Warner Bros has confirmed that Heath Ledger will play the Joker in the forthcoming sequel to Batman Begins. The film, to be called The Dark Knight, begins shooting early next year with BB director Christopher Nolan at the helm.

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An art-film documentary on young Christians has been picked up by Magnolia Pictures for distribution to theaters around the nation. The Hollywood Reporter writes, Magnolia Pictures has nabbed North American rights to "Jesus Camp," a documentary about a retreat for born-again Christian children. The project revolves around three youngsters who attend the Rev. Becky Fischer’s "Kids on Fire" summer camp in Devil’s Lake, N.D. It details their training to "take back America for Christ" and hone "prophetic gifts" in a mission as political as it is religious. The film was directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. According the Magnolia president Eamonn Bowles as quoted in the story, "One of the great strengths of the film is that it doesn’t come with this prepackaged point of view." To buttress this claim in hopes of making the film palatable to Christian audiences, Bowles pulled the film from its scheduled showing next week at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival. Given the film’s openly arch title and Magnolia president’s strenuous claims that the film is objective, one suspects that it will make its young subjects look rather ridiculous. That is not at all difficult to do if one looks at some of

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MGM has just released a new Collector’s Edition DVD of Billy Wilder’s classic 1958 comedy Some Like It Hot, which starred Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon in a brilliantly farcical story set in the Roaring ’20s. Curtis and Lemmon play two penniless Chicago dance-hall jazz musicians who accidentally witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and hotfoot it out of town to escape the gangsters who are out to silence them by means of a hail of bullets. Naturally, the only way out of town is as musicians in an all-girl band on its way to Florida, and they transform themselves into Josephine and Dapne and join the band on a train ride to Florida. Just as naturally, they run into beautiful Sugar, played by Marilyn Monroe, and naturally Josephine, er, Joe, falls in love with her. Once arrived safely in sunny Florida, Joe woos Sugar in the guise of a rich oil heir who speaks in a very poor imitation of Cary Grant—of whom, incidentally, no one had ever heard at the time of the film’s setting, February 1929. Just as naturally, a real millionaire, played by Joe E. Brown, falls in love with Daphne, aka Jerry. And

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In recognition of MGM’s release of a Collector’s Edition DVD of Billy Wilder’s brilliant comedy Some Like It Hot, here are my thoughts on the great writer-director composed shortly after his death in October 2002 and published in the Hudson Institute’s American Outlook magazine: Wilder in Retrospect by S. T. Karnick Filmmaker Billy Wilder—winner of six Oscars and countless other awards, and widely respected as one of the greatest directors of the American cinema—died earlier this year, at the age of 95. Wilder was sometimes vilified as shallow and cynical, and even several obituaries remembered him this way. In fact, he was neither. He was a great satirist whose true motives were often misunderstood. Among other attributes, Wilder’s patriotism has received insufficient notice, especially because it stands in such stark contrast to the attitudes of so many of today’s Hollywood celebrities. Wilder began his career in the 1920s in Vienna, Austria, as a newspaper reporter, but he was attracted to the cinema and began to write films in Germany in the early 1930s before trying his luck in Hollywood. The acclaimed German expatriate director Ernst Lubitsch teamed Wilder with a genteel American writer, Charles Brackett, and the two soon whipped

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