Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom:

A Fresh Look, 25 Years Later

By John David Ebert 

After a casual viewing of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom over the weekend, I decided that it would be fun to write a retroactive review of the film, which I thought actually contains some interesting implications for where we’re at now, twenty five years later. This was the second of the Indiana Jones films, made just a few years after the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1980, and it is the best of the sequels, which become gradually weaker with each subsequent entry in the series. Read the rest of this entry »

Synecdoche New York: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York, recently released on DVD, is his directorial debut and very possibly his finest work to date. Kaufman made himself famous as an auteur screenwriter in a medium which rejects the very idea of a screenwriter becoming an auteur, since film is primarily a director’s medium. Screenwriters are a dime a dozen in this business, and few of them ever manage to carve out recognizably distinct signature visions, since screenplays are usually so heavily trademarked with the director’s style and personality that there is not often much left that can be credited as unique to the screenwriter. But Kaufman, beginning with Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, managed to rise above the limitations of the medium with a vision so wry and sardonically Kaufmannian that it was also immediately its own trademark; in the films that followed, such as Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it became evident that Kaufman’s own particular way of looking at the world is unmistakably his own and as readily identifiable as, say, Stanley Kubrick’s. No one can duplicate the feel of a Stanley Kubrick film; Kaufman’s vision, it is becoming apparent, is just as inimitable. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rise of the Machines: A Contrarian View

By John Lobell 

Many, including John Ebert, have been seeing movies like Terminator: Salvation as growing out of our unease, perhaps even fear of the intrusion of machines into our lives. And, as Ebert points out, the far out science fiction of these movies is fast becoming real. If you regularly follow Ray Kurzweil’s KurzweilAI.net, you keep up on breaking news of computers millions of times faster than those we use today, alterations to our DNA, and chips being built into our brains. Read the rest of this entry »