As the waves relentlessly crash onto the shoreline of Monterey, you anticipate the emergence, any minute now, of bearded Neptune, sporting his trident as though waiting to pierce some high-end seafood and olives. “Big Little Lies,” HBO’s seven-episode drama based on Liane Moriarty’s novel and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, is about a murder tied to […]
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 […]
Astrology: Film: Review: ‘Inherent Vice’ (2014)
December 9, 2014 by
Inherent Vice, based on Thomas Pynchon’s druggy novel, isn’t just about people under the influence of a proverbial purple haze. Adapted and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the movie is itself a purple haze, a cinematic rendering of archetypal Neptune’s perennial blurry fuzzed-out state and penchant for purple, which makes it literally impossible to pinpoint […]
Astrology: Film: Review: ‘The Good Lie’ (2014)
October 5, 2014 by
Whether it’s called the Motherland or Fatherland, one’s native country is an extension of family, especially in the face of tragic uprooting. The Good Lie, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, uses the civil war in Sudan and the “Lost Boys” it generated as inspiration for a fictional story about how the human spirit strives […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Mud’ (2013)
April 25, 2013 by
Usually it’s female movie characters who pine away for the guys they just can’t have and interminably wait for the phone to ring. In a refreshing and sobering twist, it’s the male character in Jeff Nichols’s new movie Mud who’s unrequitedly in love. The lovelorn guy holed up on an island in the Mississippi is […]
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