Books, storytelling and theft are the perfect Mercurial trifecta that’s the heart of The Book Thief, a movie directed by Brian Percival and based on the global best-selling novel about a little girl growing up in Nazi Germany. Little Liesel (Sophie Nelisse) experiences tragedy early. In 1938, while on a train with her mother who’s […]
Astrology: Film: ‘About Time’ (2013)
November 1, 2013 by
Who hasn’t ever wanted a do-over to rectify a mistake, poor decision or hurt? In About Time, directed by Richard Curtis, the lucky men in the Lake family can indeed go cosmically back into their personal pasts for life-redirecting fixer-uppers. Young British lawyer Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) learns about this magical family power on his […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ (2013)
November 1, 2013 by
When we first set eyes on Ron Woodroof during the opening moments of Dallas Buyers Club, a film directed by Jean-Marc Vallée that was inspired by Woodroof’s true story, he’s immediately recognizable as a freedom-loving and non-mainstream figure who’s Uranian to the core. He’s got a druggie tryst happening with two women during a rodeo […]
Astrology: Film: ‘The Counselor’ (2013)
October 24, 2013 by
Directed by Ridley Scott, with a screenplay by novelist Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor is populated by one innocent and a bunch of other characters stretching between El Paso and Juarez who, on the morality scale, range from common baddies to outright demons. The man identified in the script at the Counselor (Michael Fassbender) is one […]
Astrology: Film: ‘12 Years a Slave’ (2013)
October 18, 2013 by
When slavery is the subject of a film or other media, the assumption is black men and women have been held captive by a master and that freedom is an imagined, longed-for taste which they may never experience. In Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, there’s an ugly twist: a free black man suffers the […]
Astrology: Film: ‘All Is Lost’ (2013)
October 18, 2013 by
You won’t find a more graceful Saturn archetype than the one expressed in J. C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, a movie – more like a cinematic meditation – about Saturnine wisdom, solitude, old age, endurance, survival and mortality. The carrier of these traits, as referred to in the closing credits, is “Our Man,” played by […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Captain Phillips’ (2013)
October 11, 2013 by
On the way to his assignment to commandeer the massive U.S. cargo ship Maersk Alabama on a transport run in 2009, Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) and his wife (Catherine Keener) discuss the futures of their almost grown children and how quickly the world is moving. Clearly an identifiable benevolent father figure, an archetype ruled […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Gravity’ (2013)
October 2, 2013 by
In Alfonso Cuarón’s thriller Gravity, the title is a loaded word. In outer space, you’re free of that force of attraction between masses, that sense of grounding represented by Saturn. And yet in the case of NASA medical engineer Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), maybe weightlessness is its own type of Saturnine confinement. With only half […]
Astrology: Television: ‘Breaking Bad’ Finale: Baby Blue Meth-Child: Walter White’s Fourth Son
October 1, 2013 by
In a previous “Breaking Bad” post, I wrote about Walter White’s three sons – one biological and two metaphoric – as well as an illegitimate fourth. That would be his meth-child Baby Blue. My taking liberties with the heirs of the White name is, of course, light-hearted. But the last few minutes of “Felina,” as […]
Astrology: Television: ‘Breaking Bad’ Finale: Walter White’s ‘My Three Sons’
October 1, 2013 by
With a nod to television’s iconic “My Three Sons” – Fred MacMurray played an engineer and widower with three biological male offspring to raise – “Breaking Bad” gave Walter White three different young men in need of a father figure. Walt Jr., who renamed himself Flynn, is Walt’s only biological son. A high school student, […]
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