9
Nov
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Avatar and the Singularity Archetype ©2010 by Jonathan Zap Edited by Austin Iredale What is the Singularity Archetype? Some of the most significant layers of meaning in Avatar are not to be found in the articles available on the web that discuss its underlying mythology, at least from what I’ve read. Avatar is charged with emergent archetypal messages from the collective unconscious that relate to an evolutionary event horizon which I’ve discussed in my writings on “the Singularity Archetype.” The Singularity Archetype, a term I coined many years ago, is a primordial image of an evolutionary event horizon that seems to be an implicit potentiality glowing in the collective unconscious of our species. I first wrote about the Singularity Archetype (though I didn’t use the term at the time) in an undergraduate philosophy honors paper I wrote in 1978 when I was twenty-years-old and which is available on ...
Is the World Spiraling Toward Eucatastrophe or is that just my Pronoia? By Jonathan Zap, 2006 From Wikipedia: Eucatastrophe is a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien which refers to the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which result in the protagonist's well-being. He formed the word by affixing the Greek prefix eu, meaning good, to catastrophe, the word traditionally used in classically-inspired literary criticism to refer to the "unraveling" or conclusion of a drama's plot…It could be said that the ending of "The Lord of the Rings" is an Eucatastrophe. Though victory seems assured for Sauron, the One Ring is destroyed beyond all hope. Essentially a bad situation suddenly turning good. Pronoia (from Rob Brezny’s new book, Pronoia) …coined in the mid-1970s by Grateful Dead lyricist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow, who defined it as the opposite of ...
The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts Review copyright 2006 by Jonathan Zap (Please excuse any erratic formatting, we are working on it, the program we are using seems to have particular trouble with italics and in the source document I used italics to indicate quotes from the book. Some book passages that should be italicized may not be, and other passages which are my own commentary may be mistakenly italicized. In most cases it will be apparent from context what is my commentary and what are the words of Joe Fisher.) The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts is a spell binding paranormal detective story, elegantly written, and as haunting and irresistible as its title implies. The implications of what British paranormal investigator and writer Joe Fisher discovers, at the apparent cost of his life, are staggering, and have such profound implications for all inhabitants of this particular ...
Brokeback Mountain and the Value of Laconic Brilliance copyright 2005, Jonathan Zap This will be sort of a movie review or two, but mostly a tangent on laconic brilliance. I saw Spielberg’s latest last night, Munich, and I must say that many of the missing gaps in my knowledge of what life was like for a Israeli assassin in the early 1970s have now been filled in. It was pretty tight, but not exactly a feel good type of movie, since it is all about moral ambivalence. Next holiday I hope we can get more of an optimistic feel good movie about early 1970s Israeli assassins. Their job is to assassinate Arabs who planned the abduction and murder of Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics. It is superbly executed (no pun intended), well ...
King Kong, the $150 Million Dollar Monkey. King Kong is definitely the King of the trinity of $120 million plus holiday movies of the year (HP, Narnina, KK), but that sure isn’t saying much. I am eternally grateful to Peter Jackson for LOR and he probably deserves a few billion to film whatever he wants as a mere token of the appreciation this species owes him for LOR. In fact, if it were up to me the Washington Monument (what has Washington done for us lately?) might as well be renamed the Peter Jackson Monument. Sauron really did have weapons of mass destruction and the war Peter Jackson created successfully concluded with eliminating the WMD and that’s more than can be said for certain other world leaders. The CGI is amazing, yes, as with the ...
Narnia---A Candy Cane Striped, Sugar-Coated Warped and Evil Mythology I started out rather impressed with Narnia. It didn’t seem too Disneyfied, the opening shots were of a perfectly realized aerial battle, Nazi fighter planes dropping bombs on London. The kids seemed like real British kids from that era, not plastic sit-com kids. The transition from the mundane world into Narnia was well done. Yes, like with the recent Harry Potter movie, this movie had a similar $150 million budget, and $150 million does buy some quality eye candy. But at a very specific point in the movie, when Santa Claus shows up (no, I am not joking), I became turned off, and as more and more heavy-handed and warped Christian allegory came into play I became increasingly nauseated. The ...
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Decaf Also Jarhead Copyright 2005 Jonathan Zap Have you ever wondered what a day in middle school would be like----a very, very, very, very long day in middle school-----if it were dressed up in a $100 million dollars worth of CGI? This movie successfully answers that question. The HP movies labor under two enormous weaknesses, either of which would be enough to sink them, and whatever buoyancy they do have comes from the cinematic sparkle that gigantic sums of money can purchase and a guaranteed fan base of loyal readers of the HP series, who are about as sympathetic an audience as you can get, given that they have been able to endure volumes of really thin, light weight fantasy over the years and keep queing up for ...