THE TREE OF LIFE: PURINA CRITIC CHOW

      

     On Christmas day of last year, my wife and I decided to take a look at The Tree Of Life, a movie I had heard a thing or two about and that apparently had garnered a strong reputation on the basis of its artistic merits. It seems that most critics loved this movie. I read a portion of an interview with Steven Soderberg where he said one of the reasons he plans to retire from filmmaking is that, after having seen The Tree Of Life, he realizes he doesn't really know how to make great movies. It's just that good.

      Okay, whatever. The movie's a little over two hours long, and feels like seven. It wants us to sense the rich interiors of its characters' lives, yet manages to come off as superficial and trite. It tries to wow the viewer with trippy visuals showing the origins of the universe and life on Earth, and instead seems a derivative imitation of the last fifteen minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (critics I've read who liked the film compare the two favorably, while at least one other, like myself, shrugged and said, “What's the big deal?”).

I'm so high right now

      I'll give it points for a couple of things. It's beautifully photographed, with sumptuous colors that effectively evoke the sleepy, sultry atmosphere of a Texas suburb. It's the only movie in the history of cinema to contrast the ups and downs (mostly downs) of a middle-class American family in the 1960's with the lives of dinosaurs. Did you ever expect to see a movie that references both the Vietnam war and velociraptors? I didn't. So, kudos for that. It's the one original thing the film has to offer (I make a point of harping on originality because some people talk about The Tree Of Life as if Terrence Malick has ushered in the Second Coming of the Art of Cinema. I don't believe he has).

If you recall, Jurassic Park was also kind of artsy-fartsy

      Mostly, we get a lot of dull, interminable Moments Of Quiet Human Intimacy of the sort that make film studies majors pre-ejaculate in their pants (the main reason theater floors are so gummy).

Shhh...Significant moment in progress

      Oh, and should I mention that Sean Penn is wasted here? He sits around looking tired and mopey, and then climbs around on some rocks. The man's one of the world's greatest actors, and all Malick could think to do with him was have him putter around like someone killing time before a dentist appointment. If you have access to a Ferrari (imagine you have really rich friends), do you just take it for a quick spin around the block, or get out on the open road where you're pretty sure there won't be any cops around? Malick seems satisfied just to look in the glove compartment. 

I know how you feel, Sean

      This has been one of the rare instances of an art film getting released to mainstream multiplexes. Unless David Lynch has just put something out, that hardly ever happens. It might go a long way toward explaining why some people are so excited by this thing.

      Going a little off subject: now that I've mentioned Lynch, I'd like to say that my favorite art film of all time is probably Eraserhead. After that, Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Both are wild, bizarre, funny, disturbing, and wholly unlike anything that ever came before them.

      For that matter, so was 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If you look very closely, you can see where Brad's ear is pierced

TRANSFORMERS MOVIES HAVE WHISKEY BREATH AND DTs

    

     I know I'm a little late to the party when it comes to bashing the Transformers movies, but hey, I only just started this blog and I've got a lot of complainin' to do, dammit!

      I should start by saying that I've yet to see Transformer 3 :ExplodykablamrobotsasstitsFUCK!, mainly because the thought of sitting through the thing makes me kind of sick to my stomach. I'm pretty sure I'll just feel like I wasted time better spent squeezing my testicles in a vice, much the way I felt after watching its predecessor.

      About three years ago my wife and I vacationed for a few days in San Francisco, and decided one evening that it would be fun to take in a movie. The theater closest to our hotel had an IMAX screen, making the proposition that much cooler. The only other movie I'd seen in IMAX before then was Behold Hawaii at an IMAX theater in Spokane WA when I was ten years old. It featured lots of swooping shots over the ocean and the heavily-forested mountains of the islands that actually had me swaying and leaning in my seat. At the time, IMAX was an expensive novelty that only showed short movies (generally under an hour) specifically shot for giant screens. More recently, with studios trying to get filmgoers back in the cinemas instead of staying home to watch stuff when it comes out on video (or better yet, downloading the movies and bypassing the whole payment part), IMAX seems to have become more prevalent, with high-profile films such as The Dark Knight and Avatar making appearances on the humongous screen (with only certain scenes or shots filmed in the IMAX process).

      We went in and saw right away that our choices were pathetically limited. The only thing showing in IMAX was Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. We knew the movie was going to suck—the first film had been nominally watchable but mostly annoying, equal parts toy commercial (much like the animated series), adolescent masturbation fantasy (Megan Fox is less an actress and more a sticky back issue of Penthouse)...

The full range of Fox's performance

  ...and pro-military propaganda (what better way to get the next generation of youngsters to enlist into whatever the hell war the U.S. will be fighting by the time they graduate high school than to show troops mixing it up with cool giant robots—the real-life counterparts of which, in all likelihood, will render traditional military service obsolete by the mid-21st century?).

Go Joe-bot!

      Transformers 2 was going to be more of the same and no doubt about it, but when was the next time we'd be within 50 miles of an IMAX screen? Sometimes you have to jump at opportunities when they present themselves, and damn the consequences.

      We purchased our ridiculously expensive tickets (almost twenty bucks apiece—and Hollywood wonders why people pirate movies) and entered the cavernous IMAX screening room. “Room” isn't the right word, I should call it an auditorium or concert hall. An arena. I bet you could've fit four hundred people in there with seats left over.

      The movie got rolling, and it turned out even worse than we expected. Lame drug humor;  sophomoric bathroom gags, fart jokes, and an unwelcome close-up look at John Turturro's ass...

This, in IMAX.  Jesus Christ

   ...vaguely racist comic relief in the form of two robots who speak in stereotypical “street” slang (now that I think about it, everything onscreen that wasn't robots wrestling and punching each other was an attempt at comedy, so maybe the movie needed some “serious relief” [pathos relief?]):  and actors wildly overplaying every scene, even the usually stupendous Turturro (the man starred in Barton Fink, for Christ's sake. How can someone who has worked with the Coen Brothers on more than one occasion also work with Michael “In My Movies You Can See The Screaming Face Of Hell” Bay without suffering fatal whiplash from the abrupt shift in quality?)

Seriously, did Rick Santorum write this?

 

      In short, Transformers 2 is, as of this writing, the fucking stupidest big-budget movie I've ever seen, and that includes Battlefield Earth—which at least has the saving grace of being unintentionally (very) funny—and everything ever produced by the team of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerlich. If the first Transformers was aimed at kids, the sequel was aimed at children with large brain tumors crushing their frontal lobes. My IQ noticeably dropped after seeing it. I get frequent nose bleeds, my head hurts, and I can't remember the sixth grade. The only way Michael Bay can regain his honor in the eyes of human civilization is to commit ritual, televised suicide, preferably by eating his entire filmography in laserdisc format.

      Small wonder I haven't gotten around to seeing the newest one.

      Sitting in the same row with us, about three seats over to our left, was a very drunk couple. The person sitting closest to us was particularly fucked up, laughing uproariously at the weak sight gags, standing up and waving her arms during the screen-filling IMAX scenes, and talking throughout at the top of her voice. We considered moving to different seats, and would have if we hadn't feared getting permanently lost, plus we weren't up for a three-mile hike to another part of the coliseum.

      The couple was irritating, obnoxious, and supremely aggravating. It's only in the last few days that I've come to realize that they served as living companion-pieces to the movie they guffawed, yelped, and nearly vomited through. The Transformers trilogy (again, I haven't seen the third one yet, so I'm making an educated guess) is in many ways an identical experience to sitting to next to a loud, socially oblivious, stinking drunk, and inspires a nearly identical urge to get away by any means readily available. The only advantage these movies have over a drunk is they don't spill beer on you.

Robot scrotum jokes:  a sign of the endtimes