Official Zhuk Rating: 9/10 bananas
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Omg I can't believe I wasted two hours of my life over this. Ok, the middle part (where there was actual ACTING and a STORY) was bearable - but all that crap in the beginning and the end and those stupid whispers. All the "artsy" pretentious crap really made me want to move to the next door theater where the Hangover 2 was showing.... |
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Yeah, too bad he didn't put "Omg" in the modern part of the film. That wouldn't have been pretentious. Pretentious is the kneejerk word every collegeboy tool uses when something goes for the mind and not just the genitals. Once in a while it is the right word, in this case, given the true definition, it's quite inappropriate and again merely a kneejerk word. Terry Malick was translating Heidegger when most people are consumed with how to score a six pack and where to park their uglies for eight or ten seconds. He has a proven track record of taking on big questions with vision, artistry, tenderness and courage. Like other magnificent artists, artists who take risks to find something new under the sun, he is not for everyone or for all times and situations. Tree Of Life in particular takes risks, has embarrassing moments, and could have been better given more time than the film business ever allows anyone. The mere fact that so many people, including many with decades of discriminating taste, are finding so much good and special in this film, whatever the nitpicks may be, more or less removes the massively overused word of pretentious from being a helpful or useful or anywhere near correct critique. Ponderous? Of course, in part. Enigmatic? Maybe. Need more viewings before you could ever decry that. Bombastic? I thought the music was in the beginning parts, but I withhold judgment until I see it more times. We have that rare filmmaker who really wants to take on the very and ultimately unknowable mysteries of creation, incarnation, family, love, deity and soul. That rare artist who goes beyond language and typical cinematic tools of inquiry--who really wants "acting" all the time, it's rank fakery in the end--to seek meaning and guidance during an increasingly tragic era of inestimable loss and suffering when the very species itself is on the brink of collapse or some new, perhaps even more compromised survival. Yes, you wasted your time. Yes, the whispers and tree shots have become too rote in Terry's films and no one has yet explained why this supremely talented and intelligent man and the great geniuses he works with have not disabused him of the notion that he should use such tropes so often. Yet, he has the courage of his own convictions and vision. He isn't trying to please us first, this is anything but a work of entertainment--which confuses and perplexes and baffles those who really only want that, even when they think they are taking in a more highbrow film or piece of music or work of literature. Malick wants us to experience his journey with these questions so that we might have something resembling a more aspected roadmap for our own journey up Calvary or out into the Cosmos, for most of life doesn't offer any such thing, just junk food and deceptions and the products of greed and mindless titillation. This film is a means, not an end. There will be many who don't appreciate it for that reason alone. Pretentious will be the word used most. Our schools and churches and even most of our art just doesn't offer any real help with the mysteries anymore, but you needn't like the film, and complaints and criticisms can be valid. Yet to damn the film on IMDB with near-meaningless and arguably incorrect cliches like "artsy" and "pretentious" while very barely providing one single minor example of the spoken tone of a fragment of dialog probably reveals a lot more about your pretensions and faculties than Terry Malick's. Forgive if I seem ad hominem, that's not the case, but I'm just tired of jejune observations and the obvious, worn out cliche words used to advance them over and over again. They waste time. My advice is never to attend another Malick film as long as you live, don't read Heidegger or Wittgenstein, avoid Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot like the AIDS, and try not to listen to anything beyond 4/4 time and without a partially clad singer. There's a whole ton of what any Tom, Dick or Harry might term pretentiousness out there waiting to defile your sensibilities. To put it all another way: Omg, whatEVER, better luck with Hangover 2! + User Reviews |
How do you watch such a film? You've got to lower any defenses you have. You've got to not allow yourself to try to make a sense out of everything you see. You've got to take it all, and let it enter you, just as smoothly as the film enters dinosaurs, cells, planetary evolution, or a simple living room of a troubled family. Make no judgements, consider nothing except the pure experience of being there, wherever the film takes you. Search no explanation, for there was no real rational reason other than intuition for images to be as they are.
Imagine a film about everything, with a remote storyline that talks about every theme, in every possible time of the world.
Imagine a film without a beginning or an ending. Circular meta-narratives, where you can pick up on any spot (i mean any) and you can create whatever inner narrative you want. A sky of images (like the mosaic poster of the film) where you can pick your own choices, and create whatever story you like. Or you can choose to frame the more palpable story visible in the film in whatever fashion you want. Up to you. The challenge is that you have to test the limits of your own imagination to live the film in its full extent. Nothing is predefined. Go wherever you want.
Now imagine all that delivered by someone who spent his entire film life trying to walk around the idea of plain old narrative layering. The absolute master of unrelated narratives, of off-screen details. The man who films hands and corn fields when he wants to say love; Who shoots the universe to build one of the most powerful expressions of intimacy, of mind's solitude in the film world. Contrast.
I don't know if this is the best film ever made. It probably is the strongest experience in film world that i got first hand, while it was coming out, new.
What is it? a film inside Sean Penn's head? a Story framed in the universe? part of it? metaphor for it?
I've heard a lot about how this film is a kind of 2001. I don't think so. Kubrick and Malick are 2 different kinds, 2 different approaches, purposes, different process, and different outcomes. Kubrick bends narratives to a point of perfection. Obsessive. Chess leaked all over filmmaking. Malick is the other end of the stick. Pure visual intuition, enhanced by Malick's intellectual background. Just because both directors are little fond of public appearances, and because both this and 2001 feature planets, that doesn't bring the films closer.
In 1963, Cortázar published one of the most important books of the last century, Hopscotch. The title of this comment is related to its original title, in Spanish. I think this film and that book have similar aspirations. Trace your path, you have the chapters, but you have to make an order out of them.
How this is done is in pure mastery of every tool of film conception. Every image counts, each shot was taken care with competence and passion, each frame, each camera move - Lubezki has worked with Malick, Iñarritu, Cuarón. Each collaboration adds a lot to what is being done. He really can read the director's aspirations, and deliver nothing short of mastery. At this time he has entered enough important projects to be considered one of the best cinematographers ever.The editing is world class. Every cut, whether the space virtual shots or the family scenes, matter to the narrative, whatever that is. What takes this to a whole new level is how, in this film, Malick tops his already incredible leverage of music. Editing has always equally present the visual as well as the sound scapes. Watch it, let it get absorbed.
This film demands an incredible lot from you, as viewer. It demands that you be a different person after watching you, that indeed you may change your generic approach to film- watching, or at least that you accommodate in you a new way to watch films. On a basic level it's about Malick's intuitions. On another level, it's about what you get on screen. But ultimately it's all about how you place yourself in the universe proposed.
My opinion: 5/5
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