The Alien franchise’s signature archetype has been the Moon, signifying Lunar birthing and caregiving: there’s the space vessels’ operating system MU/TH/UR, simply referred to as “Mother”; the extraterrestrial xenomorph, keen on reproducing; the absentee mom who misses out on her daugheter’s entire life – easy to do when you’re lost in space – and who […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Macbeth’ (2015)
December 3, 2015 by
Towards the end of the official Shakespearian “Macbeth,” the titular character delivers a grim assessment of “dusty death”: the candle of vitality burns but briefly, and life “struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” Director Justin Kurzel, whose Macbeth is based on the Bard’s, takes the metaphor of the stage and runs with it, […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Slow West’ (2015)
May 11, 2015 by
Just about the only purity and innocence you’ll see in Slow West are the breathtakingly pristine natural vistas of this country in 1870 – mountains, rivers, fields and day-and-midnight-blue skies – and Jay Cavendish, a lovestruck teen from Scotland who’s traveling through “the baking heart of America” to locate the woman he fell for in […]
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 […]
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