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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.

Due to the structure of the film, it’s no spoiler to tell you that Snow Angels is about relationships that end in violence; but this is no inspired-by-Montel over-the-top smackdown or overwrought Woody Allen melodrama. It’s a quiet, meditative examination of relationships and situations gone horribly wrong.

Interestingly, the story’s central character happens to be a Bible-believing, praying Christian—and so the question of faith became very explicit in a post-screening discussion following the film’s premiere.

PtP Managing Editor Greg Wright attended the premiere of the film with a private audience and the filmmakers in Seattle this week, and the first question from the moderator during the after-film discussion was: “So… should we be afraid of every born-again Christian?” The instant response from the audience: “Yes!”

David Gordon Green, the director, gave a very vague follow-up reply to the question. So when Greg interviewed him the next day, he started right out with that very same question. The full interview, and Green’s full response, can be found at Past the Popcorn.

posted by Greg Wright of Past the Popcorn

It’s difficult to imagine that someone who has been in the entertainment business for nearly fifty years could possibly quality as a “discovery”—but that’s very likely how Donny Osmond will be perceived for his turn as the bigger-than-life college dad Doug in Disney’s latest G-rated release, College Road Trip.

Osmond is, of course, with his sister Marie, one of the more famous faces and voices of the Osmond family, which is just about to embark on a world “50th Anniversary” tour. He has countless hit records, both as a solo act and with his family members, he has headlined hit Broadway shows—and he has raised children. He has been happily married for 28 years.

One of the central themes of College Road Trip is the need that kids have for love and trust, a theme that had “better resonate with every parent,” says Donny Osmond, who plays one of the parents in the film. “I was watching Oprah last night, and Bill Cosby was on. It was such a great episode to wake parents up, because that’s what kids really need from their parents. It was either Bill or the guest host who said, “Parents, wake up!” When you tell your kids that they’re stupid, they’ll believe it. How can they have any respect for themselves when you don’t have any respect for them?”

Read the full interview with Donny Osmond.

posted by Greg Wright of Past the Popcorn

In the production notes for his Oscar-winning foreign film about Jews pressed into nefarious service by the Nazis, director Stefan Ruzowitzky makes a rather startling claim: “Since Life is Beautiful one can, may and indeed must narrate individual fates which don’t claim to represent all victims.” Presumably, this is a nod to Life’s own Oscar win several years ago; but I suspected there was a bit more behind Ruzowitzky’s assertion than that.

I was therefore glad to have the opportunity, courtesy of a local publicist, to speak with Ruzowitzky over the phone a couple of weeks prior to the Oscars—and I asked him specifically about Life is Beautiful and Schindler’s List. How, I wanted to know, did these films open new doors for pictures about the Holocaust?

Unlike Schindler’s List’s Amon Goeth, the antagonist here, Herzog, is not revealed to us through inside information. Instead, he’s fictionally based on the first-person recollections of another of the counterfeiters, Adolf Burger. So we see in Herzog a man who is “charming, friendly, always good-looking,” says Ruzowitzky: a real “manager-politician” who is fully capable of dreaming up “new, beautiful words” for extermination. And yet the only handle we get on what makes him tick is by examining his character through the lens of the prisoners themselves—and Sorowitsch, specifically. It is an approach that asks us to examine ourselves, and our country.

—post by Greg Wright of Past the Popcorn.

Ben Stein’s new project Expelled is a critical look not at the shortcomings of Darwinian theory per se, but at the ways in which the Darwinian scientific establishment is apparently seeking to suppress open dialogue about competing theories. The justification for this suppression is that competing theories are not really “scientific,” so free speech is not the issue, “academic respectability” is.

But as Mr. Stein stated, “I think we’re missing something extremely basic in our understanding of the world, and how it got created and I’d like us to return to that. And, I think, by returning to those bigger subjects of how the world got created and what our place in the world is, we will find a new moral fence which is very much lacking.”

Past the Popcorn Managing Editor Greg Wright reports on a recent conference call with Stein.

Once upon a time, Dolph Lundgren played one of cinema’s most notorious (and notoriously overplayed) villains: Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. It was a truly memorable performance, not only for Lundgren’s imposing physical presence (amplified not by his actual size, but by the contrast of his physique with that of Sylvester Stallone, who is actually on the short side) but for the pervasive over-the-top Reagan-era Cold War caricature of Soviet stereotypes. Lundgren, of course, was entirely new to the film scene in 1985, so Drago was a pretty impressive debut. Lundgren went on to starring roles in Masters of the Universe and Red Scorpion, and then settled into a long string of supporting roles and B movies.

Recently, Lundgren’s career has also taken in interesting turn. Last year, he directed and starred in the straight-to-DVD Missionary Man, about a Bible-toting biker anti-hero, and on February 19, he has a major supporting role in the DVD release The Final Inquiry, which also features the likes of Max Von Sydow and F. Murray Abraham. Released in Italy in 2006, the film is just now making it to the American market via the Fox Faith label.

Past the Popcorn Managing Editor Greg Wright recently had a chance to talk with Lundgren over the phone about developments in his personal faith.

(Image by Carl Lindström and used under the GNU Free Documentation License.)

The Circuit ‘Riter ministry is a longtime member of the Gospel.com community. While you might know them best through their large collection of online devotional messages, their ministry has a heart for rural and small church ministry.

We recently visited their home church in Colorado to talk to Michael Ullrich, the man behind Circuit ‘Riter, to find out what makes this ministry tick:

If their ministry sounds intriguing, take a look at their website, and at their online ministries In His Steps and Share the Book!