ENTERTAINMENT
STARS
BY LILITH
ARIES: The sparks likely to fly this week are delightful ones, like sparklers on a party cake. And aren’t you just beginning to feel the first stirrings of some new and exciting exploration? The planet of bigger and better in the sign of mind, body and spirit adventuring says bring it on. TAURUS: With retrograde love planet Venus shining a light into the relationship cellar, it’s worth reevaluating your partnering parameters. Not in one? No problem: this eyes-wide-open transit helps clarify who and what you truly, madly, deeply want. And for teamed-up Taurans, where some graceful changes might be made. GEMINI: Communications are warmly cordial with Venus and Mars both in fellow air signs speaking each other’s language, and your primo year of teaming up is already off and running. Tick as much as you can off the to-do list this week before Mercury retro for the next three chucks glitches into the mix. CANCER: So you’ll be able to cruise smoothly through Mercury retrograde without system overload, take advantage of the brief window of opportunity the current holding pattern offers for catching up on backlogs, getting up to date with overdue responses, paying bills, making calls: all the ordinary chores that mount up so swiftly.
BEST GET STUFF DONE EARLY THIS WEEK BEFORE MERCURY RETROGRADES FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKS IN THE SIGN OF COMBUSTIBLE CHEMISTRY AND DUMMY SPITS… LIBRA: Retro Venus has been delving into and ironing out relationship kinks lately, and now this week fires off romantic rockets for Librans who are in one. Or just looking. Or not even looking… surprise! Any extra consideration given to the way you play the mating game could pay off more quickly than you think. SCORPIO: Moderation’s an admirable but possibly unrealistic goal with give-me-more Jupiter in the sign of expansion, plus the sweet spot of Mars and Venus having a planetary pash. It’s a premium boudoir-activities week and your attraction magnet’s pumping, so go ahead and taste it: seems a shame to waste it. SAGITTARIUS: It’s certainly worth doing things differently this week, especially where friends and partners are concerned. A spicy Mars/Venus alignment is warming up what may have cooled down over time, and with planetary provocateur Uranus in your house of glamour reigniting spontaneity, you’re brimming with spritz and verve – or Veuve… CAPRICORN: Welcome to what’s looking like a big news week in your people department, with someone surprisingly stepping up to play an important part in your life story. You needn’t even make an effort, because everything’s already working on your behalf – though it mightn’t arrive in a package you recognise, so stay open.
LEO: As the wilder shores of life start singing their siren song, this sassy week has plenty of sizzle in its talk and wiggle in its walk. Wise Lions will make time to enjoy these inviting vibes before the cosmic climate heats up to more scorchy proportions and less pleasant temperatures.
AQUARIUS: Rock-and-roll Mars in your sign taking a walk on the wild side this week with Venus the vamp could flick your reset switch on romantic action. Or at least have you thinking about taking the next step in some kind of interesting pas de deux when midweek Aquarius moon arrives at the planetary party.
VIRGO: Some river-deep, mountain-high emotions are likely to be surging for tribe Virgo right now. But Venus is making something super-clear, finally giving you the green light to either move forward or let go of certain partnership plans and isn’t that a relief? Single? This week says probably not for long.
PISCES: The Piscean urge to merge, especially one on one, could be peaking this week. Word on the astral grapevine? Uranus advising it’s time to energise tepid connections, renovate stale arrangements, ginger up your social salsa, add some pep to partnerships and slip a little chili into the romantic mix.
www.echo.net.au/byron-echo Byron Shire Echo archives
BY JOHN CAMPBELL
CINEMA REVIEWS
THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB
Why is it that the bad guys in movies such as this always go to such elaborate and invariably futile lengths to eliminate somebody? With wires and explosives, they blow up all four floors of the building where our heroine lives, only for her to survive by jumping into the bath. Could they not have just knocked on the door and shot her? Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, is back, as indestructible as ever. This time she is played by the stunningly bland Claire Foy. In creating her character, Foy has perhaps half-a-dozen lines to deliver and, to be fair, those lines appear to have been written as a means of moving the narrative from one chase and fight to the next. Otherwise, the plot is pushed along via an intensely boring obsession with cyber-hacking that can only appeal to gamers. Introduced into the narrative, as if we really care, is Lisbeth’s back-story, involving a sexually abusive father and her blonde sister, Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks), who suffered under his tyranny for sixteen years. There is also an abducted little boy-genius who holds the secret to passwords that keep the world safe (or something like that), and an African-American agent (Lakeith Stanfield) who has been sent from Washington to Stockholm with strict instructions to do his best Will Smith impersonation. An attractive female
government figure and the even prettier Sverrir Gudnason as the journo from the Dragon flicks, are thrown into the mix, in an attempt to make ‘who can you trust?’ a factor. Everybody speaks English, but with a Swedish accent (sub-titles are SO hard, aren’t they?), and it certainly is cold over there. I wanted to walk out with at least half an hour still to go, but my companion was sleeping so peacefully that I didn’t have the heart to wake her. And in any case, if I did I would have missed the blatant product placement for Ducati motorcycles in the last scene. You will see worse movies this year, but not many.
BOY ERASED It’s depressing to think that there are institutions devoted to ‘converting’ homosexuals to heterosexuality. Worse, it is infuriating to learn that thirty-six states of the US allow for minors to be interned in such loathsome places. Not surprisingly, the underpinning ethos of many of these establishments goes hand in glove with interpretations of the Bible made by its feeble-minded, god-addled devotees. Written and directed by Joel Edgerton, this confronting, crusading movie is based on the true story of Garrard Conley, whose life was nearly ruined by corrective therapy. Marshall Eamons (Russell Crowe) is a car salesman and pastor in Arkansas. He and his doting wife Nancy (Nicole Kidman) sign up their son Jared (Lucas Hedges) for a sort of spiritual boot camp that they hope will save the boy from his sinful sexual leanings. Running the course is Victor Sykes (Edgerton), as bullying and bigoted in his attitude to those entrusted to his care as Eamons is blindly unaccepting of them. Sykes’s mission is to show the young sinners the error of their ways, though it seems barely credible that anybody could seriously align masculinity with the way a bloke stands – in one class, he tells one of the boys to not sit with his legs crossed. We are talking about Christians of the MidWest, however (and Sydney’s arcane Anglicans?), so in a world becoming more polarised by the day, any idiocy is possible. Visually, the film is dimly lit – I wanted to adjust the brightness all the way through – and the pace is slow, but the performances are exact and the characters’ relationships and power plays thoroughly absorbing. Crowe perfectly understates his role, making it impossible to hate the father, despite his boneheaded piety, and Hodges (who was also the gay guy in Lady Bird) is especially impressive in the part of a young man struggling to understand exactly who he is, while flaxen-haired Troye Sivan, as fellow attendee 66 855 828 Gary, delivers the best line ooo&ha_`gmk]Û a[ck&[ge&Ym when he advises Jared to ‘fake it till you make it’. 1 Skinners Shoot Rd, Byron Bay
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mşưĕŔćĕſ Ǩǫǽ ǩǧǨǯ The Byron Shire Echo 45