Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes), from Argentine director Damian Szifron, is a film of six stories, each one a tale about people getting even. Vengefulness and retaliatory measures, as responses to offensive acts, have been around since the beginning of time. And, if animals retaliated in bestial ways when their kill was poached, Szifron makes it […]
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 […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘American Sniper’ (2014)
December 26, 2014 by
At the heart of soldiering is the Mars archetype, involving action, weapons and a fair amount of aggression to ensure the job gets done. As seen in American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s biopic of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL with the highest sniper-kill numbers in U.S. military history, Kyle clearly took his work in the field home […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Into the Woods’ (2014)
December 26, 2014 by
When beset by trauma, disappointment and hurt, people often find their way to a dark place to sort things out. The Underworld of the psyche is where knowledge can be accessed with hard, committed work. It’s an inner journey that’s well reflected in Into the Woods, a grown-up complex take on fairy tales based on […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Leviathan’ (2014)
December 25, 2014 by
A Russian modern-day epic, Leviathan begins and ends with an images of nature at its most pristine. Gradually the geography becomes more contaminated until we rest on a wreck of a house that’s the fragile link between a one-time unspoiled ancestral heritage of land and its exploitation. The inciting incident that drives Leviathan, written and […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Two Days, One Night’ (2014)
December 24, 2014 by
The work world is notoriously time-obsessed. One toils a certain number of days and hours, gets a certain amount of time as vacation and, depending on the employer, may be required to punch a time card to prove accountability. How fitting then, that in Two Days, One Night, a woman has only a limited period […]
Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Big Eyes’ (2014)
December 24, 2014 by
If eyes are the windows to the soul, you can’t get a better view of the psyche than by peering through the gigantic orbs painted on despondent-looking waifs’ faces by Margaret Keane half a century ago. Big Eyes, a movie about Keane’s creations which were both jarring and evocative, explores these sad wide-eyed wonders as […]
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 […]
Astrology: Film: Review: ‘Annie’ (2014)
December 14, 2014 by
By Jove, Annie literally lives, breathes and radiates Jupiter – the planet representing the archetype tied to education, expansiveness, and truth and meaning of life – as surely as the Sun will come out tomorrow. Directed by Will Gluck, the movie begins with the titular character (Quvenzhané Wallis) in a classroom, with an exasperated teacher […]
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 […]
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