Gospel.com Blog

Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.

Last week brought us the second entry in the summer blockbuster sweepstakes and a solid slate of releases. This week, the pace doesn’t slack off even though it’s not up to last week. And the checkered flag goes to…… Speed Racer!

(more…)

Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.

When the worst movie released on a given week is merely an uninspired romantic comedy starring Patrick Dempsey, you’re not doing too bad.

Leading the pack, of course, is the much-anticipated Iron Man, a comic book superhero PG-13 adaptation starring Robert Downey, Jr. Michael Brunk was wholly won over. “If Iron Man is any indication of what we can expect this summer,” he says, “I think we’re in for a great time.”

(more…)

Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens. We’re a few days late with this latest roundup—our apologies!

It’s not a banner week for new releases. The best of the bunch is the new Saturday Night Live alum flick Baby Mama, in which Tina Fey stars as a single businesswoman who hires a surrogate (played by Amy Poehler) to carry her child. It’s a PG-13 SNL-type effort in which “the humor never comes across as mean-spirited,” says Michael Brunk. “While it has its rude, crude moments, I never felt it was gratuitous or thrown in for shock effect. Not all of the jokes work, but in general it’s consistently witty and funny.”

(more…)

University of Minnesota (Morris) associate biology professor and raconteur P.Z. Myers makes a prominent appearance in the new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. In a sequence intended to demonstrate an anti-religious agenda amongst opponents of the Intelligent Design movement, Myers likens religion to knitting. “What we have to do is get it to a place where religion is treated at the level it should be treated,” he tells his interviewer. “It’s something fun that people get together to do on the weekends and really doesn’t affect their life as much as it has been so far.”

Whether he deliberately set out to become the focus of the ire that the clip is likely to produce amongst Christian audiences, he certainly isn’t known for being shy and retiring. When he disrupted a private telephone press conference with Expelled’s star and producers to level charges of deception and lying on March 28, journalists were in shock. There he was, on the speakerphone, living up to the very image portrayed in the film.

Before he checked out of the press conference (after three or four minutes of mutually confused banter), he offered journalists who were listening in the opportunity to contact him directly to hear his side of the story. Past the Popcorn Managing Editor took him up on that invitation, and had a very pleasant twenty-minute conversation with him.

What follows is a full transcript of the part of that conversation that touched on Myers’ feelings about religion, and what he thinks Christians should be paying attention to.

Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.

The film that everybody is waiting for this week is Expelled: No Intelligence allowed. Like the movie itself, even a review barely does the topic justice. But Greg Wright gives it stab: the movie, he says, “certainly provides proof of bias, in both intentional and unintentional ways. And the vituperative response from detractors who haven’t even seen the film proves that, yes, there is a much larger war going on out there. On the entertainment level, the film comes in at about a B. When it comes to its subject matter, though, Expelled fumbles the ball quite a bit. At the end of the day, I don’t find that the film makes a compelling case. Yes, I am inclined to believe that the opposition fights pretty dirty; I simply don’t think those folks are really the same cabal that Expelled.” If the filmmakers are really right, Wright says, they simply playing too nice to catch the culprits “red-handed.”

(more…)

Bob Cilman, musical director of the Young @ Heart chorus, is very happy that the film named after his group is bringing the talents of these post-retirement-age singers to a whole new audience. They are all in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, and he has found that the audience for Young @ Heart tends to be on the younger side.

Past the Popcorn Managing Editor Greg Wright talked with Cilman a couple of weeks ago over the phone after the film’s press tour canceled its flight out of Dallas due to storms. Cilman enthusiastically endorses suggestions that the film is ideal field trip material for retirement home residents. “It’s hard for older people when they come to see us,” he says, “because they don’t know much of the music.”

Young @ Heart, however, is not a musical documentary, nor is it about the music itself. It’s about the people behind the music, about the sacrifices they make, about living and dying with pride and hope, and about connecting with other real people. It’s a film that older audiences should connect with particularly well, as they will see a great deal of themselves in the various chorus members.

Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.

With less than a month to go before the summer blockbusters break upon us like, well, blockbusters, the indies and the studio botique labels are trying to make as much hay as they can before all of the screens are sucked up by the megaflicks.

The darkest (and sharpest) of the bunch this week is Street Kings, a police-corruption action thriller starring Keanu Reeves in a familiar-looking role. But the well-pedigreed film is probably not what you expect, says Greg Wright: “I don’t think you’ll hate this movie. No, if either cop movies or Keanu Reeves are your thing, you’ll probably even love it. Still, I’m not sure you need this kind of dark vision of America, either.”

(more…)

Long a ghostwriter for several high-profile names, Kevin Miller’s serendipitous encounter with filmmaker David L. Cunningham at a hotel in Hawaii provided the nascent screenwriter with his first professional gig: After…, a psychological thriller set in the world of base jumping and urban exploration.

Miller’s latest project, starring Ben Stein, is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary that looks at the turf wars in the science community over Darwinian evolution and the field of “Intelligent Design.”

As part of Past the Popcorn’s lead-in to coverage of Expelled, I took the opportunity to spend half an hour on the phone with Miller, chatting about his experience in the business. Next week, PtP will publish the second half of the interview, which focuses on Expelled.

Greg Wright of Past the Popcorn and Hollywood Jesus reports on a recent screening of the controversial film Expelled:

On the heels of last Thursday’s screening of Expelled in Minneapolis, at which God Delusion author Richard Dawkins sparred with associate producer Mark Mathis during the post-show Q&A, the Discovery Institute screened a 35mm print of the film for an invitation-only audience at a downtown Seattle theater just blocks away from the Institute’s offices.

Regarding the allegations of improprieties and irregularities that Dawkins and P.Z. Meyers have raised about both the Minneapolis screening and the film itself, Premise Media’s George Lang remarked that “we’re not responding to any of that because we don’t have to.”

As of this morning, though, word from both Motive and the Institute is that a press release about the Minneapolis screening is forthcoming from Premise presently.

The screening followed Lang’s remarks with fairly enthusiastic response from the decidedly partisan audience. Still, the reaction was noticeably calm and measured. The print itself was crisp, clean, and bright.

Hollywood Jesus has just launched SteinWatch, a daily blog tracking news related to Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.

Look no further than Ted Haggard or Jeremiah Wright. Evidence abounds that wearing the name of Christ exempts no one from fits of inexplicable behavior.

So it should come as no great surprise that one of the major releases this Holy weekend features a Christian who behaves very poorly—not because he’s a Christian, but because his basic character flaws are so profound that his weak grasp on Christianity isn’t enough to save him. David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels is “a drama that pulls no punches,” says Michael Brunk. “There are moments of levity, but overall the tone is fairly bleak… Personally, I found it riveting.”

(more…)