The Tree of Life

In Terrence Malick's Tree of Life: A gorgeous image of 'the end of time' provided by a veteran genius of optical special effects, Douglas Trumbull.

**** out of ****

When someone asked me what I thought of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, I told him I loved it but I wouldn't argue with someone if they called it pretentious. Malick's great ambition with this film is to blend the cosmos and eternity with personal childhood/family memories in a small town in Texas. A young director right out of film school could try the same thing and I'd probably hate it. If you boil The Tree of Life down to it's concept as a movie, it's vague and very serious. I think that is the reason this film has so many haters.

Even self-professed Malick fans told me they hated this one. I wonder if they ever notice that the strength of his films is how very elusive they are. I don't need to know what they're really about. This movie is as beautiful as standing in front of a masterpiece painting in a museum or going to the symphony. For anyone who does such things, there is a code of patience and tolerance. For some reason, in the context of cinema, that code doesn't exist for most moviegoers. High art has a lot of trouble in the multiplex. 

Check out this funny story about walkouts on this movie.

What is really strange is that movies like The Tree of Life have been made before. Fellini, Bergman, and Kubrick are three celebrated names who all produced mysterious slow-moving works of art on film. Like Malick, their films were widely distributed. I just think they were from another time when there was a bigger audience for high-concept film making.


For me, this film is just gorgeous. It is filled with shots of visual wonder, accompanied by vibrant classical selections and original score by Alexandre Desplat, edited with thoughtful fluidity, and liberated from any kind of predictable narrative structure. The acting is invisible as everyone seems native to their environment. This is the kind of movie that puts me under a spell coming from a passionate director who has a talent for finding a 'god point of view' to life and treasures seemingly mundane moments in everyday existence and sees glory.

Here is a review from Ebert Presents: At the Movies

Plus David Edelstein's radio review.


Getting back to the point I was making at the beginning, maybe this movie is pretentious. I DON'T CARE. This movie is proof to me that a lot of great movies probably are pretentious in concept but so strong in spectacle that I'm not concerned with what they're preaching.

You may see this film and agree with my belief that movies can simply exist for their aesthetic and musical beauty. You may even wonder, as I often do, if movies that are concentrated on such things are the very best of cinema. 

All I can offer to someone who intends to see The Tree of Life is my advise to not think hard about it. See it alone if you have to. Sit back with no distractions and just experience it. If you are confused by anything, don't try to figure it out while you are watching it. Just watch, listen, feel.

But then again, you may not have any response to what this movie offers. Hell, maybe beauty offends you -and if so, there's always youtube.

Hugo

Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz in Martin Scorsese's Hugo

 ***1/2 out of ****

Hugo is a brilliant love letter to cinema history. It's magical in almost every way. The acting is flawless. The homage to early cinema finds it's way into the modern craft gracefully. Even if you find 3D movies taxing to the senses, it is still obvious that this movie was tailored for the process and no time was wasted in utilizing it. 

I will definitely view this movie again and see if I can get over the one issue I have with most Martin Scorsese films. I hate saying this about one of the all time greatest of American directors, but I have always felt like Scorsese movies can feel monotonous. He finds, through astounding production ability, a mood for his movie and never deviates. He may change color scheme and environment, but the score and the editing tend to stay the same throughout the picture. To many film enthusiasts and Scorsese himself, there's nothing wrong with this. My taste for Scorsese films has always been only slightly dissatisfied by a slight dragging feeling. I got that feeling during parts of Hugo.

I almost feel terrible complaining about such a thing because Hugo is one of the best movies about movies ever! A lot of credit can go to the original author of the book, The Adventures of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick. This author did extensive research on the cinematic innovator Georges Méliès whom this movie is the focus of. He also does a great service to the post World War I Paris and the train station this film is set in. 

This movie is such a delightful education that I hope will interest a new generation in the creative art of film-making. There is no question that it will interest adults more.

The Artist

Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo in Jean Hazanavicius's The Artist

 **** out of ****

The Artist is just damn cute. I've always had an admiration for movies that pretend to be from another age and get it so right. It means that they put a lot of work into making it look authentic, which has to be very difficult. Then they can relax and embrace the naiveté of another era and do silly things like in this movie where a cute dog goes to find a police officer for help, which would be an eye-roller in any kind of modern context or approach. 

Some may not see the point in resurrecting another era of cinema or any kind of art. The objective here doesn't seem to be adding any kind of twist. For example you can look at how Spielberg and Lucas took their love of cheap adventure serials and turned them into technically sophisticated colorful epics like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars. Tarantino did the same with seventies exploitation B-movies. Then you also have your spoofs like Black Dynamite and Down with Love which were made to seem like old movies but were subtly mocking them.

Like 2002's Far From Heaven, the filmmaker is clearly in love with a form of another time and is making a movie that they wish had been made back then. The viewing experience of The Artist is just the same as watching a great movie from the silent era. What separates it from those old films is that it is a silent film about silent film.

Everyone in this movie is amazing. They're natural physical actors. Every now and then, when spotting a familiar character actor, I would feel a bit of surprise because I forgot I was watching a new movie. 

This film is just so sweet and innocent. It feels like such a special gift to watch something that puts into perspective that what worked so well back in the twenties still works now.

Midnight in Paris

Owen Wilson is Gil visiting the 1920s with Corey Stall as Ernest Hemingway and Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris

**** out of ****

I'm a Woody Allen fan. Maybe you're not but you have to appreciate that this is a guy who makes a movie a year. Every now and then you get one that is weak or semi-pretentious and every now and then you get one that is entertaining and brilliant.

Here's an episode of AV Talk where they discuss this film and recent Allen films.
 
Midnight in Paris is a movie that Allen has always needed to make because he finally addresses and questions his obvious contempt for the modern world. 

This is his nostalgia-themed film. It's a comedy about a writer (Owen Wilson) who thinks the ideal time and place for him would be the nineteen twenties in Paris. This was a time when all his artistic heroes frequented the clubs and bars discussing their visions and producing them. While visiting Paris with his not-so-nostalgic girlfriend (A bitchy Rachel McAdams) and her America-centric rich parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), he takes some time out to wander the streets at midnight where his wish comes true. A twenties-era vehicle filled with partying Parisians picks him up and take him back in time to the twenties for the night. Our protagonist finds joy and inspiration from this midnight visit and decides to make this trip through time every night where he meets people like Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stall), Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), and many others.

Michael Sheen is a genius, as always, playing a pretentious twenty-first century art enthusiast who seems like a faint echo of the man in the movie line from Annie Hall.

On one of his trips he falls for a woman who was one of Picasso's mistresses played by the lovely Marion Cotillard. Our character's love interest from another time has characteristics that give this escapist surreal comedy weight as he learns of her nostalgia for the early 1900s and lack of contentment living in the twenties. 

Allen is predictably clever enough to avoid any sci-fi or fantasy explanations for why the time travel happens in this story. Like Groundhog Day, or Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, the surreal plot needs no justification. We are only interested in the circumstances it creates.

13 Assassins

Kôji Yakusho is Shinzaemon Shimada, a man driven to kill an evil lord he knows will bring about and age of endless cruelty in Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins

**** out of ****

There is a serious lack of Samurai films that I've seen. I can't claim to think this is a film worthy of Kurosawa fans because I've only seen a couple of his films. The source of 13 Assasins is kind of unexpected: The maestro of the horrific, Takashi Miike, a man who made one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen, Audition.

There is a moderate amount of gore in this film but the violence is cleverly paced by delivering the most unsettling images of cruelty at the beginning which inspires a journey for vengeance that has close to no graphic results until the movie's final thirty bloody minutes.

What's behind this carnage is a really good story about a group of Samurai who are so appalled by actions of a sadistic lord, they agree to dishonor their code of loyalty and stage an assassination on the lord as he travels. 

This is a very entertaining piece of historical fiction and it isn't to be believed. It has a slight over-the-top edge one might expect from an American Western. That comparison is nothing new to Samurai flicks.

That's all I can really think to say about this movie. I thought it was awesome.  

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

A bunch of shit all happening at the same time in Transformers: Dark of the Moon

 * out of ****

I hate Michael Bay. There are few successful directors working today who come close to my disdain for him. I dislike his movies so much, I think I need to see a shrink to find a psychoanalytical explanation for why there is an awful bad-fast-food taste in my mouth when I watch a movie by him. What is clear, is the annoying combination of kinetic visuals and maxed-out sound mix that all his movies have. There is also the shallow perspective of his characters and subject matter. If there are middle school or high school teachers who show Pearl Harbor to students in history class, they ought to be ashamed. Why? Because Michael Bay films are stupid and even with a profound historical subject like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he couldn't help but give America a dumb outlook on it's own history.

So here's what I have to say about Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Needless to say, I didn't like the first Transformers movie and I walked out on the second one. I am honestly willing to give any of them a chance because giant robots fighting amongst the skyscrapers of a major city is cool. ILM's special effects are always guaranteed to deliver... and then Michael Bay is always guaranteed to make the action unintelligible. The extent of my respect for him is that he is a hard-working director of high production standards. That doesn't amount to much when he seems inept at knowing how to make a character like-able or how to pace a movie so that there is a sense of payoff. I'm sure that in his love-life, he skips foreplay and immediately employs a jack-hammer. You can sit down and watch a Bay movie and see a scene of great spectacle, top-notch special effects, intense editing, and music that is coming to an apocalyptic swell -and it's only thirty minutes in. He's skipped over giving the audience a reason to care about what's going on. That could be perceived as a movie that's like a ride -but it's not. He cuts way too much and his shot's don't manage lead from one to the next with any kind of grace. It's disjointed chaos and the closest thing I could relate that to is a giant videogame you can't play.

Describing how I feel about Bay films, I would think, would describe how I feel about this one. But I'll try to describe the film's highlights to the best of my recollection: All the Transformers betray their amazing design by talking like dopey cartoon characters and are given dialogue that sound's like pre-recorded cliches. In a movie that's trying to bring a cartoon to the real-world, the Transformers should be more interesting than the humans. Alas the movie's real concern lies with the deflated ego of Sam Witwicky who just wants a little recognition as a savior of the world (from the events of the previous films), is having a little trouble with the relationship stability with his replacement babe, and is stuck with an embarrassing car. In a Michael Bay film, a man's in a lot of trouble when he doesn't have his hot babe and cool car. 

He goes job-hunting in what I guess is Bay and screen-writer Ehren Kruger's excuse for comically driven character exposition. Bay says he's inspired by the humor of the Coen Brothers... I'll find another opportunity to expound on that weird claim in a future review. This portion of the movie is scarce on explosions but heavy on what Bay must perceive as awkward humor without a grain of subtlety. Craziness breaks out. Leonard Nimoy does the voice of a traitorous Autobot who joins the Deceptacons to take over the world with Chicago as their home base. The Autobots are banished but -surprise- come back anyway. Sam's babe is in trouble. The Soldiers who have been in all three films without an ounce of character development show up to resist the occupation showing off new military tech which is supposed to impress us even though it's being showcased in a movie about giant robots. Things blow up. A great amount of complication in the plot ensues and I have a headache.

Here is Half in the Bag's review.
 
Sometimes, I think there is a lack of objectivity when I watch a Bay film. I feel as if there is anything being offended more than my eyes and ears, it is my sense of morality. He seems to love things that I think are bad: Egotistical protagonists, materialism, negative racial-ethnic-gender-sexuality stereotypes, militarism, and American supremacism. There are people out there who will never be offended by such things. Bay has an audience and I'm afraid I don't speak for them... 


But here's someone who speaks for me:
Check out this scathing review of this movie and Michael Bay's career from AICN.

The Descendants

A moment of beauty in Alexander Payne's The Descendants

 **** out of ****

The Descendants is a movie that feels very honest. I don't know how to describe it. Considering how it is a family drama that deals with tragedy, I really like how it dodges becoming overly sentimental. I also like how it's quirky bitter edge never betrays the seriousness of the film's story and characters with needless cynicism. 

A Hawaiian father (George Clooney) has an enormous amount of responsibility through juggling a family-inherited land decision, rekindling with his children, and a wife in a coma. Things get more complicated and the movie drifts with the main character into a world of emotional confusion. We are with him empathizing and rooting for him through his struggle to stay rational.

Alexander Payne is well-known for bitter drama comedies like Election and Sideways. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky points out that most of his films aren't as evolved as this one because everyone is a caricature except for the protagonist. I might have to agree with one. I like Payne's work but sometimes it has a 'everyone's stupid or crazy except for me' kind of alienating theme going on. I feel like The Descendants thankfully more mature than that. There is even a character in it who seems to be the dopey comic relief and turns out to be more human than you thought. 

I have always enjoyed Payne's ability to show people as their plain believable selves. They look so far away from the way we have come to expect people to look in the movies. He avoids glamour or reserves it for the appropriate characters while everyone else looks like people might in your family picnic video: loosely dressed for comfort, past their prime, and maybe not perfectly in shape. He inhabits the Hawaiian setting with very ordinary people and there is still a magical charm about the location and the music in the film that gives it such pleasant character. 

This movie is very slow paced and I think it worked quite well that way. I really can't think of a damn thing wrong with this movie. 

The Adventures of Tintin

Andy Serkis and Jamie Bell are Captain Haddock and Tintin through motion capture animation by Weta in "The Adventures of Tintin"

***1/2 out of ****


The Adventures of Tintin plays the Zemekis game of modern digital movie-making and pulls it off better than anyone else has. This is a top quality kid adventure flick that has all the devoted energy you could imagine from two of the most spectacle driven filmmakers working today.

Steven Spielberg directing and Peter Jackson producing is a winning combination. I was under the impression for a time that Spielberg wasn't very good at adventure stories anymore. Maybe it took a big lovable geek like Jackson to be his new George Lucas.

The animation approach was a perfect choice for bringing this beloved Belgian comic to life. Live-action would have been a constant battle against the real physical world. This movie exists in it's own whimsical environment where all the objects and characters are zany but the backgrounds and sets are rendered so well they could pass off as real. As a result you are given the sense of a breezy adventure around the world dominated by entertaining caricatures.

Andy Serkis, once again, steals the show as a drunken ship captain. He still proves to be the most refined professional at motion capture acting. Somehow, his performance comes out more expressive than everyone else in the film.

The story does lag a little near the end but I can't say I got tired. I'd say it is the only weakness to this movie. It does surrender to a MacGuffin formula where I don't care as much about what the characters are after than I do for the chase scenes and rich visuals. I had that kid-like feeling watching this one. I seriously wished this had come out when I was ten years old. It's just too much fun.   

Check out this very fun interview with the two greats who produced this movie. Holy crap! Jackson looks normal again! Really, if you're a geek, watch it!

War Horse

The film's hero, Joey, gallops at top speed through the horror of the trenches -one of several astounding shots in the gorgeous film, "War Horse".

 ***1/2 out of ****

I think of a short time in my late teens and early twenties when I had gone from being a Spielberg child to a sullen cynic hell-bent on rejecting his then-current movies. Those were the years between Schindler's List and Minority Report when I started perceiving how his films could be so transparent in their manipulation. It was a time when I saw a hero of mine for all his faults and rejected him like a young man might reject his father.

Spielberg is a director who is going to tell you how to feel and leave very little emotion up to the viewer's choice. His movies are emotionally driven and rarely intellectual. He is also not particularly good at comedy. I think I got over these issues during my late twenties when I started to understand everything else about him that makes him one of the greatest directors ever. 

The man is in love with spectacle just as much as he is with people. As a movie fan I believe that every Spielberg movie is worth watching -even the bad ones. When Spielberg fails, there isn't the slightest indication of laziness on his part. He blocks long takes and embraces the naturalism of overlapping dialogue. His movies guarantee a rich quality through the help of Janusz Kaminski (and other great cinematographers) and the enchanting music of John Williams. Outside his work, just watch the guy talk about film. He's very thoughtful. I recently noticed it's almost as fun to watch Spielberg geek out on his favorite movies as Tarantino.

I address the history of my feelings about the director as a preface to this review because War Horse is easily the kind of Spielberg film I would not have liked during the phase I described at the beginning. It is a very manipulative tear-jerker that asks you to view a story of miraculous triumph in a time and setting where nothing of the sort happened... and the character isn't even a human.

The film doesn't seem to owe as much to history as it does to film history. This is Spielberg making a classic war movie. The ending shot made me think of Gone With The Wind. Like Baz Luhrman's Australia, it is an emotionally driven drama that uses a very disturbing period in history to deliver a classic Hollywood-style audience friendly epic that would have been completely embraced if it had been made fifty years ago.  

Movies like this are comfort food for me. I felt love for the Horse in the film as he endured the hardships while changing hands between the different sides who suffered the needless cruelty of World War I and how they were all able to stop for a moment and show this noble creature mercy. It is a film that is full of wishful thinking. This is well-executed escapism which is one of the two biggest reasons I like going to the movies.

Here is Ebert's review.

Melancholia

Kirsten Dunst in Lars Von Trier's Melancholia

** out of ****

It's hard to see a movie that has a lasting effect and call it bad. It's unusual for any movie to have that kind of power over me at all. Melancholia is, no doubt, very strong and gorgeously executed. Lars Von Trier is a director who can upset his audience. What separates his good work from bad, is complicated. Maybe it has to do with how meaningful the film feels to the viewer.

Whether his work is good or not, I feel as though this is an artist venting his misery to distract himself from suicide. He usually creates characters in a situation that is hopeless and gets you interested in them. It's as if he sees beauty in sadness and maybe, you the viewer, might hope for triumph. But he is just going to take the movie further in to hell.

His last film, Antichrist, hypnotically seduced me into the sad, yet empathetic world of it's two characters and then released it's horror. For that, I thought it was excellent.


Melancholia is just as morbid, if not more, but I felt a great distance from everyone in it. This is Kirsten Dunst's greatest performance that I've seen. That performance is still alienating  because it embodies true inescapable depression, which even inescapably depressed people don't want to think about. Von Trier surrounds us with the beauty of a dream wedding. It's luxurious and tasteful. He seems to want to share a pain that comes with depression: Even being surrounded by true bliss is no consolation.  He's created a dark nightmare world where everything is beautiful but no one is good except for a child who Dunst's character constantly turns to for her only faint sense of security. 


The other problem I had is that this film is in two acts which both feel like very different films. The first is the wedding party I described. The Second shifts to the point of view of her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) after the wedding. The plot shifts to be about a planet called Melancholia which is coming towards earth and the sister fears it will collide with us. This part of the plot was only conveyed in a surreal prologue to the movie and had no exposition during the wedding party. I don't know if this is to suggest that the last part of the movie is something of a dream or not. I just know that during the last part of the film, the depression and despair are stretched out to an unnecessarily tedious level.


In the end, I suppose this movie subscribes to an attitude that laughs at human beings attempts to be good and welcomes apocalypse.

The Help

Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer in The Help

 *** out of ****

Hey white people! Do you feel white guilt? Well now you can relax. 

The Help offers 24-hour relief from such feelings.

How does it work? 

By creating a fictional white girl who bravely defends black maids during the years of Jim Crow laws in the American south. Comic relief plays a part as well. You, as a white person, can feel reassured that you too may have been a good person back in such a pressure-filled terrible time. Understanding the injustice done to blacks is always much easier and less alienating when a white character, who black characters are cool with, acts as your vessel.

Now that I've dished out the sarcasm necessary to vent my disdain for movies like this, let me be objective: The Help isn't a bad movie. I just think it's a shame that we live in an age when black-made movies expressing a black American voice rarely get attention. We've taken a major step backwards in the history of 'race in film' when 'white perspective' stories about black people are the only ones that make successful films. The Help is still emotional, empathetic, and, above all, well-acted.

The movie is what it is and I can't blame a fictional work for not being more authentic. It is an entertainment that has a lot of life breathed into it by a superb cast, of which the heart is the excellent Viola Davis. Listen to the interview here as well as her defense of the film.

This is like a refined version of a Hallmark TV movie. That ought to give you an idea whether this is your kind of flick or not. It's classic American cinematic drama with doses of silliness. Which is something I don't mind.

The cynicism I feel isn't so much about the movie. It's more about the audience it attracts: People who want a story about such a sad subject to give them a false sense of gratification.

Here is another opinion worth considering from Scott Tobias of the AV Club.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Rooney Mara is Lisbeth Salander in the new version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

***1/2 out of ****

It is no surprise to me that I just saw a very well directed and produced movie. David Fincher is called one of today's greatest directors and I have no argument with that. I was disappointed when I first found out he was making a movie that had already been made. Sure, he's perfect for the material, but it just sounds too easy to look at a film that already works and see how it might be better. Frankly I think Fincher could assemble a team to do a remake of Citizen Kane and I wouldn't be terribly bothered. Well maybe I would. The point is that he's too good an artist to be improving the works of others. 

This movie looks and sounds gorgeous, it's perfectly cast, intense, Trent Reznor's score is no-surprise fitting as hell, and there is a part that uses the music of Enya in the most unexpected way.

 

There are minor changes in the story that don't bother me, when comparing films. The films running time of 158 minutes could have been shortened a bit by tightening up the subplot of Blomkvist's reputation and it's repair. This section made what felt like an unnecessary extra act tacked onto the end of the film.

Mission: Impossible -Ghost Protocol

Jeremy Renner and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible -Ghost Protocol

*** out of ****

Here it is: An Action Movie!

The Mission: Impossible movie series has been a vessel for film directors to have a little exercise in their abilities for action and spectacle with little consequence except for giving people a fun time at the movies. No one is truly invested in the series protagonist Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and no one needs to be. We're simply watching an able-bodied actor perform stunts and survive impossible odds. The investment in these films is over how well the action and thrills are executed. Mission: Impossible -Ghost Protocol is exactly what I needed it to be.

Brian De Palma, John Woo, and J.J. Abrams have had their hand in this franchise and now one of today's greatest directors in the world of animated cinema brings us a fun-filled intensely choreographed action spectacular. Brad Bird had a talent in his animated films for evoking great performances through naturalistic voice actors and subtle character-driven animation choices. In live action, he brings weight and gravity to some seriously cartoony ideas.

The highlight of this film is in Dubai where Hunt has to climb the side of the worlds tallest building. You have to give a lot of credit to an animation director who knows how easy it is to simulate such a thing with today's digital tools but doesn't. He also brought IMAX cameras along for the ride.

Of course there are plenty of CGI special effects, but like the other movies in this series, only the best. ILM's John Knoll who supervised the groundbreaking train scene in the first one returns to deliver more eye candy including a chase scene in a sand storm.

Simon Pegg is funny. Paula Patton is drop dead gorgeous. Jeremy Renner adapts to any materiel he is given like the professional he is. And of course Tom Cruise runs, climbs and does that intense look that make people afraid for those in his personal life.

J.J. Abrams who directed the last movie returned to produce this one. Abrams and Bird make a great team. They produce action which feels like a relief from the current shaky-cam kinetic editing method. Things feel coherent like they actually bothered planning how one shot would connect to the next. The other mission accomplished here is making this outing more of an ensemble piece. In the first two films the scenes where Ethan Hunt worked with a team seemed seldom. The 'team' aspect of Mission: Impossible is important given that the TV series it was based on was always about a team on a mission. They've lived up to that expectation with this movie and avoided Hunt being James Bond for the most part.

I really don't think anyone ever intends to make put a profound twist on this franchise. All of the entries have threatening ideas of global catastrophe but play it safe by creating enemies and issues that have little to do with current events. Attempts to breathe a little emotion and personal understanding of who Ethan Hunt is may seem a little irrelevant but a noble effort to treat the audience like humans. The point is have fun and forget about it.

Check out this review from the AV club.