Weirdly enough, the initial frenzy of Tweets sent immediately after the screening succinctly summed up the gist of the polarized reactions:
“As beautiful as TREE OF LIFE is, it’s pretentious drivel of the worst Cannes kind.”
“Tree of Life is naive, pretentious, hypnotic, enthralling and absolutely unmissable.”
“Utterly mesmerising first hour, slightly listless second, generally unmissable”
“visually breathtaking and technically masterful, but excruciatingly drawn out and annoyingly pretentious”
“A glorified perfume ad” Ow.
“Tree of Life just ended, and it’s a very sad and beautiful…wank? The ultimate refutation of narrative? An interminable tone poem?”
“Tree of Life is a prayer.”
and my favorite:
“….sad to report that Samuel L. Jackson does not show up after the credits. Unclear as to how Tree of Life fits into The Avengers.”
A month to goooooo.
I read a part of Ebert's review and am not entirely sure if I understand what he means by prayer, but I'm curious. I will definitely see ToL regardless of the reviews. My friend joked that it seems like the Great American Novel in film form. It does look visually stunning if nothing else.
ReplyDeleteHow much do I love Ebert? I think "prayer" probably describes it perfectly - all of Malick's movies, especially The New World, are spiritual tributes to the land, to nature, meditations on grace and loss. A lot of the reviews have also described it as "impressionistic", so I hope everyone will approach it the way they would a painting - capturing the emotions and feeling of fleeting moments through the medium of film, rather than any traditional approach that calls for narrative and usual requisites expected of movies.
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