With two episodes to go, the second season of “True Detective” could use some love. Viewers can’t seem to get season one’s dyad of Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) out of their heads. Two oddballs – Cohle and Hart fit that bill extraordinarily well – are much easier to stack up […]
Archives for July 2015
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘The End of the Tour’ (2015)
July 29, 2015 by
Two people participate in an intense bonding experience which ultimately turns out to have a limited shelf life. That notion – the ephemeral nature of human connection – is made especially poignant in the haunting The End of the Tour, which posits that embracing the moment may be the most solid option in life. Directed by James […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Trainwreck’ (2015)
July 14, 2015 by
It’s every dad’s dream that his little girl lovingly takes to heart the life lessons he drops like pearls. In Trainwreck, one daughter who embraced such messages years ago now finds herself on a bleak road trying to undo the sins of the father. Directed by Judd Apatow, the movie starts as young Amy and […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’ (2015)
July 11, 2015 by
Where’s that “safe word” when you need it? Male Stanford students, who participated in a daring piece of psychological research in 1971, thought the “contracts” they had with that academic institution guaranteed them a way out at any time. But as The Stanford Prison Experiment, a film based on those events, demonstrates, the study took […]
Astrology: Fashion: Gingham
July 8, 2015 by
There’s a moment in Amy, the Amy Winehouse documentary, that seems like a huge fashion disconnect. It’s the singer wearing gingham. Sure, it’s a strapless dress with a scalloped trim. But there’s an unspoken law about the globally popular fabric that bows to a courtroom populated by Dorothy Gales, utililitarian-chic workers and homespun fashion-minimalists. The […]
Archetypes: Television: Review: ‘Penny Dreadful’: ‘Take That, Dollface.’
July 6, 2015 by
“Penny Dreadful”’s Victorian-era, English demon-huntress Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) was never big on dolls. During the show’s second season, she confessed she’d played with them as a child – because if you didn’t you were considered a deviant – but never liked them. “Those eyes, staring at you, just waiting to come to life,” she […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Amy’ (2015)
July 5, 2015 by
Extraordinary English vocal talent Amy Winehouse broke hearts when she died at 27 in 2011 from alcohol poisoning. Asif Kapadia’s documentary, Amy, only heightens our sadness as we relive it. As Amy demonstrates, Winehouse didn’t so much die as orchestrate her own disappearance, a phenomenon associated with archetypal Neptune, whose bailiwick also includes drugs, addiction, […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Self/less’ (2015)
July 5, 2015 by
Death means disintegration of the body, as well as the evaporation of every thought and mental talent the deceased ever accrued in life. Damian Hale, a wealthy real estate mogul with terminal cancer, is one of those people who’d like to stick around a bit longer. Self/Less, a medical thriller directed by Tarsem Singh, explores […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: Magic Mike XXL (2015)
July 1, 2015 by
Putting away the things of childhood is the extra-extra large theme behind Magic Mike XXL. Sure there’s plenty of male skin here. But the movie, directed by Gregory Jacobs, has its serious underside: a likeable bunch of strippers’ search for their self-identities. There’s a lot of archetypal Mars – males, physicality, energy, sex and sexual […]
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