Robert Phoenix

Retro
Sometimes when it’s Mercury retrograde, I just want to go into one of those Lascaux styled caves, or maybe a kiva up in the Taos Pueblo and just hang out with some clean water and bushel of fresh fruit, nuts and seeds, but since I’ve already been in a cave-like setting for the last two weeks, it doesn’t really play out that way. So here I am, fire walking across the pit of Mercury Retrograde. It’s already hit. My guest for tonight canceled. Oh well, that means I’ll be doing live mini-reading over on the BlogTalk side of things during MR. Should be interesting. Maybe I’ll go into the future and work backwards for people.

I’ve been thinking abut cinema and what films really portray MR in the truest light. I came up with three that really communicate the essence of MR and two of them are time travel films. Let’s start with the first.

GROUND HOG DAY

Can anyone think of a film that is more MR than the Bill Murray classic? The scene where he drives off the cliff with the stolen Phil has got to be one of the top ten comedic scenes of all time. When he punches Ned in the face, is a close second. Murray had had a string of minor hits, but nothing like Meatballs, Ghost Busters, Stripes or Caddy Shack. That was Bill Murray (Virgo) in his zone. He went off road to try some zen comedy in Somerset Maughm’s classic, “Razor’s Edge” but Murray and the quest for truth only made sense if you were up away too late in a hotel in Miami on acid, but that’s a whole-nuther-story. “What About Bob” was a minor Murray classic. It wasn’t until he was able to channel all that smarm and charm into the cynical feature correspondent, “Phil,” the same name of the celebrated ground hog from Punxatawny. The rumor is that Harold Ramis, The Director, modeled “Groundhog Day” after The Strange Life Of Ivan Osokin which is about a man that gets to live his life over and the same results happen, even though he supposedly makes different choices. The whole concept of “free will” is examined throughout Ouspensky’s novel and eventually gets a workout in Groundhog Day as well.

Ramis’ film is about a time loop that gets played over and over again, until Murray can master the art of letting go and serving. This is critical, because once he’s able to realize that he is stuck in a loop, he begins to manipulate reality based on his foreknowledge of events. It works until he tries to seduce the pretty producer played by Andie McDowell. Once he is in the realm of the heart, his manipulation of time and space fails. That’s when he has the epiphany of being in the moment and serving others instead of self. MR, especially MR in Virgo. Read the rest of this entry »

Dances with dolphins?

Since the Gulf became more than an inky Rorschach blot upon our collective unconscious, we, as humans do, scramble to rise to the occasion. Left to our own devices, we can be pretty crafty and innovative. When struck with a sense of imminent peril, we can be inspired and lightning quick with our response. Since Uranus has flipped into Aries, we have seen two, fairly innovative solutions to the Gulf stain, rise to the surface. We’re talking some highly developed, Uranian/Aries ingenuity. The following are just two solutions.

I always find it fascinating how life imitates art and occasionally, vice/versa. Take Kevin Costner for instance. Costner’s peak, was not “Dances With Wolves.” Costner’s peak, was “Water World.” “Dances” afforded him the budget and the studio’s patience for essentially morphing Mad Max with The Sub-Mariner. They could have easily titled it, “Wave Warrior.”

In “WW” he spent a huge amount of cash, rigging up a “flotilla” of barges and derricks off the coast of Hawaii. It’s the type of movie making you would not see now. Half of what they did would be CGI, the other would have been shot in Baja, closer to LA and cheaper. By the way, you will not see many blockbuster films this summer. Hollywood’s production schedule is finally catching up to the marinas trench of the economy.

In “WW” Costner plays a hybrid human, who can breath underwater, that comes to the rescue (reluctantly) of a mildly anarchic and unrefined community, who have made their aqueous stand on an old rigging and refinery outpost, which still works, pumps and refines oil. They’re there because some great cataclysm has covered the world in water. Follow me? However, there is a woman, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, who has a tattoo that is also a map of land. They want Costner, ultimately, to be their Moses and deliver them onto said promise land. He eventually does, but not before he vanquishes a wild, seafaring bunch of S&M attired pirates on jet skis called, “Smokers” who lust after oil/gas to power their jet skies and marauding and pillaging lifestyle. Read the rest of this entry »

Kubrick’s eyes wide open.

There are very few directors that have imparted such a singular imprimatur on their work as Stanley Kubrick. Hitchcock and Coppola come close to Kubrick in their own way, but Hitchcock basically stayed within one genre (suspense/mystery) and Coppola dropped a few bombs which more or less bent him towards the conformity of the studios. Coppola hit his peak with “Apocalypse Now!”. Notice, I didn’t mention Spielberg or Lucas in the mix. Nor did I include Welles, who basically made one great movie, two very good ones, and a lot of questions marks.

Kubrick’s films were almost all well received critically. Some even did well financially, all were fairly different from not another and yet, there is a them that exists throughout all of them, like a great arc against the backdrop of the latter part of the 20th Century.

Kubrick’s storied career really kicks off with “The Killing” a gritty, crime drama about a heist at a racetrack, where betrayal uncoils like snake and culminates with “Eyes Wide Shut” where secrets and betrayal are the common theme, gilded over a much deeper exploration of something decidedly dark and more sinister than most people would ever dare to imagine.

There are no charts for Kubrick which include the ascendant/birth time, so we’ll have to use the personal planets to uncover the mystery of Stanley Kubrick:

Kubrick was born on July 27th. 12928. He was an Earth Dragon, capable of making things happen on the material plane and quite frankly beyond. While his Sun was brightly illuminated by the sign of Leo, which is now rising in the northern hemisphere, hot on Orion’s tail, it’s Kubrick’s Moon in Scorpio which might provide the skeleton key for understanding not just his chart, but his overall strategy and art.

Since we don’t have his actual birth time, locating the degree of his Moon is not the easiest of tasks. But if we simply look at the Scorpio Moon on face value and then back engineer it’s connection to the rest of the chart, we might be able to get a much clearer picture of its importance.

The Scorpio Moon is dark, deep, intense, sexual, possessive, secretive, psychic, slightly sadistic (more on this later) and deeply regenerative. People that have Scorpio Moons are privy to secrets and hold their own closely to their chests. When we look at Kubrick’s career, “2001, A Space Odyssey” is the one film most associated with the director’s greatness. Here, the central character of the film during it’s first part, is The Moon itself. The film unfolds as a piece of classic ballet. The opening sequences are like a primordial “Rite Of Spring” where early man and his savage nature encounters something mysterious and quite possibly transforms the nature of the species itself. “2001″ transitions from the thumping heat and violence of early man, to the gossamer like grace of objects floating in space, dancing between the void of The Earth and The Moon. It’s important to note that the effects that Kubrick was busting out for “2001″ were truly mind-blowing. Science fiction, especially space science fiction films at that time, were mostly clumsy efforts that couldn’t quite capture the feeling and the esthetics of life in space. We often take such effects for granted now, especially in the light of CGI, but what Kubrick was able to accomplish was nothing short of paradigm shifting when it came to film and effects. But it’s The Moon and the secrets of The Moon which sets the stage for the rest of 2001 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming to a city near you?

Two days ago the top searches on Yahoo! were 911 attacks and cloning. Is something in the air? If a butterfly flaps it’s wings in China and there’s a storm in Africa, what happens when small pecks of random thoughts enter the noosphere, circulating like digital neurons around a collective, virtual soultron, accumulating mass faster and faster as The Hadron Collider spins, bending the space/time curve while HAARP is carving crystalline divots in the sky just prior to the lurching of plates and the slumber of dragons interrupted? How does all of this affect our thoughts as we send them out into the teletype of the void? We cannot predict. This blog has readers the world over and it’s not the only one. We are transmitting and consuming information at light speed, at a rate that even the hardiest mainframes in Geneva cannot keep up with. Ultimately, we are the virus in the program, not the other way around, though it seems like it at times.

Illusion reigned supreme in Hollyweird, Neptune’s children under his watery Sun, second Sun, Venus and Uranus, nuzzling in their warm proximity to the gilled god were feted and celebrated. But did it really matter? Did anyone really care? My doppelganger won for best actor. I’m happy for the dude. Sandra Bullock proved that she has more staying power and box office clout than Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts combined. But what about the big ticket items? “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” ? Ironically the films were directed by an ex-husband and wife and they were about a make-believe war on a distant planet, and a make-believe war in a distant country. Illusion reigned supreme.

Some months back, I started to muck around the fibril goo of trans-humanism, getting all sloppy in Uranian vats of Piscean possibility and pleomorphic fetishes. Remember, Capricorn was once a Sea-Goat, a hybrid from another space and time. The archer is half-man/half-horse, Chiron his kindly brethren. The zodiac is sprinkled with transgenic modeling. Are the twins really twins or did they emerge from neighboring test tubes on a continent now submerged? Is history about to repeat itself? Is Rahm Emmanuel part ferret?

I remember one time when I was landing my bodysuit, ever so gently after a group experience on some mighty medicine and one of my fellow travelers was stuck between worlds, caught in the net of his own ego. What’s a pro-active shaman (not me) supposed to do? Why hit him with a spike full of Ketamine because he can’t get off the fence of course! I watched him devolve into a proto-human, howling for his caged soul to be released, not as 20th century man, but something more primal and hurt from lifetimes of pretending to live by rules that were contrary to it’s nature. There’s way, way more to our DNA than we know or might even imagine.

“Nonymous,” one of my favorite readers hails from Italy, so he might know a little bit about fascism. He chimed in with a comment that the last time Uranus was in Aries, it gave rise to The Third Reich, which of course was where Eugenics really took hold in the modern world. Huxley must have been stiff for weeks on end when he found out about IBM’s punch card technology, employed to begin mapping the racial genome of Europe. That handy little piece of technology, as primitive as it now seems was the operating system of Eugenics, which now goes by a new name, “Trans-humanism.” I suppose you could thrown “Trans-genics” into the mix as well. And guess what we have coming around as Uranus slides into Aries? The national census again typing, branching and grouping. Categorizing our status. Is it really necessary?

When I ask if it’s really necessary, I’m not decrying it’s implementation, nor am I advocating that you burn it in some faux revolutionary fuck you. But let’s be real for a nano-second. You have a computer, you have cable TV, you have a cell phone, you have discount cards to any number of stores. You have credit and debit cards. You might even have a fast tracker on your car to speed you through toll lanes. Gotta GPS? Now I ask you, with all of those open access ports and all the loopholes in The Patriot Act, with Facebook tracking your every post, Yahoo selling your emails to The DOD, Verizon and other cell phone providers offering key codes to back doors, do we really need a census? Isn’t there enough of us out there already? Just a thought. Read the rest of this entry »

Sheer lunacy?

Okay, tonight is a twofer, meaning you get two consecutive posts on the same day for one visit. Talk about value! It’s a Full Moon and I would be remiss if I did not address it. It’s in Leo, the biggest and brightest Full Moon of 2010 and i have always found the Leo Moon to be quite fascinating. First off, I believe it’s the alchemical bride, as it brings together solar illumination, with lunar luminosity. In essence, it’s an illuminated moon and it stands opposite the Sun in Aquarius, providing the backlight of our current age. It’s a warm and incandescent moon, adoring and convivial. Go out, mingle, maybe even let out a good howl. It is the “Wolf Moon” in case you didn’t know. But while we’re on the subject of illuminating The Moon, my pal, ufologist and guest on Free Association Radio on 2/11. Dennis Whitney, turned me onto Jose Escamilla’s latest film, “Moon Rising.”

In case you don’t know of Jose’s work, he captured what’s known as “rods” on film some years back. But in “Moon Rising” he did something outlandish, outrageous and remarkable. He took black and white photos of the moon, all we ever see and colored them in. What comes through the coloring or the illumination process is mind-blowing. Shapes and what looks like structures begin to emerge out of the mono-chromatic landscape. Escamilla and others in the film begin to portray a very different satellite hovering above us. I’m posting the first of a multi-part series of youtube videos from “Moon Rising.” It’s definitely worth watching all of them. As the Sun (Leo) touches the moon, take a little Aquarian journey to discovery that The Moon and our reality might not be what they appear to be.

The Face Of Chiron?

I’m fascinated by social events and phenomenon as they relate to the discovery of new planets in our solar system, or new facets of existing planets. One of my favorite examples of course is our favorite ex-planet, Pluto. When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the mob and Al Capone were in full blown psychopathic-twitch-reflex. Capone and his ilk were called “The Underworld” and of course, that is one of the hallmarks of Pluto; sex, death, transformation, drugs, the depths of the psyche, the underworld. Cosmic discovery meets terrestrial uncovering. The planet of the underworld and the underworld on this planet. Ten years later, Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan would cook the fuel for the nuclear bomb at UC Berkeley and name it, “Plutonium.”

The ott-controversial Chiron was discovered in 1977. This “asteroplanecomet” is often referred to the wounded healer of the zodiac. It has it’s own orbit and moves quite slowly through the various signs. Perched between Saturn and Uranus it could be part of the planet, “Fenix” often referred to as “Maldek.” It was the fifth planet from the Sun and supposedly got tangled up into a nasty war between some agro-aliens and had to be taken out for the sake of everyone. That’s one version. Out of Fenix/Maldek, Chiron was ejected. It’s the largest surviving chuck of the former planet. In Greek Mythology, Chiron was a “civilized centaur.” Unlike those other beastly rutters, he was skilled in medicine and surgery. He was supposedly a great teacher and quite kind. And, according to the Greeks, were it not for Chiron, we’d still be fumbling around in the dark, looking for matches. Chiron made a deal with Zeus, that he would sacrifice himself, so that Prometheus, the fire (knowledge) thief, would be unchained from the rock, where human pate was served to birds each and every day. So Chiron becomes a sort of Christ like figure, dying for the sin of humanity, in this case, the arrogance of Prometheus.

When we look back at 1977, it was no ordinary year. Personally, it was a train wreck for me in high school, where I consumed far too much rye mold, if you know what I mean. But collectively, it’s kind of a whoa year. In keeping with the fire/gods theme, 1977 was officially the first time lasers were used in creating fusion energy. This is actually a pretty important development. In addition to the fire theme, something else quite remarkable happened that year and has since set a ripple effect through time, to this very day. Read the rest of this entry »

He lives.

Ahhh, that fresh breeze wafting across your consciousness is the subtle change of current, Mercury moving forward again. Sometimes astrology reminds me of this game my kid loves called “Chuzzle.” It’s about matching little furballs with eyes, in at least three-in-a-row. It’s pretty easy until one of the furballs gets locked up and the entire row cannot move. The only way that you can unlock the row is to come up with a combination of three. But it’s not just one little furball that can be locked up–there can be multiple furballs. So you can unlock one, but there are still little furballs to be liberated. That’s what the stars are like now. The Mercury furball has been released, while The Mars furball and Saturn furball are locked up, meaning they’re still retrograded. But thats ok, at least communication is freed up–that little furball can ascend to the next level.

While the likes of Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola are synonymous with the outrageous success of the USC film school, Carpenter, a Trojan alum himself has cut a decidedly different swath through the celluloid jungle. Born 1/16/48, he struck cinematic gold with his first real full length, “Halloween” which was made for $200,000 engrossed $65 million world wide. That’s 1980 millions, not bloated, overinflated post millennial reserve notes. Carpenter is also a composer and crafted the Halloween theme score, which has become an iconic and instantly recognizable tune.

While his craggy countenance captures the the flinty edge of Capricorn’s features, beneath it, he is an artist, with Moon in Pisces, Mercury and Venus, both in Aquarius. These three personal planets work in a synchronous trinity, providing Carpenter with the poetic inspiration of the Piscean Moon and the technical acumen of executing films with the intelligence of Aquarius. Capricorn knows how to wheel and deal with the power brokers and the producers. John Carpenter was born for the rough and tumble world of Hollyweird. No film can be more illustrative of this, from his body of work, then ‘They Live.”

When I first saw they live I was struck by the film on so many levels. First off, it’s budget probably wasn’t all that much more than Halloween’s. The special effects aren’t that special. The aliens are shot in a reverse polarity tone, visible only when a pair of specially prepared glasses are worn by people to see that there are aliens amongst us and that the system/world that we live in is filled with symbolic cues, that prompt us to “buy,” “breed,” “obey,” and “sleep.” The main character played by Rowdy Roddy Piper (Nada) drifts into LA. Set in the not-too-distant-future, there is a widening gap between the halves and have-nots. People are starting to live in tent cities that are bulldozed at night. The rift in the classes is becoming more apparent on a daily basis.

Piper drifts into town looking for work, lands at a tent city where he stumbles upon a a group known as “The Resistance.” They are the ones that are making the special glasses that reveal previously unseen layers of reality. They’re also jamming the local TV broadcast with their wake up calls from a small studio hidden in a church. Piper finds the glasses and puts them on as he’s strolling through downtown LA. He begins to see the butt ugly aliens in plain sit for et very first time, while the subliminal messaging of advertising is reveled to him. The world is never the same for Piper’s character from that moment on. He eventually drifts into bank and gets into a shootout, wasting aliens with a shotgun he wrestled free from an alien cop. While he’s in the bank, he utters, one of the great all tim lines of filmdom;
“I’ve come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass and I’m all out of bubble gum.” Piper then unloads on the aliens. It’s a hilarious moment that provides an almost voyeuristic, vicarious thrill.

From there, he eventually meets up with Keith David, another drifter that does day labor. He tries to convince David of the surreality of the alien world just beyond the lens of the special sunglasses. David refuses. It’s a classic case of someone that actually has a perspective into a reality that others do not or choose not to see, willing to remain in ignorance and doubt. There is no point in reasoning with David, so Piper forces the issue with him, demanding he wear the glasses. David refuses and one of the greatest fights in filmdom ensues. For nearly five minutes, Piper and David beat the shit out of one another in an alley. On one level, it’s metaphoric. If Piper wants to impart the truth, he has to go to the mat, risk getting torn from limb-to-limb. It’s also quite symbolic in the sense that there are many times that we want others to see the world the way that we do and noting short of knocking them out of their trance will do. My friend, Alan Howarth, a collaborator with Carpenter on a number of projects was also involved with “They Live” told me that they had chiropractors and bodyworkers on set to work with Piper and David on the fight scene as the two of them were going as close to all out as they could. The visceral quality of a street fight in an alley between two, rugged and burly brawlers is more than just the magic of cinema. It’s about as real as they could get it.

Piper’s character experiences betrayal at the hands of Meg Foster who works for the aliens, but rebounds and eventually leads an assault on the TV station that broadcasts the entrainment frequency. if you haven’t seen “They Live,” I highly recommend it. It’s funny, surreal and chillingly prescient.

When Carpenter made this, I really thought he was committing professional suicide. He had just hit some pretty remarkable thresholds of commercial success with “The Thing” and “Starman,” so maybe he thought his directorial cache could take the hit of “They Live.” Because quite frankly, on the heels of “They Live” Carpenter’s golden touch turns decidedly lead like. He trots out bombs like “Memoirs Of An Invisible Man,” “Vampires” and “Ghosts Of Mars.” To be fair, I’ve heard that he had funding pulled on the latter two films and wasn’t able to fully execute the vision he had for both.

“They Live,” besides being an obvious take on aliens living among us is also part a of small wave of alien movies during that time that look at the Jewish diaspora through an extraterrestrial lens. If you sat Abe Foxman down and made him sit through “They Live” there would be little doubt that he would begin to see this as a critique on Jews on Jewish culture, though Carpenter was really assailing Reaganite conservative culture at the time. “Alienation” starring Mandy Pantinkin and James Caan also orbited around this same theme. For this indirect shot across the bow alone, I thought that Carpenter had committed professional hari-kari. But upon more research, it’s looks like another version of “They Live” that will supposedly hit the screens in 2011. I usually hate re-makes and anxiously await this one, if it ever gets made. Even though the effects and even the actors were low budget, there was inherent charm in “They Live” which directly communicated the unsophisticated nature of humanity against the slick and manipulative forces from another world.

Saturn will conjunct John Carpenter’s natal Neptune in 2010/11 and I think we’re going to see his best and most focused work yet, as his natal Moon will get and imaginative boost from Jupiter. They Live was released on 11/4/88. Venus was in Libra (2 degrees), Mars was in Aries (0 degrees) and Neptune was in Capricorn (8 degrees). In the coming two years, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto will all be aspecting those planets in a fairly significant way. Look for They Live to have a social resonance in the months to comes, especially if the remake does arrive in 2011 as advertised. In the meantime, try on these glasses for me.

Best fight scene of all time.

The face of Gemini’s duality on display.

I wish Stanley Kubrick could have lived another ten years, so that he could have directed at least one of Dan Brown’s illuminating works of fiction. Kubrick would have turned “Angels and Demons” into something so unnerving that there wouldn’t have been any chance to tie a neat bow on it’s ending like the imminently agreeable, Ronnie Howard, who has been rumored to have risen quickly up the Masonic chain of command. I know it’s a little tacky, but Howard usually casts his lesser known and rumored scientologist brother, Clint in his films, but alas he was AOL. The least he could have done was cast him as some sort of Rahphelite statuary that resembles a gargoyle. Okay, I know it’s a cheap shot, but Brown’s book deserved better than the company hatchet job performed on it by Opie. If you really want to to have a look at the real deal regarding secret societies, I would advise having another go at “Eyes Wide Shut,” Kubrick’s masterpiece and expose of sex rituals, programmed slaves and dark orders. Rumor has it that Kubrick got a little too close to the truth and got his Directors Guild card punched for good. There’s some pretty decent analysis on the web regarding “Eyes Wide Shut” and programming. But back to the subject at hand.

Angels and Demons represents duality, a quality often associated with Gemini. It’s about good and evil, light and dark, catholic versus illuminist, matter vs anti-matter, angels vs demons. You get the picture. From the checkerboard tiled floor in the pivotal assassination scene in “The Manchurian Candidate” to the larger than life chessboard, with human pieces in “The Prisoner” duality plays a huge role in the occult symbolism of the esoteric intelligencia. It represents Hegellian dialectic (problem/solution/synthesis), but also the demarcation of humanity apart from God. “Angels and Demons” is rife with this sort of thematic memes, but the real, dualistic throwdown comes between science and faith and illuminati vs catholic church (at least on the surface). Read the rest of this entry »

Growing old and up!

A few months ago I posted about the power of the octogenarian as it resides in Pluto in Capricorn, the aspect that will see The Baby Boomers move into Social Security territory and I explored how Pluto In Capricorn would be a deeply empowering one for this generation, as Capricorn rules the bones, joints, the aging process and even death itself. Pluto brings sweeping changes to any sign it co-mingles, rearranging institutional DNA, transforming the social and cultural manifestations of the sign it is in.

In short, Pluto in Capricorn can imbue the aging boomers with a renewed sense of purpose, energy and the realization that their time is shrinking, so they’d better maximize it.

In keeping with that theme, I want to give great praise to Pixar’s latest masterpiece, Up. I saw it today with my son, his friend and his mom at The Emery Bay UA, which is a stones throw from The Pixar studios. Unlike Wall-E, which left me feeling cold, Up had me alternately tearing up and cracking up on numerous occasions. The storytelling, especially at the beginning was so economical and emotional that while my 3D glasses were misting, I was conscious of the care and depth that went into character development as the opening sequences set the stage for the rest of the film. I’m not going to spoil it for you and betray the power of the first ten minutes, so without great detail, you’ll have to take my word for it.

The main action of the film takes place when a crumudgeonly, old, widower, coot named “Carl Hendrickson” perfectly voiced by a real crumudgeonly old coot, Ed Asner sets out on the adventure of a lifetime, by attaching thousands of balloons to his house, which is uprooted from it’s foundation and takes to the sky. However, Carl is unaware of the fact that an eight-year-old Wilderness Explorer named “Russell” has accidentally stowed away on his domicile dirigible.

They make an unlikely pair of travelers and yet, their path is as star crossed as Carl’s was with his wife, Ellie. Together, the two of them wind up somewhere in South America, a mythical and remote area called, “Paradise Falls,” a place that captured Carl’s imagination as a child, when the daring explorer, George Muntz traveled there in super sleek zeppelin, replete with a loyal band of dogs that went everywhere with him. Muntz returned from Paradise Falls and brought back the skeleton of a primordial bird that scientists claimed was a fake. Angered by their denials of his claims, he vowed to go back to the area and never return until he had procured a live version of the rare creature.

Carl would not only meet, but go head-to-head with his childhood idol as Carl and Russell get swept up in an epic battle between good and evil in Paradise Falls. Muntz is ably voiced by Christopher Plummer, who manages to convey a sense of psychopathology that is truly frightening at times.

What does any of this have to do with Pluto in Capricorn?

In old guy vs. old guy, we’re given heros and villains that have no super powers, not even the power of youth. They are the antithesis, especially Carl as someone that can rise to the occasion, and not only open his flinty heart, but make life changing decisions, where he has to surrender his cherished past on the fly. Carl’s heroism lies in his ability, even at his advanced age to find something worth living for, but only as it relates to an equally powerful ability to surrender. It’s these qualities that have everything to do with a positive expression of Pluto In Capricorn as it not only relates to “The Boomers” but all of us who have to find meaning in our lives, after we think they have ended. Muntz represents the negative aspect of Pluto in Capricorn, cold, calculating, desperate for recognition and vindication. Muntz has isolated and deprived himself of any meaningful relationship, save his legion of loyal hounds.

Ironically, the alchemical symbol of Cancer (the hearth and home) meeting Capricorn (the peak of the mountain) is achieved in balance.

One of the gimmicks selling Up is 3D viewing. I didn’t find the 3D all that scintillating, but it seems to be a trend of the future and will no doubt eventually make it to home theaters at some point, as more and more films are being produced in 3D mode.

Up also has a couple of loose ends that are unanswered, like what happened to Russell’s father, but the few plot holes and dangling threads don’t stand in the way of a marvelous viewing experience and a very positive expression of Pluto in Capricorn as a redemptive and regenerative force.