Matthew Vaughn’s Kick Ass

Reviewed by John David Ebert

Matthew Vaughn’s Kick Ass is a new addition to the ever growing corpus of works in the superhero celluloid genre, and I must say that it is one of the best and most original superhero movies ever made. It is actually a metanarrative in the tradition of Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction or A History of Violence: that is to say, the kind of narrative that steps outside its own genre in order to reflect upon that genre’s conventions and presuppositions. It is simultaneously a superhero narrative and also a film about superhero movies. It is also incredibly violent. Read the rest of this entry »

Clash of the Titans: A Movie Review

(Actually, more of a meditation)

by John Lobell

Ok, a mish mash of plots and stories, quarrels and backstabbing among the Greek gods (no Titans, despite the title), confused story lines, and lame dialogue. So, should we just appreciate the great special effects (love that Pegasus) and dismiss the rest? Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland

Reviewed by John David Ebert

(thoughts by John Lobell under Comments)

Tim Burton’s films are generally uneven in quality, and lately, they have not been particularly good. When we think of Sweeney Todd or Big Fish, Sleepy Hollow or Planet of the Apes, we are presented with celluloid spectacles filled with remarkable and even memorable cinematic imagery, but which are generally mediocre products marred by humdrum screenwriting. Burton suffers from the same problem as a number of other visually-talented directors who are not very good at judging the quality of screenplays. Ridley Scott comes to mind; as does (the now long since forgotten) Alan Parker; perhaps David Fincher is a better recent example. Read the rest of this entry »

A Serious Man

Reviewed by John David Ebert

Though I’ve never reviewed any of their movies on this site, the Coen brothers are among my favorite filmmakers. Their films are remarkably free from the kinds of flaws that plague the work of other directors, especially of the Hollywood type, for cliches, sentimentality and kitsch are rare occurrences in a Coen brothers film. And they have possibly the most sophisticated and developed sense of irony that cinema has seen since the days of Stanley Kubrick. To watch a Coen brothers film is to watch an unfolding cascade of novelties, originality and good writing pour forth with a freshness and disregard of convention that is virtually unmatched in cinematic history. Read the rest of this entry »

The Book of Eli: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

On the surface, there’s nothing new about The Book of Eli. It has all the essential plot structures of the traditional Western: the loner who wanders into town from out of the waste land, where he encounters bad guys running the town who are a bunch of lawless rogues and opportunists hoarding all the women as well as the town’s natural resources. This structure is nearly invariant from A Fistful of Dollars right down to HBO’s Deadwood television series. The look of the film’s post-apocalyptic setting, with all its crumbling highways, rusting gantries, deserted way stations and broken machinery, is derived mainly from the Mad Max movies and also John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. So the plot mechanisms and the visual furniture are all familiar to the point of being timeworn. But the film is actually about something that is very interesting and unusual for sci-fi popcorn cinema, and that is the power of media to shape civilization. Read the rest of this entry »

Moon: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Duncan Jones’ Moon has the word ‘classic’ written all over it. It is one of the best science fiction films in a long, long time, one that is faithful to the development of the genre and to the tradition of the battle against the Machine that was inaugurated with Kubrick’s 2001. In many ways, the film owes a great debt to Kubrick’s masterpiece, but also to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, for it reworks the latter’s themes of isolation, alienation and identity confusion. The film was reportedly made for only 6 million dollars, but it has the look of a 60 million dollar film, one that happens to have a fresh and innovative screenplay. Read the rest of this entry »

District 9:

A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

I finally got around to seeing Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, which is, indeed, a better film than Avatar. The difference between the two films is instructive, for Blomkamp’s film succeeds because it inherits a cliched premise–an alien invasion of the earth–which it then proceeds to subvert by turning upside down, while Cameron merely lines up a string of sci-fi cliches and assembles them with all the craftsmanship of a prefabricated tract house. Cameron’s film is the celluloid equivalent of styrofoam packaging: it makes a lot of noise, but there’s not much to it; Blomkamp’s movie, on the other hand, is fresh and inventive. Read the rest of this entry »