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: ‘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: Film: ‘Populaire’ (2013)
September 3, 2013 by
Can a movie about national and international typing competitions be a sly nod to Uranian equality in the workplace and female egalitarianism and independence? Mai oui! That’s the message of Populaire, a frothy and visually delicious French delight, directed by Régis Roinsard. Set in 1958, in a small French village, Rose Pamphyle (Déborah François) is […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Drinking Buddies’ (2013)
August 20, 2013 by
Beer is not the only thing brewing in Drinking Buddies, a romcom with a serious edge written and directed by Joe Swanberg. With a Chicago craft brewery as its setting, the movie explores the notion that a taste for mates may not be so changeable as one’s palate for artisanal hops. High-spirited and quippy Kate […]
Astrology: Film: ‘The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones’ (2013)
August 20, 2013 by
In The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, New York City has been given an in-depth makeover that’s literally as deep as hell. Based on the first novel in the series by Cassandra Clare, the movie, set in modern times and directed by Harald Zwart, takes us to a Hogwarts-like realm smack in the middle of […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Lovelace’ (2013)
August 8, 2013 by
In Lovelace, the first glimpse of Linda Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried) is total glam – she’s bedecked in pearls, wearing a fashionable scarf and driving a posh car. That shot, though, was a role she was playing – a notoriety-making one – in the top-grossing porno movie Deep Throat. Her real story was far more Saturnine […]
Astrology: Film: ‘2 Guns’ (2013)
July 30, 2013 by
The boundless movement, talk and sibling-like play that pervades 2 Guns makes this movie Mercurial to the core. The leading male characters are undercover DEA agent Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Marcus “Stig” Stigman (Mark Wahlberg), a naval intelligence officer who’s gone AWOL. The two men, as we learn, stumbled upon each other a while […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Blue Jasmine’ (2013)
July 25, 2013 by
Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine is the assured work of an older artist unafraid to make the point that people typically go to their graves clutching the archetypes they’ve been projecting and embracing for decades, no matter how self-destructive. Blue Jasmine, the character, is actually Jeanette (Cate Blanchett), who took on her flowery moniker years earlier […]
Astrology: Film: ‘The Time Being’ (2013)
July 24, 2013 by
Does being an artist – free to boundlessly create in unbridled Neptunian fashion – mean having to forsake all else with Saturnine stringency, discipline and ambition? This age-old question is explored in director and co-writer Nenad Cicin-Sain’s The Time Being, in which Daniel (Wes Bentley), a talented, committed but financially unsuccessful painter, gets an opportunity […]
Astrology: Film: ‘R.I.P.D.’ (2013)
July 19, 2013 by
R.I.P.D., a movie in which dead cops do right by the living when they join the Rest in Peace Department, boasts a “good” dead Boston cop, Nick (Ryan Reynolds), whose moral compass went temporarily askew on earth. There’s the sort-of-dead “bad” Boston cop, Hayes (Kevin Bacon) who killed Nick. And there’s also Roy, a blustery […]
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