Read “What the Hell? Seven Depictions of the Underworld in Film” by Ashe Cantrell, Film School Rejects, July 21, 2011
BYU’s Divine Comedy
“In 1994 two BYU students were in a communications class together and found that they had a common love of sketch comedy that was clean but still really, really funny. They decided to start a comedy troupe. They held auditions for cast members and behold, Divine Comedy was born. Each year a few members would leave the group and they would hold auditions to replace them. Being in Divine Comedy is a bit like being the Dread Pirate Roberts.” —Divine Comedy, Brigham Young University
Seth Gordon, “Horrible Bosses” (2011)
“. . .Is there a better place for expression than art? Whether releasing anger, oozing sexuality or spilling sorrow via an artistic means or simply ingesting someone else’s version of it and laughing uproariously, a creative outlet is our healthy friend. As I sat in my Dante’s Inferno class less than 24 hours after seeing Horrible Bosses, I couldn’t help but laugh at how Dante, too, was doing just that in the 1300s–using his poetry gift to banish real people to eternal punishment in “the hurricane of Hell in perpetual motion.”
Dante doesn’t just send people to one big place called Hell, he parses according to the level of sin, whether or not they wronged him personally, and even singles some of them out for an extra dose of suffering. That it is methodical and medieval makes it all the more riveting.
The rest of us wind up rooting, projecting our own frustrations and ill will onto characters in a book or on screen. We rub our hands together and lick our chops at seeing where people eventually ‘go’ or how they’ll be categorized. In Horrible Bosses, there are sins of greed and carnal yearnings by the one-dimensional bosses, intent to murder by the average-guy employees and even an in-between — the hit man played by Jamie Foxx who steals but isn’t what he portrays himself to be.” [. . .] –Nancy Colasurdo, Fox Business, July 6, 2011
Taxi Driver
“‘Taxi Driver’ was a groundbreaking hybrid of the grind house (with its urban vigilante plot borrowed from Michael Winner’s 1974 ‘Death Wish’) and the art house (with quotations from Godard, Bresson and perhaps, in some of Travis’s more abstract nocturnal wanderings, the unfocused subjectivity of Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde films). The movie draws on contemporary fears of urban decay and social collapse, but is as timeless as Dante, with its descent into an East Village hell followed, in the extraordinary coda, by a glimpse of a West Village paradise where Travis is miraculously reunited with his corn-fed Beatrice (Cybill Shepherd), a sequence of teasingly ambiguous reality. ” [. . .] –Dave Kehr, The New York Times, April 8, 2011
“Damages” (Season 2)
“There is a reference to Dante in the TV show Damages with Glenn Close. In Season 2, episode 12 (‘Look What He Dug Up This Time’), scientist David Purcell repents for having falsified a report on contaminated water on behalf of finance tycoon Kendrik, who in exchange is protecting Purcell from a murder charge. Purcell decides to confess everything to the police after telling Kendrik about the nine circles of hell, and commenting upon the damned souls’ ability to see the future and the past, but not the present. Of course, Kendrik does not get the reference and tells Purcell that he is out of his mind.” –Matteo Soranzo, McGill University
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