appearing as if they’re making a religious picture.

That’s fine, I guess. But somehow Peter Jackson managed to let religious fans know that their beloved author’s themes would be respected without coming across like Mel Gibson making The Passion of the Christ. From a PR perspective, there’s no reason why Adamson can’t learn to do the same — assuming he does know what he’s doing and does want to respect Lewis’s themes and intentions.

Walden Media, don’t let us down!

After all the warnings that Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ would cause violence and have a harmful effect on people’s . . . well, morals, presumably, if it was going to cause violence . . . comes this amazing story of a murderer being driven to repentance and confessing his crime after seeing the film.

What this man did is horrendous, but the story shows the power of the story of God’s Son, even via the medium of film, to touch the most hardened hearts.

But on this subject, I do.

Find out why.

The big media conglomerates need to be busted up.

But on this subject, I do.

Find out why.

The big media conglomerates need to be busted up.

Went and saw the remake of The Manchurian Candidate this weekend. It was . . . good. Not as good as the original, 1962 classic version of the film, but still quite good. Worth seeing. (Assuming that you can deal with an R-rated movie that has some violence and a small amount of cussing.)

They changed things around a bit, which they needed to do lest this be a shot-for-shot copy of the original (no pun intended). Since most of the audience knows the basic secret of the film (which I won’t reveal here, just in case you don’t), they reveal it sooner in this version, so the audience isn’t left sitting around going, “Why are they being so coy about this?”

Since we’re no longer in the Cold War, the villains in this version aren’t Communists. In fact, they’re capitalists, though more than that I won’t say.

For the most part, the changes they make are good ones that serve to keep fans of the original version of the film guessing as to what’s going to happen. Several are quite nice.

For example, in the original film there is a character named Rosie, who shows up, instantly falls in love with Frank Sinatra (who is a complete wreck at this point and not a likely prospect for someone to fall in love with), and says bizarrely unintelligible things in a scene with him.

When I first saw this scene, I immediately thought: “She’s working for someone. She’s got Frank Sinatra in some kind of altered mental state and the strangeoid things she’s saying to him are activating post-hypnotic suggestions or something.” Except that they’re not. The original version of the film never follows up on this, and Rosie seems to be just a woman who fell in love with Frank Sinatra. (Making the bizarro dialog scene a flaw in the original film.)

The new version of the film does pick up on this thread and develop it. In the new film the Rosie character is dramatically expanded. She is not activating post-hypnotic suggestions (she just comes across as kind of flighty). But she is working for someone (not who you might think), as Denzel Washington, playing the Frank Sinatra role, quickly finds out.

This is one good change among several in the film. One change in particular toward the end of the film spins things in a welcomely unexpected direction, though not all the changes are good. The climax of the film, and expecially the anticlimax, are not as clear as they should be, but this isn’t enough to ruin the film. It’s still a good thriller.

There are several really funny moments in the film. At one point Denzel Washington is telling some government agents that they need to have doctors examine a particular person to search for an “implant” he is carrying in his body. One of the agents begins to hum/chant the Twilight Zone theme, at which point–without skipping a beat–Denzel says: “They can hum that while searching for it if they want to.”

A concern that I had before the film was the fact that some are reporting it as a highly partisan film. “More partisan than Fahrenheit 9/11,” one reviewer said. That’s nonsense. There are some sly winks to contemporary politics in the film, but not more than that.

And that’s nothing new, anyway. There were sly winks in the original film, as well. In fact, the original film’s Johnny Iselin character was a knock-off of Joseph McCarthy, right down to the fact that he (like McCarthy) keeps changing the number of Communists thought to have infiltrated the government.

This film is not partisan propaganda. It’s a political thriller that draws on contemporary politics for some of its set dressing, just like the original version.

One thing I was interested to see was how Meryl Streep’s character came off. She plays a senator, and many people thought they detected resonances of Hillary Rodham Clinton in her performance. Streep denied this, but the truth is somewhere in the middle. When you see her on screen it is unmistakable that she is made to look like Hillary Clinton visually, and she is an aggressive, self-possessed person. But there the similarity ends. Streep may look like Rodham Clinton, but she doesn’t sound like Rodham Clinton.

The person she sounds like is someone completely different and completely unexpected.

She sounds like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry.

Yes! That’s right! If you imagine Hillary Rodham Clinton telepathically channelling Lwaxana Troi, you have a good idea of Meryl Streep’s character in this film.

And that in itself is a treat to see.