Quentin Tarantino, a huge fan of the Western, likes to hybridize genres. His latest experiment, The Hateful Eight, set in Wyoming about a decade after the Civil War, is a movie about a bunch of cunning entrepreneur-cowboys for whom, in Saturnine style, the end justifies the means. A significant part of this three-hour, solo-film festival […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Welcome to Me’ (2015)
Welcome to Me is a fairytale for grown-ups. Its message? The way to address life’s limitations is often through embracing further limitations. Primed to learn this lesson – the hard way – is the film’s deluded heroine Alice Klieg (Kristen Wiig). Alice, a 30-something denizen of Palm Desert, California, who suffers from borderline personality disorder, […]
Astrology: Film: ‘The Spectacular Now’ (2013)
For many teens, even those with good grades, high school is a four-year stretch of fuzzed out, Neptunian captivity. The overall blurriness – a minimally defined sense of self, ample opportunity to idealize the wrong people and pursuits, and a dose or two or unrequited love – sends young minds scrambling to inhabit utopian fantasy […]