Drink THE MASTER's Kool-Aide.

I've never been the biggest Paul Thomas Anderson fan. I've seen Magnolia twice, sure, but even after viewing There Will Be Blood, his notable shift from Altman-esque dramedies to Kubrickian psychological essays on American greed, I've come to realize he's always been a director I've admired for what he was trying to do rather than actually liking or appreciating his films.

So why did I drive an hour to Santa Clara, take the train to San Francisco, wait in line for two hours to snag one of the last remaining 200 tickets for an early screening of his latest The Master at the legendary Castro Theatre, wait another two hours before the movie started? Well, sometimes I just feel I want to be part of something I know will be important, something where I won't be alone in my pop culture obsessions. The communal appreciation for going to a packed screening has been threatened by the shooting in Colorado, but maybe because of the horrible tragedy, they've become more important than ever. Roger Ebert once longingly wrote that in 1969, he saw a record line of umbrellas for every person waiting to see Godard's Weekend. The digital era is opening up new models of distribution, and closing theatre doors in the process. What a shame that is--standing in that line, chatting with other movie fans, it truly did feel like a blast from the past, never mind that Anderson shot most of The Master on the now almost ancient format of 70mm (though IMAX's popularity shows it won't be dead forever). Hell, even celluloid is becoming a relic with Kodak halting all future production of 35mm.

Anderson recognizes this nostalgia in the early moments of The Master. In one of the earliest scenes, an army doctor confronts Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix, a welcome sight after 3 years of semi-retirement) about a crying spell he once had, to which he replies that he was having a bout of nostalgia brought on by reading a letter by his underage sweetheart. Nostalgia may be Freddy's excuse, but it's also fairly clear he's suffering from PTSD and unresolved family issues. Freddie's deep tragedy lies in his inability to see the manipulation around him, even from Mary-Sue Dodd (Amy Adams as you've never seen her before, a Lady Macbeth in lamb's clothing).

The Master's greatest achievement is linking the post-war condition and the uprise of new religions. The "processing" sessions between Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and Freddy are composed of nebulous, lowest-common denominator questions concerning guilt and potential past lives. It seems that if Lancaster Dodd hadn't found Freddie, someone else would have, and exploited him just the same. The similarities between The Cause and Scientology are there, for sure, from the film's timing of the early 1950s, the name of Dodd's wife Mary-Sue and their living on a boat, the Cause's claims to be able to reconnect to past lives mirror Scientology's claims to cure dyslexia, among other things. But Tom Cruise and co. can sigh of relief that The Master's gaze on Scientology is only in soft-focus; although Freddie does eventually suffer from disillusion, the arc isn't as neat as you'd think.

So if The Master isn't about Scientology, what is it about? It's more about one man's wading through the remnants of his post-war life and trying to find some sort of purpose. I have a feeling some will find Phoenix's performance as too over-the-top, his character too childish or feral. Re-watching Phoenix in Two Lovers reminded me how physical of an actor he is, but in the end it all comes down to his eyes. This is put to best use in the "processing" scenes, where Phoenix's intense physicality is put against Hoffman's effectively charismatic Orson Welles impersonation, and it's a joy to watch the two great actors to toe-to-toe with each other in intense close-up. If there's any justice both will be nominated for Oscars.

Anderson's use of 70mm is also put to beautiful use. Images in The Master linger with the same scent of a Wong Kar-Wai film after you've pushed your body off the red velvet seat. The very first image of the ocean. The tracking shot of a mink model selling her attire, and then herself, at a department store. A montage of beautifully re-created vintage family portraits. The rack focus of Freddie walking at twilight, then focus on the yacht in the background where he will eventually be swallowed into The Cause, then back to Freddie. The ocean. Lancaster playing his own game of "pointing to somewhere into the distance, and then riding as fast as you can towards that point" in the desert. Freddie's sweetheart Doris looking longingly at him, haunting his memory as the truest person in his life. Lancaster Dodd situated in England, with a huge window behind him lighting his immense office. The ocean, again, and again, always changing, always drifting.

The Cause might not cure cancer, but The Master should cure the public of viewing P.T. Anderson's films with hesitancy that he is now anything less than a master filmmaker.

Meditations in an Emergency

In less than one month, I will be 23--and it terrifies me. Terrifies me because I know my day will not be the stuff John Hughes movies are made of. Terrifies me because I worry like crazy that I've come this far and I'm still light years away from being a truly functional adult. Terrifies me because I know that on July 17th, I will be one year closer to being 30. And it all scares the shit out of me.

But even as I fear my birthday coming closer, the prospect of a clean future does sound more promising than the recent past I'm leaving behind, however. This includes a massive car repair bill, car noises not related to that massive bill, rejection by a trailer company (crazy, right?), my Cal Grant renewal being denied, finding mold growing in my room and thus forcing me to find a new place to live, a health issue which combined with a romantic/sexual rejection I know will cause me to slowly drift into Repulsion territory, and having a dollar in my bank account for about every blow Antoine Doinel has taken. I'm 5 foot 7, I weigh 135 pounds. My body is not built for this weight.

I can't stop being angry at the world, or a friend who I didn't know how to ask for support from, and then was furious when he didn't supply it. I can't stop imagining pulling a Jack Nicholson or John Goodman and just hitting things with a golf club while screaming, "You see what happens when you FIND A STRANGER IN THE ALPS?!" Every night for the last two weeks I have begun to sob with a Pavlovian impulse whenever I climb into my empty bed. I don't know how to put a lid the part of me that thinks my anger is absolutely justified because for the greater part of my life I felt like a doormat, and now this is my time to be speak my mind. Is this because I'm in my 20s? Is this exasperated by coming of age in a time when it's become easier to send an angry text message than to verbally explain to someone what I'm going through? Or is it completely my own doing by being a person who (over)reacts first and asks questions later?

It's a hard world, and it changes every day. We are born, we grow up. We fight, we fuck, we fall in love. We watch trees grow and civilizations crumble. We pay taxes. We laugh, we cry. We move on. We will die. The one constant is art, always patiently waiting like our own personal Penelope, from the Van Goghs in museums to the Wong Kar Wai DVDs in our cabinets. That's the thing I like about movies: I get older, and they stay the same.

So I am going to take a breather from my venting my stress into the very public abyss of the internet and do the one thing I can do best: Learn from the movies. Here are my favorite things to watch when I'm quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again:



Two Lovers (2009, James Gray). This movie silently came and went in theatres back in early 2009, despite at the time being labeled as the last film Joaquin Phoenix would ever make (time has proven that label false). And it's a real shame, not just because it's exceedingly rare to find a romantic drama not Twilight-related or a Nicholas Sparks adaptation, let alone an intelligent one: it's because Gray's direction shows a keen eye for the way people watch those they love, whether it's deeply-rooted family love or an obsessive new passion, and maybe the vicious circle of how we seek out what we know is already damaged. The best description of what makes the movie so special can be summed up by Owen Gleiberman's Entertainment Weekly review: "I tend to bristle whenever a new film gets compared to ''a '70s movie,'' as if an era defined by its rambling unpredictability of form can now be reduced to a mere genre. But James Gray's Two Lovers really is a '70s movie, in the mode of such raw, unfiltered character studies as The Panic in Needle Park, Wanda, and Fat City. You have to watch it with different brain muscles than you’re used to using, because the film has no frills or hooks, no visible ''arcs,'' nothing to grab on to but the fragile humanity of the people on screen." And indeed, the fragile humanity of the people in the audience such as myself. 




Five Easy Pieces (1970, Bob Rafelson). Speaking of golf clubs to a car windshield...no, seriously; Rafelson's family drama perfectly encapsulates the volatile emotions of being a young, angry person, and in that sense is the quintissential 70s film. There's never a scene that directly explains why Robert Dupea is so damaged, or why he hasn't spoken to his father in years. The only scene that nearly explains it is a totally dialogue-free scene, in which Bobby plays the piano for his love interest Catherine, and the camera pans from Bobby's face to his fingers playing the piano, finally over the wall of family photographs, until it comes full-circle back to Catherine. This is Bobby journeying back into the past, revealing his once promising talent as a pianist and reconciling it with his family. It's at this moment that you realize this is really the only true moment you'll understand Bobby, and the moment that still explains nothing at all--not the anger, not the distance, not the fact that he can't stay in one place or with one person. Five Easy Pieces doesn't offer any solutions, and even alludes to the fact that Bobby still hasn't changed at the film's end. If only calming the inner beast really was as easy as the title so teasingly suggests.

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962, Agnes Varda). My father's best piece of advice to me, as well as proof of his ability to significantly lower his standards, is that the first and best thing a person can do to succeed is get up, get dressed and get out the door. Agnes Varda's marvelous breakthrough is that lesson incarnated, in which a pop singer awaiting the test results to determine if she has stomach cancer wallows in self-pity and hides from the world until she triumphantly takes off her wig (Pedro Almodovar must've loved this movie), puts on her sunglasses and walks out into the streets of Paris. And with this exodus she experiences all the pains and pleasures of living: death (in the form of a man devouring live frogs), cinema (with splendid cameos by Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard doing his best Harold Loyd impersonation), and the possibility of love when a soldier on leave decides to accompany her to the hospital. The message is simple: Once you step outside your comfort zone, you'll realize that the world is a big place filled with endless possibilities. But Varda, a former photographer, infuses her story with both a visually electric style and a big heart for her protagonist's journey, it's impossible to call Cleo anything but wonderful.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, Wes Anderson). When I'm in a down-trodden state, I don't like to watch comedies, because being around someone who's in the exact opposite mood as I am doesn't make me wanna perk myself up, it makes me feel more alone. So I watch dramas in order to feel like my mood is not an isolated incident. But Wes Anderson's movies always make me laugh even when I feel like crying, because though his movies are a fusion of melancholy and deadpan comedy. It's often hard to remember that underneath those bright color schemes and 70s soundtrack, all his characters are undeniably screwed up and in a crisis. The Royal Tenenbaums is my favorite, and it's a whallop of screwed-up adults, least of which is the weasely patriarch: Margot Tenenbaum has felt isolated from her family since her father made it clear she was adopted; Richie is in love with Margot and has let his depression ruin his tennis career. Chas' wife died in a plane crash, and as a result has adopted such a rigid hold over his two sons, one imagines Finding Nemo's Marlin telling him to go easy on them. Somehow, seeing adults as complicated, even neurotic people makes me feel less insecure, and makes me feel better, and it's a real triumph to Anderson that he never condescends his characters to make them cute or cardboard cut-outs, and also that he squeezed out Gene Hackman's finest performance ever. 

Click here for Jon Hamm's recitation of "Mayakovsky," where this blog post got its title from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPPhd4elT5o


"Mad Men" (2007-present; created by Matthew Weiner). This is crazy, but for the majority of times "Mad Men" has been in my possession on DVD, I've been going through a crisis of sorts. It's true: I watched the last half of Season 1 as I was coping with my first boyfriend telling me he wanted to take a break. Three months later, I received the entirety of Season 2 a few days after being fired from a job I was loving. I breezed through it in probably a 48-hour period. A year later, Season 3 went by even more quickly was with me as I coped with said boyfriend coming back into my life before I was ready. Season 4 was the only time I was truly happy watching it, but this year the bulk of my financial, car, emotional, health and other problems began on March 25th--the day the fifth season finally premiered. But it's not without a hint of irony that the very thing that is close to me in an emergency is also great medicine for it. 

I mentioned earlier how seeing seemingly functioning adults portrayed as complex and cracking makes me feel better. Well, every character in Mad Men is struggling to reconcile their choices, their own image of themselves, their true identity. Some of them, like Peggy, come to terms with their past and move on, but I get the feeling that if Don Draper ever found true happiness, the show wouldn't have a purpose anymore. This quiet discontent has poisoned his marriage with his first wife, then his singular healthy relationship with a psychologist Faye who might've helped him reconcile Dick Whitman with Don Draper. But as Rachel Menken smartly realized, "You don't want to run away with me, you just want to run away." 5 seasons in, even though his new marriage to the young, pretty Megan is seemingly working out, Don Draper is no closer to realizing exactly who he is. We know he aspires to be a good husband and father, but even that dream is a far away place; he'd have better luck selling that kind of happiness to a client than believing it himself.

'Contagion' a weak virus.

It's very strange that Steven Soderbergh's hip remake of Outbreak would be oddly appropriate viewing for the 10-year anniversary of September 11th, but Soderbergh is a director who has always surprised me, and his versatility is a major reason why he's among the most exciting American filmmakers working today--and I'm crossing my fingers that he keeps on working, too. His coolness is written all over this film, from the visual little details of everyday physical nuances to Cliff Martinez's throbbing score. Contagion's greatest strength is 48-year-old Soderbergh's pulse on 21st-century communication. However, unlike his great Traffic, Contagion can be sterile like the sky is blue because of its devastating lack of detail to character.

Weaving multiple storylines spanning all over the world, the film starts with a cough. A cough businesswoman/wife Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) shrugs off as jet lag--until it becomes a seizure, and then much worse. Considered patient zero for a highly contagious virus, the virus claims victims exponentially, becoming an epidemic. The cast includes Matt Damon as Paltrow's widowed husband, Jude Law as a San Francisco-based blogger/conspiracy theorist, Laurence Fishburne as a CDC manager, Kate Winslet as the doctor Fishburne hires to investigate the virus, Jennifer Ehle as a disease expert racing to find a cure, and Marion Cotillard is sadly underused as a WHO epidemiologist who travels to Hong Kong, believing it to be the source for the virus. You only need to have read three of the actors to know this is an incredibly well-cast film, and all the actors do admirable work; there isn't a bad performance in the whole movie, with many of the cast having to perform scared and sick (Paltrow in particular does a great seizure). But the problem with a cast this big, no matter how talented, is that it produces character overcrowding. There is absolutely nothing remotely interesting to be found in Winslet's Erin Mears or Marion Cotillard's character ($10 reward if you can remember her name without the aide of IMDb). Both of these characters, doctors who are investigating the source of the virus, albeit in different continents, should have been combined into one character, because at least then it would have allowed some room for, oh I don't know, knowing whether or not they put their socks on before or after putting on their pants. It's especially vexing for Cotillard because she's not only incredibly beautiful, but also incredibly talented, and after Chris Nolan forced her to chew the scenery in Inception (no doubt by starving her first), it's distressing to see her character here dropped unceremoniously for what feels like the last half of the film. Indeed, it's a very telling note of the screenwriter's regard for his characters that when someone in this movie serves their purpose, usually expository reasons, they are dropped like a fly.

As such, those who do shine in Contagion don't have to work very hard; Matt Damon continues a professional winning streak as a widowed father concerned for his surviving teenage daughter--his portrayal of sudden grief at his wife's death is genuinely affecting. And as a widowed husband/surviving father, he is the face of humanity in the film. Jude Law has the benefit of portraying the most fascinating character, a "freelance journalist" who seems to nail the government's secretive acts while trying to eradicate the epidemic. It's through him that the film's title not only refers to a disease, but viral communication. I find it through these two characters that I draw the parallels to 9/11--in the years after, there are two emotions most deeply felt: humanity and anger. The blogger's hipness does much of the actor's work in gaining the audience's attention, including mine: I grew up north of the San Francisco Bay Area and know all too much about the free media. Where the screenplay takes the blogger I found disappointing to the overall message, but nothing's perfect, certainly not this film.

Be more 'Crazy,' less 'Stupid,' and we might 'Love' you. Also, learn proper punctuation, you sound like a schmuck.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. doesn't like you. You might try to like it, but like a guy that hits you over the head with his supposed knowledge of fine wines and French literature, this movie just doesn't know when to stop following a guide-book on romantic comedies when all we want is total honesty. I feel I should go apologize to guidebooks now for having insulted them.

Steve Carell and the always-luminous Julianne Moore are Cal and Emily, who have been married for about 25 years, having been high school sweethearts. Now Emily wants a divorce and Cal is left dumbfounded, in a pool of his own self-pity. Lucky for him, of all the (presumably many) gin joints in all the towns (presumably Los Angeles) in all the world, smooth-talking ladies man Jacob (Ryan Gosling in his sexiest role) overhears Cal's sob story to anyone who will listen, and decides to take Cal under his wing, giving him a new wardrobe and teaching him the tricks of how to seduce women. Meanwhile, Jacob meets Hannah, a young lawyer (played by Emma Stone, who always has a delightful glitter in her eyes) who rebuffs him upon his initial seduction and therefore must be his soulmate. Cal and Emily's 13-year-old son thinks his 17-year-old babysitter is his own soulmate, not knowing that she has a crush on Cal, his own father. Kevin Bacon and Marisa Tomei also pop up as potential love interests for Cal and Emily. Bacon is great fun, playing his role with a surprising amount of genuine charm and warmth, but with just enough of a hint of deviousness to make us question if he'll snatch Moore away for himself. Marisa Tomei is not allotted that dignity, for one reason or another, overplaying her role to the point of becoming a cruel caricature of a desperate, needy woman.

This movie has a wonderful cast, and their only fault is signing onto a project that is clearly beneath their talents and failing to allow very much honesty (the film's moments of genuine charm or catharsis is few and far between). Steve Carell spent 7 years on The Office playing a man whose outlandish whims were intensified by a devastating insecurity; most of the time the show felt like a game of "What Can Make The Audience Most Uncomfortable?," but Carell's finest moments of real vulnerability has made me excited to see him stretch his acting choices now that he's free from The Office. But despite moments of genuine catharsis as I've mentioned earlier, all of them involving Julianne Moore (if I'm making it sound like Ms. Moore can do no wrong, it's because she couldn't even if she tried), the role feels like a rehash of some of the most awkward moments on The Office combined with makeover scenes from The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Julianne Moore has made a career out of playing adulterers, but despite her lovely gravity, the only thing that made her stand out was how often her character wears high-heels. I mean, really, it's so noticeable you'd think this role was written for Sarah Jessica Parker. Emma Stone is wonderful but her part is too small to make an impression. And even if Ryan Gosling hadn't put an iota of passion into his role, he couldn't fail if he tried--his abs are just so marvelous, even the camera is in love with them.

No, a quick trip to IMDB will tell you who to put the blame on, and that is screenwriter Dan Fogelman. Why am I so quick to blame the writer? Because this is the first thing he's done that's gotten an MPAA rating over PG. He's the man who penned one of the worst-reviewed Christmas films (Fred Clause), Pixar's weakest film (Cars and its sequel Cars 2), and has also penned Tangled and Bolt. All of these are children's films which makes it suddenly understandable where all the worst cliches of the film come from: the misunderstandings which come to merge at a family gathering, the children too precocious for their own good, the climactic speech in front of an audience which nicely wraps up the film's message and makes everyone happy again, even the rain after a harsh argument which makes Cal say, "this is so cliche!" Screenwriters, making a meta-film reference doesn't make your script any less of a cliche, it just highlights your failure to create anything original.

If the film had not busied itself with so many subplots (honestly, the son/baby-sitter/father crush-triangle went to very uncomfortable places) and focused not on Moore and Carell, who are very capable actors but didn't seem to have much chemistry but on the budding romance between Stone and Gosling, who do have a lot of chemistry, it could have reshaped the movie into something much more delightful. After all, any guy who can work Dirty Dancing into a seduction deserves more screentime. Ryan Gosling and especially his abs deserved a better screenplay. Crazy and stupid, I know. But true.

Girls Just Wanna Help Autistic Kids!

The great thing about house-sitting, especially with a massive DVD collection, is that you get to watch movies you would never in a million years actually want to watch other than having a morbid curiosity as to whether or not the two critics for At The Movies actually got it right. There's no paper trail from the library, no comments by a video store clerk that might arouse a blush and tarnish your image as a film snob with impeccable taste. Now, I consider myself a gal with a good taste in movies, but I also realize that from time to time looking outside the box can have beautiful consequences, if anything just to realize how great a good movie really is by comparison. So here's a brief rundown of the more fluffy "chick flicks" I viewed on a particularly lovely house-sitting weekend.

Eat Pray Love (2010, Ryan Murphy). Based on the best-selling memoir of a woman who overcame a crisis brought on by divorce by traveling to Italy, India and Bali to find her center in life, the film version, despite some truly moving moments, cannot overcome the bad casting of Julia Roberts; As an actress famous for her million-dollar smile, Roberts simply cannot personify self-pity or depression because even frowning makes it look like it takes all her effort. As a result, the film is less a story of a woman's realization of her self and happiness than another rich American who travels abroad and heartedly laughs at how Italians uses hand gestures to kiss off others, then has the cathartic moment when she travels to a more poverty-stricken nation that everything does *not* revolve around her.

Dear John (2010, Lasse Halfstrom). Nicholas Sparks may be one of the worst authors to ever be printed, and the fact that he is an internationally beloved best-seller is only proof that the terrorists are winning. As such, the only reason why any film adaptations of his works succeed are because of the commitment of the female leads. Rachel McAdams put her heart into a role that was very beneath her in The Notebook, and her Mean Girls co-star Amanda Seyfried follows in her footsteps for Dear John. As the girl who is so angelic she's practically a saint (she doesn't drink, smoke or sleep around but she does admit to "swearing constantly in [her] mind"), Seyfried is so good that she nearly makes the utterly wooden Channing Tatum seem engaging just by looking into his eyes. As Savannah and soldier John, they have a beach summer romance as typical in a Sparks story, then things get overdramatically complicated as typical in a Sparks story, in this case John enlisting immediately after 9/11 and their continued relationship via snail mail. Both roles are too good to be realistic (in addition to Savannah and her dream to open up a horse camp for autistic children, John is written as a sometimes badboy with a heart of gold, and by the film's end, the only career soldier not to swear, drink or get PTSD), but despite this I really was with the film until the last third when the plot manipulation needed to throw the couple into an emotional climax threw me off because it relies far too much on Savannah's goodness to a point where it really, truly did become unrealistic and even uncharacteristic. But nothing wrong with the film is anybody's fault, not even the dull leading man or the director known for his overly warm-hearted fare, except the screenwriter who was too dumb or too scared to change Spark's book.

Letters to Juliet (2010, Gary Winick). Another summer Seyfried romance involving letters! This time Seyfried gets a better character to play with, in this case a young fact-checker for the New Yorker named Sophie who discovers a long-lost letter to "Juliet," really a group of female secretaries who answer letters written by the love-lorn in Verona, Italy, and decides to set out and set things straight. The writer of that letter, Claire, played by a still-luminous Vanessa Redgrave, never forgot her first love and sets out with her grandson Charlie and Sophie to see if her love is still out there. Even though Sophie is engaged to a workaholic chef and Charlie's so cynical he's clearly hiding a heart of gold in plain sight, the two become attracted to each other. I might have been able to forgive the predictability of their blossoming from animosity to love had the ending been a little more real. I fast-forwarded through it, but believe me when I say it involves a balcony of some sort. The real heart of the film lies in Claire's search for her long-lost love (the fact that he is played by Franco Nero, Regrave's real-life longtime love, only adds to the story's genuine spirit), because it's a rare chance to show love between seniors in a very warm and real way. If only someone had had the courage to make it all about her.

It's Complicated (2009, Nancy Meyers). I like Meryl Streep, I love Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin will always have a very special place in my heart for portraying The Jerk's Navin Johnson, the man born a poor black child. I thought all of this would overcome the fact that Nancy Meyers shoots romantic comedies as though they were an ad for The Olive Garden. It didn't, and unlike Letters to Juliet (and much like Meyer's earlier Something's Gotta Give), it turned the depiction of a romance between people over 25 into a never-ending parade of sex jokes. By the time Meryl and Steve were lighting up marijuana I blew this joint.

No Strings Attached (2011, Ivan Reitman). It turns a depiction of a romance between people barely over 25 into a parade of never-ending sex jokes....and somehow it mostly worked. Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher are a pair of friends who decide to have a friends-with-benefits relationship, not knowing that they will eventually fall in love with each other. Shakespeare once coined this phenomena of the audience having the upper hand as dramatic irony; we call it predictable writing. Or art imitating human nature. Portman and Kutcher are not actors I usually enjoy, Portman for her acting choices and Kutcher for his personality, but I found them surprisingly winning together; this comedy allows Portman to breathe and have fun while Kutcher is genuinely down-to-earth and likable. It's also very rare for a film to depict a woman as an utter non-virgin (it is Portman's character who proposes the sexual relationship) and who has to go through the journey of truly listening to her heart. Not every joke lands in this film, especially not Kevin Klein's scenes as Kutcher's dad, but pull a few of your judgmental strings and you might be pleasantly surprised.

Terrence Malick's Big Bang Theory

And so our thirst has been quenched, if ever so momentarily before another potential drought, by the arrival of a new Terrence Malick film. And so the never-ending debate has been resparked of the notoriously reclusive director's status as a master filmmaker or a pretentious hack. The utter disregard for linear storytelling, the scope of his story and his questions, the whispy voice-overs in favor of dialogue, the years--literally, years--of editing in which Malick has a chance to leave no permutation of sequence uncharted. As a fan (albeit apprehensive) of Malick's films, I never find it easy to wrestle with the tireless existential questions his films ask about human beings and our place in time, nor have I even found it easy to be completely engaged as was the case with The Thin Red Line and The New World. But I'd rather watch a film that tries to be great and asks more questions than it answers over a film which strives for nothing and succeeds.

"There are two ways through life in this world--the way of nature, and the way of grace" intones Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain, who is the stunning image of a young Liv Ullmann in more than just looks). Malick, I believe, given his trademark of the relationships between humans and their environments, is more in line with the way of nature. In a stunning, utterly surprising turn, Malick includes a 20-minute sequence in the second reel of The Tree of Life depicting the beginnings of the universe, from the big bang to dinosaurs. In the hands of any other director this could have been preposterous, but Malick uses this sequence to demonstrate that every life, every family, goes through their own life and death, and shows how miniscule our place as humans has been in the grand scale of time. Every triumph and failure can be seen as gargantuon or miniscule depending on how you look at it. Much of the film takes place in the 1950s as the O'Briens (Chastain is the mother and "way of grace," while Brad Pitt turns in a surprisingly restrained turn as the more complex father who takes a Darwinistic approach towards parenthood) and their three sons as they experience a loss of innocence, a tiny spot in the place of the world but a universal story of a family's loss of innocence.

Malick uses many, many different layers and allusions, from fairy tales to The Book of Job, and a Fellini-esque ending which may or may not be the afterlife--I really don't want to get into all of that, because I know that whatever answers I may come up with may not will not begin to scratch the surface of the film's many mysteries. Maybe I just don't know what the hell Malick was trying to say or prove. But I do know that although I don't think Malick will ever reclaim the focus of his 70s work, I was hooked on every minute of the film's 2 1/2 hour running time in a way that I haven't been since Malick's Badlands. Many people may tack the word "pretentious" onto Malick because he asks more questions than he answers. If only they knew it was far, far more pretentious for a filmmaker to ask questions than to claim to have all the answers.

I kinda want my time back from 'Cashback'

The protagonist of Sean Ellis' Cashback sees work as a form of trade. "I give them 8 hours, they give me money." This raises a similar question about the watching of movies: we give the enigmatic "them" two hours of our time, and in return what we receive can range from an enlightening moral awakening about humanity to propaganda and everything left, right and in between. That we are never sure what to expect from a movie is part of what makes each fresh viewing so seductive.

Ellis' Oscar-nominated short film Cashback was extended into a feature length film less than two years after production, and if you look at these two together, it's impossible to tell the difference, to the point where I can only think that shots from the short were inserted and mildly tweaked into the feature film (the same cast and crew is used for both films). They both tell the same story, of an art student who develops insomnia after the break-up of his recent relationship and while working the night shift at a supermarket, finds a sort of magic in everything around him, from a spilled package of peas to his co-worker Sharon, while flashing back to the moments in his life which would shape his desire towards women. But despite being nearly shot-for-shot similar, the difference in length is where this difference is most noticable: While the short at 18 minutes packs just enough laughs and character introductions to make for an amiable pilot for a TV show (how anyone could expand the story each week is someone else's problem), but as a feature Ellis seems to have been in a same dream-like state in the writing stage in the same why his protagonist is--and that compliment is only a back-handed one.

Ellis' visual style, though perhaps stealing a page from a famous scene of Tim Burton's Big Fish in its depiction of time slowing down or completely stopping, is lovely. Even in a setting as mundane as a supermarket, the colors are saturated as though they came from a Wong Kar-Wai film (the usage of the exact same recording of the phenomenal opera piece"Casta Diva" proves Ellis has viewed the master's 2046). Some of the time-manipulation scenes are quite beautiful, especially the final scene when used as a declaration of love, but these scenes happen so frequently that after the second time the magic wears off and questions about this space-time continuum arise (is the sleep-deprived Ben Willis simply imagining this or is he actually walking through the world as time stops? Ellis never seemed to have made up his mind about this and created plot holes in the process). In the most well-known of these time-manipulation scenes which appears as the film's poster, Ben stops time so he can draw nude women shopping in the supermarket by undressing them in the middle of the shampoo isles. Despite narrating about his love of the female form (he's an art student, after all!) deriving from a Swedish nudist roommate as a youngster, by the time this scene is over you mostly just wonder how this guy ever got laid in the first place when he takes advantage of women's bodies with this "superpower."

Alas, as a story is often told in film criticism, the beautiful visuals nearly overshadow a lacking script, but not quite enough. Extending a short film into a feature can give a filmmaker more time to shape the characters, but this attempt is quite lackluster--the protagonist, perhaps because of his insomnia, is quite pedestrian at best and there is nothing registered in his face to suggest anything is at stake in this young man's life. There's a colorful cast of supporting characters, but none of them are developed to be anything beyond brief comedic relief, and none are ever truly funny at that. Throwaway moments, including the manager giving an inappropriate touch to the beautiful Sharon, could have been a glimpse into these people's histories but do not appear again in the remainder of the film and makes their very inclusion seem more important than they actually are. The best performance comes from Emilia Fox as Sharon, Ben's love interest, whose role is nearly a Xeroxed copy of Pam from "The Office," but Fox shades the role with enough nuances to elevate her thin role to something more deft than the rest of the cast can manage (the fact that she's very beautiful doesn't hurt, either).

While Ellis' film urges looking closer at the beauty in every day life, it's strange to write that Ellis never slows down enough to have this beauty develop organically in front of the camera; Ben's flashbacks alone take up about 1/3 of the movie, which is the same amount of time we spend in our lives sleeping. The result is a film which is much more slower than it should be, and which, despite all its good qualities which I hope Ellis will overcome in subsequent projects, was ultimately not worth my invested 2 hours.

But enough with this; it's 11:53 pm and I'd rather be dreaming.