Tree Of Life

I remember the time when I first watched the film “Koyaanisqatsi” some months back. The stream of footages and ambient structure of sounds culminated the roots of evolution and human psyche in a most complacent way. While watching those splendors, one gets the feeling of a force prying over society. The structure of civilization, and the hustle of human dough, undergoes fragility through the ages.

The Tree of Life lights that psyche and bringing of the O’Brien family in an impressionistic way. It discusses life in broadest range, categorizing effortlessly into montage of sequences which play out like a symphony. I’d be posed a stooge if I go on describing what I felt in those verses. The movie follows the life and turmoil of the eldest son Jack (Hunter McCracken), from the O’Brien family, through whose eyes we glimpse into the fabrics of human life. While questioning the death of one of O’Brien’s sons, Science traces back to the inception of life, finding its way back to Jack.

Terrence Malick adopts elegant and fluid camera movements, providing an esoteric view on the O’Brien family. Sound in the film is stark and intact, heartbreakingly supplementing the terrific vision of Malick’s work. He has created an environment of raw emotions against abstracts in their full glory. I was floating merrily in the flux experience the visuals put me in. The Tree Of Life begins more like an offering than a movie. It certainly requires calm and attention, as it is not meant to be recollected. The viewer needs to surrender certain tools of presumptions, and simply waft in the soufflé sensory this photoplay bestows.

Mr. O Brien (Brad Pitt) portrays an unnerving father, who rigidly incorporates values in the upbringing of his three sons. Brad Pitt is excellent throughout, reflecting “call me sir” fumes in his persona. On the other side, the luminous Mrs.O Brien (Jessica Chastain) is angelic in true sense, and counters the temper Mr. O Brien holds. The relationship is spiritually invigorating and questions the deepest mysteries that are instrument in finding tranquility.They seem to represent the Yin and Yang energies, complementing each other in a 

defined way. The heart of the film beats in the tension between the eldest son Jack (Hunter McCracken), and his abusive father. Sean Penn plays as a grown man Jack, eroded mentally, and ruminating on his past.The Tree Of Life could be viewed as the memory of Jack O Brien unfurling through layers of emotions, just to find peace in that heap.

The film is downrightly beautiful and confusing, ending up in frustration. It has no storyline, but creeps up tension, death, and eternal bond of love in a juxtaposing affair. The scope of the film is magnificently ambitious, and universal in all aspects. If only the ending had been dauntingly accessible, and objectively straight, the film might have connected a larger group of people. Nonetheless, it is a rare tale of lost human souls, forever battling through life and death, in this poetic essay of existence.

  

4/5

Midnight In Paris(2011)

A free-wheeling drive into the magical ecstasy of Paris..

Gil with his fiancee Inez, on a day-time shopping in Paris

A successful Hollywood screenwriter, Gil (Owen Wilson) tries to bone a serious novel as he visits Paris with his uptight fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) on a tag-along business trip of her parents. Gil, a restricted writer and an escapist art lover, consumes the streets of Paris at midnight, and finds the greatest escapade his dreams could offer. His romantic notions of Paris in the 1920’s in rains are not shared by Inez.While travelling with her folks, Inez is all around a pretentious British professor (Michael Sheen), which presents Gil the opportunity to wander around his dream city.

Seated on the steps of an unfamiliar street one night, losing his way to hotel, Gil is being invited by a host of celebrities of the 20’s. He is surreally transported to the era where he’d always dreamt to have born in. Gil is enthralled by a lovely woman named Adriana (Marion Cottilard), who’s a fulcrum seductive object in many of the star artists of the 20’s. Gil’s strolls at midnight could take him closer to the heart of the city, but farther away from the woman he’s about to be married.

Gil strolling the streets of Paris alongside Adriana.

Woody Allen etches out a troupe of literary characters from Ernest Hemmingway, Pablo Picasso to madcap couple of Fitzgerald’s, and all other Giants of the 1920’s,and adjoins their enduring era of creating art with Gil, who simmers it in his wide-eyed and drawly manner.Gil finds a source of inspiration, when he befriends Ernest Hemmingway in that riotously funny bar-room scene.He introduces Gil to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates),who is an arbiter to the many works of artists at the time.Owen Wilson couldn't be a better conduit for Allen’s romantic excursion. Midnight in Paris is a sparkling travelogue, where wish-fulfillment is charming in its brief and sketchy episodes of literary celebrities.The film avoids the transitional elements or digital enhancements of time-travelling, thereby eliminating any sci-fi gimmicks of obscure explanations.Woody Allen just brushes past all instruments of time-travel, and glides across the parable structure of this absorbing venture.The passages in this movie are as relishing and elating as one could possibly imagine.The film is graceful in its pace, gloriously lit, and glancingly funny. It is a loving embrace of Paris’s magical aura of attracting dreamers and thinkers from world around.

Like many of Woody Allen’s films, Midnight in Paris ends with a moral, depreciating kick. Here, across this tale, Allen states that "Everyone wishes to ponder on the idea of living in a different era, including people of that era." The material utilizes the best out of this ensemble cast, and serves magical renditions for the crew to sketch on their skills.One couldn’t stop imagine how merry and happening the making must be.

4/5