These films have just about nothing in common. One is a drama made years ago, the other is comedy made last year; one has a very self-important tone, the other totally without pretension; one is about a search for a moral purpose, the latter is about the ubiquity of moral purpose. I’m going to have a hard time making this stick, except for the word Cedar in the title of both films. Ouch.

As luck would have it, they’re the two films I watched back to back. Still, they’re both American movies that are not set in major urban areas. There must be something that could be held up for a comparative analysis.

Cedars And Godliness

I know it seems like a joke and coincidence that I’m attempting to write a movie double of two films connected only by the word cedar in both titles. Cedar of course is on the flag of Lebanon and there are such things as Cedar of God. King Solomon’s temple used cedars. The mentions of cedars in Bible seem to indicate that God liked this tree a lot, amongst his creation of trees. According to some, it may even have been the tree used for the cross. Thus unsurprsingly, there is a lot of God-talk in the middle America of ‘Cedar Rapids’.

The Cedars in ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ is more psychological. The forest of cedars forms a kind of terrain where desire plays out, but at the same time the title indicates a condition of winter and a frozen landscape. The cedars in the film seem to envelope the living space and surround the people living in the small fishing town. The trees are like sign posts of the unconscious as the characters move through them towards a different consciousness. Thus, the cedar tree reference in both films conjure metaphorical link to something spiritual. That is not to say I believe in the spiritual or that even the characters in the film believe in the spiritual, but that there is a certain irony in the reference to the cedars in both films.

Small Town Blues

Both of these films are set in country towns. Part of the narrative involves the fact that people in small communities know each other all too well. The assumptions implicit in ‘Cedar Rapids’ is that there is a certain style of business that thrives in small communities and these are at once strengths as well as delimiting factors for the denizens of these spaces. Similarly, ‘Snow Falling on Cedars revolves around Ethan Hawke’s character Ishmael’s travails as a small town newspaper man. The smallness of a community brings a different resonance to the relative importance of things. In both films, the influence of community brings about important plot points.

Tim, played by Ed Helms in ‘Cedar Rapids’ calls upon his one to one relationship with his clients in order to undo a wrong. Ethan Hawke’s Ishmael has a one on one relationship with the authority figures in the town which enables him to persuade them of important circumstantial evidence. The people in turn support a moral cause in both films. What’s interesting about ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ is that even if the town can barely conceal its racial prejudice, it can still find moral certainty enough to do the right thing. In ‘Cedar Rapids’, the opening voice over pretty much tells us the main character believes in small towns exactly because a small community can be counted on to watch out for one another, and this informs the moral character of the town.

Yet, there is something not too right about these townships.  In both contexts the main characters are chafing against the invisible limitations placed upon them for being in these small towns. This small town blues essentially allows the irony to breathe in both films.

Sexuality As Future Tense, Past Tense

We all look forward to our first sexual encounter. Some more than others, and provided it’s not like some molesting by a Catholic priest or a dirty uncle Ernie, the moment has its own poetry. it’s in that spirit that ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ spends a lot of time on the remeniscences of Ethan Hawke’s Ishmael. The big question for Ishmael is why Hatsue cannot overcome her background and love him. It’s a plaintive plea for love which turns into a retributive rejection by Ishmael, but in some ways this is a weird film. It is almost as if the narrative wants to have it explained explicitly why intercultural relationships are unlikely to work out in the the context of a largely prejudicial American society. The plot is built on Ishmael’s awkward inability to see himself in the context of the society he comes from and inhabits.

Tim Lippe in ‘Cedar Rapids’ is also awkwardly unaware of his surroundings and wider public opinion, both about him as an insurance salesman, but also as a human being. There is an equal degree of lack of self-awareness in Lippe that lands him in quandaries that are actually not that profound if one had perspective. With both characters, sexuality triggers much of the reassessment, which is an interesting twist. Just as ‘Snow Falling on Cedar’ proceeds with the anticipation of sex, ‘Cedar Rapids’ proceeds on the memory of sex, and the memory is oddly grotesque, for Tim is in a relationship with the woman who was his primary school teacher. For Tim, his retarded emotional life exactly mirrors the oddness of his relationship with his former primary school teacher.

Unlike a Bond movie where sex never transforms anything in the story line or within the Bond persona, the anxiety about one’s sense of self is explicitly wound up with sex in both films, and that in of itself is an interesting match.

Race Politics In Loop

It seems like a minor plot point, but when Tim meets Ronnie Wilkes as played by Isiah Whitlock Jr., he stops dead in his tracks, in fear because Ronnie is a black man. He gets over the initial abjection pretty quickly, but the fact that Ronnie is black becomes a plot point in the rescue sequence later on. ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ is a film about a community not dealing very well with the presence of Japanese migrants. Amazingly enough, both films have more than one anxious moment to do with race.

Kazuo, who is on trial in ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ is always presented as ‘the other’, from start to finish. Ishmael attempts to cross the cultural chasm between his White American identity and Hatsue’s Japanese American identity, but fails mostly due to World War II. It’s not entirely clear in the film whether the failure is because of the gap that is too wide, or it is because given the war, it had no chance whatsoever. The films expends a great deal of energy on showing Ishamel’s yearning for Hatsue but it is in no way clear as to its position about if Kazuo were to date a white American woman. One imagines that there is still too big a taboo.

After all, if a white American male is still freaked out at the site of black man in a film made in 2011, then what chance is there for the taboo being broken in Hollywood really?

Existentialism As ‘Doing’

When you think about, characters in movies – good or bad – at some point have to be existentialists in as much as they should be defined by their actions much more than their thoughts or words or abstractions. This is because the audience can only understand the character through what the character does and says; not what the audience thinks the character is thinking. given that is the condition of the narrative, in most films we await the main character to do something. It could be anything – kill the President, build a barn, solve a case, bury the treasure.

That being said, we wait a long time in both films to see just what these main characters are going to do; and as it turns out that both Tim and Ishmael do the right thing. Still, in both films, it’s a mighty struggle to actually highlight what exactly the right thing is meant to be. ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ spends a good deal of time showing why Ishmael might feel put out enough that he doesn’t simply come forward with the evidence. He even comes close to destroying the evidence. Tim in ‘Cedar Rapids’ is clueless as to what exactly the problem is, until he is informed that his predecessor bribed his way into winning the coveted prize. For a moment it seems he must swallow his pride and give into the tyranny of corruption, but then he comes back to blow the lid on it. Both films work very hard at getting to the point – the belabored style is oddly something that they share. Odder still, the two films end up with a weakly argued existentialist position.

As some of you have noticed I’ve stopped writing about what the industry is like or doing for a long while now. I put up my white flag and decided just to blog what pleases me rather than what irritates the shit out of me; and it has to be said that the film industry – both here and over in America – was giving me the major shits at every turn. I’ve given it half my life, I iwsh not to waste the other half trying to recoup what I cannot get back.

Anyway, today, I just want to show you a link here form Pleiades. Cutting straight to the chase…

One aspect of the modern world that has also changed is that people now have damn big TVs, and don’t feel all that much of a need to venture from their home, especially when the popcorn prices are so high. But while studios and distributors can wear the flack for screwing around consumers by not having same time international releases, on this score it is the exhibitors who deserve the blame.

Last year there were reports of Universal Pictures “risking the wrath of cinema operators by launching new tests of premium video-on-demand (VoD). Universal suggested it would shrink the release of the film Tower Heist on VoD” to only 21 days after being released in cinemas – and this VoD was being done only in two cities in the US – Atlanta and Portland, and they were going to charge $59.99 for the privilege. It was a “test” to see how the strategy went. How did it go? Well it didn’t. The exhibitors reacted by threatening to completely ban the film from their cinemas – and not just in Atlanta and Portland. When a studio the size of Universal Pictures can be made to back down from a test that would get its product to consumers faster, you know there are problems with the industry.

The same exists in Australia where any independent producer game enough to suggest trying a bold strategy of releasing a film in cinema and online at the same time will be a producer who does not have a film released in a cinema.

Murdoch may think that the pirates are the problem, but a look at the industry shows it to be a tired, aging Frankenstein that created a monster, chose not to feed or nurture it, and then blames it when it goes and dines elsewhere.

Murdoch may think SOPA will save his studio, all it will do is further alienate an audience that is treated like it has not aged past 19, doesn’t have access to the internet or owns 40 inch plasma TVs, and like they don’t have a hell of a lot more choice on how to spend money than they did 30 years ago.

The key for the industry is: Don’t make crap, and don’t treat your audience like crap either. Can’t be that hard.

You’d be surprised at how hard it is for the willfully obtuse. Or perhaps not.

Walk-off HBP sent me this link to a NYT article that argues that maybe Japan has been over statinng its dismal financial situation for two decades and that perhaps things are not as bad as claimed.

It is true that Japanese housing prices have never returned to the ludicrous highs they briefly touched in the wild final stage of the boom. Neither has the Tokyo stock market.

But the strength of Japan’s economy and its people is evident in many ways. There are a number of facts and figures that don’t quite square with Japan’s image as the laughingstock of the business pages:

• Japan’s average life expectancy at birth grew by 4.2 years — to 83 years from 78.8 years — between 1989 and 2009. This means the Japanese now typically live 4.8 years longer than Americans. The progress, moreover, was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, diet. The Japanese people are eating more Western food than ever. The key driver has been better health care.

• Japan has made remarkable strides in Internet infrastructure. Although as late as the mid-1990s it was ridiculed as lagging, it has now turned the tables. In a recent survey by Akamai Technologies, of the 50 cities in the world with the fastest Internet service, 38 were in Japan, compared to only 3 in the United States.

• Measured from the end of 1989, the yen has risen 87 percent against the U.S. dollar and 94 percent against the British pound. It has even risen against that traditional icon of monetary rectitude, the Swiss franc.

• The unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, about half of that in the United States.

• According to skyscraperpage.com, a Web site that tracks major buildings around the world, 81 high-rise buildings taller than 500 feet have been constructed in Tokyo since the “lost decades” began. That compares with 64 in New York, 48 in Chicago, and 7 in Los Angeles.

• Japan’s current account surplus — the widest measure of its trade — totaled $196 billion in 2010, up more than threefold since 1989. By comparison, America’s current account deficit ballooned to $471 billion from $99 billion in that time. Although in the 1990s the conventional wisdom was that as a result of China’s rise Japan would be a major loser and the United States a major winner, it has not turned out that way. Japan has increased its exports to China more than 14-fold since 1989 and Chinese-Japanese bilateral trade remains in broad balance.

As longtime Japan watchers like Ivan P. Hall and Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr. point out, the fallacy of the “lost decades” story is apparent to American visitors the moment they set foot in the country. Typically starting their journeys at such potent symbols of American infrastructural decay as Kennedy or Dulles airports, they land at Japanese airports that have been extensively expanded and modernized in recent years.

Now that is interesting. The most interesting point might actually be just how much the yen has appreciated. If you read any newspaper or magazine in Japan, the rising yen has always spelled doom, but there has never been a country that’s gone broke on the back of an appreciating currency. Consider that for a moment. If Japan really were going out the back, unable to compete, you’d think foreign investors would pull their money from the yen, but repeatedly since 1985 when the Plaza Accord was struck, investors have chosen to put their money in the yen. Are they right? Who knows? It’s not gold, but every time there is a shock to world markets, the yen creeps up.

Even in 2006 when I was in Japan for a shoot and visited the headquarters of Mitsubishi where they build just about everything in heavy industry, there simply was no sense of panic about the state of the yen or the world – and it struck me as being at odds with all this talk that Japan was being beaten at everything in the world. So, here’s a little paragraph from the NYT that needs attention:

Part of what is going on here is Western psychology. Anyone who has followed the story long-term cannot help but notice that many Westerners actively seek to belittle Japan. Thus every policy success is automatically discounted. It is a mind-set that is much in evidence even among Tokyo-based Western diplomats and scholars.

Consider that paragraph as an admission by the NYT that maybe even the westerners on the streets in Japan covering events there don’t really have a inside scoop on Japan. It is possible, it is likely, it is entirely conceivable. After all, there’s a huge gap between what is said by politicians and bureaucrats in public and what they say in private. Whatever the case may be, the article flies in the face of accepted common paradigms about what is going on in Japan.

I laughed so much I thought maybe I’ve become psychopathic. This is a great tribute film masquerading as a Grahame Greene adaptation. I knew the film was set in 1964 as opposed to its original period, and people have been wondering why it had to be, just to accommodate the youth riots. The quick and dirty answer is that this film has less to do with recreating Grahame Greene’s novel so much as retracing ‘Quadrophenia’. It’s blatant, but knowing it helps you really enjoy this film. I know I did.

If you don’t know or like ‘Quadrophenia’, this film is likely to fall on blind eyes, so to speak.

What’s Good About It

There’s plenty to like in this film. It looks like they made this film out of off-cuts from Quadrophenia in parts and then it segues into its own thing just beautifully. The cinematography, the production design, the editing, are all lovingly rendered. The performances are great and there’s really never a dull moment as you watch Pinkie the psychopath cause havoc.

Also, the moment pictured above, where Pinkie on his stolen scooter with Phil Davis’ Spicer in tow, finds itself leading the mod’s scooters is priceless. Phil Davis of course was in ‘Quadrophenia’ playing Chalky. There is also a shot of the hotel steps which is the same angle as the one in ‘Quadrophenia’. It was so close, I expected Sting – or somebody who looked like Sting – to come bounding out dressed as a Bell Boy. It didn’t happen, but my heart quickened in anticipation. It’s that kind of film. If you know and love Quadrophenia, then ‘Brighton Rock’ is a must-see film.

What’s Bad About It

I think that for a film that works so hard to work in the riots and the Quadrophenia look, it might have y’know, slotted a Who song in there somewhere.

What’s Interesting About it

Alas, I should have done a movie double with ‘Quadrophenia’. Oh well… For instance, the landscape relationship apparently doesn’t make sense, but only if you don’t know ‘Quadrophenia’. The reviewer above complains most bitterly that Dover makes an appearance for no good reason. Well, in ‘Quadrophenia’, Jimmy the personality-afflicted mod rides the lambretta he stole from Sting’s character, right up to Beachy Head where he destroys the scooter in a gesture of identity suicide. So in this film, the psychopathic Pinkie takes his young wife Rose up to Beachy Head on a stolen lambretta to urge her to suicide. While I’ve never been to Brighton, I know the Brighton Beach in that movie fairly well. Once the riot breaks out, I kept expecting to catch glimpses of action that matched ‘Quadrophenia’. The shot where some youths break a shop window shot from inside, clearly is in reference to the earlier picture.

There’s Crazy And Then there’s Psychopathy

What really pops out about both films is the apparent hands-off attitude to insanity. In ‘Quadrophenia’, it is quite possible Jimmy has gone schizophrenic because of his drugs, but it’s never made explicit as an explanation. In ‘Brighton Rock’, it’s never quite explained how or why Pinkie comes into the world, but it is clear that from the beginning, there is something deeply wrong with this character. Indeed, Pinkie is at once a total misfit from the get-go. He’s a young hoodlum, raised by a hoodlum, who witnesses the death of his father figure, as well as getting facially disfigured.

Psychological problems always make for good drama, and in a sense this is why drama queens we meet in real life might be people harbouring a personality disorder or an outright insanity of some kind. One other thing that can be said for certain is that having crazy characters means he writer does not have to delineate a motivation that we find logical. In other words, you don’t know what they’re going to do next because if there’s only crazy logic to it, then it means it’s not going to be rational.

Still, the film works very carefully as to why Pinkie does certain things. The father figure in the photo is dressed in a war time parka, so he puts it on on the important day. He steals a lambretta scooter, which combined with the war time parka makes him look the part of the mod. Clearly it’s a gag. It’s totally crazy-reasoning for the character that somehow lands Pinkie at the head of the mod crowd, who are in  one sense the expression of the dysfunction in British society; but the film works very hard to get him there. Now, the deeper question to ask is whether the craziness of the rioting youths and the hoodlum violence of Pinkie and his gangster life are interchangeably equivalent in English culture.

Is Pinkie violent because he’s just born that way? Or is it a social problem of England that manifests itself as both the senseless youth riots and the psychopathic killer that is Pinkie? And that question might be the reason why the film makers decided to update Brighton Rock to the era of the riots. The cathrsis of death at Beachy Head in ‘Brighton Rock’ is not only evoking ‘Quadrophenia’, it is symbalically raising the issue of why there are such people. Is society headed over the cliff with Pinkie?

In light of the recent riots in the UK, it does make you wonder if there’s a lot more crazy out there than we thought.

Teenage Wasteland, It’s Only Teenage Wasteland

Pete Townshend made a million out of singing about how awkward being an adolescent can be. Indeed, the phrase “teeange wasteland” sums up so much of the angst and inadequacy of feeling these characters growing up and coming of age in the 1960s.  There’s a little alleyway in Brighton that has turned into a shrine because of the sex scene that was shot for ‘Quadrophenia’. It’s all part of the emotional terrain that is worked hard in ‘Brighton Rock’, for both Pinkie and Rose are awkward adolescents who have only ventured into adulthood with the minimum of emotional equipment. The kiss in the rain is particularly awkward and strange, and it harks back to the awkward sex in the alley from the earlier film.

One of the unstated issues in the film is the inadequacy of both Pinkie and Rose in their inability to express their inner turmoil. Rose thinks she has made a connection with Pinkie, simply because he tells her they have a connection. She nary searches her own feelings before she’s decided that she is going with him to the ends of the world. Pinkie doesn’t even know how he feels because he’s too traumatised and he’s a psychopath. His stated reasons for doing things are ironically at odds with what he really seems to want. This dynamic of two inadequate people groping for a relationship finds a connection with the abortive sexual encounter in the alleyway in ‘Quadrophenia’. Phil Daniels’ Jimmy thinks he’s the problem while he worships Steph, and it turns out Steph can only be described as a feckless girl with personality problems of her own. Rose and Jimmy are both yearning for the other person without knowing who the other person is, and in both films they finish up not knowing.

Is Pinkie Evil?

The world that is presented in ‘Brighton Rock’ is tangibly limited and the horizon for its characters are nowhere near as wide as the ocean. They swim in a small pond of a community, and are largely incapable of change. The gritty social realism in the film is enough to make you recoil in horror, just looking at the council building flat or the ugly backstreets. The England of 1964 is nowhere near as glamorous as the swinging 60s ought to feel. It is in this cosseted world that Pinkie has grown into being, perhaps like a tumour.

On the face of it, there’s no arguing the fact that Pinkie is evil. But it’s also pretty clear that Pinkie is a psychopath. It brings up the point whether criminality is a function of society and mental illness. Pinkie is at once a belligerently hostile young man who earns his angry young man epithet easily, but he’s also incredibly recessive for his obvious moral weaknesses. Similarly, Rose is only socially normative to the degree that Catholic guilt has shaped her into a cowering woman, but we find in her alliance with Pinkie against Ida that her morality doesn’t run all that deep. It falls upon deaf ears that she could be charged with being an accomplice. They’re both far more crazy than they are criminal, although their criminality does cause problems for them; it’s almost as if it is a side issue. They’re rebels without a cause and without a clue.

It might seem like the same old depressing film making to some but this film does offer up some interesting insights into the socius of 1964 England. I guess my best advice is that you take in ‘Quadrophenia’ before you sit down to watch this film.

…or are they both some kind of twisted sequels to ‘Black Swan’? It is as if Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis decided while on the set of Black Swan to make the same movie, about couples who start fucking and then realise that, oops, they’re actually in love.

What’s Good About These Films

They’re like 2 peas in the pod of stupidity. One is always better than two; or perhaps it is best to repeat messages just in case people don’t get it the first time. After all, any excuse to watch people on screen fake a shag is good Friday night fare for couples’ nights at the movies.

Oh, I know I complain too much. I should be grateful it’s not based on some comic book, but with these kinds of characterisations, you could’a fooled me.

What’s Bad About These Films

Unless you like redundancy, you have two films with essentially the same story. I watched both for reasons I cannot explain and found them to be just as idiotic as the other. I’m not insulted by them; it’s just that I have a hard time coping with just how little imagination seems to be doing the rounds in Hollywood these days – and all the while there’s some cabal of execs pulling down stupid money deciding on which films get made. My suspicion is that the second film got green-lit by mistake, when the exec thought they were the same film, having green-lit the other.

Okay, So Why Write About Them?

I was thinking about the distance it took from the Baby Boomer text of ‘Annie Hall’ to late boomer ‘When Harry Met Sally’ to Gen-X texts ‘There’s Something About Mary’ and ‘High Fidelity’, right down to these two films. If you bother to think about it, each generation is trying to express the problematic of romance in terms of their generation, and when we get down to Gen-Y, we’re given these films which beg more questions than the answers they provide. Forget for the moment that I have a hard time relating to Ashton Kucher and Justin Timberlake as guys who are romantic heroes, or that Natalie Portman and Mila Junis seem more hysterical than any emancipated women on screen before them. These films are really odd.

Back in the Baby Boomer days, the big mystery for men was what they were supposed to do. In ‘Annie Hall’, Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer essentially has to let go and relinquish control, as does Billy Crystal’s Harry at the very end of ‘When Harry met Sally. By the time Gen-X is going through these kinds of questions, men are assumed to have relinquished paternalistic control. Instead they are asked to step up and support their half of the bargain, as is the case with Ben Stiller’s character in ‘There’s Something About Mary’ and John Cusack’s character in ‘High Fidelity’. In other words, the relinquishing of control doesn’t relinquish responsibility for men.

So what is being asked of the Gen Y male in these films? They’re being asked to fall in love, despite the deals that get made, relinquish control keep responsible, but most importantly, be infinitely patient with the stupidest foibles in the world, in the nae of romance. And this is a curious thing because after all the emancipating and liberating and feminism and what-have-you, the big romantic challenge for men is actually falling in love. If it weren’t for all the sex scenes, it’s like a Jane Austen novel, just even more castrating.

The Reification of Relationships

The most important thing to notice in the progress (or regress, perhaps) of romantic comedies is that the instiution of marriage clearly gave way to de facto relationships because nobody could trust the institution of marriage any more – at least not the sort of people who write scripts for Hollywood. It’s not clear if this reflects the wider population, but in American cinema at least, there has been a gradual deconstruction of the institution of marriage to such and extent that all relationships can be reduced to sex. Having arrived at this moment, the characters in these films freak out and conservatively back-pedal quickly to traditional modes of relationships, which involve ceremonies an understanding and the underpinning of love.

Back in my days at Uni, I had a behavioral science lecturer come in to and lecture that social purpose of marriage was to regulate sexuality. We have marriages because we need to ensure that everybody has equal chance of mating and laving off-spring. So the lecture went. I think it fell on largely uncritical ears who thought behavioral science itself was some kind of bullshit. Today I look back on that lecture and these films and tend to think that what is going on is a deregulation of this market. The way society is set up with morals is clearly to create obstacles so that sexuality *is* regulated. This explains why they have arranged marriages in certain cultures as well as prostitution (the exchange of sex for money) is scorned almost universally.

What these films then show is that we’ve arrived at a point in history where possibly, the institution of marriage has utterly failed to regulate sexuality in our society to a satisfactory degree, and so it is being wound back by the forces of libido itself. This is why the characters in these films decide to embark on no-strings-attached-fuck-buddies project. And nobody questions this decision. Consider for a moment how scandalous ’9 ½ weeks’ was back in the day when Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger’s characters essentially went at it and that was most of the movie. These films are -while being much less titillating – further down the track from ’9 ½ weeks’ and exist as a kind of post-morality sign post. Maybe things really are loosening up and in a generation or so they’ll be making movies about how quaint it is to want to get married.

To be frank, I’m not so much scandalised by these films; I’m more bemused that they exist as a kind of state-of-the-marital-union sort of addresses on sexual mores in LA.. I don’t know if the rest of the world is ready to follow bravely into this world. After all, a completely deregulated sexuality might mean too many people getting too much sex, and render sex unremarkable, and thus take the intrigue right out of relationship movies. It might be a better world but I suspect the movies would be even worse off.  Maybe what the sign post is saying is that from here on in, don’t expect too much from Romantic Comedies.

As best as I can tell, the current show touring Australia from Paris is based on the collection Pablo Picasso owned of his own work at the time of his death. In other words, these are the works he liked so much, with which he would not part. As such, it offers an entirely different sort of entry point to most collections of Picasso works that are extant. I’ve seen the Guggenheim collection and the Norton Simon Museum collection and over the years there have been some others that have come through town so even if I can’t claim to understand Picasso’s work, I have a good level of prior experience of seeing his work.

In one sense, it’s a Picasso exhibition that’s mostly curated by Picasso himself.

What’s Good About It

The outstanding thing about this collection is that it covers a great deal of his career, so there’s almost something from just about every period of his career. Each room is contextualised around a part of Picasso’s life, and so you get a better feel for how he developed his style and vision through his life. In that sense, this is a fine collection that allows you into the mindset of the creator, much more than other collections of Picasso, although I must admit I have not seen the big collection in Spain.

There is a wide range of works, covering small sketches and paintings through to larger canvases and sculptures. I’d seen the book of the exhibition about a month ago when I got drawn into an argument about the greatness of Picasso, but when I saw the whole exhibition it made more sense than the book.

What’s Bad About It

Some of the rooms are dark. You don’t really get a good sense of colours in some instances and in with some sketches, you’re squinting to get a sense of contrast. You get a little booklet where they explain the rooms and the period of Picasso’s life, but it still feels somewhat under-explained. I don’t know if the onus is on the curator for something like this, but it did seem sparse in parts.

What’s Interesting About It

When you see this series of works, some of his favorite objects and motifs begin to leap out at you. For instance, he really liked guitars, and other fretted instruments like mandolins and lutes. There are two sculptures that ostensibly are representations of guitars and it is actually quite interesting how he deconstructs the guitar into abstract art. You get the feeling that Picasso spent a lifetime tangling with the guitar – possibly because he was a Spaniard to the end – and he kept trying to capture something about the guitar that drew him in.

He also liked animals, for they make frequent appearances in his works. Bulls and Minotaurs are famous; as is the dove of peace he designed for the United Nations; but in this exhibit we’re introduced to goats and goat’s heads and goat’s skulls quite a bit. Clearly he liked women a lot, but it’s surprising just how much he liked abstracting the lines of animals.

As for the women, this is perhaps the only Picasso exhibition that offers insight into who these women were to Picasso. He kept paintings of these women long after they were out his life. He’d managed to abstract them as well as capture them and perhaps he didn’t need them any more. There’s clearly something predatory and unrelenting about Picasso’s pursuit of these women and on to the canvas. And no matter how much he abstracted their faces, he really liked lining up the pair of nipples and breasts properly. he wasn’t about to start abstracting “tits and arse”.

“The Greatness of Picasso” Arguments

We’ve all been there. Confronted with the mass of Picasso’s work, somebody always pipes up and says they don’t think Picasso is that great. You can even hear that person as you walk through the exhibit, and they bloody well mean it because they say in a whisper that is inevitably heard by everybody in the room. We get int these arguments any time somebody decides the abstracted lines are simply crap, and not good descriptive art. You hear the argument that if Picasso could draw and paint as well as he could, then why didn’t he go off the rails so much? And why do critics think this is so great.

My humble opinion is simply this: Picasso got bored easily. And to the extent that he got bored, he decided he was only going to paint or sculpt or draw what interested him and kept his interest. There is one particular back-to-the-classicism painting of Olga, with the background unfinished. Clearly he was interested in Olga, and painting her with sufficient fidelity, but when it came to filling in the background, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, but kept the unfinished canvas. It’s obvious – without ascribing motive, hopefully – that he simply chose not to fill in the background, and moved right along to the next thing. While the reason is unknown, my best guess is that he got bored.

All these developments he made such as cubism appear to be a desire to abstract shadow from form, form from subject, lines from outlines and image from perspective. The reason Picasso painted these funny mixed up faces was because he wanted to paint lines that he liked from the face at certain angles, but for them to all be there at once. To me, this is self-evident; but I have no hope of convincing you of this insight if you disagreed.

In as much as there is so much of Picasso’s work in this world, I imagine there is a powerful legion of critics who still question whether Picasso was a genius or not. The thing about going through the gallery looking at this exhibition is that in the very least, Picasso was an inventive artist, forever trying a new way to express something. He did not fear failure the way a perfectionist does; and to that extent he was a lot more free than most people would imagine.

I for one do not think Picasso’s works is for everybody. It’s not going to convince everybody, unlike say, the voice of Pavarotti or Shakespeare’s plays. It’s probably sacrilege to say this but I don’t think everything he did has a wide appeal. Yet, if you look at a lot his works in one spot and spend the time to carefully observe the lines and shapes he painted and sculpted, you begin to get a sense for what defines his style, as well as why that might be so.  I can’t – and won’t – claim to understand all of his work but I will venture that based on this exhibition, there’s something of Picasso that I do grok.

Over the break I wanted to briefly write down some observations about the power of memento mori, but then I lost my post; then I tried to reconstruct it and lost my train of thought. Here is what remains of the wreck.

Memento Mori is of course the reminder of our mortality that is woven into themes and paintings. There’s a theory going around that the purpose of artistic endeavor itself is a kind of memento mori, and what makes art truly important is how powerful this reminder can be. This would explain the persistent popularity of such genres as Gothic Horror in literature or Goth as a style, and even heavy metal music. What struck me about this is that it is actually difficult to make something lasting without memento mori. In turn, the most popular works of any artist picked at random probably deals with death.

Shakespeare’s most famous play is ‘Hamlet’, and it has the famous “alas poor Yorrick” scene with skull in hand as well as the soliloquy about living and dying. If that is too literal, then at least it is worth considering that memento mori in literature marks most of the great books in any list. In the Iliad, there’s Achilles’ lament for Patroclus mirrored with Priam’s lament for Hector. In the Odyssey, there is the episode where Odysseus talks to the dead in Hades; The epic of Gilgamesh is about Gilgamesh’s search for immortality because deep down he fears death. It’s everywhere in classical literature. This is a tradition in narratives that flows through to modern texts.

So it seems to work for the importance stakes by just inserting death. For instance, if Madame Bovary or Anna Karenin didn’t die in those books, would they have been revered less or more? What makes every photo taken during the US Civil War so artistic but the intrinsic knowledge that all he people in it are dead, and that if they were soldiers, some of them likely died not long after the photo was taken. Doesn’t Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary series milk this for all its worth? This suggests you can have a pretty good work of art and add death and it probably adds profundity – and what else is this profundity but the sentiment that is provoked by the memento mori?

Try this for an example: Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ has a sad ending. When Disney gets its hands on it, it has a happy ending, and a spin off TV series to boot. Which is more profound? We know it’s the original version with the death. I’m not really going anywhere special with all this except to say that it is a lot more ingrained in the arts than we might think at first glance. Is important Art then good art? The sizable audience to the Disney ‘Little Mermaid’ franchise might suggest otherwise. Critics always pick the less popular, but death-wedded original.

Modern Substitutions

I know I’ve mentioned this before that if you stick the Holocaust reference in to your film somewhere, it doubles your chances for an Oscar. This is suggested by some to be because the Academy is filled with Jewish people, but the more direct reason is that the Holocaust has placed itself as the ultimate memento mori that substitutes for all the massive death and destruction wrought in World War II. A film increases in importance simply because you have the Holocaust as part of the story; like a talisman it activates our awareness of death. Considering that Stalin’s regime killed more of its own people than the Nazis did to their own and others, and the demonisation of Communism through the twentieth century, it’s interesting to note that communism, gulags and the GRU don’t have quite the memento mori effect of Nazis, death camps and the SS. By comparison, the dull utility of comunism and communist design has far less weight in fiction and the arts in general.

Of course, it is easier to understand Nazism in  light of memento mori because in most part it was an attempt to aestheticise ethics. Thus, Hitler and Himmler adorned the SS uniforms with mystical symbols and a deaths head. It’s an instant fetishisation of death that is familiar to us. It is a familiar move because we’ve seen it before and since. But the allure of aesthetising death itself as a political act couldn’t possibly have so much meaning without the power of death in art itself.

The modern world of media and pop culture is filled with more references to death than you can poke a stick at.

Here are some examples worth pondering. My favorite Pink Floyd album is ‘Animals’; The best-selling work by Pink Floyd is ‘Dark Side of The Moon’ which in survey of ideas such as time and money, deals with death with the song ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’ (which I covered, by the way, here).

For all its celebration of sex, a lot of rock is a kind of memento mori, what with all the heroes who have died young. The list of dead rock musicians who didn’t make it to a ripe old age is a significant list of names starting with say, Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.You only have to write the names of dead rock stars and it suddenly evokes the body of work in rock. Try these names: John Lennon, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, John Bonham, Marc Bolan, Keith Moon, Syd Vicious, Kurt Cobain. When you watch the Foo Fighters live, David Grohl himself becomes a kind of living memento mori in the memory of Kurt Cobain, which explains the morbid fascination surrounding the Foo Fighters.

Yet, of all the sub-genres of rock, the most enduring branches are in fact Metal and Goth because their visual motifs remain largely unchanged. Death features prominently in the oeuvre of metal and goth. Album after album by Iron Maiden is filled with ironic images of death. Death is central thematic unity of Metal. One could argue the excesses are a kind of kitsch but if you judge the sales of Iron Maiden albums to their die-hard fans, you’d have to conclude it is doing its job.

Recently I put together an electric guitar from Warmoth parts for a friend. It had one knob – a volume knob  and it was important that it had a death skull on it. The meaning of it was simply to imbue the guitar with a memento mori. “all shred axes should have a memento mori,” he proclaimed. It makes some sort of intrinsic and extrinsic sense, not only because it is to play heavy metal, but because deeper down playing music makes you count down time; and thoughts of time inevitably lead to thoughts of death, vis a vis ‘Dark Side of the Moon’.

The main character in the Star Wars cycle turns out to be Anakin, who is Darth Vader, and Vader’s helmet is like a skull with a helmet. In the original three movies, Darth Vader is like the big memento mori character – who of course dies at the end of ‘Return of the Jedi’; and in the more recent prequel trilogy, the audience grapples with Anakin’s descent into being Darth Vader.  It’s part of existentialism that the prior acknowledgment of one’s one mortality enables one to take on the challenge that the remaining time in our lives present, and yet it actually has artistic roots in things that go back to pre-history.

The point of all this is to say, it is everywhere, if you simply choose to look.

I didn’t want to watch this because it was directed by Stephan Elliot. But it is ‘Easy Virtue’ by Noel Coward. It’s been rewritten heavily, but it does seem to preserve the spirit of the play.

What’s Good About It

The performances are very strong in this film. Even Jessica Biel who one might suspect does not have enough chop to be in this company puts in the best thing I’ve seen from her. Kristen Scott Thomas is a standout as the angry, put upon Veronica and Colin Firth adds a tremendous centrifugal force with his wry presence, keeping it all together. Ben Barnes is not as solid  but he does a nice job.

Begrudgingly (because I never found Stephan Elliot to be terribly profound), I have to say the directing is very good, if a little loose. This is not a taut film. It’s more meandering, and has moments that build tension that go nowhere and then surprise you; but it is a good viewing. You could do worse, like watch another comic book hero movie and ponder the decline of thought.

What’s Bad About It

I don’t know if the problems of the story really translate as well to the present day as they should. It’s fun to watch but at the same time you feel like the fundamental problems of the play are culture, but the problem in the film is money. Money always has a solution in  movies while culture is the tougher battleground.

The film goes a long way to explore the cultural differences that would have been perceived in the 1930s, but then turns on the revelation that the real bugbear that is bothering Veronica Whittaker is money. it’s actually disappointing because the film works so hard at setting up the problem and you wonder how it’s going to work itself out, given the characters.

Also, the tone of Kristen Scott Thomas’s Veronica Whittaker is bitchy, but it’s the wrong kind of bitchy. That’ probably more in the directing than the performance because we know Kristen Scott Thomas is capable of greater subtlety.

What’s Interesting About It

The film actually echoes ‘Brideshead Revisited’ more than Coward’s play. It’s not as anatomical as ‘Brideshead Revisited’, and Coward was more condemnatory of the landed gentry in England but there’s something of a kindred spirit there. There are moments that also echo ‘Vile Bodies’ by Evelyn Waugh as well, what with the sports car driving woman.

It must be some kind of revisionist nostalgia that makes the 1930s England almost interesting for its remnant class snobbery falling apart as the money runs out in the Great Depression. It’s quaint to watch but you know if you encountered it in real life it would give you nothing but revulsion. Which makes you wonder why they keep going back to this well of intemperate prejudice for our dramatic fodder. Perhaps we are blind to the similarly intemperate prejudices of our own time.

Weird Casting of Jessica Biel Here

I don’t think Jessica Biel’s face looked good in this period’s hair. She’s got an odd looking face and the hair made her look stupid. Okay, there are plenty of other things to be watching in this film, but the most distracting thing was how the period hair really didn’t suit Biel. Which I guess goes to show there isn’t that much wrong with it. The tango she dances with Colin Firth is actually quite nice. It’s not meant to be a professional dancer strutting her stuff, it’s meant to be an expression of her profound sadness and that comes across very nicely in the performance of the dance. It’s good enough to sell the moment when Colin Firth’s Jim jumps in her car to escape the manse at the end. There is no rational explanation, you intuitively understand why, and it makes sense because of the tango. Pretty good cinema if you ask me.

The Motor Car

In history, motorised transport essentially liberates the distance a person can move. We come to realise that possession of horses by the gentry allows the gentry a kind of monopoly over people who do not, and so allows them to travel. This is why travel is enshrined in the upper classes’ entitlements even today. Going on vacations to places where *ordinary* people cannot go is the privelidge of the wealthy. In that context, a woman with a motor car alone smashes the immobility of that society. This alone should present more drama in the story but it doesn’t.

The story seems to elliptically spin around the fact that Larita loves John so much, she cannot leave the nightmare manse, and the drama is played out in the space of this old manor house. Perhaps it is my own personal tastes as a writer that made me keep thinking, when is this woman going to just get in her car and drive away? Of course it turns out to be the denouement, but it seemed really odd that the gleaming, modern, almost anachronistic machine kept inviting and she – as a car racer from Detroit no less – kept ignoring its invitation to just drive away. It’s just as hard to fathom as veronica’s obsessive demands that Larita ride in the fox hunt.

The Fox Hunt

It’s going to be a perennial sticking point for animal lovers but it’s hard to imagine the fox hunt disappearing completely in the UK. It’s a bit like the Japanese and the whaling fleet. They “just can’t give it up because they just can’t give it because they just can’t okay?” is the illogic behind it. It’s not a good one because it applies to things like honour-killings under Sharia law and clubbing seals in Canada and any number of violent, cruel cultural practices. They’re objectionable if one applies a universal eye to them but the people who do them will invariably claim a cultural practice defense, and those attacking will always demand the universal to apply by dint of it being universal. It’s a sticky point.

In this film, we see the hunt subverted by the acting of riding a motor bike alongside the horses and hounds, which I guess represents the smashing of the cultural practice defense by positing that modernity should supersede cultural practice. I get that but I wonder how many people who mount the cultural practice defense would bother to understand it; that is to say, if you said the whalers “modernity demands you cease” or said to these Islamists, modernity demands you not do honour-killings”, or even Canadian furs-seal clubbers “modernity says you shouldn’t club baby fur seals”, just how much traction that would have. Maybe we modernists are merely imagining that modernity itself is a kind of cipher to stop being barbaric. Maybe it is possible to be modern and barbaric, or worse still, be modern and savage, as the Nazis were. To that extent, the fox hunt scene does make you wonder just how far Europe and Europeans think they have come – It’s interesting that way.

Good heavens it’s hard to defend ‘our’ Mel Gibson after he blew up his marriage and slagged off the Jews and got into a messy situation with some Russian harlot. It’s really hard to take him back into our hearts after all the news and PR disasters – most of which were self-inflicted – and try and take him seriously as an actor. How can we not see the guy on the screen and not think of the chaos? How can we ever see any star without the baggage of their public life?

He’s here in this movie, with a rude name.

It comes as a shock that the poster-girl for the politically correct, Jodie Foster of all people would team up with Mel Gibson, and then defend him in public. It didn’t work. People stayed well away from watching ‘The Beaver’ but they might have missed an interesting movie as a result. I know, Mel Gibson is insufferable in some ways, even for his fans and the only person more insufferable than Mel is of course Russell Crowe. In ten years’ time it may well be Sam Worthington. You can see the trend developing.

What’s Good About It

I was thinking when the last time was that Mel just had to act. Of course it was the ill-starred ‘Edge of Darkness’ remake, but before that feels like it’s been a while. it’s actually nice to see Mel Gibson do his acting thing. There’s still the actor who did lethal Hamlet in there and he’s still got some chops without being over the top or self-referential or heaven-forbid boring. The directing is adequate if a little oblique, and the script is interesting enough. It has a few nice laughs, if you’re inclined for some black humour.

Frankly, I’m shocked Jodie Foster has such a black sense of humour, even though she brings in the film with a touching end, reminiscent of ‘American Beauty’. The Beaver character is most excellent in bringing to sharp relief, the drama inherent in the story. It would have been easy enough to make a movie about a depressed guy and how his depression is ruining his life, but this isn’t quite that film. This film is about the persona of the Beaver that comes out of crisis and ends in (SPOILER ALERT!) blood sacrifice. It’s arresting and intriguing, and that makes it good.

What’s Bad About It

The American high school bildungsroman ‘B’-story running against the ‘A’ story of the beaver seems overwrought. It’s a good story on its own, but it detracts a fair chunk of energy from the black comedy of the Beaver himself. The other thing that bothers me is that I don’t think the psychosis of Gibson’s character has any realism to it, so the realism with which the film is shot runs quite counter to the tone of the script.

What’s Interesting About It

It’s never clear what kind of craziness is afflicting Walter, as played by Mel Gibson. So we’re never really sure about the status of the beaver as a character. After all, we see Mel Gibson mouthing the lines every time it speaks, but the Beaver has an English accent, largely reminiscent of Ray Winstone, which adds an alienating effect to the character. Also, the eyes of the beaver puppet are strangely real looking, so when the Beaver get s a close up, he looks a lot more serious than a muppet. The Beaver, as voiced by Gibson, is a fantastic character.

Mel Gibson’s Self Loathing

I don’t know why Mel Gibson of all people should have so much self-loathing, but based on his characterisation of Walter as well as the Beaver, it seems quite apparent that he draws greatly on his self-loathing to energise his characters. It’s either that, or his temperament is naturally an angry depressive that wants to kick the world in the balls; but the thing is, he’s freaking Mel Fucking Gibson. He’s a star actor who made a good fortune out of playing leading men, and then went on to direct movies and won Oscars. He builds his own version of a Catholic Church. He makes his own bible epics for his own pleasure. Most people would be pleased as punch. But not Mel. He’s out there binge-drinking, drink-driving, and telling traffic cops how he hates the Jews in Hollywood. I’m trying to wrap my head around that.

I kept wondering as I watched the film,just how awful were his experiences growing up – in Australia no less – for him to be so angry. And, you know me, I’m an angry dude, so I know what anger is, and even then I can’t fathom the depth of Mel Gibson’s self-loathing. What makes the film so funny is just how much he can bring this self-loathing to his characters, Walter and the Beaver. In some ways, this is his maddest performance yet, beyond Mad Max and Thunderdome, way beyond even Hamlet.

Maybe Mel Gibson is like a medieval despot, who is constantly in fear for his life, and this is why he keeps searching for the inner shithead, and expresses it to the world. I just can’t fathom it, but when he can point it at the screen, he sure is capable of capturing folly and madness. One of these years, he’ll be able to play the best King Lear on screen, ever.

Jodie Foster As Middle Aged Mom

I’m a little freaked out that I can remember Jodie Foster from ‘Bugsy Malone’ and ‘Taxi Driver’ through ‘The Accused’ and ‘Silence of the Lambs’ through to ‘The Brave One’. Now she’s this taut-faced, rather sour-looking woman. I don’t know if it was the acting that made her role like that, but it was notably sour to watch. She was always a cold fish on the screen but I think she has now become a seasoned pickled herring of a woman. She’s harder to warm to on the screen than ever before.

It’s not that she’s playing an unsympathetic character; it’s that she herself presents with the wrong nuances for the character, and that leaves you cold. Back in the day when she was winning Oscars, she was better at showing this as an edginess, but it’s interesting that she comes across more alienating these days. It’s understandable just looking at her on screen, why her husband character Walter would be so depressed. The fury of the Beaver is totally understandable because Jodie Foster is playing the wife. Maybe this is excellent casting. you sure as heck wouldn’t hire Jodie Foster to play a mom in any conventional Disney film, for instance.

What’s really interesting, I guess, is that this is the film she wanted to direct, but then I’m always surprised by some of the films that get made when I shouldn’t be.

The Beaver Persona As Tyler Durden

I think Mel Gibson must have got the persona of the Beaver from working with Ray Winstone in ‘Edge of Darkness’ because that is exactly who he sounds like. The Beaver is a bellicose and belligerent bastard of a beaver puppet (and it must be asked, what kind of toy manufacturer makes a puppet like that?). If we are to see him as an independent character and not Walter’s projection, then he’s also a bit of a pervert who enjoys the vicarious pleasures of a threesome. It’s funny, but also creepy and that is exactly the zone where the black humour lies. The Beaver arrives at Walter’s moment of moral crisis as he is about to commit suicide and like a hostile personal trainer, goads and threatens and humiliates Walter into being the picture of some kind of success.

The closest character I can think of is in fact, Tyler Durden from ‘Fight Club’, so it is no mean feat that this film got made and  also, the meme of the violently hostile alter ego is getting another run. Is the Beaver Mr. Hyde? Would the Beaver perhaps house all of Walter’s hidden anger and negativity? – and if so, are they not possibly Mel Gibson’s own? One is left wondering at the strange bravura of the Beaver character.

Certainly, given that the film is called ‘The Beaver’, there probably should have been more development of the character instead of playing a two-way bet and pretending it was all an extension of Walter’s insanity.

Terence Malick making  a film is one of those events in cinemas these days. After languishing in obscurity for a good many years, he emerged from a two decade hibernation with ‘Thin Red Line’, which was in many respects a much better war movie than the oft feted ‘Saving Private Ryan’ that year. I know ‘Saving Private Ryan’ will always have its die-hard fans but what made ‘Thin Red Line’ so much better was how he kept bringing the affairs of men to contrast with the landscape and nature that surrounded them.

His films are filled with odd shots and odd cutaways that build a misc en scen like a quilt work, rather than the continuity cutting and standard shots that bolster narratives we’re used to seeing. Dialgoue flows obliquely and voice overs are like fragments of inner monologues. In short, they’re nothing like your standard Hollywood fare.

What’s Good About It

This film has many, many beautiful shots of beautiful things as well as evocative shots of evocative things, poignant shots of poignant things. In short, Malick has mastered the notion of an objective correlative and perfectly matches his observational style to the mood he is trying to create or convey. Despair and grief segue into tired memories and straining guilt. Every shot has a kind of tension that leads into the next so masterfully, you cease to question the absence of context or foreshadowing or the abruptness of the change of scenes.

This is a film by a stylist at work, putting his entire sensibility about time and space and people and objects to the fore, and in most part it is a fascinating, beautiful thing to watch.

What’s Bad About It

Sometimes the film meanders into a narrative space that can only be described as oblique and fragmented. I doubt one could do a straight narrative film with Malick’s style, but even allowing for it, this film really meanders into the incomprehensible. It just doesn’t make much logical sense in parts, but you’re drawn in all the same by the power of the images.

I don’t think the script would pass muster in a modern screen-writing class, but that’s the point. Modern screenwriters are not capable of conceiving of films like this. This one, is an auteur boldly going where he wants to go, come hell or high water. There are moments in the fanciful flights, where you simply cannot keep up with the director; unfortunately they’re the moments the film fails abjectly.

What’s Interesting About It

I’m amazed Brad Pitt wanted to do this film badly enough he stuck his name on as producer. I’m amazed Sean Penn wanted to do this film too. He seems to walk around with a pained expression and the look of the most miserable person on the planet, and then he has a dream sequence where he continues to look forlorn and dejected. I wonder if he bit Malick’s head off.

Grace

The film kicks off by talking about grace, after flashing up a quote from The Book of Job. So I feel unqualified to talk about any religious aspect of this film – to be frank I doubt I understand it in any metaphysical way. In that sense I am the wrong audience for it. The weirdest moment in the film might be the dinosaur moment when some herbivore that is lying on the riverbed encounters a carnivore that steps on its head, but for some bizarre reason chooses not to kill it and eat it. It’s a touching moment, though I couldn’t say for certain if this was because it fits in with the Job quote or the notion of Grace, though it seems that God might love his dinosaurs equally as he loves mankind.

The amazing thing about the film is that it tries to reconcile the grandness of the universe with the travails and the inner turmoil of individuals. It is as if Malick is saying “get some perspective”, but at the same time how could anything be meaningless in all of this universe, any more than it could be meaningful? With all due respect to Christians and theologians, it’s a pretty damn big universe out there that God’s created; and that’s if you even buy into the notion that he did.

Transformation of Consciousness

I was wondering what this film reminded me of, and I have say it was ’2001: A Space Odyssey’. In the last section of ’2001′, we have the sequence in the room where Dave Bowman witnesses a whole life cycle of himself, in the room. It occurred to me as I was watching the film that the whole of ‘The Tree of Life’ was something like watching the life cycle of Terence Malick, as if we were somehow made into Dave Bowman.

Of course, the film plots out – in a very sketchy way – that there is a great distance of feeling and understanding that  separates father and son. The distance is made up by the vastly different states of consciousness possessed by father and son, and then the son as a grown man. So while we are all a product of our time, our consciousness shifts during a life  time so that we come to a different understanding about ourselves and the universe. By watching this film, our consciousness about time is altered slightly. It’s a bewildering film that way.

So What Exactly Happens?

This is the weird thing about this film. You see a bunch of sequences that build some scenes and others are just off-hand images of flowers or shadows of kids. You are never certain about the time relationship of anything in the film. For all we know the whole film is one long reminiscence and fantasy by Sean Penn’s character, but we never get a full grip on the narrative standing point. We have no idea who’s story this is, or if it is anybody’s story. The facts of the story seem to be far less important than the emotional truths of the film’s characters. And that makes this a fascinating film to watch.

The film is like a puzzle where you piece things together as Malick presents them, but you’re also left with the feeling that not everything is being told, and not everything is open for discussion. Maybe the film invites us to a second viewing, simply by being so obscure. But by no means is this a bad film. Amazingly, it’s a ‘good’ film – you just have to open your mind to its unorthodox wonders.