There is fair bit of meat on the bones of the multiplex this week and Kurt, Andrew along with a sneezy and congested Matt Gamble tackle Terrence Malick, Woody Allen and the current state of the X-Men franchise. Everyone seems to have a different stance on these films, and the discussion is pretty lively. Beware of spoilers but stick around for some important tidbits and caveats regarding Midnight in Paris. The segment re-naming contest continues another week, free DVDs for everyone, Yummy! In the meantime, we do go through 3 or so What We watched each (Drew does Zack Snyder, Kurt does Terrence Malick, Gamble does a couple of upcoming feature films (and warns us off of both of ‘em) as well as more HBO. Gamble takes off but Kurt and Drew soldier onward past the three hour mark along to DVD picks, Netflix Instant arrivals and departures. Plus, all the free trimmings you are accustomed to from the this third row podcast: Do you want to find out answer to life, the universe and everything? Is it true that if Bill and Ted had a Ménage à trois with Audrey Tautou, you could get a perfect film? These pressing issues and more in this weeks show. Cheers.
As always, please join the conversation by leaving your own thoughts in the comment section below and again, thanks for listening!
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http://rowthree.com/audio/cinecast_11/episode_216.mp3
Full show notes are under the seats…
IN-HOUSE BUSINESS:
– Jandy’s 100 Reasons Why I Love the Movies
– Thanks to Mad Hatter for the kind words in his latest podcast
– “what we watched” naming contest
List of DVDs for grabs:
The Day After
Azumi
Crimson Rivers
Kentucky Fried Movie
Land of the Blind
Elizabethtown
Quills
CQ
Hard Core Logo
The King
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
Dark Water (Japanese version)
MAIN REVIEWS:
– Tree of Life (Kurt’s Review)
– X-Men: First Class
OTHER REVIEW:
– Midnight in Paris (Kurt’s Review)
WHAT ELSE WE WATCHED:
Andrew
– The Way Back (1/2)
– 300
– Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Houle
Matt
– Art of Getting By
– Larry Crown
– “True Blood”
– “Game of Thrones”
Kurt
– Badlands
– Thin Red Line
– Seven
DVD PICKS:
Kurt
– Another Year
– True Grit
Andrew
– Superman: Anthology [Blu-ray]
– Another Year
OTHER DVDs NOW AVAILABLE:
Jandy’s DVD Triage
True Grit
The Housemaid
A Matador’s Mistress
Just Go With It
The Company Men
61* [Blu-ray]
The Outlaw Josey Wales [Blu-ray digi-Book]
American: The Bill Hicks Story [Blu-ray]
The Wild Hunt [Blu-ray]
The Man Who Would Be King [Blu-ray digi-Book]
Vera Cruz [Blu-ray]
Hair [Blu-ray]
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert [Blu-ray]
New York New York [Blu-ray]
The Bridge on the River Kwai [Blu-ray]
“Breaking Bad” (s3)
“The Big C” (s1)
INSTANT WATCH NEW RELEASES/EXPIRING SOON:
Kurt
– The Fly (new)
– Summertime (expiring June 15)
Andrew
– “Masters of Horror” Series (Dante, Argento, Carpenter, Landis, Miike, et. al.)
– Jackie Brown (expiring June 15)
Also:
Jandy’s DVD Triage
OTHER STUFF MENTIONED:
Pearl Harbor Trailer
NEXT WEEK:
Super 8
PRIVATE COMMENTS or QUESTIONS?
Leave your thoughts in the comment section below, or email us:
feedback@rowthree.com (general)
andrew.james@rowthree.com
kurt@rowthree.com
Midnight in Paris needs to pander — most people don’t know who these individuals are.
So did you like the movie Antho42? As much as I did?
Listening to the Filmspotting episode right now. For the first time I 100% agree with Minnesota Matty. It’s 100% magical. Yet there’s no lame CGI portal and crazy effect – it’s just a cab ride into the past. It isn’t explained and hand holding (thank God) – It just is. And it’s just pure.
If I had to nitpick ONE thing I didn’t like in the film. The one scene with the stolen earrings. That was the one small bit that I think could’ve been removed. But it’s so short that it didn’t bother me in the end.
One person’s magic is another persons lazy. That Allen and company get all there is to say about ‘nostalgia’ out there in a couple scenes, the rest is just treading water in slow motion for most of the time.
What did you think of the Private Investigator thread and its resolution?
Me? I thought it was just as charming as the rest of the film. It was not a particularly interesting plot thread, so I liked how they just whipped it to a close in an amusing manner.
I think the difference between us Kurt (and this goes back to why you like 28 Weeks, and I like Days), is that the film needs to really say something about something to you. It has to have a clear and interesting message. For me, I don’t really need that. I just liked the wit and magic of it all. A LOT.
Yeah, it was pretty good; I like films that incorporate magical realist elements.
When is the new Movie Club Podcast going to be release?
On Tree of Life, I hadn’t considered and kind of like Kurt’s notion that the endless summer (which is in fact disproportionately long in the film) might have some justification for its length in depicting the tension between the lived life and the tree of life. The myopic perception of the infinite through memory resists this being a God POV exercise… the spiritual is eluded to, the awesomeness of the universe are presented, but then MOST of the film is captured through the spectrum of one person’s memory… no matter how heady you want to get about the immensity of life, it gets filtered through the terrestrial act of living. I like the way the sun continually breaks through in the background of shots (this reminds me a lot of Silent Light actually how light itself feels like a cosmic force, bleeding around the characters that they are too blind to see as something revelatory).
You have the cosmic pov first, then the human, then perhaps where these two merge into grace. Still grief becomes the awakening to the cosmic, which is a curious arrangement, placing parenthesis around it, perhaps eluding that even that is subjective in a way. What comes first, man or God? I found it strange why it starts with the death, but it does make sense if you want to frame the cosmic ambiguously as neither subjective nor objective (Malick was a Heidegger fan, I could see this kind of philosophical musing on reality by him)
“what we watched” naming contest:
The side dishes (orders)
or
The leftovers.
Also begins with the quote of Job which if I remember right is about understanding the spiritual through living rather than in theory. The expectations, the pomp the circumstance, the facile sense of justice and righteousness must be torn asunder in order to get to the real revelation.
…which is the Mother’s story as much as the child’s. The movie begins with HER grief, doesn’t it? She seems to be the Job of this story, yet from the child’s perspective she is perfect (we each find salvation in someone else?). She followed the rules of a 50′s mother, and yet the seed of corruption broke into her one child, while the other one died for no reason – she seems to be the one tested. To mix analogies, Sean Penn’s character is more like Judas, betraying his mother’s sanctity, not living up to the ideal that she represented. He begets the problems of his parents, which is I take it, the reasoning for calling it The Tree of Life. Suffering begets suffering, but is the suffering random or is there grace within it? It is the grace part I find hard to parse in the film.
There’s a tradition of Christianity (which I am in, incidentally), that believes strongly in God’s grace as mediated through other people – that we see grace expressed through the actions and love of people much more often and just as meaningfully (perhaps more meaningfully) as direct, individual spiritual experiences. Add in experiencing God through nature, and that’s what I felt from Tree of Life – that even though there’s this sense of the infinite and the spiritual throughout, it’s focused through the mother especially, but also the father and the other brothers. I realize that interpretation is colored by my own particular beliefs, but I felt it much more strongly than in films that actually purport to be “Christian.” That’s kind of a version of what you said, Mike, about understanding the spiritual through living, not theory. You get a more real understanding of the spiritual by living and loving and interacting with other people than by sitting alone and thinking about it – something that seems foreign to current understandings of “spiritual,” but that I think Malick has captured in some way.
Mike, there was an article I read a few days about about Malick and Heidegger – I don’t know enough about Heidegger to get it all, but it was interesting. http://notcoming.com/reviews/treeoflife/#
EDIT: Wrote this before your latest, Mike. Not addressing the mother-as-Job question, which is an interesting one that I haven’t thought about yet.
Silent Light is way better.
That is all.
“There’s a tradition of Christianity (which I am in, incidentally), that believes strongly in God’s grace as mediated through other people – that we see grace expressed through the actions and love of people much more often and just as meaningfully (perhaps more meaningfully) as direct, individual spiritual experiences.”
If that case, why do you even need God or religion?
In that way of thinking, Antho, grace doesn’t FROM other people, but THROUGH them – you still need God ultimately, but he usually works through people rather than directly. I don’t want to get into a religious debate, just wanted to express what I felt from the film.
The creation stuff comes after a direct question from the mother, doesn’t it? I am starting to think that there is something deliberately subjective about it relating to the mother, and as Kurt mentioned, the notion of randomness or grace in the dinosaur scene. It feels part and parcel of the grief component of the film, and I have a hard time grasping how Sean Penn’s part plays into this (my problem with the flow again). The rewatch will help clean this up for me I think. Does Sean Penn even show up before the creation montage? I guess it has the duel function of being both the creation of the universe and the creation of the child, macro to micro (now it seems obvious!) and that is how it segues into the birth which begets its own dilemmas.
BTW I love the added touch with the dousing of DDT as a kind of sly remark on our hubris.
and Jandy, thanks for the article, first, I had no idea Malick lost his brother early in life, and second, I MUST buy his translation of Heidegger. I find the Heidegger I have read insanely difficult but fascinating. What seems facile on the surface of Tree of Life, I have no doubt, has some implication in philosophy deeper than most superficial readings allow.
I do think there’s some perspective-shifting going on in the film. The creation stuff, as you say, Mike, seems to be the POV of the mother, which kind of makes sense, since she’s the most tied in to the spiritual aspects of things. Then I think there’s both a Sean-Penn-looking-back POV and a Jack-as-a-boy POV that aren’t the same. Does Brad Pitt have one?
I should actually listen to the rest of the podcast, I only barely tapped the beginning of the review before I started doing other things.
Saw Midnight in Paris again today… with the gf. My relationship shall live on. She LOVED it.
Already some Oscar buzz for this one. Most likely in the writing department. But possibly direction as well.
A very VERY dark horse, but Owen Wilson has about a 10% chance of getting a nod as well. And how awesome is Cotillard and Allison Pill!?
Loved the movie just as much on a second viewing.
I don’t hate the film, it panders to me like a MFer, but it is not without its charms, just that the schtick wears thin after a while, it gets its points across pretty much after the first act, then it dawdles its way to a sort of silly finish.
My negative reaction is more to everyone going gaga over this sort of film than because the film is badly made or whathaveyou. I will say again, Allen’s previous film says much of the same things, but far, far better.
One thing can’t remember if we mentioned for Tree of Life is the score. It’s f’ing fantastic. Also just the sound design in general. The murmur of the surroundings is terrific as well. Malick let’s us breathe in the atmosphere. A lot like Reichart’s “Meek’s Cutoff.”
My entry for the “what we watched” naming contest: Cinema Sightings
“Analogous Add-on”
re: the ending of Seven
see
http://choice.ytmnd.com
I have now completed 6 episodes of Game of Thrones.
I thought the first episode was weird-good, then it was boring, then it got better, and I fell behind.
And everyone said how it picks up and gets crazy. I just finished episode 6. I’m bored again. Wayyyyyyy bored. These actors are pretty shitty and uncharismatic. At this point I’m only really in it when The Dink is on screen, and only he can carry this thing so far.
I have the rest of the eps so I may as well finish and see what’s up, but I really don’t see what has people so excited.
“everyone said how”
You’re ruining shit for yourself man.
Goon, just finish it and then come back and discuss!
I finished Game of Thrones. The last few episodes were definitely another upswing, but overall I still give a resounding Meh to this series and don’t know if I’ll be back.
Just got the entire set of S1 Game of Thrones. I plan on getting deep into this before FANTASIA hits.
Balls ddep?
Goddammit!