60- Tree of Life [9.5]
The impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950′s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father.
I will not recommend people to see Tree of Life. That is not to say that I believe it’s unworthy of being seen–quite the opposite, actually. As I left the theater, speechless and unable to make complete sense of what I had just seen, I knew one thing with certainty: Tree of Life is a film that will stick with me for a long, long time.
In doing this site, one of the rules I adhere to in reviewing movies I’d just seen for the first time is to write and assign a rating without the influence of reading others thoughts. I’m going to break that rule now (and hopefully just this once time), as even though I was sure of wanting to give the film a 9.5 after watching it, I had absolutely no idea how I was going to get across what I wanted to say about Tree of Life. I still feel that way (cue “stumped” pun). Thankfully, there are a lot of very talented reviewers on the internet who have summed up my thoughts much better than I could have stated them.
Please beware of some very minor spoilers below:
Tree of Life is not a movie that anyone else can understand for you.
And yet, a number of the more conflicted responses I’ve read suggest that some viewers are unwilling to understand the movie for themselves. I don’t mean that to sound quite as condescending as it reads, but rather to draw attention to the idea that the film’s myth and mass may have convinced otherwise astute audiences to second-guess their reactions. Of course subsequent viewings will yield greater or revised understanding and a more exacting appreciation for the smaller sinews of Malick’s opus, but my Twitter feed — that infallible fount of information — has been absolutely overrun with anachronistically humble sentiments like “I’m not really sure what it’s about” or “It was beautiful, but I’m going to have see it again before I weigh in.” This from people who routinely unloose opinions with all the caution of Harold Camping predicting the weather.
Perhaps some viewers fear that their reaction might seem reductive in the face of such a mammoth work, or maybe the shifts in the movie’s somewhat non-linear narrative are so seismic that people are struggling to reconcile the film’s deceptively different movements into a coherent symphonic whole. Of course you’re free to see that as a fault of the film and not its audience, but I’m of the mind that Tree of Life isn’t a riddle to be solved so much as it’s an article of empirical faith that writes beyond the margins.
Tree of Life is surely one of the most gorgeous movies ever made; every shot in the film is sheer beauty, and almost every moment contains something simply wonderful to look at. Not only is the film a joy to look at, a solid two hours out of its two and a half hour runtime is astonishing, a work of sublime filmmaking narrative.
But it’s that other half hour or so that continues to trouble me, and seems to be the hardest bit to unravel. It takes the form of narrative bookends, with Sean Penn as the grown up version of the boy who is the center of the rest of the film, and I kind of don’t really understand what it’s saying. If there are any bits of the film that feel ‘pretentious,’ it’s these bits, which include surreal scenes of Penn wandering in a desert, chasing after his younger self and Penn on a beach, hugging all the people from his youth, including young versions of his mother and father.
Audiences who engage with Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life may find that it will be impossible to watch without bringing their own personal history, their emotional baggage, their own family experiences with them to the film. The film’s considerable power comes from Malick’s ability to go to a universal place and yet still make the film seem very personal and relevant to each individual who sees it. It is possible to view the film empirically. Just from the one viewing that I had, I feel it is a masterwork, but it resonates with me with such force that I find myself unable to think about the film without it being filtered by my own life experiences. I do not think I will be the only one who feels that way about this film.
Tree of Life is absolutely not for everyone. It’s quiet, contemplative, and it rewards patience and understanding. Many moviegoers will flat out hate it – they will hate Malick’s refusal to tell his story with a conventional narrative; they will hate Malick’s flights-of-fancy that will come off to some as incredibly indulgent; they will hate the fact that Malick devotes most of the film to a portrait of a family in small-town 1950s Texas and think that it is not a subject deserving of so much time and attention. The criticisms put against this film – it’s indulgent, pretentious, too long – could be valid for a moviegoer unused to working with a film the way Malick requires. The film is as full and as long as Malick needs it to be; critics of the length remind me of Amadeus’s Mozart asking which notes he should take out of his opera. He has a journey in mind, and he will not skip any step, because as so many have said before, the point isn’t about where you arrive but how you got there. But Malick tells this story the only way he can, and how audiences respond to it is very much what the movie is about, as opposed to any kind of linear narrative path.
…
So there you go. It’s very well possible that I may go on and change my mind completely about how much the film meant to me and what I make of it. There were times where it completely frustrated me. At other times, I was holding back tears. Regardless of the spectrum of emotions the film ran me through, I do not believe I will ever see a movie like Tree of Life again.
59- Attack The Block [9.0]
A group of London teens find themselves in the middle of an alien invasion and fight to defend their tower block from some evil extraterrestrials.
For months I have been hearing a lot about Attack the Block. The mash up descriptions have been amusing: The Goonies meets The Wire. Shaun of the Dead meets District 9. (My friend who attended the screening with me last night said Boyz n the Hood meets Cloverfield.) So what exactly is Attack the Block? It is an often hilarious, occasionally touching and–most excitingly–wholly original alien invasion story.
As a generalization, what do kids who have no parental guidance and live in a crappy neighborhood do? They engage in immature, dangerous, and often illegal activity. They live for the moment of something exciting happening, no matter the trouble it may cause. Attack the Block is loosely framed around this idea, and with it, we are introduced to a handful of excellent characters who frequently shift from heroically to fearfully fighting aliens.
In the last few years, audiences have been getting an abundance of genre parodies, retreads and meta takes on films of the past, a lot of which have been lazy. In despite of people’s willingness to compare Attack the Block to the feel of other films, what makes the movie so great is because it blazes its own trail. The humor is hardly referential to genre conventions. I especially enjoyed the manner in which the teens and residents of the neighborhood react to the invasion itself, which I don’t think another film anywhere close to this nature has taken the approach Attack does.
I’m hesitant to divulge too much of the films’ finer points, as it’s best to see this movie as fresh as possible. I’m not sure what the distribution plan is for the U.S., but I guarantee you will be hearing about Attack the Block for months to come.
58- Carnival of Souls [1.5]
A drag race turns to tragedy when one car, with three young women inside, topples over a bridge and into the muddy river below. The authorities drag the river, but the search is fruitless and the girls are presumed dead until a single survivor stumbles out of the water with no recollection of how she escaped.
Carnival of Souls was a bore to watch. With a very short runtime of seventy-eight minutes, I couldn’t believe how eager I was for it to be over. Perhaps the best thing I can tell you about Carnival of Souls is that the director’s name is Herk Harvey and one actor’s name in the film is Larry Sneegas.
57- Eyes Without A Face [6.5]
A plastic surgeon becomes obsessed with making things right after his daughter Christiane’s face is terribly disfigured in a car accident that he caused. Overcome with guilt, Dr. Genessier and his vicious nurse concoct a plan to give Christiane her face back by kidnapping young girls and removing their faces– and then grafting them onto Christiane’s.
I was pleasantly surprised how effective this fifty-year-old horror film was. Without the benefits of being able to pause and rewind scenes (as well as watch at home) to notice the makeup and effects in certain shots, it must have been pretty frightening to see some of the more graphic scenes in Eyes Without A Face. The theme by Maurice Jarre is so similar to Luciano Michelini’s for Curb Your Enthusiasm that I couldn’t help but be taken out of the movie every now and then. Regardless, this slow but entertaining, fairty tale-esque dark film makes me glad to have my own face.
56- Big Fan [4.0]
A parking garage attendant and lifelong New York Giants fan finds his life spinning out of control following an altercation with his favorite football player.
Big Fan offers very little into the psyche of an obsessive sports fan. Director Robert Siegel (who wrote this as well as Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler) shows little respect for his characters, thus making it difficult to get behind anyone. It seemed to me that Patton Oswalt’s Paul is meant to be looked at as pathetic, which I take no issue with– it’s the fact that not a single person in the film is treated any better that makes Big Fan hard to enjoy.
55- Leaves of Grass [5.0]
An Ivy League classics professor becomes mixed up in his lawless identical twin’s drug dealings after receiving word that his brother has been murdered, and returning to Oklahoma to discover he’s been hoodwinked.
Leaves of Grass is a film full of very talented actors. Edward Norton is excellent as usual, playing twin brothers. Tim Blake Nelson (who also directed), Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfuss all make good contributions as well. It is unfortunate, then, that the film is such a mess. It’s jarring tonal shifts is one thing, but the fact that Leaves of Grass doesn’t have any consistency from scene to scene means either Nelson couldn’t make sense of the screenplay he wrote or he isn’t very good behind the camera.
[Side note: is Steve Earle obligated to have his songs play over credits in every film or show he acts in?]
54- I’m Through With White Girls [1.0]
After years of dating white women, an unconventional “brotha” vows to try his luck with some “sistahs” of his own race. But when he falls for a self-described “half-Rican Canadian”, is it possible he’s found his soul mate?
I’m through with finding a description ridiculous enough to warrant sitting through an entire film like this.
53- A Film Unfinished [8.5]
Since the end of WWII, one copy of a 60-minute (unfinished) propaganda film, shot by the Nazis in May 1942 (a year prior to the uprising), labeled simply “Ghetto,” sat undisturbed in an East German archive.
A Film Unfinished shows the Nazi propaganda machine in full effect, as Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto are forced to participate in scenes creating a false history. Almost sixty years later, some of the Jews who experienced the horror are interviewed and view footage from the unfinished film as the reflection of the projected images appear on their faces. The haunting effect is one of the many things in A Film Unfinished that will likely stay with me for a long time.
It is one thing to watch horrific acts depicted in fiction. It’s another to see the real thing in a documentary. The bastardized blending of fiction into propaganda in A Film Unfinished is especially difficult to watch. One scene depicts Jews supposedly bustling along the street as their day would normally go when, in actuality, they are moving hurriedly because a gun was fired off screen to get them to move quickly. There are a lot of graphic scenes in the movie and I strongly urge caution before watching (though I do believe it is incredibly important for people to see). I’ve long been fascinated with what goes into making a film, but I wish could unsee what occurs in this particular documentary.
52- Let Me In [7.5]
A bullied young boy befriends a young female vampire who lives in secrecy with her guardian.
Having loved the original Swedish film Let The Right One In, I brought a lot into seeing Let Me In. Comparisons would be inevitable and I grappled with considering some often asked questions in regards to remakes– is there a necessity to this film being made and does it add anything to the original?
I don’t know that Let Me In really needed to be made, what with the Swedish original being widely available for DVD purchase or viewing. (If you are so oppose to subtitles that you can’t watch a film, than you are sorely missing out on a ton of excellent cinema). I believe that overall, Let The Right One In is a superior film; however, Let Me In is fantastic in its own right, and succeeds in areas that the original hadn’t. My rating for the film isn’t influenced by this point, but I have to hand it to Matt Reeves and Hammer Films for not watering down and making a standard Hollywood remake when they easily could have.
One of the many things that made Let The Right One In so special was its two young leads. Let Me In is no exception– Chloe Moretz (Kick Ass) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road) are just as excellent as Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, adding new dimensions to their respective characters. Depending on whether or not you appreciate a remake making nods to an original will largely shape your experience, as there are some shots that are near identical to Let The Right One In. In fact, the lighting and sets are remarkably similar to the original as well. Both films share one flaw together– awful CGI. I didn’t care for the blurring out of Owen’s mothers face, and some of the other unsubtle visual cues. Michael Giacchino’s score got overbearing at times, but was most effective in some of the quieter scenes.
If someone were to ask me which of the two films I’d recommend, I would say both, and that’s perhaps the biggest compliment I could give Let Me In. Then again, you could always go ahead and read the book on which both movies were based on.
51- The Great Dictator [9.5]
The story of the period between two world wars–an interim during which insanity cut loose, liberty took a nose dive, and humanity was kicked around somewhat.
Over the course of the last six decades, the concept of physical comedy has de-evolved into gross gags that don’t require much imagination. One needs only to look back at Charlie Chaplin to see how physical comedy can be done successfully without having to offend for the sake of laugh.
The Great Dictator is more than just a showcase of Chaplin’s comedic talents– it is at turns a dramatic, romantic and political satire film. The frequent tonal shifts may turn some off, but I was pleased with how cohesive the whole movie felt. Gluing together everything are Chaplin’s two performances as Adenoid Hynkel and the Jewish Barber. Besides being a daring film to make in 1940, The Great Dictator stands as a great achievement in cinema that I take to be the highlight of Chaplin’s career.
50- Thor [6.0]
The epic adventure spans the Marvel Universe from present day Earth to the mystical realm of Asgard. At the center of the story is The Mighty Thor, a powerful but arrogant warrior whose reckless actions reignite an ancient war. As a result, Thor is banished to Earth where he is forced to live among humans. When the most dangerous villain of his world sends its darkest forces to invade Earth, Thor learns what it takes to be a true hero.
When it was announced that Kenneth Branagh was to direct Thor, it seemed to be a perfect match of director and material. With his background as actor and director of many Shakespeare adaptations, Branagh would be able to get the best performances from his actors. Considering he’s never worked on a project with such a large budget and expectations, the only worrisome factors were whether or not he’d be able to handle the fight sequences and find a way to make the Asgard sequences and costumes not look cheesy. For the most part, he succeeds.
The fish out of water trope has been used many times before, but it’s necessary for the portions of the film in which Thor is on Earth. Chris Hemsworth handles all facets of Thor (the arrogance, humility and charm) with ease, proving that his star-turning performance in Star Trek was no fluke. Tom Hiddleston was the highlight of the film, with his layered portrayal of Loki. The reasons for his actions, coupled with his intelligence and playfully mischievous side make Loki the best villain to appear in a comic book adaptation thus far. Idris Elba does a fantastic job as Heimdall, the guardian of the rainbow bridge (which is exponentially more awesome than it sounds).
Thor is not without its faults– the romance with Jane Foster, Thor’s personality change and the third act are all rushed. Though the film speeds along without losing its momentum, an extra few scenes to pad the Earth and Asgard sequences could have gone a long way to fleshing out some of the character development (it’s obvious that the majority of Renee Russo’s lines ended up on the cutting room floor). Depending on how you feel about Kat Dennings, some of the humor on Earth may feel unnecessary (though Thor gets some great lines– “I need sustenance!”).
I would have liked to see a Thor film that solely takes place in the nine realms, but perhaps that will occur in a sequel. I took most issue with Branagh’s incessant use of dutch angles (achieved by tilting the camera off to the side so that the shot is composed with the horizon at an angle to the bottom of the frame). The vast majority of the films’ shots appear sideways, and though I understand how it could be used to make Asgard feel more alien-like, Brannagh chooses to frame a lot of Earth sequences that way as well.
It’s frequently said that summer blockbusters should be mindless entertainment that allow the audiences to turn off their brain for two hours. On top of that sentiment being insulting to film viewers, it perpetuates the notion that there should be a four month lull of intelligent filmmaking. Thor challenges this idea by rooting the central conflict in Shakespearean themes. Though the film has an abundance of special FX shots and the origin tale of this nature has been done before, Thor is a step above the rest of its class by pushing what is to be expected of a comic book film.
