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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.”

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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.

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.

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.

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

As empty a snack as it might be, the latest Dennis Quaid vehicle, Vantage Point, showcases the actor at his best. Here a plays a Secret Service agent who stumbles onto a conspiracy during an attempt on the President’s life. The films “final sequence is awfully satisfying,” says Greg Wright, “even if there isn’t any quotable dialogue in the film and Vantage Point ends up being about nothing at all. It’s like getting to the bottom of your popcorn bag and realizing you’ve just had nothing but popcorn.” And sometimes, he concedes, that’s just fine.

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

It sure seems this time of year that films pushing past 90 minutes are rare. Cloverfield has been the shortest of the bunch, but this week’s releases won’t bring David Lean to mind any time soon.

Perhaps the best of the bunch, The Spiderwick Chronicles is a rush-rush headspin of a family fantasy. “I’m having significant trouble coming up with a good precedent for what director Mark Waters delivers here,” says Greg Wright. “I honestly can’t think of another film that has captured both the ‘danger’ of goblins (and Faerie in general) and their whimsicality.” But it all goes by too fast, he asserts — and he’s none too happy about the father subplot, either.

Another of this week’s big releases, Jumper, is just as thin, being awfully short on sense as well as minutes. But it’s a good look at the ways in which “‘special’ people will always be (justifiably) targeted by the morally indignant,” advises Greg Wright. Still, he concludes, audiences “far too accustomed to superficial and multiple false endings will find that the film’s climax just offers too little payoff. It all ends up feeling like a cheap paste-on toupee looking for a hat.”

Mike Smith had better luck with Definitely, Maybe, a romance of sorts in which a young girl challenges her father to find where his marriage went wrong. It’s a film, he says, that “takes the age-old question ‘Why do marriages fail?’ and tosses it into the larger question: ‘Why does any relationship fail?’ Director Adam Brooks comes up with a pretty direct answer.” And it’s one that Smith likes: personal responsibility.

Jeff Walls was not so impressed with the formulaic Step Up 2 the Streets, though he “can appreciate all the physicality and athleticism that goes into these vigorous dance moves.” He’d rather rewatch something with Fred Astaire than wait around for the sporadic comedy and dance wedged in with the cliches. But if you like the dance formula, this one does it pretty well.

If you like really short films, Kathy Bledose says adults are a good fit for the collections of Oscar-nominated shorts going into limited release this weekend. And on other fronts, Jennie Sphor doesn’t find much to celebrate in the French sex-drama The Witnesses, while Greg Wright finds George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead about as good as your going to get out of zombie film.

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.)

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

The time for whining is over, says Past the Popcorn Managing Editor Greg Wright. This week’s releases feature three strong entries that should make parents feel pretty good about the values presented on the silver screen.

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Mission Network News reports on the movie, The Godman, being shown in India that’s having a tremendous impact:

Already they’ve received more than a half million letters from people who have responded to the movie. Hoskins says that response is a direct result of pre-trained national believers…”So far, we’ve had over 3,405,000 people that have watched the movie, and we’ve had literally hundreds of thousands of people who have accepted Christ.” Those numbers represent only those who watched in Christians’ homes.
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Hoskins says we don’t want to see “spiritual abortion” take place. That means “you give birth to something and you don’t feed that new child. And so what we’re needing to do is plant the Word of God and ensure that Scripture engagement takes place.”

According to Hoskins, it’s more critical in India than anywhere else because of Hinduism. “All gods are equal, and there are thousands of them. We don’t want Jesus just to be another god that you accept. We want Scripture engagement to take place for those children and their parents to understand that Jesus is the one, the only true Lord.” However, that takes time and good resources.

Watch a trailer over at Book of Hope International.