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 »