The Hunger Games

Reviewed by John Lobell

First, this is a discussion of the movie; I have not read the books. Second, I am going to exercise some laziness and, for those not familiar with the story line, quote from Wikipedia to get us up to speed:

“The story takes place in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future in the nation of Panem, which consists of a wealthy capitol surrounded by 12 less affluent districts. As punishment for a past rebellion against the government, the Capitol initiated the Hunger Games—a televised annual event in which one boy and one girl from each of the 12 districts are selected in a lottery as “tributes” and are required to fight to the death in an arena until there is one remaining victor. When the protagonist Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence) hears her younger sister’s name called as the female tribute for their district, she volunteers to take her place in order to save her from having to participate. Joined by her district’s male tribute Peeta Mellark (Hutcherson), Katniss travels to the Capitol to train for the Hunger Games under the guidance of former victor Haymitch Abernathy (Harrelson), expressing resentment for both the Capitol and its populace for forcing her and her fellow tributes to fight to the death for their own amusement.” Read the rest of this entry »

Melancholia:

A Movie Review by John David Ebert

With the exception of War Horse, most of the films I’ve written about on this site lately have been disappointments to one degree or another, but let me just say that this is most definitely not the case with Lars von Trier’s most recent film, which constitutes, as did Anti-Christ, one of the best works of his entire corpus. Unlike the current fate of the earlier generation of American cinema’s Old Masters, von Trier’s Vision has gotten more and more refined over the years, and he has revealed himself as a celluloid artist of the front rank in his recent films. Read the rest of this entry »

A Dangerous Method

Reviewed by John David Ebert

David Cronenberg is the director of a string of classics such as Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash, The Dead Zone and The Fly. His last great film was Existenz in 1999. The films that he has made since, including Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and now A Dangerous Method, while still interesting, represent nonetheless a decline and diminishment of his earlier abilities. But then he is no different in this respect from the fates of the other great masters, all of whom, without exception — Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, Herzog — have suffered various downhill paths and anticlimaxes that have resulted in an overall “twilight of cinema” during the past decade and a half. Its best days would, indeed, appear to be behind it. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse:

Reviewed by John David Ebert

Steven Spielberg’s new film War Horse, while not a great film in any classic sense of the word, is nonetheless his best film in a long time. It doesn’t break any new ground and admittedly, it has the feel of the maestro going back and mulling over old themes — the anxiety of loss, the disorientation of war, the failure of the father to provide sufficient protection for the threatened family, etc. etc. In certain respects, it is a crossing of E.T. with Empire of the Sun: the typical Spielbergian fetish animal — the shark in Jaws, the alien in E.T., the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park – here becomes the fascinating horse which is now let loose on the battlefield where Spielberg finds himself most comfortably self-assured. The film’s battle scenes are indeed a fine return to form, although they aren’t on the scale or intensity of Saving Private Ryan since it is, after all, based on a children’s book. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »