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 […]
El Topo: From Cult to Classic
A movie review revisited by Griselda Steiner of a film by Alejandro Jodorowsky With Frank Pavich’s movie, Jodorowsky’s Dune, about to open at Film Forum in New York, and the article in the New York Times Magazine of March 14 titled “The Psychomagical Realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky” discussing Jodorowsky’s first new film in 23 years, […]
On Gravity
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 […]
A New Book by John David Ebert
To order this book, click here: http://www.amazon.com/Post-Classic-Cinema-Collected-Film-Reviews/dp/1489539484/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391119632&sr=8-1&keywords=post+classic+cinema Introduction to the Last Days of Celluloid: An Excerpt from Post-Classic Cinema by John David Ebert Film, today, now finds itself in exile. But in exile from what? And from where? After the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in the Romano-Jewish Wars of 70 AD and then […]
On the Metaphysics of Being a Porn Star
The Life and Death of Shauna Grant An Essay by John David Ebert “‘Transcendence’ always involves departing from the known and familiar “beings” and going out in some way beyond them.” –Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) Suicide On March 21, 1984, Colleen Applegate – known to the porn industry as “Shauna Grant” […]
On Michael Douglas as Liberace
The Celebrity Morphodynamics of Liberace: Behind the Candelabra A Review by John David Ebert According to Arnold Toynbee, in his monumental work A Study of History, pre-Civilizational societies are locked into a state of arrest because they derive their particular form of “social mimesis” from imitating the dead ancestors, which therefore orients them toward the […]
On Breaking Bad
Breaking Bad A Review by John David Ebert Walter White has a problem: the model that he has been following as the “imaginary signification” to shape his life by isn’t working. He is an affable high school chemistry teacher whose wife and in-laws do not respect him. They regard him as an amusing and powerless […]
Riddick: The Animal Side
a movie review by John Lobell Somewhere along the way I lost a step, got sloppy… dulled my own edge. Maybe I went and did the worst crime of all: I got civilized. So now we zero the clock. Gotta find that animal side again… I am a big fan of the Riddick series—Chronicles of […]
On Star Trek Into Darkness
Star Trek Into Darkness Reviewed by John David Ebert Star Trek Into Darkness is a perfect specimen of what I have termed “post-classic cinema,” which refers to the characteristic nature of the cinema of the past decade or so, which is a type of cinema with a completely different ontological status from that of the […]
On Iron Man 3
I Iron Man 3: Reviewed by John David Ebert In ancient Mesoamerican myth,the superhero was the figure of the Aztec eagle warrior: with the jaws of the eagle wide open, the hero’s costume revealed him as a human being swallowed up into the gullet of an astral creature, for the great superhero of Mesoamerican civilization, […]
On Room 237
Room 237 Reviewed by John David Ebert Rodney Ascher’s documentary film about Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece is an amusing, if insipid, attempt to make Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining “make sense.” He calls on the wits of five exegetes — whose faces we never see — to analyze the film as though they were giving […]
On Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit
The Hobbit Reviewed by John David Ebert I saw this movie in IMAX 3D, and while watching it realized that the drive-in movie hasn’t disappeared at all, it has actually been placed inside of the movie theater auditorium and crossed with the stadium-style seating of the old dramatic theater houses. But instead of being gathered […]
On The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead Reviewed by John David Ebert As I have pointed out elsewhere, television is now the great new medium that is taking over the role once occupied by cinema, especially the role of miniaturizing ancient and long forgotten cosmologies. And so, from now on, I will be including reviews of television shows on […]
The Evolving American Myth, Part 2: Clint Eastwood
In my discussion of The Chronicles of Riddick on this site (which I have retitled The Evolving American Myth, Part 1: The Chronicles of Riddick), I refer to the story of Percival, one of the Arthurian Romances, and to the vision of an inner moral sense in each individual. I trace this inner moral sense […]
Babette’s Feast: revisited
by John Lobell As we await Cloud Atlas, let’s look at a more modest spiritual movie from the past, Babette’s Feast, a 1987 Danish movie directed by Gabriel Axel, staring Stéphane Audran as Babette, and based on a story by Isak Dinesen. Babette’s Feast looks at the dual nature of out existence. In the […]