Is Bigger Better?
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The Tree of Life, dir. Terrence Malick (2011)
Terrence Malick has made five films in thirty-eight years. All of his films are recognized critically as masterpieces. Keeping with that tradition, his most recent film The Tree of Life won top honors at the Cannes film festival last month. Speaking about the film, head of the Cannes jury Robert DeNiro said, “It had the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize.” DeNiro’s offhand comment is invaluable to deciphering how this film has steadily risen, without much apparent consideration, to a respectable position within the pantheon of contemporary American filmmaking.
The movie is basically the story of Malick’s Texan youth in the 1950s, intercut with glossy meditations on the history of life on Earth. Sean Penn, playing the older version of the young boy we see constantly intimidated by his father (Brad Pitt), wanders awed and aimlessly through a gleaming present-day metropolis. There is a quiet voiceover, often whispered, presumably because only serious things are whispered. As with any of Malick’s films, bizarre moments are captured with a grace that makes them undeniably appealing. In one scene a band of young, directionless boys destructively wander the hinterlands of their hometown; a father intensely urges his son to hit him as the camera floats gently before their faces; children frolic in clouds of hazardous DDT.
What sets these sequences apart from the rest of the film is their total honesty. They don’t defer to clichéd images that stink of Planet Earth—they instead capture the weirdness of being young, the inanities of fatherhood, strange moments that are genuinely past. Even if these aren’t real memories, they’re still something known, something felt, something represented.
However, the elements of the film that haves garnered most praise, confusion, and appreciation are the sequences concerning the origins of life. (more…)
City of Light
by Giampaolo Bianconi
I spent two rainy, somewhat cold, humid days in Paris last week. Exhausted and dirty, I felt like a young hero from a Balzac novel: none of the nobility, all of the fervor. At least I wasn’t wearing Tevas and crew socks. (more…)
Domestic Animals
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The Fantastic Mr. Fox, dir. Wes Anderson (2009)
It’s been widely remarked that, in a sense, Wes Anderson has been making animated films all along: consider the seeds of his kid-in-a-candy-store stylizations in Bottle Rocket, the prep-school pretensions of Rushmore, the whole-hearted storybook sentimentality of The Royal Tenenbaums; through to The Life Aquatic’s more playful and adventurous scenarios and The Darjeeling Limited’s barely-there characters and overpopulated, super-symmetrical frames. Anderson’s pop-baroque style necessitates that he take a heavier-than-heavy hand in the design of his films, culminating perhaps in his collaboration with Louis Vuitton on the animal-print suitcases for Darjeeling. Animation, then, gives Anderson the opportunity to exert near-total control on this film: not only the shots and performances, but every set, object, and character was cut from whole cloth to Anderson’s specifications. The Fantastic Mr. Fox, though, was animated in London, while Anderson spent most of the shoot in Paris, issuing commands via a barrage of emails, telephone calls, and other fiber optic channels. He literally phoned this one in. (more…)
The Great Imitation [Part Two]
by Adam Hirsch
[The following essay began as a review of three movies that came out this past weekend: Julie & Julia, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and (500) Days of Summer. However, in the middle of watching them, it began spiraling into something much larger. It's in three installments, one for each film. -- AH]
I left off in the last installment by arguing for the existence of a grey area within imitation of an objective art wherein the actual form and procedure of imitation makes everything jell. By “grey area,” I mean to say the subjective portion of the imitative capacity in the work that differs from person to person and action to action. The imitation, when completed in this correct form, becomes new in some way.