IT: Chapter Two (3/5 Stars)

I read Stephen King’s IT in high school and remember it provoking a couple of sleepless nights. It was a very good book, but it had certain flaws. For one thing, it was incredibly long, over 1000 pages. It seemed to me at the time, then and now, that the book had no editor. Noone at the publisher ever thought to read the manuscript and suggest that any portions of the book be cut for time. By this point, Stephen King had more than a decade of bestsellers behind him. Maybe as a rule the printers felt his words, all of them, were sacrosanct. Secondly, I never really understood IT. I wasn’t sure whether it was a form of imagination whose power would wane if someone didn’t believe in it, or whether it was a real thing that could kill you whether you believed it was real or not. And then there was the general weirdness of IT, which I will explore more later.

The movie “IT: Chapter 2” is a good movie whose sum is less than its parts. It has problems, and to its credit, they are the same problems of the book. The movie is too long with too many scenes of two many characters that the Director Andy Muschietti did not have the courage to cut. And it isn’t really clear what IT is or how it really functions. And its weird. So the movie has the same problems of the book, which in turn make it a mediocre movie. However, if what you wanted to see was a faithful adaptation of IT, well, you got it, weirdness and all.

The book has been wisely separated into two chapters. The first chapter came out a few years ago and told the story of the main characters as kids. They had an initial victory against IT, personified by a nasty clown named Pennywise (Bill Skarsgaard), but did not ultimately vanquish IT. Then six of the original seven kids left town and generally forgot about their haunted town of Derry, Maine. As grown-ups they receive a message from the one person who stayed Mike Hanlon (played by Isaiah Mustafa). IT is back. The others don’t quite remember yet, but they all show up in Derry. Their numbers include Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain), Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy), Richie Tozer (Bill Hader), Ben Hanscrom (Jay Ryan), Eddie Kasparak (James Ransome). They called themselves the losers club back then and each had their pet “loser” qualification. Bill had a stutter, Ben was fat, Mike was black, etc. Of course, there were also seven of them and they were all friends, so how much of a loser could each possibly be. Like the heroes in Stranger Things (shout out to the cross-over Finn Wolfhard), who played ceaseless hours of Dungeons and Dragons together, I felt like this Losers Club had a lot of fun and support, besides, of course the evil town and its murderous clown.

It is hard to describe what IT is because it seems to have extraordinary capabilities (it can show up anywhere and look like anything) but weirdly unable to kill people when it really wants to. To put it another way, a lot of non-main characters die horrible deaths by IT. The main characters get put in the exact same positions but generally escape through no particular kind of sustained logic. Whether IT is harmful or harmless seems to gyrate wildly in the movie (as it did in the book).

IT the movie like IT the book is of a highly episodic nature. The talented cast are together in a few scenes, but generally move on to do their own things. Something that from a character development standpoint, is welcome, but when it needs to be done six times, takes a long time to do. It is interesting though how in the first chapter the most interesting characters were Bill, and Ben. The most interesting characters in this chapter are Richie and Eddie, who coincidentally also provide most of the comic relief. There are plenty of computer-generated effects in this movie. If it weren’t for the multitudinous amount of fantastical episodes, I could point to this movie as a good way to use special effects to develop character.

Then things get weird. It think Stephen King may have smoking a good deal of peyote when he wrote the ending to IT. There are giant turtles and weird rituals and at least one scene that would be very very illegal if it was adapted for the movie screen. The movie doesn’t get as weird as the book, but it certainly does get weird. I’m glad for it even though the weirdness makes the ending a whole bunch of nonsense. I rather they did it this way, got as close to the weirdness in the book, without breaking any laws, then to see something stupidly simplistic. The ending is not going to work either way because IT never really makes any realistic sort of sense. At least then you can make the climax memorably weird.

One last general observation: What is a movie star anymore? This is a very good cast with leading actors who I have seen in many movies. But is any one of them what you think of when you think of a movie star? Do we have movie stars anymore? The biggest movies out there are franchises with giant casts (James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain’s biggest movies sales-wise were in the X-Men franchise). Who do we have left that is a genuine movie star the way that Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne were movie stars? Perhaps Tom Cruise, Leonardo Dicaprio, and Brad Pitt. But they are all getting relatively old. Do we have any young movie stars? Such a thing has perhaps been lost with the general splintering of entertainment and culture.

Crimson Peak (2/5 Stars)

If you had asked me what I thought about director Guillermo Del Toro before I had seen Crimson Peak I may have answered, “He’s like Tim Burton, but scary.” Both men have this undying affinity for the macabre and their movies are works of art to that end. But whereas Tim Burton has long ago forgotten what scared him about ghastly figures, Guilermo has made at least one great movie, “Pan’s Labyrinth” that tapped into true horror. I was hoping “Crimson Peak” would be more like the latter but unfortunately it is more like former. Whatever shock value the undead may have had in Guillermo's earlier movies has worn off and now he presents them like Burton does, all style and no suspense.

The movie stars Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) as a young aspiring novelist in the era of Victorian Gothic Romance. She is subject to sexism by chauvinist editors who do not like her romantic stories that have ghosts in them. This is not too big a plot point and is more of an excuse for the character to comport herself in an annoying way that suggests she has two centuries foreknowledge of being on the right side of history. 

Her budding feminism takes a back seat when she meets a dark handsome count (Tom Hiddleston) whom she feels she should dislike greatly. He is an Englishman from a declining family who is seeking investors for a clay pit dredger he has designed. They hit it off during a waltz at a ball and it seems like wedding bells until something odious is uncovered by a private investigator. Her father threatens the man to break off the engagement in a cruel and public way or he will reveal to his daughter this dark dishonest lie behind his betrothal promise. Take a moment and review that last sentence. If the secret were told to the daughter she would certainly not marry the man, thereby in all probability breaking off the engagement in a prudent and quiet manner. The father takes his course of action because he loves his daughter. Actually he obviously hates her but the movie does not seem to consider this. Compounding his daughter’s woes he is murdered the next day and she marries the count anyway because of course she has no idea why she should not marry him or even suspect foul play.

If I seem unduly vague about the deep dark secret it is because the movie is too. We are not told what the secret is until the last act of the movie. It should also be noted that Mia’s mother died when she was young and her ghost visits her at night and gives her cryptic warnings. She enters the room in the creepiest way possible and whispers “Beware of Crimons Peak!” This too is because she loves her daughter but really could this ghost be more unhelpful. Although it is not revealed what Crimson Peak refers to for a very long time, it could not be easier to figure out what is meant once Mia moves to England and stares at the Count’s estate for the first time. It is obviously haunted and in fact has been especially designed by Guillermo to to look haunted. This detail escapes our young lady.

There is a true disconnect here between production design and what would be considered honest human reactions. The fault lies all over but it begins with Guillermo Del Toro who has put quite a lot of work into making everything in the movie look extravagantly horrible from the mansion, to the costumes, to the macabre undead ghosts, but does not expect the characters to react to them as if they are seeing them. A good example is when our lady sees her first ghost in the mansion. It is a grosteque anatomically correct blood soaked man with half his flesh ripped off. It stalks toward her. She is frightened but not nearly frightened enough by all human standards. And once she leaves the room she is a little jazzed which is the same to to say that she is impossibly calm. Then there is the sister of our Count played by Jessica Chastain. Hers is an awful one-note performance of disdain and malevolence. She does not even pretend to put a conceit of civility while the Count is courting our young lady. This fazes our lady but not enough for us to believe that she is the intelligent woman the movie would have us believe she is. To say that Mia Wasikowska’s performance is wrong is to cover over the fact that the character itself is unbelievable and the story impossible. 

In conclusion, Guillermo has pour all of his efforts into the production design and treated his characters like afterthoughts. Many times a good production design will help performances by making the world the characters inhabit more believable. Here it does the opposite. Guillermo is certainly a great visual artist but that does not necessarily translate into good storytelling when it forces characters to react in weird and unnatural ways. Not all bad production design is cheap and devoid of love. 

I don’t really a critical thing to say about this but it does merit mentioning: Mia Wasikowska’s hair is both the best possible style (while up) and worst possible style (while down) in this movie.

Given that the ghosts are generally unexplained and our lady’s reactions to them are bewilderingly muted, I started wondering half way through if they were even dangerous. They were certainly not particularly scary at any point. There does happen to be an unflinching exposition of gore at the end of Crimson Peak. I don't have a problem with gore as far as to say that it needs to be earned. The audience should be engaged in the story to a point that when our lady cracks Chastain's head in with a shovel, the reaction is not accompanied by bad laughs and groans. This is a bad movie. Guillermo needs to find something that scares him next time. This is just so much fluff.

The Martian (5/5 Stars)

Science. It works, bitches.

- XKCD T-shirt

“The Martian,” like this year’s other great blockbuster “Mad Max: Fury Road” is a movie that would not have been possible before the silent revolution in moviemaking that took place early this century. It is a niche blockbuster that combines the sort of expensive spectacle you have seen before with an unapologetic high common denominator focus of a particular audience. With Mad Max it was gearheads and metal freaks, in this case its engineering nerds and space wonks or whatever they call themselves. Gone are all the trappings of a Hollywood movie. There is no love triangle or family drama, no superpowers or aliens, no class warfare or crime, or even sex and violence. There is a Mars mission already underway at the start. There is a sandstorm and the team has to abort. During the abort, astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is struck by debris and presumed dead. The crew leaves Mars without him. But he is not dead. He is very much alive and now marooned on Mars. It will be another four years before the next mission can get there. How will he stay alive?

No, really, how exactly will he stay alive? Because the math (and there is a lot of scenes of Mark counting things and making calculations) says he will starve in 300 sols (Mars days) if he keeps to the rations he has stored. What follows for the entire length of the movie is a series of engineering problems. Mark has to use his knowledge of botany, chemistry, physics, and several other nerdy things to stay alive on this alien planet for years with nothing but the tools that were brought for a thirty day excusion. In the past studios were very hesistant to give a bunch of money to a movie that would take ten minutes to take the audience through a step-by-step chemical process on how to create water (interesting spoiler: it takes fire to create water) so the main character can grow potatoes. But this movie has taken that chance and given the box office receipts, it will succeed wildly in finding an audience nobody cared to cater to before. 

If you are into this sort of thing. If you are not turned off by people being smart and building cool things, then “The Martian” plays as an almost absurdly easy crowd-pleasing movie. The optimism and can-do attitude and cooperativeness of the best of science is all over the place. Whereas many other mainstream movies are individualistic in that stupid Ayn Randian sort of way (good me against bad world!), Mark Watney’s experience is no Robinson Crusoe type of existence. He is surviving by standing on the shoulders of giants: the knowledge passed down to him from his education, the equipment built for him by the NASA network, and once he achieves communication with NASA, the around the clock expertise, problem solving (math!), and selflessness of everybody on the ground and in space.

For a movie that is ostensibly about one person on one planet, the star power of the cast belies that it is merely that. In the spaceship, the rest of the crew includes Commander Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, and the underrated Michael Pena. On the ground Jeff Daniels runs the show, Kristin Wiig is his press secretary, Sean Bean is in charge of the astronauts, Benedict Wong and his team builds the rockets over there at the Jet Propulsion Lab, Chiwetel Ejiofor is the satellite expert, and Donald Glover is calculating the fail-safe plan in Astrodynamics. Everybody is working together to save Mark Watney and though there are many arguments about the best way to do it, nobody is working against each other. Thus although there is plenty of suspense, there is pleasantly no drama.

Not that it’s easy. And this is where this kind of movie, even as successful as it will be, will be hard to replicate. It was based on a book written with no time constraints by an engineer in network with a bunch of nerds who were checking his work for scientific errors. The whole point was to be as scientifically accurate as possible not merely do enough to assuage an audience. I do not know how to replicate that on purpose but I sure hope some studio will try.

Ridley Scott directed this movie. He made his name a long time ago with such movies as Alien, Blade Runner, and Thelma and Louise. It has been awhile since he has been culturally relevant but he never stopped being an extremely competent filmmaker. He was the perfect person to be in charge of this movie, which is less about drama and more about technical expertise. Matt Damon stars as Mark Watney. This too is perfect casting as he excels at playing exceptionally smart/charming/handsome people.

One last note: would you be surprised that this movie was almost Rated R? As I said before, no violence and no sex, but there are Fucks abounding. The rule is that you have one Fuck. Two Fucks is an R.There are at least six or seven Fucks in this movie. The astute filmmaker will take notes on how you can have a Fuck in a movie without adding to the Fuck count. And yes take note on when to use that one real Fuck. I think they made the right choice here. After performing self-surgery without anesthesia is fine use of your one Fuck. Having said that, Fucks notwithstanding, all parents who want their kids to go to college and study something other than art history should take them to see this movie, It is a wonderful humorous optimitistic story about determination and teamwork that is appropriate for kids of all ages.

A Most Violent Year (4/5 Stars)

“I have always taken the most right path”

- Abel Morales

The fate of this movie may be a prime example of the whims of zeitgeist. Just like it sometimes feels a mega hit comes out of nowhere (see “American Sniper”), so can a strong well made movie go nowhere for no particular reason. Writer/Director J.C. Chandor’s third feature “A Most Violent Year” did not make much money or garner a high number of award nominations (strikingly The National Board of Review made it their movie of the year though it should be noted that this designation happened before everyone else, including the Oscars, completely ignored the film). Perhaps though this movie should not yet be written to the dust heap. I have a feeling that the maker is so strong that we might be discovering this ‘lost’ movie ten-twenty years from now. It is further proof that Chandor is as versatile as he is competent. His first movie was ‘Margin Call’ an intricately detailed and highly expository view of high finance on the day of a stock market meltdown. His second movie was the exact opposite. He ditched all the words and wrote a nearly silent movie about one old man at sea named “All is Lost.” This time he switches direction again with a period piece about a heating oil business under attack by rising crime in 1981. It looks and feels entirely different from his first two movies except for the invisible sure hand of the director behind it. Sometimes when you see a movie you can just sense the controlled confidence of a Director with a capital ‘D.’ Alfred Hitchcock movies have this feeling. So do Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan movies. The movies of young J.C. Chandor have this feeling as well.

The story concerns an immigrant Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) and his wife Anna Morales (Jessica Chastain). Abel is on the verge of expanding his business greatly by buying a refinery for his heating oil business. He has just given a down payment of $40,000 and expects to close the deal with bank financing at the end of the month. At the same time somebody has been hijacking his trucks and selling his oil at a discounted rate to one of his competitors. At the same time the district attorney (David Oyelowo) has started an investigation into his company for complying with the standard industry practices which were generally fraudulent. His wife, who has mob connections, does the books for his company. His lawyer is played by Albert Brooks who has completed the transformation from a young neurotic comedian to an old steely dramatic actor. The man is a heavy now and fits in great with the last great character of this movie, the brooding emptied out noir scape of 1980s New York City. I did not live in NYC during this time but I’ve seen the movies that were made in the early 1980s. One in particular, Escape From New York, imagined a future where the island of Manhattan was transformed into a high security prison populated entirely by criminals. People were not very optimistic back then and you can feel it in this movie.

There is violence in “A Most Violent Year,” but it is portrayed in a way that is almost never seen in movies. Whereas an action movie generally has highly stylized set pieces that ignore many real world implications this movie dives right into the nitty gritty of real life. Take these plot points. There is a discussion as to whether the drivers in the heating oil trucks should be carrying firearms. This is a concern because if a driver shoots a gun on a crowded highway, whether in self-defense or not, it has huge legal ramifications for the company. And if the legal inquiries happen that may scare off the financing from the bank that is central to the real estate deal. I wish action movies would take a look at how J.C. Chandor has made this movie because the violence that takes place albeit with fewer explosions has far more weight and suspense ingrained in it. There is even a car chase in this movie, which simply does not feel like a regular car chase scene. It feels dangerous. For example, if they were to plow into a street cart of fruit (which does not happen but does happen in every other movie with a car chase) you can bet that the owner of said fruitcart would have a major part in the movie. 

The look of the movie is where J.C. Chandor is being his most innovative in this movie. “A Most Violent Year” follows the great cinematic tradition of period pieces that present the world of the past through the film stock of those years. If you are ever wondering why so many movies that take place pre 1960s are black and white or have at least some of the color drained out of them, well we remember those decades that way because all the movies were black and white. This is the same with the graininess of the 1970s. And here, the advent of videotape with its over saturated reds and browns gives “A Most Violent Year” its warm 1980s look. Certainly walking down the street in 1981 did not look like we see it in this movie but we remember it that way because that’s how we recorded it back then. Oh and my favorite set piece is the NYC subway completely overwritten with angry graffiti. That more than anything represents what is known as the Bad Old Days.

The acting is great. Jessica Chastain as always fits in perfectly with whatever she is doing. Oscar Isaac has the keen ability to look like someone who no longer walks around the modern world. In fact, in one of his first major roles he played a Roman Centurion (“Agora”). That sounds about right. I want to see him in a movie where he plays the antagonist in some ancient battle against Russell Crowe. It think he will do a very good job in his next movie that takes place a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

Oh and I was a fan of the Jews, those Orthodox Jews that inhabit South Williamsburg. Those are the guys that Abel does the real estate deal with. I used to do real estate deals with those guys too. You can just tell that anything that happens in NYC from the best to the worst, those guys are going to be relatively unaffected by it. They have their own culture and they have it for the long haul. 

Interstellar (4/5 Stars)

Whatever can happen, will happen.

Young Murphy Cooper (Mackenzie Foy) asks her father (Matthew McConaughey) why she was named after something bad. Her father replies that Murphy’s Law is not necessarily pessimistic. All it means is that (given enough time) anything that can happen will happen. The pessimistic side of this looks at chaotic unforgiving nature and all the ways it can and will disrupt the best plans of mice and men. But look at it in another light. For instance, if you believed that humans could adapt to anything, well then, given enough time our species should be able to solve any problem that the universe throws at it. Of course, the supposition that must be true is that human beings actually could someday evolve to be capable of anything, even going so far as to say master space and time. That is a wildly optimistic notion and it is surprising to come from writer Jonathan Nolan and director Christopher Nolan particularly since their non-Batman movies have been great explorations of self-delusion (memory in Memento, magic in The Prestige, dreams in Inception). But here it is, and it is a good thing the Nolan’s are in charge of this project because I’m not sure anybody else could have made it. It is perhaps the most expensive and epic intellectual exercise since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and only the Nolan’s have the box office clout to finance a movie like this. Try to see it in the theater because it is not going make any sense on a small screen.

The movie starts with humans on Earth confronted with the extinction of their species. It takes place about fifty years from now. Old Man Cooper (played by John Lithgow) talks of how when he was a kid it seemed like everyday something new would be invented. Imagine that, six billion people all wanting it all at the same time. But something happened in nature. There is this dust storm blight that kills vegetation. The only crop that can grow now is corn. The blight feeds on all the Nitrogen in the atmosphere and every year it creates more Nitrogen, which only makes the blight even stronger. Population has dropped. Technology has stuttered. Pretty soon humanity won’t even be able to grow corn and then everyone will die.

The last ditch effort of humanity is a secret NASA mission led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) to send a spaceship through a wormhole that has just been discovered near Saturn to a distant galaxy where hopefully there is another planet that can sustain human life. Matthew McConaughey, a retired pilot, is chosen for the job. So is Professor Brand’s daughter, Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), two other guys, and a couple of sentient robots named TARS and KASE. TARS has a humor setting in his A.I. and provides comic relief.

It is a very long journey and one of the most interesting conceits of this story is its portrayal of Einstein’s theory of relativity. One facet of this theory is that as one approaches the speed of light, the slower time goes for the mover. Another is that proximity to a black hole also slows down time for the mover. At one point in the movie a trip to a planet near a black hole that takes merely hours takes many years on Earth. And suddenly Murph Cooper is no longer played by the ten-year-old Mackenzie Foy but by the thirty-something Jessica Chastain. (It should be noted how remarkably similar Mackenzie and Jessica look like each other). I saw a great meme with a picture of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar that harked back to his first movie, Dazed and Confused, where he uttered the memorable line, “You know what I like about high school girls. Each year I get older but they stay the same age.” Of course this meme changed it a little bit. Now it reads, “You know what I like about my children. Each year they get older, but I stay the same age.”

Then there is a cameo by a well-known actor that I hesitate the mention because none of the advertisment material apparently wanted me to know about before he shows up quite unexpectedly. It is a great turn by that unnamed person. Matthew McConaughey continues his bewildering streak of very good movies. The same can be said for Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. And of course, it looks very impressive, the Black Hole and Wormhole especially. 

I don’t think I can say anymore without ruining some of the surprises. It is worth seeing, that is all. 

Take Shelter (5/5 Stars)

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Have you ever noticed that the easiest way to get a person to talk/confess/give up secrets in a movie is not to beat them up or threaten them? It is instead to bring into the room a loved one and threaten to hurt them instead. The scene usually goes like this.

Bad Guy: You will tell me what the secret code?

Good Guy: What are you going to do, kill me? Go ahead and do it. I’m not afraid of death.

Bad Guy: Oh I’m not that naïve. That’s why I don’t plan on killing you. I plan on killing her.

(Bad guy henchmen bring in abnormally attractive love interest bound and wailing)

Hot Girl: Don’t do it, don’t tell them the secret!

Bad Guy: I will count to three

(He points a gun at the hot girl)

Bad Guy: One….Two… (cocks pistol)

Mr. Bond: Okay okay, I’ll talk, I’ll talk!

Bad Guy: I thought you would, hahaha!

This is a cliché, but as with every cliché, it rubs up against a fundamental truth. Good people (i.e. the heroes of movies) don’t want to see the innocent get hurt. Such a concept scares them even more than themselves getting hurt or even being killed. And it is this truth that “Take Shelter” takes advantage of to great effect. Where most horror movies mine their scares from anatomical dissections, this movie simply presents an ordinary good person and imposes upon him terrible dreams of poison rain, mysterious bad men, vicious animals, and other forces that would harm, perhaps even kill, his loving family. This is a very scary movie and one of the best of the year. 

Curtis, played by Michael Shannon, has a loving family, a beautiful wife, played by Jessica Chastain, and a little daughter. He has a good job in construction. It provides him with a decent enough salary to afford a nice house, a vacation to Myrtle Beach every year, and a medical plan. And then one day Curtis has a vivid nightmare. There are gigantic storm clouds on the horizon. It starts raining a brownish kind of poison water. The family dog goes insane and attacks him. When he wakes up in horror the next morning, he can still feel the bite marks in his arm. What’s more is the sense of dread he feels in his bones. Something bad is coming.

Curtis has reason to worry. His family has had a history of mental illness. His mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was ten. She left him in the car at a supermarket and never came back. Such a thing happening to Curtis reasonably frightens the hell out of him. His family needs him. His daughter needs the medical plan. They still have loans on the house. Gas prices are through the roof. Either his dreams are portentous and a huge storm is indeed coming or he is going crazy. Curtis decides to prepare for both. He becomes obsessed with rebuilding the tornado shelter in the backyard and seeks help from a counselor about his nightmares and day delusions. There is a great scene where he walks into the counselor’s office, and calmly explains that he took the quiz in the back of their clinical magazine, and has found that he has 5 of the 12 symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. All he needs is two more to be diagnosed. Please doctor, what do I need to do to stop this before his wife, his daughter, all his friends, and the whole town figures out what is going on. He doesn’t want his wife to leave him and take his daughter. That would be a reasonable thing to do if they found out he was crazy. Curtis has so much to lose and the coming storm is threatening it all. It is hard to think of anybody conveying this more effectively than Michael Shannon does here. Shannon is not an attractive leading man. He has the height, face, and demeanor of a bouncer, elite soldier, or killer assassin character. To see this type of stoicism fall apart at the seams makes the journey that much more frightening. I’ve said before that it is rare when movies allow men to be brave because being brave requires an acknowledgement of vulnerability and that sort of thing is not considered masculine. This movie is the exception. What a brave man this Curtis is trying to be. Michael Shannon deserves an Oscar Nomination for the performance. 

This movie is the second feature of a young director named Jeff Nichols. Nichols’ first feature, Shotgun Stories, also starred Michael Shannon. It is a very good partnership. “Shotgun Stories” was an impressive movie, like most first movies of great directors, for what it accomplished with a budget of almost nothing. In “Take Shelter,” Nichols is aided with a little bit more funding and it has allowed him to add the special effects necessary for some serious storm clouds. They are threatening but never in an over the top distracting way. This movie is put together with such simplicity in theme, camera style, and plot that it is almost surprising how effective it is. Like a Hemingway novel, its effectiveness comes from the inherent truth within the frame. The fears are universal and the dread is real. We know that gas prices will never go down to what they once were. We worry about our risky home loans. We don’t want to lose our jobs. We need our health and our health care desperately. Freakish weather, due to climate change, is here to stay and only going to get worse. The sense that everything is getting worse and that times may never be as good as they once were is a palpable feeling in the air. If people one hundred years from now wanted to know what it felt like to live in 2011, they could do a lot worse then, “Take Shelter.” It is a movie of our time, told perfectly. It should be nominated for Best Picture.

Try to go and see it in a theater if you can. It should be perfect for Halloween.

The Tree of Life (4/5 Stars)

He’s the one

Who likes all our pretty songs

And he likes to sing along

And he likes to shoot his gun

But he knows not what it means

Knows not what it means

When I say….

In Bloom, Nirvana

“The Tree of Life,” is a very pretty movie. I admit I didn’t quite understand it, but that still won’t stop me from suggesting other people see it. I would say it is worth seeing just because it exists. Sure, it is probably a good idea to take some time to think about it or read an article or two about the meaning in order to draw your own conclusions. That is something I myself will attempt to do at the end of this review. But I don’t think you have to in order to enjoy the movie. If there is one thing about this movie I can definitely say, it is that it is not the least bit preachy or confrontational. The movie is rated PG. It contains gorgeous images that are flashed onto the screen at a dime a dozen pace. It is lovingly directed, acted, and edited with great attention to artistic detail and is told in a calming, meditative, and above all, spiritual way. There was once this very similar movie called “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It too involved an incredible scope of vision that intertwined the eons of history with a visual odyssey set to an amazing score. Sure it was kind of long at times and had a meaning that was kind of hard to grasp, but the children of the sixties had a good way of dealing with that problem. They got high before they saw the movie. Now I’m not saying that you should do that before seeing “The Tree of Life.” I’m just saying I heard it worked for “2001: A Space Odyssey.” No, I wasn’t high when I saw the movie. I was tipsy on white wine, which is totally fine with Jesus.   

The director of “The Tree of Life,” is none other than Terrance Malick. He has made five movies since 1973. Rounded out, that is about one movie per decade. It shows. A Malick movie is something that always looks like the creator took the time to make as perfect as possible. In most other movies, there will perhaps be a scene or a single shot of great beauty that will catch your eye. Those movies will almost always take the time to really linger on the shot and milk it for all its worth. This happens about every 30 seconds in a Malick movie. If you watch the trailer and then the movie, you will notice that most of the images in the trailer happen within the first half hour of the movie. There is plenty more where that came from and it is just as good. The cinematographer’s name is Emmanuel Lubezki and the composer’s name is Alexandre Desplat. You should remember those names, as it is very likely that they will be hoisting Oscars come next February.

The plot of the story is unconventional to the extreme. After a brief prologue concerning several family members hearing about the death of a 19-year-old son and brother, the movie takes a detour to show the creation of the universe, from the big bang to the formation of the Earth. Evolution takes over in a series of montages that could be described as a biologist’s wet dream. This includes dinosaurs. Finally a boy named Jack is born in 1950s suburbia. At this point, we finally get characters. There is the mother played by Jessica Chastain, the father played by Brad Pitt, and three boys played by Hunter McCracken (“Jack”), Laramie Eppler, and Tye Sheridan. The story of the family is told through vignettes of specific details. The camera flows through the house and surrounding neighborhood in a curious and wonderful way. Most of the time it doesn’t matter what scene came just before or what scene comes right after. When the people speak it has the tendency to break the spell, so most of time the characters don’t speak, or when they do it is whispered in a voiceover or replaced by the lyrical score. In a way, the actors are even really acting. They are more like models in a moving Norman Rockwell painting. The main conflict in the movie is Jack’s relationship with his domineering father, a strict disciplinarian who insists that his sons call him sir, do their chores very perfectly, and learn how to fight him, etc. He is a bully but is deliberately shown as having the belief that he is doing his son’s a service in getting them ready for a hard world. He speaks enviously of neighbors with more money and his failed dreams of being a musician. He has it all figured out for his kids though, that is until the end of the movie where something happens and he doesn’t anymore. Life goes on and the family moves away from their idyllic house in the suburbs. We then see Jack all grown up as Sean Penn. The movie loses reality as Sean Penn looks like he’s taking a journey into the wilderness until we see that he is meeting up with a crowd that contains his already dead parents. They all walk around a big lake together to the tune of a Gregorian chant. Then the movie and the song end with several Amens. I read Ebert’s review and he suggested that the last couple of scenes were some kind of afterlife. I’m going to take his word for it. (Although if heaven we’re walking around a lake for all eternity, I think I would rather be reincarnated.)

So okay, what the hell does all of it mean? I’ll take my best shot at it. We might as well start with the quote at the beginning of the movie. It says “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”  It is from the biblical book of Job. For those not acquainted, the book of Job is the story of a good person who has many bad things happen to him. Wallowing in self-pity and scorning life, Job is joined by three friends who insist that since God is just, Job must have done something to deserve his situation. Job disagrees. He does not lay blame at God’s feet nor ask for anything back but simply asks for an explanation. If he is guilty than what did he do? This conversation goes on for a while until finally God shows up to put in his two cents. And here is where it gets interesting. God doesn’t explain himself. Instead he chides Job for having the gall to even raise the question. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God asks. The point being that men do not have the knowledge or experience to understand what God is doing nor does God have the duty to answer the questions of his own creations. The book of Job is part of a series of books in the Bible called the Books of Wisdom (others are Proverbs and Ecclesiastes). These are kind of amazing books because in essence they take an agnostic view of God. They don’t deny the existence of God, but they also quite explicitly reject the idea that God can be fully understood. Ecclesiastes is particularly skeptical. It declares everybody to be wrong and everything done on Earth to be in vain. All of this just goes to show that no matter what your beliefs are, there is a book somewhere in the bible that will support them.  

My best guess is that “The Tree of Life,” is a deeply spiritual agnostic movie. It juxtaposes the creation of the universe over billions of years with the story of how young Jack’s father was really mean to him for seemingly no reason. It assumes that they are connected somehow in some greater plan but does not explain why or how. In other words, a connection between the different parts in this movie is something the audience has to take on faith. Either you believe it or you don’t. The ending of this movie drew giggles in the theater that I was in. I can understand that because I saw the movie and I can attest that it doesn’t make logical sense. But such is spirituality and I believe Malick gets it at least that much right by not trying to prove anything. It is a mistake I would think to look to biblical prophecies or miracles as definite proof of God or his will because basing belief of God on tangible things isn’t exactly faith. It is more of a pseudoscience. In essence, faith is about being presented with a legitimate mystery, attributing it to God, and accepting that you won’t be able to understand it. Science on the other hand is based on the assumption that with enough work everything is knowable and if there is a God, then how that works is knowable as well. The two are completely incompatible no matter what anybody says. Both points of view have their downsides when it comes to living life though. The linchpin in this movie is the conflict within the Brad Pitt character. He is struggling to master a world he doesn’t understand and ruinously brings that fight into his home instead of accepting the mystery and being thankful and enjoying the life that has been given to him. 

I don’t know, maybe.

For those interested in spending more than one restless night thinking about these sorts of things, may I suggest the Coen Brothers movie, “A Serious Man.” It is about a Jewish physics professor who wants a decent explanation as to why his life is turning to shit, just like Job.