I still need to see it. I'm not sure it's still playing near here though

I've been told to watch this while on acid.

I'm going to see it a second time. At first, it seems a little erratic, but I think there's a lot in it.

Jeff, you should just watch everything on acid. Sesame Sreet? You better believe Ernie's rubber duckie can talk!

the film was confusing enough without acid!

I loved it. It was one of the most honest and beautiful movies I've ever seen.
I pretty much saw the movie as exploring the difference between nature and grace and how for the most part, people either follow the way of nature or the way of grace.

And that's what I found to be the purpose of Sean Penn's character. He reflects back on his life, and the choices he made as a child and how that's impacted him now. He sees his mother as being the epitome of grace (where grace is all about acceptance and selflessness) and his father as being the representation of nature, or at least, the fall of man in nature (where nature is selfish and doesn't recognize love for what it is). There were times when the father told Jack (the younger Sean Penn character) that you have to be selfish in life to get what you want, whereas his mother would repeatedly tell him to only love and accept others. And then later, you see how his father regrets that choice as he wishes he wasn't so stern with his boys and had made a greater effort to show love.

Jack tries to take after his mother's grace, but in the end his loss of innocence (which mostly happens after the boy drowned in the pool where he then goes off an asks God why he should have to be good when God isn't good himself) leads to his own fall (hurting his brother, breaking into the woman's house, etc.) as he follows his father's footsteps in the ways of nature. And that's what he basically has to come to terms with as an adult as he reflects back on his childhood (and then later making that peace on the beach in his inner consciousness).

I think the movie can be basically summed up as showing birth of the universe (literally), to the birth of life on Earth (seeing all the single-celled organisms floating around and the jellyfish), to the birth of empathy and love (the two different species of dinosaurs and one deciding not to kill the other weak and injured one), to the birth of man (the child swimming out to the surface from the underwater bedroom) where he has to then fight between the ways of both grace and nature through the eventual loss of innocence (the life of a family in Waco, TX seen through the reflections on a childhood), and how in the end we all need to make our own peace.

Or something. At least, that's what I took away from it. I definitely want to watch it again.

These were my thoughts from another blog on it, I'll come back later to read everyone else's take.

Tree of Life- A

Just as this movie ended and we all tried to return our brains back into their original and upright reality-processing positions, the man behind me who had been annoyingly sighing every twenty minutes or so proclaimed loudly, "that was by far the worst movie I'ce EVER seen in my life! The man who directed that should be arrested!"

I had a couple thoughts as he said this, but I decided to keep them to myself...and of course my fiancee on the ride home. First off, clearly this man has never seen Batman & Robin, Glitter, or any of Uwe Boll's "movies" if he thinks this is the worst thing ever committed to celluloid. Also, if he wanted to see a movie that holds your head and spoon-feeds you its story until your heart-strings are sore from all the manipulation, why didn't the man go see Transformers or some other mindless summer movie experience instead?

But there is a way to compare this film with what Michael Bay and Malick are both trying to achieve on some level: visual emancipation. Both movies try to wow you with a flurry of images flying by your eyes rather than what is coming out of the character's mouths. But in Malick's case, those visuals are trying to mine deep into your psyche and dance around with your brain matter, rather than Bay's pummeling fireworks that double-down on bombardment of the mind's basest pleasure chambers.

Malick is always a director who bites off more than he can chew, and I mean that in the best way possible. All his works are stultifyingly ambitious in scope, and if half of his themes and concepts he lays on top of the characters in his films connect with me, he's done a pretty good job.

There is a good deal of the film that centers on a mother and father's relationship, as well as their teachings to a trio of boys they have made together. The fact that the mother and father both work as symbolic characters as well as flesh-and-blood people at the same time is a pretty amazing feat. This film is really about lingering on life's true moments of unfettered emotional resonance, or finding the poetry in the everyday way a child sees the world and grows into its own being to being the process anew. The film is the equivalent of a child looking out a window in the back seat of a car during a ride through the sunny countryside on the way to grnadma's house, and then slowing down the entire journey to zoom in on all the minutiae the child sees and of the world whizzing by normally in a blur of detail and movement.

As one reviewer has said of many of Malick's films, the movie gives as much as the viewer is willing to put into it, and I think this film above all his others is the most pondering and far-reaching yet.

Yes, it could be seen as "pretentious" and has a lack-luster ending that barely reigns in all its freewheeling elements, and sometimes it felt like I waswatching This Boy's Life and then sudddnely snapped into the silent, stormy world of Fantasia, but the visual and mental treats this vision of human's relationship with god, man and nature, and how it doesn't pass judgement on where the line between these three meet or part ways is simply so stunning everything that doesn't quite connect yet or ever will simply evaporates into the film's ample ether area.

The film is actually best summed up in the image that it begins with: a slow fade-in to a writhing, unsettled mass of energy. Is it gasses that are slowly but surely forming the beginning of the universe? Is it the inside of a womb where a new life's molecules are beginning to combine and form a living, breathing addition to this world? Is it god itself starting to appear to save/destroy us all?

Good summarization, Khol.

I don't think I would compare Malick to Bay. They both have strong visuals but deriving from entirely different means (CG vs natural light film) with entirely different intents.

Malick will probably end up on Criterion, if he isn't already. Bay's work will just degrade overtime as faster better CG comes along.

haha I know Malcolm about the Bay/Malick comparison, it was meant to be completely playful, to make the barest of connections between the two movies out at the multiplexes at the same time, both being on the opposite sides of the cinema intelligence spectrum.

As for extended thought on the film, I'm anxious to see it again, to try and absorb more of the life force this movie throws at you, with you as the viewer grabbing a giant net and trying to catch as much of the lush visuals and meaning as it screams on by.

It's funny I just watched Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain", which is a movie that has the actual tree of life in the film and is about many of the same subjects that TOL the movie addresses in a completely different manner. It's interesting to me that Brad Pitt was attached to star in the first, much higher budget version of "The Fountain", but left a month before filming because Darren would not change some scenes/lines that Pitt saw not to his liking. The movie was canceled and later filmed for half the original budget and a different cast.

Both used as little CG effects as it could, with outer space in both films being comprised of minute chemical reactions filmed in slow motion and then blown up to represent space's most fantastical collisions and visual displays. And both dealt with a non-linear story tracing thousands of years looking at the concept of death and rebirth possibly being one in the same thing.

I just got my hands on the first draft of the script and oh man, it's so good. I've never read a script that is this dense and descriptive.

hey, malcolm's back