MOVIES, Y’ALL with Cole Hutchison

by | Jul 1, 2011

The Tree of Life (2011)
dir: Terrence Malick

Much like noise music, green bean ice cream and unexpected anal sex, the films of Terrence Malick are certainly a love-em-or-hate-em affair. Personally, I love the guy, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand why many people might prefer ingesting broken glass to sitting through 3 hours of his “spiritual” musings in an uncomfortable theatre surrounded by mouthbreathing cinephiles barely managing to hide their weird awe-induced boners. If you’re not familiar with any of his work, The Tree Of Life probably isn’t the best place to start. My first Malick film was 1998’s The Thin Red Line, and I’ll freely admit that it took a good amount of time to grow on me. But once you’re hooked it becomes difficult to fathom what your initial problems with his cinema were in the first place. Dude has a way with images; every single frame oozes with a meticulous obsession that manages to come across as uncannily natural, as though the viewer has simply stumbled across a random, non-professional’s diary that just happens to be written with exemplary skill and passion. His musings (and muse he does) tend to be a bit simplistic, as though siphoning the myriad images, ideas and philosophies possible within life on Earth into basic—but exhaustively depicted—archetypes is okay as long as you make the effort to recognize the miasma before simplifying it. And, honestly, with filmmaking this strong it is okay. His are movies that breathe and use that gift to effectively suck you in. Nevermind his tendency to meander; these are breath-taking locales and we are lucky to be invited. The Tree of Life is essentially an invitation into Malick’s own childhood, from whence, it becomes obvious, was spawned his own particular outlook on the dualistic nature of the universe and man’s exhilarating but tiny existence within it. Without giving too much away (there is a lot of joy inherent in the very act of discovering a Malick film without the unnecessary weight of prior knowledge or critical opinions), I will say that this film’s most astonishing achievement is its ability to convey nearly the entire spectrum of experience and emotion that I myself (and, I’m assuming, most American males) went through during the formative years of my adolescence. And this is something that Malick pulls off almost entirely with images. It’s a highly personal work that also succeeds in tapping into a universal sensibility, a shared consciousness. I could gush about the cinematography, the unexpected dinosaurs (yay!), the father-son dynamic that will probably hit a little too close to home for many viewers, and the transcendent observations about the patterns of nature that are usually reserved for eating mushrooms in the woods with your best friends, but I’d rather let Malick’s film do the talking. So just shut up and listen.

More movies after the jump…


The Tree of Life (2011)
dir: Terrence Malick

Much like noise music, green bean ice cream and unexpected anal sex, the films of Terrence Malick are certainly a love-em-or-hate-em affair. Personally, I love the guy, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand why many people might prefer ingesting broken glass to sitting through 3 hours of his “spiritual” musings in an uncomfortable theatre surrounded by mouthbreathing cinephiles barely managing to hide their weird awe-induced boners. If you’re not familiar with any of his work, The Tree Of Life probably isn’t the best place to start. My first Malick film was 1998’s The Thin Red Line, and I’ll freely admit that it took a good amount of time to grow on me. But once you’re hooked it becomes difficult to fathom what your initial problems with his cinema were in the first place. Dude has a way with images; every single frame oozes with a meticulous obsession that manages to come across as uncannily natural, as though the viewer has simply stumbled across a random, non-professional’s diary that just happens to be written with exemplary skill and passion. His musings (and muse he does) tend to be a bit simplistic, as though siphoning the myriad images, ideas and philosophies possible within life on Earth into basic—but exhaustively depicted—archetypes is okay as long as you make the effort to recognize the miasma before simplifying it. And, honestly, with filmmaking this strong it is okay. His are movies that breathe and use that gift to effectively suck you in. Nevermind his tendency to meander; these are breath-taking locales and we are lucky to be invited. The Tree of Life is essentially an invitation into Malick’s own childhood, from whence, it becomes obvious, was spawned his own particular outlook on the dualistic nature of the universe and man’s exhilarating but tiny existence within it. Without giving too much away (there is a lot of joy inherent in the very act of discovering a Malick film without the unnecessary weight of prior knowledge or critical opinions), I will say that this film’s most astonishing achievement is its ability to convey nearly the entire spectrum of experience and emotion that I myself (and, I’m assuming, most American males) went through during the formative years of my adolescence. And this is something that Malick pulls off almost entirely with images. It’s a highly personal work that also succeeds in tapping into a universal sensibility, a shared consciousness. I could gush about the cinematography, the unexpected dinosaurs (yay!), the father-son dynamic that will probably hit a little too close to home for many viewers, and the transcendent observations about the patterns of nature that are usually reserved for eating mushrooms in the woods with your best friends, but I’d rather let Malick’s film do the talking. So just shut up and listen.

More movies after the jump…

Gomorrah (2008)
dir: Matteo Garrone

When I was 22 years old I spent a month traveling around in Italy and Sicily, essentially for no other reason than that I loved Italian food (I still do!) and I assumed the beaches would be incredible (they were! And there were boobs!). One evening while riding on the Trenitalia (LOL) my friends and I met three young overtly friendly dudes from the city of Naples, probably most famous in the rest of the world for the honor of being the (hotly debated) birthplace of pizza. Pizza is delicious, but these three dudes left a pretty bad taste in my mouth because they managed to come across as by far the sketchiest individuals that I encountered in that boot-shaped land, which is kind of saying a lot. The bad taste might have also been the hash that they smoked with me, which momentarily made them seem completely awesome until that horrible, inevitable realization that I would now be spending my entire night-train journey wide awake, clutching my bag, totally sketched out and really, really high. Luckily our train came to a stop no more than an hour after the clandestine smoking session took place in our semi-private booth and, prompted by the verbal announcements of an unexpected train employee, my three skeezy travel buddies bolted for the nearest window (!) and jumped out (!!), abandoning both the train and my paranoid, hash-induced waking nightmares of robbery and murder. My own xenophobia aside, Napoli is a fucked up place. This film does a pretty fantastic job of conveying just how corrosive and all-encompassing of a grip the Camorra (see what they did there?) crime family has had on the 4th wealthiest metropolis of the land of my ancestors. We’re introduced to a good variety of characters from different walks of life, all of whom eventually find themselves forced to make difficult decisions when facing their unavoidable interactions with the criminal element so hopelessly entrenched within the very infrastructure of their birthplace. Rather than portray organized crime as an obvious enemy that must be staunchly fought, though, the film acknowledges that by this point in history it is more of a cancer that has become functionally malignant, not quite killing the city but rather infecting it so deeply that the only real choice is to learn to live with it as best as one can. For the most part, that’s what the characters in Garrone’s film attempt to do. But don’t interpret that as meaning it is any less difficult to handle. There are moments in this film that will stay with you for a very long time, the kind of decisions-by-circumstance that will sadden, infuriate and disgust you in equal measure. Garrone has quite an eye for natural geographical composition and the gorgeous shots to be found within decaying city architecture that provide an impressive frame for the tapestry of human misery and corruption that he presents to us. It’s great, good-looking stuff, but far from a flattering portrait for uneducated tourists like myself to gawk at.

Viridiana (1961)
dir: Luis Buñuel

Buñuel is an undeniable genius, I think that’s something that we can all agree on. And Viridiana is definitely one of his most complete and consistent masterpieces of subtle social destruction. It’s one of my personal favorites of his for many reasons, the least of which being that Silvia Pinal is a stone-cold solid fox and even the vague intimation that she may spend many of her evenings cordoned off in her chamber administering an obsessive punishment of self-flagellation is enough to make me sweaty in weird places and then wonder what the hell is wrong with me. Not to mention the director’s well-known obsession with legs and feet, and two of the most jaw-dropping scenarios of expertly realized sexual innuendo in cinematic history. Recently while watching the film for the first time in a few years, it dawned on me that this is actually the most accessible and least overtly surreal of his films, and would probably be a good starting point for anyone who is understandably curious but woefully ignorant of the master’s work. So take that as an invitation, if you need one. If you’re already a convert, do yourself a favor and revisit this classic. I did, and now I can’t resist the urge to pounce on my leggy girlfriend every single time she walks by in a pair of shorts. Sex! Summer! Everybody wins!

Marilyn Drew Necci

Marilyn Drew Necci

Former GayRVA editor-in-chief, RVA Magazine editor for print and web. Anxiety expert, proud trans woman, happily married.




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