The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

5 out of 5 Stars

I've seen this before, several times, on DVD and Blu-Ray, but I got a chance to go to a special screening of the film with director Andrew Dominik and Cinematographer Roger Deakins in attendance. They had a fantastic Q&A after the film. This movie is absolutely amazing. I can't recommend it highly enough.

World War Z

3 out of 5 stars.

This ended up being better than I thought it would be, considering the whole reshoot debacle. The only thing that bugged me was the almost super human-ness of the Zombies. Other than that, though, Forster really created a tight and tense thriller.

Killing Them Softly

Killing Them Softly is a great mix of those 1970's small time gangster pictures, and a more modern cinematic aesthetic. Directed by Andrew Dominik, whose previous film The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, was a stroke of cinematic genius, Killing Them Softly reteams him with star Brad Pitt, who plays Jackie, an enforcer who has to set things straight when a couple of low level doofus's knock over one of the mob's card games.

Pretty much everyone turns in a great performance in this movie, which is overtly about America and its seedy reality, but, is in a smaller way about growing old and tired. Again, the cinematography is gorgeous, the editing flawless, and the story is fantastic.

Moneyball

Moneyball is the adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name, originally to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, who was dropped after coming to the table with a vision that the producers didn't feel fit the film. Enter Bennett Miller (director of Capote), and, with Brad Pitt still signed to star, Moneyball, the story of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane and his use of stat's and mathematics to build a winning team for Oakland out of overlooked and forgotten players, all of whom had individual strengths that led to a strong team, versus building a team around a few stars.

Pitt is always perfect, but the real stand out in this film was Jonah Hill, as Peter Brand, a Yale graduate who turns Beane onto the concept of using stat's and math to pick players. This is Hill's first "serious" role, and he does a great job at it. It would be nice to see him in more stuff like this, as opposed to just playing "Jonah Hill" over and over again. Everyone else feels like they have such small roles that it's hard to even talk about performance here. Even Philip Seymour Hoffman, a power house actor, has very little screen time, and spends most of it scowling and silent. This film was about Beane, though, his tribulations and eventual triumph, and you really feel like you've experienced it by the time it's over. Moneyball is one of my favorite of the year. Understated, with a great story and great acting, with equal amounts drama, and humor.

Tree of Life

You're average movie-goer probably doesn't have a clue who Terrence Malick is, but, to cineaste's, he is the closest thing to god many of them have (and as elusive). He barreled onto the scene in 1973 with his masterpiece debut, Badlands, followed only five years later by another masterpiece of 70's American cinema, Days of Heaven. It would be 20 years before we saw another film, 1998's The Thin Red Line, which would be followed by The New World, and now Tree of Life. While everyone can agree that it's fantastic to no longer have to wait twenty years to get a new film by Malick, Tree of Life has been gestating as a project since the Badlands/Days of Heaven era, a few more years and some quality input may have kept this one in line with Malicks previous works.

Tree of Life gives us a first hand view of a period of time in the lives of one Texas family. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain play the father and mother. They have three young boys, the oldest, and the one that the film focuses on, is Jack, played by Hunter McCracken. We see Pitt be the traditional 1950's era father, trying to teach his boys how to be tough, while Chastain plays the traditional mother, gentle, loving and caring. Interspersed throughout their story is the very evolution of the universe and Earth itself, from the beginning of time back to the 1950's, and occasionally to the present, where we meet grown Jack, played by Sean Penn.

Tree of Life is a lot of what you would expect from a Malick film. The cinematography is epic and gorgeous, and the film is meditatively paced, and allows itself to unfold in front of you. The problem with Tree, though, is it is bloated. There are multiple scenes that don't really go anywhere, and edits within the scenes that feel contradictory, or are unnecessary. It's hard, though, because these things (and the sheer length of it), butts up against how beautiful and transcendent the film can be. While it doesn't seem to have a solid plot, Tree is more like a scrapbook of this family's life than anything else, and those little moments being strung together can really bring out an empathy in the audience, if they allow it too. Both Pitt and Chastain deliver fantastic performances, and the young boys playing their sons are pretty much perfect.

I feel incredibly mixed about this film. I like it and I don't. I think if you are already a Malick fan, you definitely should see it and make up your own mind. If you don't really know who the guy is, but you've heard good things, go rent Badlands or Days of Heaven instead.

Roger Ebert's review/meditation on Malick's "Tree of Life"

A Prayer Beneath The Tree Of Life

By

Roger Ebert

Terrence Malick's new film is a form of prayer. It created within me a spiritual awareness, and made me more alert to the awe of existence. I believe it stands free from conventional theologies, although at its end it has images that will evoke them for some people. It functions to pull us back from the distractions of the moment, and focus us on mystery and gratitude.

Not long after its beginning we apparently see the singularity of the Big Bang, when the universe came into existence. It hurtles through space and time, until it comes gently to a halt in a small Texas town in the 1950s. Here we will gradually learn who some of the people were as the film first opened.

In Texas we meet the O'Brien family. Bad news comes in the form of a telegram, as it always did in those days. Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) reads it in her home, and gives vent to grief. Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt) gets the news at work. We gather a child has died. It is after that when we see the universe coming into being, and Hubble photographs of the far reaches.

This had an uncanny effect on me, because Malick sees the time spans of the universe and a human life a lot like I always have. As a child I lay awake obsessed with the idea of infinity and the idea of God, who we were told had no beginning and no end. How could that be? And if you traveled and traveled and traveled through the stars, would you ever get to the last one? Wouldn't there always be one more?

In my mind there has always been this conceptual time travel, in which the universe has been in existence for untold aeons, and then a speck appeared that was Earth, and on that speck evolved life, and among those specks of life were you and me. In the span of the universe, we inhabit an unimaginably small space and time, and yet we think we are so important. It is restful sometimes to pull back and change the scale, to be grateful that we have minds that can begin to understand who we are, and where are in the vastness.

Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life's experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer "to" anyone or anything, but prayer "about" everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.

We all occupy our own box of space and time. We have our memories and no one else's. We live one life, accumulating it in our minds as we go along. Terrence Malick was born in Waco, Texas, and has filmed much of "Tree of Life" in small Texas towns; the house of the O'Brien family is in Smithville. I felt like I knew this house and this town. Malick and I were born within a year of one another, and grew up in small towns in the midlands. Someone else, without my memories to be stirred, might be less affected by its scenes of the O'Briens raising their three boys.

I know unpaved alleys with grass growing down the center,. I know big lawns with a swing hanging from a tree. I know windows that stand open all day in the summer. I know houses that are never locked. I know front porches, and font porch swings, and aluminum drinking glasses covered with beads of sweat from the ice tea and lemonade inside.I know picnic tables. I know the cars of the early 1950s, and the kitchens, and the limitless energy of kids running around the neighborhood.

And I know the imperfect family life Malick evokes. I know how even good parents sometimes lose their tempers. How children resent what seems to be the unforgivable cruelty of one parent, and the refuge seemingly offered by the other. I know what it is to see your parents having a argument, while you stand invisible on the lawn at dusk and half-hear the words drifting through the open windows. I know the feeling of dread, because when your parents fight, the foundation of your world shakes. I had no siblings, but I know how play can get out of hand and turn into hurt, and how hatred can flare up between two kids, and as quickly evaporate. I know above all how time moves slowly in a time before TV and computers and video games, a time when what you did was go outside every morning and play and dare each other, and mess around with firecrackers or throw bricks at the windows of an empty building, and run away giggling with guilt.

Those days and years create the fundament. Then time shifts and passes more quickly, and in some sense will never seem as real again. In the movie, we rejoin one of the O'Brien boys (now played by Sean Penn) when he grows to about the age his father was. We see him in a wilderness of skyscrapers, looking out high windows at a world of glass and steel. Here are not the scenes of the lawn through the dining room windows. These windows never open. He will never again run outside and play.

What Malick does in "Tree of Life" is create the span of lives. Of birth, childhood, the flush of triumph, the anger of belittlement, the poison of resentment, the warmth of forgiving. And he shows that he feels what I feel, that it was all most real when we were first setting out, and that it will never be real in that way again. In the face of Hunter McCracken, who plays Jack as a boy, we see the face of Sean Penn, who plays him as a man. We see fierceness and pain. We see that he hates his father and loves him. When his father has a talk with him and says, "I was a little hard on you sometimes," he says, "It's your house. You can do what you want to." And we realize how those are not words of anger but actually words of forgiveness. Someday he will be the father. It will not be so easy.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

David Fincher is one of the great director's of his generation. Although he hasn't made that many films, as compared to the filmmakers that started coming out around his time (Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith), all of his films (short of the studio cannibalised  Alien 3) have been amazing works of art. He has made countless television commercials and music videos, and continues to expand his visual grammar. With The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, though, he's brought a softer edged humanity to his story telling, with the help of source material by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Button is the story of one man's life, lived physically in reverse. He is born the average weight and size of a new born, but with all of the characteristics of a man well into his eighties. He spends his early life fighting geriatric ailments, living in an old folks home, and believing himself to be just like those around him. As he grows older, though, he grows physically younger, feeling constantly out of place as he maneuvers his way through an ever changing world. He constantly opens himself up to new encounters, and new loves, but is always forced to give up those things which he loves the most.

And that is the key to Button. If there is a single message in the film it is that death, and letting go of the things you love the most in life, is a natural part of life. It happens to everyone, and can not be controlled. Button is a heartbreaking film, and, as the title character, Brad Pitt brings an unbelievable earnestness to Benjamin, a simple man who always seems to be happy to simply experience life. Fincher puts on an incredible patina to the entire film, making you feel, more than almost any other film I've ever seen, that you are right there in that moment with Benjamin. Cate Blanchett plays Daisy, Benjamin's life long love interest with absolute honesty and clarity. She is the person you fall in love with, and lose, but you never really lose them in your heart. Benjamin is lucky enough, though, that he and Daisy always seem to find each other.

I think the one thing that surprised me the most about Button, though, was the importance of women in Benjamin's life. You never seem him have any guy friends. There is no real father figure (even his real father never really gets to act the part). The film is, in fact, completely about the women in Benjamin's life - Queenie, the woman who becomes his mother after he's abandoned at birth, Daisy, his life long love, and Elizabeth, a relationship he has while working as a sailor in Russia. Love, in this film, whether familial or romantic, is the number one message of this film - You may get only one chance to seize your moment with someone. If your lucky, and you screw up the first one, you might get a second, but its best to take the chance when you have it. Life doesn't last forever, and whether your young or old, you WILL lose everything and everyone you love in the end. Love them while you have them. Make today the day.

I want to end this review with this phrase that Benjamin writes to his daughter - "If you find yourself living a life your not proud of, I hope you have the strength to start over".

Burn After Reading

This is a little late, considering I saw this film almost a month ago, but, better late than never. Burn After Reading see's the Coen Brother's return to dark comedy after their cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, and the more mainstream (but not very popular) Intolerable Cruelty and The Lady Killers. The Coen's have a bit of a reputation for a darker brand of humor, and have no problem jumping right back into it, even after the huge mainstream success of No Country.

The film stars Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt as a couple of dimwitted gym workers. McDormand, who plays Linda Litzke, is trying to get plastic surgery so that she can look younger and fitter, so that she can attract more men. Her insurance, however, won't pay for the procedure. When her doofus friend, and fellow gym employee, Chad (Pitt) finds a disk that he says holds secret government documents on it, they attempt to blackmail the owner of the disk, now ex-CIA agent Osborne Cox (played by John Malkovich) into giving them the money they need. Cox, though, isn't giving them a dime, and Linda and Chad's attempt at blackmail only leads them further down the rabbit hole.

Burn After Reading is hilarious. I mean, some of the jokes are only funny if you find off the wall, out of nowhere violence funny, but, hey, that's what the Coen's do best - make you laugh at things that shouldn't be funny. George Clooney is particularly hysterical as a sex crazed, ex-FBI agent, and JK Simmons is equally hilarious as an apathetic CIA boss.

While the film does drag a little, at times, I find that, for the most part, the Coen's always seem to deliver with something hilarious to keep you coming back for more. I really can't wait to see what they come up with next, and whether it's more serious, like No Country For Old Men, or more dark humor like Burn After Reading, I'm all for it. Or, you know, they could make a Big Lebowski 2. I know I'm not the only one who would be looking forward to that...