Jesse’s futile escape attempts in last night’s “Granite State” – using a paper clip as makeshift key to uncuff himself, hoisting himself up to make it out of his underground prison, and just almost climbing over what seemed to be a mile-high wire fence – set me thinking about a scene in the “Breaking Bad” […]
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: ‘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: ‘Jobs’ (2013)
August 15, 2013 by
In Joshua Michael Stern’s Jobs, our first glimpse of Steve Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) is at the Apple Town Hall staff meeting in 2001, as he’s making his way towards the podium minutes before introducing the iPod. He’s walking his idiosyncratic forward-leaning walk – short steps, slightly pigeon-toed, with his head in front of his body. […]
Astrology: Film: ‘The Patience Stone’ (2013)
August 13, 2013 by
The female character portrayed by Golshifteh Farahani in The Patience Stone – co-written and directed by Atiq Rahimi, the Afghan-born filmmaker who also wrote the novel on which his movie is based – has every reason to be talking to herself. She’s a young Muslim woman – the players in this chilling parable are designated […]
Astrology: Film: ‘The Way Way Back’ (2013)
July 3, 2013 by
Like many coming-of-age movies, The Way Way Back, written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, is about the necessity for Uranian upheaval. And the film’s young protagonist knows, from the depths of his being, that this fated summer his Life Must Change. Fourteen-year-old Duncan (Liam James) has a bad feeling about his single […]
Astrology: Film: ‘A Hijacking’ (2013)
June 19, 2013 by
When you’re CEO, you’re unquestionably in Plutonian control of the entirety of the enterprise. In A Hijacking, Tobias Lindholm’s psychological and weapon-wielding thriller, procedural certainty disintegrates instantly when Danish shipping company chief executive Peter (Soren Malling) learns that his cargo vessel, the Rozen, has been hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. We know, […]
Astrology: Television: ‘Orphan Black’: Uranian Sisters
June 7, 2013 by
“Orphan Black” started out when a gal with a drug debt, desperately in need of cash, stole a look-alike suicide’s ID. That’s when this dramatic thriller, broadcast in the U.S. through BBCAmerica, changed its identity. Make that identities. And after the program’s Season 1 finale, the audience learned the full ramifications of that theft. As […]
Astrology: Film: ‘The East’ (2013)
May 31, 2013 by
Eco-terrorists are still terrorists. But when they’re as earnest and nice as the ones in Zal Batmanglij’s The East, it will make life a lot more murky for the infiltrator who’s been assigned to find them, become one of them, and take them down. The woman assigned to crack the case – the group’s name […]
Astrology: Film: ‘After Earth’ (2013)
May 31, 2013 by
Director M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth is less the sci-fi action story it purports to be, and more a meditation on the prickly nature of the father-son relationship. After Earth is set far into the future, a thousand years after earth has become uninhabitable. The planet to which humans had been evacuated relies on the […]
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