Based on the true story of crooked broker Jordan Belfort, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a three-hour evocation of the revelry-filled Roman festival known as the Saturnalia. At some point during that ancient manic carnival, the head reveler was put to death. This mythology-as-art winds up imitating life as Belfort’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ (2013)
December 2, 2013 by
The fictional Llewyn Davis, a struggling early-’60s folk singer eager to achieve success gigging in New York City’s halo’d Greenwich Village, may have developed his musical and vocal talents. However, his Saturnine self-mastery skills are utterly abysmal. To watch Inside Llewyn Davis, written and directed by Joel Cohen and Ethan Coen, is like being dunked […]
Astrology: Film: ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’ (2013)
November 22, 2013 by
The Hunger Games franchise likes to quantify. Twelve subjugated districts of the fractured country called Panem paying obeisance to the Capitol. Seventy-four (and counting) annual fight-to-the-death competitions, each one involving the forced participation, to the death, of two-dozen child and teenage tributes. And now, in Francis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, there’s a 12-day […]
Astrology: Fashion: Katniss Everdeen’s Gray Shawl-Vest-Cowl
November 22, 2013 by
She steals every scene she’s in up on the big screen in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. And we don’t mean Jennifer Lawrence. It’s that gorgeous, gray, gotta-have-it thingie Jen’s Katniss wears over a leather jacket in the beginning of the movie. You know the multi-hyphenate woolly item I mean. Thick gray yarn. Hybrid cowl-wide […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Nebraska’ (2013)
November 11, 2013 by
People are quick to spit out old-people adjectives. Stubborn. Demanding. Irrational. In Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) wears those descriptives proudly and even defiantly. His senior traits ignite, generating mayhem among those who love him and those who don’t. The catalyst fueling what ensues is a sweepstakes letter, informing Woody, who lives in […]
Astrology: Film: ‘About Time’ (2013)
November 1, 2013 by
Who hasn’t ever wanted a do-over to rectify a mistake, poor decision or hurt? In About Time, directed by Richard Curtis, the lucky men in the Lake family can indeed go cosmically back into their personal pasts for life-redirecting fixer-uppers. Young British lawyer Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) learns about this magical family power on his […]
Astrology: Film: ‘12 Years a Slave’ (2013)
October 18, 2013 by
When slavery is the subject of a film or other media, the assumption is black men and women have been held captive by a master and that freedom is an imagined, longed-for taste which they may never experience. In Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, there’s an ugly twist: a free black man suffers the […]
Astrology: Film: ‘All Is Lost’ (2013)
October 18, 2013 by
You won’t find a more graceful Saturn archetype than the one expressed in J. C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, a movie – more like a cinematic meditation – about Saturnine wisdom, solitude, old age, endurance, survival and mortality. The carrier of these traits, as referred to in the closing credits, is “Our Man,” played by […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Gravity’ (2013)
October 2, 2013 by
In Alfonso Cuarón’s thriller Gravity, the title is a loaded word. In outer space, you’re free of that force of attraction between masses, that sense of grounding represented by Saturn. And yet in the case of NASA medical engineer Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), maybe weightlessness is its own type of Saturnine confinement. With only half […]
Astrology: Television: ‘Breaking Bad’: Series Finale: ‘Felina’
September 30, 2013 by
If culminations ideally revert back to beginnings, “Breaking Bad”’s series’ closer did real good. We finally got to hear Walter White, in true Saturnine fashion, define himself. Saturn is all about boundaries. Unlike Neptune, whose hallmark is one massive, fuzzed-out, merge-energy that makes it impossible to know where things begin and end, Saturn is all […]
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