It’s Good Friday, so somebody out there must be writing about Jesus movies. Ah, here we go – it’s Joshua Land at Moving Image Source comparing The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. “The single most hollow claim of those who picketed Last Temptation was the notion that Universal was exploiting Christianity in pursuit of the almighty dollar; like The Passion of the Christ, Scorsese’s film was an obviously uncommercial proposition from the get-go, and it remains remarkable that the studio ever pursued it at all, let alone held firm in the face of protests—particularly after Paramount had already dropped the project before it even went into production.”
David Lynch won’t do commentary tracks, so the folks at Shooting Down Pictures have taken it upon themselves to live-blog Inland Empire. “I don’t think it’s an informational kind of film. I don’t think it’s part of his vocabulary. That might be the trouble behind understanding the ‘genre’ of this film. Simply avant-garde play of light, affectations and moods. I think the first time I saw this, by this point I was thinking that it was explicitly about interpretation. And it’s setting up all these signs for you to interpret in any number of ways. But it is going to provide a network of significance, and there are several things that will keep popping up for you to pay attention to how and when. There’s an intuitive kind of architecture to the film. A lot of it is just the face - dreams, and faces. It’s all about cinema as a dream, dreams as cinema. It’s not even a syllogism, it’s all a bunch of links.”
Director Richard Kelly (Southland Tales) blogs on his MySpace page about his new movie The Box. “The film was digitally photographed using the Panavision Genesis camera. In my audio commentary on Tony Scott's Domino, I mentioned that I would never shoot a 1970s period piece using a digital camera. My position on this changed when I saw David Fincher's extraordinary Zodiac. It can be done.”
This open letter to Bill O’Reilly has nothing to do with movies, but Roger Ebert wrote it and it’s too good to pass up: “I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was dropping your syndicated column. My editor informs me that ‘very few’ readers complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, ‘many more complained about Nancy.’ I know I did. That was the famous Ernie Bushmiller comic strip in which Sluggo explained that ‘wow’ was ‘mom’ spelled upside-down.”
And in List-o-Mania this week…what the hell, let’s go with the 10 Greatest Mall-Set Action Scenes from Spoutblog, including Commando. “There’s nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger throw off about eight mall cops attempting a circular apprehension. There’s also nothing like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger swing across the atrium of the Sherman Oaks Galleria using a plastic balloon-like decoration that couldn’t possibly have held him. Yes, there are a lot of over-the-top moments in this action scene, but there’s no denying it’s entertaining, at least to those of us who aren’t employed as mall security.”