For some artists, inspiration comes in disparate pieces that get magically assembled into a riveting whole. Brian Wilson, the musical genius behind The Beach Boys, welcomed and embraced those random, other-realm visitations. It was the broken pieces of his life he couldn’t glue back together. Directed by Bill Pohlad, the biopic Love & Mercy jumps back […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Hungry Hearts’ (2015)
May 31, 2015 by
It’s fitting that the protagonists in Hungry Hearts meet neat in the bowels of a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan. The bathroom door jams and the duo are literally trapped in an area the size of a closet. It’s a signal that plunging into the heart of this movie – food, one’s approach to it, the […]
Archetypes: Film: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Brings On the Matriarchy and the Feminine (2015)
May 16, 2015 by
The great balancing act in Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t the circus-like, high-pole-dipping soldiers swooping down onto enemy vehicles like birds of prey, or the astounding center of gravity that keeps racing rigs and trucks from keeling over onto desert sands out of sheer momentum. The real equilibrium here is the propulsive paean director and […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
May 16, 2015 by
At the beginning of the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, Peter “Star Lord” Quill (Chris Pratt) spots and snatches a lizard, and then uses it to simulate a microphone. In the first moments of Max Max: Fury Road, Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), eyes a two-headed one and gobbles it whole, the creatures’ tail, in a […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Good Kill’ (2015)
May 12, 2015 by
Is military killing easier to rationalize when it’s done with a joystick? That’s the question at the heart of Good Kill, which looks at how drone warfare affects a group of military fighting the Taliban from crate-like structures in the Las Vegas desert. Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, the film, which screened at the […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Pitch Perfect 2’ (2015)
May 11, 2015 by
Although Pitch Perfect 2, like its predecessor, is about the Bellas, a girls-only a cappella college singing group, the franchise’s archetype is not the singer. The archetypal honor goes to the misfit, carried primarily by Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), whose Aussie roots, larger proportions and clumsiness brand her as unique. She’s a Uranian outlier, despite […]
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 […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Hot Pursuit’ (2015)
May 7, 2015 by
On the surface, Hot Pursuit is about an uptight law enforcement agent shepherding an unwilling witness to court to testify against a drug lord. Archetypally, it’s a joust between by-the-book, tightly coiled Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) and renegade Colombian hottie Daniella (Sofia Vergara). Given that one woman intensely colors inside the lines and the other doesn’t […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ (2015)
April 27, 2015 by
Although set in Dorset, England, in 1870, period movie Far from the Madding Crowd is a modern take on relational independence and interdependence, the age-old push-pull between affectionate Venus and emotionally free-from-all-ties Uranus. Written and directed by Thomas Vinterberg and based on the classic Thomas Hardy novel, the movie opens with heroine Bathsheba Everdene (Carey […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Welcome to Me’ (2015)
April 26, 2015 by
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, […]
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