At what point does impediment become a portal? That’s the question posed by The Mountain Between Us, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, which is essentially two characters trying to escape death from both the elements and their deepest fears and regrets. The players are Ben (Idris Elba), a neurosurgeon, and Alix (Kate Winslet), a photojournalist. They […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Logan Lucky’ (2017)
August 19, 2017 by
Being unlucky is often in the eyes of the beholder. That’s the conceit at the heart of Logan Lucky, a comedic heist movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, which takes a couple of brothers – their entire “simpleminded” family is nestled in Boone County, West Virgina and carries the generational “bad luck” stigma – and watches […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Alien: Covenant’ (2017)
May 15, 2017 by
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: ‘Snatched’ (2017)
May 10, 2017 by
A sharp turn off the beaten track – defying one’s traditional pattern of behavior – is at the heart of Snatched. Directed by Jonathan Levine, the female-centric movie adds another archetypal dimension to its Mother-Daughter theme: Saturnine safety and convention vs. Uranian risk, individualism and non-conformity. Emily (Amy Schumer) has just been dumped by her […]
Archetypes: Television: Review: Feminine Archetypes in ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ (2017)
April 22, 2017 by
Families bequeathe their most valuable possessions to subsequent generations to preserve legacy. In HBO’s fact-based dramatization “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” based on the book by Rebecca Skloot, an item as dear as gold is gifted to the world and bypasses the offspring. The story focuses on what’s medically known as the HeLa cell […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Life’ (2017)
March 23, 2017 by
Life will out. As a viable entity, it has no choice except – as we known from the story of the scorpion and the frog – to survive by acting according to its nature. That’s not good news for the six-member crew of an international space station in Life, directed by Daniel Espinosa, whose mission […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Kong: Skull Island’ (2017)
March 8, 2017 by
The multi-layered archetypal survival theme in Kong: Skull Island comes as no surprise. Throw in a entitlement motif, though, and the mayhem that occurs in 1973 on an uncharted island in the South Pacific packs on a lot more proverbial muscle. Briskly directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, the film quickly lays out the time line of […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘A United Kingdom’ (2017)
January 31, 2017 by
A United Kingdom, directed by Amma Asante and based on a true story, wastes no time announcing its Uranian theme of breaking with tradition. On the one hand, the upheaval is personal. In 1947 Englishwoman Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) attends a dance with her sister (Laura Carmichael) and has one of those love-at-first-sight moments with […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Split’ (2017)
January 17, 2017 by
Bickering families are ugly, whether they’re blood kin, feuding gods and goddesses, or archetypes all scrambling for a place in the sun. In Split, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a man named Kevin (James McAvoy), who has dissociative identity disorder, is the vessel containing 23 personalities, a bit like someone wielding a multiple […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Fences’ (2016)
December 16, 2016 by
If a movie is titled Fences and its protagonist has had his dreams of being a baseball star crushed, it’s fair to consider that sport’s well known adage. To “swing for the fences” refers to players who literally aim to hit the ball over a field’s barriers, scoring a home run. That sort of physical […]
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