APOCALYPSE NOW
Directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola

A movie review by John Lobell

Apocalypse Now is number five on Ebert’s list on this site of visionary movies (2001 is number 1). He writes: “Coppola’s epic retelling of The Odyssey combined with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a totally unique, absolutely original cinematic vision. Again, as with Kubrick and Lucas before him, the mythic structures are consciously intended, as Coppola shows us in the climax when his camera pans over a shelf of Kurtz’s books to reveal copies of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and of The Golden Bough. The central myth of Coppola’s movie is the death of the old, sick king and along with him, his entire crumbling kingdom of Iron age madmen….”

Ebert also has a two-part YouTube discussion of the move that you can click on the left of this site. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: A Movie Review 

By John David Ebert  

There is a scene in this movie that occurs early on which shows how Wolverine derived his enormous physical strength. He was part of a government experiment that involved injecting his bones with an indestructible metal called “adamantean.” We watch as Wolverine descends into a tank full of water and a series of needles inject his body at various points with a liquid form of this metal which coats all his bones, effectively transubstantiating their calcium into a mythical metal that is indestructible. Read the rest of this entry »

Terminator Salvation: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

When James Cameron’s film The Terminator came out in 1984, the idea of machines becoming sentient and eliminating human beings from the world may have seemed far-fetched, a mere science fiction premise for an entertaining 80s drive-in movie. (Yes, drive-ins still existed in the 80s). But now, 25 years later, with the fourth Terminator film having just been released, the idea is not only no longer far-fetched, but it has in fact become a reality.

You don’t believe me? Read the rest of this entry »

Star Trek: A Movie Review

By John Lobell 

The new Star Trek movie is so highly satisfying because it introduces a richness of back-story into a franchise we know so well, and because it adds a mythological depth. This depth does not approach that of Star Wars, but it is there. And since we now have time travel (the young Spock meets the old Spock, played by Leonard Nemoy), we may even get to see the development of a mythological relationship between James Kirk and his father. Read the rest of this entry »

Knowing: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

Great artists are always sensitive to changes in our environment that remain subliminal to the rest of us. They pick up these transformations – usually inflicted by new technologies — with their ant-like antennae, and narratize them as pictures which often dramatize scenarios of invasion. George Pal’s 1950s version of War of the Worlds, for instance, was not about aliens from another planet, but about the invasion of our society by television. Note how the aliens bathe their victims in floods of electromagnetic radiation just like the average denizen of our modern living rooms bathed in low frequency pulses fired at him at light speed from his electronic scanning box. Read the rest of this entry »

Watchmen: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

When I put a mask on my face, it instantly changes the relationship between you and me. Whereas, only moments ago, there was you—a three dimensional human being troubled by various difficulties—and me—a similar type of entity also with similar kinds of problems—now there is you and it, a third thing, a new entity that has entered into the relationship. This third entity, more often than not, evokes some type of strange, otherworldly being: a monster or a demon or an evil spirit, or else, if it is a mask of another human being, tends to evoke a cliché, such as, say, Richard Nixon. In either case, the I that was me only moments before has temporarily—one hopes—disappeared into another realm entirely, namely, the world of ritual, dream, myth, superstition, stereotypes and even clichés. It is, in other words, a flatter world, simpler than ours, more iconic, two-dimensional rather than three dimensional, in which beings tend to exist as eternal icons. Read the rest of this entry »

A Glance Into the Symbolic Landscapes of Tarzan

By John David Ebert

Descent

If Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his earlier protagonist John Carter, Warlord of Mars, had in 1912 established the pattern of the superhero who arrives on the ground from the heavens above, then with his second creation — Tarzan, Lord of the Apes – he invented the idea of the superhero who emerges, Titan-like, from out of the earth itself. The narrative pattern in which Tarzan is raised by apes in Africa to become a literate, thinking man capable of walking the streets of Western cities is a disguised retelling of the Darwinian myth of human evolution from apes to civilization. For Tarzan, brought up amongst a tribe of African apes, is symbolically descended from beings of the earth, the same beings, no less, who have spent six or seven million years quietly constructing the human physical body beneath an enclosed canopy of African trees. By the time this body was ready, with Lucy and her people, to embark upon the traumas of the open savannah, it was simultaneously prepared for the descent of the human mind which took up its residence in this newly constructed body like a mother bird settling down to brood in her nest.

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