- The Tree of Life
It's been a long time since reviews were as polarized as those for The Tree of Life, the newest film from director Terrence Malick. The film was booed at an early Cannes screening, and then went on to win the coveted Palme D'Or. The film is a meditative marvel, a look into the deceptively simple life of a family in 1950s Texas, against the backdrop of cells splitting, waters raging and creation itself taking place in the background.
It's a film about God, with a capital G. Characters offer prayers, lamentations and ask Him questions from time to time and get painfully oblique replies: the wind rustles leaves and grasses, the sun splits the sky, but questions like "Why?" and "Where were you?" go unanswered. Asking the questions are a man (Brad Pitt), his wife (Jessica Chastain of The Help, The Debt) and three energetic boys. One boy becomes a grown man, in pain (Sean Penn); another doesn't grow up at all. The father is taciturn, loving in turn. The mother is the embodiment of grace. "I will be true to you, whatever comes."
Penn (also in Malick's The Thin Red Line) has little to do, but Pitt and Chastain deliver powerful performances with minimal dialogue. Child actors are likewise spellbinding, as they seek out danger and adventure in the neighbourhood. Tangible images of family life give way to light and fluids at the dawn of creation, in an astrophysical realm. And yes, at one point there is a dinosaur bleeding on the beach. (The Tree of Life is nothing if not a great dinner discussion waiting to happen.) Each shot is a masterwork, though fleeting enough as not to appear self-indulgent. All these images tell the story of a life lived (and lost) better than a conventional narrative could. Yes, it's a tricky film, in the 2001: A Space Odyssey vein. But once you fall under its spell, even at 140 minutes you won't want it to end.
No extras on the standard disc.
- The Trip
Two middle-aged guys drive around England's lush countryside, eating fabulous meals and doing impressions. That's all that happens in The Trip. But what a trip it is! Michael Winterbottom once again showcases the deadpan humour of Steve Coogan, on assignment to do restaurant reviews for The Observer magazine, and his last-choice of traveling companion, fellow actor/comedian Rob Brydon.
There's a thin story thread about Coogan's loneliness and his need to bed women the way Don Quixote tilted at windmills, rooted in his career insecurity, no doubt. When Coogan does manage to get a cellphone signal out on the moors, he has awkward conversations with his girlfriend Mischa (taking what is probably a permanent break in America) and dispiriting calls with his slick American agent, who keeps promising that Coogan will be as big in the U.S. as he is in Britain. Brydon has a wife and baby at home, but Coogan returns after the week away to a lonely apartment, and no less enlightened by his week away than when the assignment began.
But "It's not about the destination, it's about the journey," says Brydon, half-sarcastically. And overall the film feels like we're spying on two old friends, who battle do see who can do the best Connery, Woody Allen, Billy Connolly or Michael Caine impression (both actors excel at it), in between singing Abba, reciting Wordsworth and Coleridge, and eulogizing one another. Would you rather be cremated, or have a headstone, like Elvis? Would you let your child have minor surgery if it meant getting a Best Actor Oscar? The patter between the two men is utter nonsense, and completely hilarious. Keep the bit on the costume drama on repeat: it's a side-splitter
Special features on the standard disc include a making-of feature, which breaks the magical spell somewhat. There is an extra with Rob's pics and climbing footage, plus trailer, deleted scenes, a close-up look at the food served at each location, and movie poster gallery.
- Transformers: Dark of the Moon
If you didn't anticipate leaving Transformers: Dark of the Moon with a headache, it's your own fault. This is a Michael Bay movie, people! Bay excels in skull-splitting entertainment, never more so than here, with the third Transformers film.
The space program was propelled into action by a lunar crash by a Transformer, you know. JFK rushed to send Neil and Buzz (who makes a cameo) to the moon not just to plant the flag, but also to conduct a top-secret mission on the dark side of the moon when the cameras weren't rolling. The Autobots and the Decepticons are after the same technology that crashed there, via an Autobot voiced by Leonard Nimoy.
It's an orgy of metal clanging together, fireballs erupting, infrastructure succumbing to force. Quite sexy, really. But forget plot. There are some new interesting characters who speak briefly into the cacophony (John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Ken Jeong, Patrick Dempsey) but the rest is left to Shia LaBoeuf, who yells for two hours straight, and new girl Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who wears skin-tight white dresses, and glasses, once, in her scene with Obama.
The Transformers are superior beings, or so we're told, but we've managed to teach them a great deal of bad habits. And so, the smaller ones go through the girl's underwear drawer (wait, she wears underwear?) and the bigger ones use bad words. Thank you, Hasbro.
Surprisingly, no features on the Blu-ray disc.
