re: TulaneLSU's official 2011 movie reviews thread

That was a good thread

The Ides of March Maybe you know J Anouilh's play Becket. If you don't, it's the story between the Archbishop of Cantebury, Becket, and the King of England, Henry II. The two, who were at one time best friends, become arch enemies because Becket is unwilling to lay down the honor of God and the Church at the altar of the monarch's power. What the play so aptly does is show the conflict between doing what's honorable and doing what friends want. The Ides of March deal with the same issues, but its message is far different, far less idealistic and memorable. In any event, I believe the naming of this movie is wrong. Something more befitting its themes would be a title like Honor and Friendship. Instead, the writers incorrectly lead viewers with a ubiquitously known title about a secretive putsch that has little to do with the movie.

The movie's focus is on two men, two ideologues, one younger, the dude in Drive and Crazy, Stupid Love, and one older, the guy in Oceans 11. The movie is at its best building both of these characters into superhumans, people who care about the concerns of the world, but who are not dragged down by the filth of the world. Act I, Eden, is a walk through Clooney's own liberal policies, which sound ever so convincing and ever so compelling.

But Eden does not stay perfect forever. As the Catholic monk, Henri Nouwen wrote about the fall of spiritual leaders, Leaders with a good message "separate themselves from their own concrete community, try to deal with their needs by ignoring them or satisfying them in distant and anonymous places, and then experience an increasing split between their own most private inner world and the good news they announce." Often the leaders who have the best ideas and the most pure motives are the ones who succumb to the cheapest of sins. And once sin enters the pictures, the dominoes comes crashing down. Sin multiplies and reverberates through the land, destroying individuals, destroying relationships, and destroying dreams. Who was once a ideologue of justice to the people becomes the power he preached he came to stop.

The game of politics pretends to be above sin, and so its adherents use what they believe is more sophisticated language, but any new terminology is only a re-released Disney movie in 3D. It might look or sound a little different, but it's really the same thing. So we enter the second act, the act of guilt and of shame. But for as much honor as these men and their camarilla exuded in their public lives, in private, they seem to lack shame. Shame is replaced with a thirst for power and self-betterment.

One comes away from this movie with little more than cynicism toward the American political system. A few good scenes here and a few good scenes there, but the take home is that American politics is nothing but skulduggery. I think this is a terrible message to send to the public. There are times to be cynical about the world we live in, yes, but to make your message one of cynicism? I'm tired of people making comments like, "Who cares who wins. All politicians are in it just for themselves." How have we allowed that type of cynicism to enter our public conscience?

When movies don't have anything to say, or when what they have to say is entirely negative, that is when movies lose any worth they might have. Sin is everywhere in the world. I don't need to be reminded of it when I see a movie, and I don't need the director to shove his own pessimistic fatalism down my throat. In the end, all is broken, all is lost; friendship and honor give way to selfishness. Maybe I'm feeling the optimist today, but I think Ides is Clooney's disheartened way of throwing in the towel. 4/10

I could write more of worth on one movie than you could write on every movie you've ever seen. That bothers you, I know.

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I could write more of worth on one movie than you could write on every movie you've ever seen. That bothers you, I know.

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I can tell you a shite ton about Jenna Haze's filmography.

What's Your Number? When the revivalist preacher, Charles Finney, was in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, he preached these words: "Sin consists in a known and voluntary neglect to know and obey God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves...True confession implies that we cease from all known sin, of either omission, or commission. Also, that we cease from all excuses or apologies for sin." It wasn't unusual for Finney and other camp revivalists to preach for hours on the meaning of sin. Their practices helped form a lot of the sin-centric preaching of modern day revivalist preaching. Never before appreciated, however, is how Finney and his contemporaries have implicitly shaped a new genre of Hollywood movies: the Sinner morality play.

What I mean by Sinner morality play is that it focuses for the vast majority of its length on the sin of people and society. But unlike the revivalists, the movie almost promotes this lifestyle as normal. In What's Your Number? the sin is promiscuous sex. Gone are the mores of sex for marriage. In their places we learn that it's normal, even encouraged, for the unmarried to have sex, just so long as you don't have sex with more people than some imaginary moral number (10 is given in this movie). All the while, we are taught to believe in the movie that there's nothing wrong with unfettered sex, but at the very end, just as in Finney's preaching, there is a come to Jesus moment. There is a moment when the characters realize that sin is wrong, undesirable, and has caused all their hurt and dissatisfaction with life. Granted, there is no Jesus: the savior in this movie, like in much of American culture, even what passes as Christian culture, is self-realization. What causes conversion in this movie is the movement from pleasing others to pleasing the self. This, of course, does not fit into the Christian model, where we are to please God and it is God's grace that brings us to conversion, not self-realization.

There are many movies being made today that share this pattern of sin, sin, sin, sin, self-realization, conversion, rejection of sin. Sadly, a majority of the romantic comedies, movies like No Strings Attached and One Day, and even movies like The Hangover have a similar structure. Revel in the bad for the first 95 minutes. Then hit a moral point in the last five minutes of the movie. Personally, while I like ending on a positive note, I find it patronizing. Americans always want to end on a positive note, but the real take home message in such movies is the morality the movie implies for the majority of the movie, usually one of debauchery and devilishness. I'm not easily fooled.

There are several hilarious scenes; my favorite was the darts scene, and I like the final message of the film. However, I cannot give a high rating to a movie that plays in the mud all day long only to take a shower at midnight. 4/10

The Tree of Life To watch The Tree of Life is to stand before the expanse of the ocean or the heavens, knowing that every little thing you see has meaning, even if you don't understand what the meaning of each thing is. A day removed from watching this film, I feel like Christopher Columbus upon his landing in the new world or Frederick Cook. There is a mysterious infinity of faith and love in The Tree of Life.

Mr. Malick does not want to confuse people. He wants to open their eyes to faith and to the huge questions of faith, questions that are often reduced by fundamentalists of every stripe. For the fundamentalists who claim faith, faith is reduced to certainty. For the fundamentalists who assail faith, faith is a remnant of evolution gone awry. Faith is something to be jettisoned as baggage that has no worth in the modern world. But Mr. Malick sees and believes right through both forms of the same arrogant idolatry. So when Malick begins the film with an epigraph from Job, the divine question in response to Job's creaturely theodical question: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth...when the morning stars sang together?" we are to view the movie through that passage in Job more than the Genesis creation account(s). This movie, like Job, is one person's, Malick, attempt to reconcile his faith in a good God that brings life to be with the God who allowed his brother to die at an early age. The movie is an an honest prayer, a supplication of integrity to God: God, why did you allow my brother to die? How can you say you are good and how can you ask me to be good, if you, God, are not good?

I think this question, uttered in a soft whisper, as all the movie's direct communication with God is done, is what drives the movie. But the movie begins with the answer: a beautiful sweep of history from the electron to DNA to the dinosaur to destruction to the specific story of one family, all are the work of the God who freely moves as a gaseous spirit of fire, the loving, birthing, consuming fire. We have the question of divine goodness and power within the boundaries of goodness in the beginning and goodness at the end. Thus, I think, it is Malick's way of saying, God, I know you are good. I know you are good, but why? Why? I know you are good. God's goodness is not known in the acetonic assurances of Mrs. O’Brien's mother, who cites scripture, just as Job's friends did. No one, not even God, who does not dwell in the depths of despair with another has the right to do such things. And that is why this movie only can make sense in a Christian worldview, a lens that sees the Creator as the Suffering Servant, the one who bore our iniquities and carried our sorrows. Only this God has the right to answer Job's question with another question: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? Only the God who knows suffering of the most real sort can understand Job or Jack O'Brien or Terrence Malick or you or me.

Doorways play such a huge role in this movie. But the most significant doorway is that at the end, when the grown Jack cautiously walks through, or boldly leaps through the door. This is the Kierkegaardian leap of faith. "Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep," says Jesus. And it is only after taking that leap into a new existence that the question of why falls to the wayside and he is reunited in a prelapsarian, or rather, post-redemptive paradise, reunited with his family, transported to a place where every tear has been wiped away, every imperfection made pure. Near the end, Mrs. O'Brien says, "The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by." This is the way, the truth, and the life of grace with which the movie opens. And the message is this, I think: That until we leap into the Christ, who was with God in the beginning and who suffered with and for us, and who loved us to the ultimate distance, unless we are bound to that Christ, we will have no love. Without love our lives wither and fade, and death is the end. But with love, with Jesus, we live forevermore in the valley where the tree of life bears fruit for us forevermore.

There is so much more to say about this movie, and perhaps I will one day say it. But I believe this movie to be an inspired work of God. It is a true masterpiece against which all works of art should be compared. It is the greatest movie that has ever been made. 10/10.

You'd swear TulaneLSU had never seen an arthouse film before.

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Check out Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker if you want to see an arguably better movie about faith and doubt

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This 1000x

Stalker is THE best movie ever made.

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It is the greatest movie that has ever been made. 10/10.

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If you love "parody Malick" you would probably not appreciate his more restrained work.