I’ve always loved a movie about writers. And the premise of Ruby Sparks no doubt intrigues me: A novelist struggling with writer’s block finds romance in a most unusual way: by creating a female character he thinks will love him, then willing her into existence.

Now, what writer hasn’t dreamed of having this happens to them? Especially when one of your characters has all the criteria of the man/woman of your dreams  But as Calvin Weir-Fields finds out, it’s a lot trickier than you think. At first glance, this movie shares some similarities with Stranger than Fiction, but with a few twists on its own. Whilst the Will Ferrell movie focuses on the character who finds himself the subject of narration only he can hear, this one focuses more on the writer.

Paul Dano stars as Calvin, a young writer who’s under pressure to relive… click here to read whole article and make comments

MercatorNet editor Michael Cook has asked me to introduce the newest addition to the MercatorNet family (the rowdy teenager of the blogs if you like) - Popcorn.

Popcorn is a MercatorNet blog on the Movies. Our aim is to look at what’s going in mainstream cinema and to hopefully give Hollywood the MercatorNet treatment, so to speak, to “put a sound vision of the human person” right at the heart of the movie world.

The idea of this post is to give you a heads up of what you can expect from Popcorn over the coming weeks and months (provided Michael doesn’t pull the plug on us before then!).

As editor I want the input of our readers and contributors to form the basis of my plan to take over the world and... Sorry, thinking out loud.

Our job on Popcorn is to… click here to read whole article and make comments

“Following the massacre at the Batman film in Colorado, are you thinking it would be in bad taste to go and see the film yourself?” This was the question asked by BBC Radio 2’s The Jeremy Vine show on Monday afternoon as the world was absorbing the details of the tragedy that unfolded at the The Dark Knight Rises premiere in Aurora, Colorado last weekend.

A fair question considering the hysteria generated by the film and the associations that have inevitably been made with the shootings at the theatre and the movie those involved were there to see.

I was listening to the Jeremy Vine show at work and as far as I could tell the general feeling was that if we stopped going to the movies because of something like this then the bad guys have won. As one caller noted, ‘We didn’t stop… click here to read whole article and make comments

In an era where seemingly every Summer we get a superhero cinematic event, Christopher Nolan still manages to kick it up a notch with The Dark Knight Rises. Really, even without the ruckus over death treats over negative reviews and the tragic event that happened in Aurora, CO, during a midnight screening, the hype over the final chapter to Nolan’s Batman saga is still a colossal one. The over-exposure is really quite overwhelming, to the point where I have to make extra effort to tune it out and be as fresh as possible.

Well, I’m happy to say that it paid off to know as little as possible about the plot as I was surprised a couple of times watching this. I think those of you that still have not seen this yet, I suggest you do the same and avoid reading about it… click here to read whole article and make comments