Month: July 2011

Film Review – Sherman’s March

Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (1986, dir. Ross McElwee)

When you think of Civil War documentaries none is more prominent than Ken Burns’ aptly titled The Civil War mega-series of the 1990s. It was an incredibly detailed and exhaustive look at an event that reshaped America and is still felt today. This is not that sort of documentary. Ross McElwee is a Southern filmmaker born into the war-haunted landscape of North Carolina. He begins the film with an honorable premise, attempting to travel the path of destruction Union General William Tecumseh Sherman left across the South. This quickly crumbles when McElwee’s girlfriend breaks up with him to go back to her ex. Suddenly, the tone of the film shifts into a bizarre examination of women in the South mixed with occasional delves into the original premise of the picture.

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Film Review – Submarine

Submarine (2010, dir. Richard Ayoade)
Starring Craig Roberts, Yasmin Page, Noah Taylor, Sally Hawkins, Paddy Considine

The directorial debut of British comedic actor Richard Ayoade has drawn unfair criticism for “being too much like Rushmore or Amelie”. Its easy to see how you could mistake this film for something like that, but after viewing the film it becomes apparent Ayoade has made an homage to French New Wave cinema. Ayoade takes those hipster affectations he’d being excused of exploiting, and actually frames them in a poignant look at the hyper-urgency of the adolescent mind.

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Film Review – The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life (2011, dir. Terence Malick)
Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Sean Penn

“A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.” – Stanley Kubrick

In the first hour of Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life we see the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies, the violent volcanic upheavals of land masses on a young earth, and the evolution of animal life. This massively cosmic scope is sandwiched in the middle of an equally intimate examination of a young boy in smalltown Texas during the 1950s. Malick presents all of this in the form of a prayer, beginning with The Mother (Chastain), a red-haired aging woman who receives a letter that her son has died overseas in the Vietnam War. She must relay this news to The Father (Pitt) and the entire scene is done with as a little dialogue as possible. We also have the surviving eldest son, Jack (Penn), in present day still struggling with childhood anger towards his father and the loss of his brother. All of these plot pieces are purely interpretive though. What I stated in the most obvious, traditional narrative way of describing the film, but much more in happening underneath it all.

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