The Adventures of Tintin:

A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

When Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel twenty years after finishing his Genesis masterpiece on the ceiling — a masterpiece which astonished everyone and caused Raphael to go back to his School of Athens to paint Michelangelo in as the morose Thinker in the foreground — he painted The Last Judgement on the wall behind the altar, and the resulting work ignited a storm of criticism about the painting’s Mannerist merits. It was generally conceded to be a recognizable masterpiece, but it was  not received with anything like the warmth and enthusiasm of the ceiling fresco from twenty years earlier. Personally, I find it stiff, badly organized and full of awkwardly drawn figures and rather unimaginative depictions of the resurrection of the dead at the end of Time. But then, by 1534, Michelangelo was getting on in his years. Read the rest of this entry »

Immortals, Mythology and Metaphysics

A Review by Benton Rooks

“…Myth remains the proper language of metaphysics.” –Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

There are three essential layers and functions for any mythology: social, psychological and metaphysical /spiritual. The dualistic social function varies significantly from culture to culture—myths have often been used by the media, Church and the State as tactics of control to subdue the “masses”—but they are also educational tools for illustrating how mere mortals can achieve spiritual perfection or immortality through divine acts. A myth, then, cannot always be said to be false, at least not metaphysically, and therefore it may in fact be more true than some of the mythical narratives our consciousness weaves for us in the day-to-day routines we often find ourselves hopelessly trapped in. Read the rest of this entry »

Rise of the Planet of the Apes:

A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an entertaining, if not particularly inventive, prequel to the Planet of the Apes franchise. And when I say that the film is not inventive I mean that it unfolds in exactly the way the viewer anticipates that it will. Hence: a genetically engineered virus that is designed to reverse Alzeheimer’s is tested out on chimps but has the side effect of increasing their intelligence, whereas the virus is lethal to human beings. The apes go crazy, break out, take over civilization and the virus begins to spread throughout the human population. Just like the trailer shows us. No surprises. The writing is competent, but a little bland and not particularly imaginative. Read the rest of this entry »

Sucker Punch: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

In my book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons, I compared the development of Hollywood cinema in the 1970s and 80s with the achievement of the High Renaissance at the moment when, with artists like Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael et. al., Western oil painting hit the apogee of its arc. The stylistic idiosyncrasies of these Renaissance artists had the effect of breaking these artists out from the anonymous guilds which had hitherto characterized Western art as a series of schools or nationalistic developments: there is, for example, a “Northern Renaissance” style that is clearly and discernibly different from the “Southern Renaissance” style; there is a Florentine style that differs markedly from the Venetian school. But the level of mastery and competence attained by Titian or Giorgione had the effect of creating the cult of the artist as a genius, as a sort of school unto himself. In my film book, I suggested that something very similar took place in cinema with the rise of such great creative artists as Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Woody Allen, etc. They were preceded, of course, by the French auteurs, but only just barely. There had never been anything like these directors before, and there hasn’t, I’m sad to say, been anything like them ever since. Read the rest of this entry »

The Adjustment Bureau:

A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

On the surface, The Adjustment Bureau appears to be yet another film about the Western myth of the Individual’s battle against Fate, a standard rehearsal of how, with the development and differentiation of the Self and free will, Western civilization identified itself with the myth of the solar hero who conquers the beasts and monsters of the zodiac of the night sky which, ever since the birth of astrology at the hand of the Sumerians, had determined his fate for millenia. The West — and this includes the Biblical Near East — rejected this astro-determinism and put in its place figures like Beowulf and Siegfried, men who chased away the monsters of the night sky and paved a path toward the dawn of human Reason and Enlightenment. Read the rest of this entry »

Super 8: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Hollywood movies are in trouble.

Just like the cliche of the graying middle ager with the beer belly who regales his bored listeners with tales of his former high school glories as a football superstar, so now we have, with J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 the celluloid equivalent of the wash up living on faded memories of yesterday. Indeed, most of the movies being made nowadays, from superhero movies to the average sci-fi flick, are living off of cannibalized images, themes and stories from the golden era of the 1970s and 1980s when Hollywood movies were actually achieving something that had never been done before. Read the rest of this entry »

Anti-Christ: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Though this film was released in Denmark in May of 2009 and is therefore not technically recent, I just watched it for the first time on Netflix streaming video on demand and must say that it requires discourse. In an age of Hollywood formulas and computer generated celluloid video games, watching this film actually surprised me by reminding me that film, in the hands of a real artist, actually is a real art form. I had forgotten that. The film is made with the same sensibilities which attend European avant-garde art: the paintings of Gottfried Helnwein, let’s say, or the blackboard drawings of Rudolf Steiner; the photography of Gerhard Richter or the installations of Joseph Beuys. If the world of Euro-avant-garde art repels you, you might as well forget about the movie and also skip this review. This film wasn’t made for the little old lady in Dubuque. Its imagery is frank, and often brutal, and sometimes gives us scenes that thus far we are only accustomed to seeing in porn. Charlotte Gainsbourg, for instance, is shown, in one scene, masturbating: not pretending to, like Natalie Portman in Black Swan, but actually doing so on camera. And Willem Defoe’s penis is a sight you may as well get accustomed to here. Read the rest of this entry »

Source Code: A Movie Review

by John Lobell

[Spoiler alert] In my comment posted after Ebert’s review on this site of Inception, I wrote: “Notice that we have been getting a lot of movies with a non-linear, layered time, and notice that (most) audiences are totally comfortable with these movies.” I then went on to briefly discuss Groundhog Day, 50 First Dates, Memento, the Terminator movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Lake House. I could have added the Matrix movies, 12 Monkeys, Vanilla Sky, and The Adjustment Bureau. Read the rest of this entry »

My Top 20 Films Since 1992

by John David Ebert

After watching Quentin Tarantino’s list on You Tube and then realizing that absolutely none of his films overlap with my own list, I’ve decided, just for fun, to post that list here, with brief discussions of each film.

Here they are, then, in order by release date:

1. Ed Wood (1994) This is my favorite Tim Burton film, his funniest and also Johnny Depp’s best performance. The sheer, maniacal insanity of the film, its evident love of filmmaking, and the persistence of Wood’s vision mark it as a classic. Fans of Forrest J. Ackerman’s (now defunct) magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland will know exactly what I’m talking about. Read the rest of this entry »

True Grit: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

In this etching by Picasso entitled “The Blind Minotaur,” we are presented with the image of an enfeebled and sightless Minotaur who is being led about by a young girl carrying a dove. The Minotaur — in other words, a gruff old monster — can no longer see and so he requires the young girl as an extension of his nervous system, for she can see things which he no longer has the ability to see. She completes the missing components of his psyche.

Read the rest of this entry »