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: Fashion: Katniss Everdeen’s Gray Shawl-Vest-Cowl
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)
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: ‘All Is Lost’ (2013)
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)
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’ Finale: Walter White’s ‘My Three Sons’
With a nod to television’s iconic “My Three Sons” – Fred MacMurray played an engineer and widower with three biological male offspring to raise – “Breaking Bad” gave Walter White three different young men in need of a father figure. Walt Jr., who renamed himself Flynn, is Walt’s only biological son. A high school student, […]
Astrology: Television: ‘Breaking Bad’: ‘Ozymandias’: What’s in a Name?
The title of last night’s “Breaking Bad” episode, “Ozymandias,” comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s short poem about an ancient ruler commemorated in a sculpture which, like his kingdom, has disintegrated. The pedestal, still intact, reads, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.” So much for Walter White’s empire. Those craggy, sky-topping desert cliffs looked like […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Blue Caprice’ (2013)
A son’s being taught by his dad how to drive a car is one of those seminal steps to manhood. This celebrated ritual becomes a deadly foreboding in Blue Caprice, a film that tracks a murderous sniper spree conducted from inside that titular vehicle by a man and the abandoned male teen he’s metaphorically adopted […]
Astrology: Film: ‘The World’s End’ (2013)
There’s merit to finishing incomplete projects. Even when, as is the case in Edgar Wright’s The World’s End, the mission needing resolution is two decades’ old. The action centers around five adult Brit males who, when they completed studies in 1990, went on their Golden Mile pub crawl that would culminate at The World’s End, […]
Astrology: Film: ‘Drinking Buddies’ (2013)
Beer is not the only thing brewing in Drinking Buddies, a romcom with a serious edge written and directed by Joe Swanberg. With a Chicago craft brewery as its setting, the movie explores the notion that a taste for mates may not be so changeable as one’s palate for artisanal hops. High-spirited and quippy Kate […]










Latest Tweets