ON THE TORTURE OF PRINCESS LEIA An Excerpt from My Forthcoming Book Star Wars: Scene-by-Scene by John David Ebert Three Imperial T.I.E. fighters—polished gray-black—are now shown heading for the Death Star as a transitional shot to the space station. Meanwhile, inside one of the Death Star’s corridors, Darth Vader is shown walking purposefully forward, […]

  Mad Max: Fury Road Reviewed by John David Ebert Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s fourth installment in his classic “Mad Max” series turns out to be a little like The Phantom Menace: it is big, loud, full of flashy, glitzy special effects, stunts and various super-machines, but all this apparatus merely has the […]

GUEST REVIEW: Ex-Machina by Brian Culkin Of all the thematic binarities Ex-Machina employs to develop its narrative–man vs machine, morality vs power, secrets vs transparency–it is the one never overtly spoken of that has the most profound effect.  For in this binarity, the mise en scene of the entire film, the primal dialectic of nature (the pure […]

FIGHT CLUB REVISITED A Retroactive Review by John David Ebert David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club–his fourth–is a kind of thematic sequel to Martin Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver.  Both films, that is to say, are studies of alienated individuals who turn hostile to their own societies, but in the case of Taxi Driver, Scorsese’s film was […]

  This book can be ordered from Amazon at: https://www.createspace.com/5301621 From the Preface: The following is a book, not so much about superheroes, but about the kinds of heroes made possible by transformations of media. The twentieth century has perhaps seen more media transformations than in the entirety of human history since the dawn of those […]

Exodus: Gods and Kings Reviewed by John David Ebert Ridley Scott’s new film is the most recent in a long series of Hollywood Biblical epics that stretches from Cecil B. Demille to Darren Aronofsky’s recent debacle, Noah. It is a much better film than Noah, and makes for better watching than most of the previous […]

Interstellar Reviewed by John David Ebert Christopher Nolan’s new film Interstellar hybridizes two ancient Near Eastern genres: the myth of the end of the world (first articulated by the Sumerians with the Flood myth of Ziusudra that later found its way into the Bible) and the later ascensionist literature, created during the first to third centuries AD, […]

  Maps to the Stars Reviewed by John David Ebert For the ancients, the quickest route to the stars was death: all you had to do was suffer heroically after accomplishing some great deed and, like the twins Castor and Pollux (who became Gemini), the gods might consider placing you into the heavens as stars […]

UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY ART Taught by John David Ebert Hosted by Open Online Academy For Eight Weeks Class Begins: September 29, 2014 Class Ends: November 21, 2014 Number of Video Lectures: Approximately 60 To Enroll, simply press a button at the following link and sit back to begin watching the first week’s lectures on Sept 29: […]

R.I.P. H.R. Giger: A Review of Jodorowsky’s Dune by Benton Rooks [www.bentonrooks.com] “A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and the joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and fear of his people…You have to be God and the devil, both of […]

Giant Humans, Tiny Worlds: Adventures in the Universe of Graphic Novels (An Excerpt) by John David Ebert This book can be ordered here: https://www.createspace.com/4683141 At first glance, a graphic novel is simply a comic book with a spine. But a spine implies an organism with a higher, more evolved form of life—composed out of the […]

The link below is a web page detailing Wikipedia’s reasons for deleting me from existence. I highly recommend  you take a look at it because the implications of it are staggering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/John_David_Ebert_(2nd_nomination) I am the author of 8, count them, 8 books. The first, Twilight of the Clockwork God, was published in 1999 by a […]

Nymphomaniac A Review by John David Ebert Lars von Trier’s new film Nymphomaniac–which opened on Christmas Day in Denmark in its five and a half hour version, and is just now being released in the US as two separate films, each approximately two hours in length–is not, in actuality, an erotic film at all. In […]

Some Reflections on Gravity by John David Ebert The appearance, in science fiction history, of a narrative like that of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity is a cultural watershed indicating that the Twilight of the Space Age is now upon us, despite all appearances to the contrary. By contrast, for instance, with the vectors of the science […]