The feeling- and consciousness-infused machine has been one of cinema’s more popular go-to sci-fi archetypes. Add the titular robot of Chappie to that list. Set in a near-future Johannesburg that’s riddled by crime gangs, Neill Blomkamp, the movie’s co-writer and director, has created a parable – sandwiched between two revenge tales – about one man’s […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ (2015)
February 26, 2015 by
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, overstuffed like a frenetically busy street in Mumbai, is short on narrative and richly heavy on the theme of aging. The movie’s predecessor, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, focused on the eruptive Uranian surge that sparked a light in a group of retirees to live out the rest of […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’ (2015)
February 13, 2015 by
Kingsman: The Secret Service seems pleased to be nothing more than a good-guys-save-the-world film. But at the archetypal level, the movie is way more than its display of outlandish, cartoon-like derring do. This is about legacy, fathers and sons. Directed by Matthew Vaughn and based on the comic book series, Kingsman is the name of […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ (2015)
February 11, 2015 by
If there’s a semblance of saving grace to the inert sexual drivel that is Fifty Shades of Grey, it’s the film’s gauzy archetypal connection to the myth of Persephone, whom Hades abducted while she was picking flowers and took to his Underworld lair. Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and based on the novel by E. L. […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘A Most Violent Year’ (2014)
December 31, 2014 by
The killing and savagery rampant in the world are mirrored in the hearts of people who inhabit it. In A Most Violent Year, written and directed by J. D. Chandor, the ethics and values of Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) are sorely tested in 1981, one of the more statistically turbulent times in New York City. […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Selma’ (2014)
December 27, 2014 by
Saturnine self-mastery is never easy. The challenge becomes even more formidable when one’s values and integrity are tied up with the political well being of a people. In Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, the Rev. Martin Luther King finds himself in exactly this position as he straddles being true to his core beliefs while creating […]
Astrology: Film: Review: ‘Mr. Turner’ (2014)
December 16, 2014 by
Genius often erupts in strange packages, a notion personified in Mr. Turner, the biopic of iconic 19th century English painter J.M.W. Turner. Written and directed by Mike Leigh, the movie explores the quotidian behavior of the portly, trundling Turner (Timothy Spall), a most ordinary-looking individual with a jutting lower lip who, somehow, through his artistic […]
Archetypes: Film: ‘The Theory of Everything’ (2014)
November 7, 2014 by
From the time he was a young man, cosmologist Stephen Hawking was obsessed with the notion that time had a beginning. In 1988 he even published a book on the topic, A Brief History of Time. Not surprisingly, then, the predominant archetype in the Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything is Saturn, whose domain is […]
Astrology: Film: Review: ‘St. Vincent’ (2014)
October 7, 2014 by
Sainthood is aspirational at best and yet, as depicted in St. Vincent, it’s a possibility within reach in the real world. Written and directed by Theodore Melfi, the movie makes the surprising agent of divinity a curmudgeonly Brooklyn guy named Vincent (Bill Murray) who’s in his late sixties, drinks, gambles, is in debt to a […]
Astrology: Film: Review: ‘The Giver’ (2014)
August 14, 2014 by
Many people refer to their homeland as the mother country. Those people didn’t know The Chief Elder, a matriarch as stern as they come who’s running the show in the country depicted in The Giver. Directed by Philip Noyce and based on the YA book by Lois Lowry, The Giver essentially rips in half the mother archetype, […]
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