The movie is a bit oblique, for sure, but I don't understand people who demand their money back or find it so impossible to digest that Salon magazine has to print a guide to it. You don't have to like it, you may find it pretentious, but try for a second to experience a movie that, contrary to what you are used to, does not masticate everything for you in a formula that you already know by heart so that you don't have to actually use your brain for two hours.
The Tree of Life is not pretentious in an intellectual way. It does not demand a whole lot of brain activity. Sure, it does not feel like it has a three act structure, and there is very little dialogue, and there are no robots destroying mankind, or women desperately looking for males, or heroes conquering something or other. It is a personal meditation on faith and nature. It requires that you surrender to its images, to the feelings it evokes and let the flood of visuals and moods wash over you. I think it is meant more as an emotional and aesthetic experience than an intellectual one. It is not pretentious like say Godard's films are intellectually pretentious. If there are any references in it, biblical, literary or otherwise, you don't lose the power of the experience if you don't know them. It's not the kind of movie who makes you feel like a fool by being erudite and pedantic or by name dropping cultural references. If you approach it with an open mind, and more, an open heart, you may get a lot of beauty out of it.
So stop the whining. Be truly adventurous and experience a different kind of film.
It's not gonna kill you.
It's style is like that of a first-year film student trying to prove to everyone how deep they are.
ReplyDelete^^ agree. and when i realized the only reason i was still watching was to prove how deep _I_ was, i turned it off. never watching again.
ReplyDeleteA movie does not have to be "intellectually pretentious" for the majority of its watchers to hate it.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you found the "movie" beautiful. The rest of us close-hearted folks were wanting a story to be told, you know, like the trailer suggested. Of course it's not gonna kill us, only bore us and waste our time without warning.
Not all of us have enough time on our hands to appreciate and enjoy every 2 hour hodgepodge of imagery with half-assed plots. If you enjoy walking into a hamburger joint to be unwittingly served beer-soaked chicken liver, that's fine and all. But please don't assume or imply that the reason why you don't mind the film while most others hate it is because you are "truly adventurous" with an open heart and the rest of us are retarded monkeys who just lack the intellectual capacity to enjoy anything different.
Words can not describe how pretentious and retarded you sound.
Too bad we haven't evolved far enough to use telepathy. Perhaps if we did we could figure out WTF the "genius" who made this film was thinking. Cable is far too good for this waste of time. Misleading trailer. Had I seen it in the theatre I would have not only demanded my money back but also demand compensation for time lost. Garbage.
ReplyDelete"The Tree Of Life" is about a Mother accepting the death of her son, and a man dealing with the death of his Brother.... What movie did you see?
ReplyDeleteWhen you realize it's all just about how a guy gets lost in the desert (much like lost) with a few other castaways, finds a time machine, goes back through all of evolution, trips on some acid, visits niagara falls a few times then builds some skyscrapers it really is kinda cool.
ReplyDeletePiece of crap movie. The writer should have just gone to therapy for a fraction of the cost instead of vomit that mid life crisis literate bs on us
ReplyDelete