bobt145

A review of a young couple's life, in flashbacks, from the beginning in Italy to San Francisco and back, in love, in denial, in the struggle to come to terms with life itself.

Lina Wertmueller's direction dives right to the heart of the angst of love, its feeling of closeness and its opposite feeling of being unable to fully connect, an impossible dream of emotional need clashing with the physical isolation of each.

Candice Bergen and Giancarlo Giannini are particularly magnificent in the violent, extended fight on the night full of endless rain.

Their friends, often seen as groups of faces, provide a Greek chorus of comment, detached and occasionally mocking.

This is yet another terrific reason to keep the VHS player working!

In a film that takes its viewers from The Big Bang to the future, "The Tree of Life" achieves much of the poetry of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," awakens a sense of wonderment in the patient viewer, yet leaves us wondering about what it says of human interaction.

Perhaps Malick has simply taken too large a bite for one film.

It is certainly a bold effort. And that, in and of itself, is something to appreciate. Very few attempts at such universal themes as meaning, spirituality, our place in time, have been made in the last 25 years.

The O'Brien family of Waco, Texas is the human focus of the film. Their home is in the shade of a magnificent, arching tree of amazing size. You may have never seen one like it.

The tree serves as the frame of "The Tree..." Intercut between family dialog and children's play, Malick gives us reminding gazes at its trunk, its largest branches and the sky above it. It is as if the tree is a cosmic umbrella, an always present frame for the scurrying below.

It is Malick's reminder that humans then and now are not the end-all of creation, not the reason, not even reason in the sense of Descartes. We are just a microscopically small part of the amazing Universe.

If we're lucky, we'll find our own meaning along the way and have our memories to define the journey.

Don't see "The Tree..." if you want plot or resolution. This will be a polarizing movie. I would say all but ten percent st the showing I attended didn't like it. As one other visitor to the Men's Room afterward said, "That stunk." He was not a thrill seeking, attention challenged man. He was older, of the type who has seen hundreds of good movies. Yet, he just didn't get it.

I can't decide whether some of the negative reaction is isolated to just the family story. Malick might have done it differently. removed a disturbing sense of violence in the father, Brad Pitt. Perhaps made the mother more substantial, less intuitive. But isn't that what mother's are? He was certainly telling us that the details didn't matter, as if their sum, no matter what specifics, would always spell lives only important to their immediate memories.

Not sure. Still thinking about it. And that is the aspect of the film I liked most.

A modern train glides smoothly over a ravine bridge against a framed backdrop of snow-covered peaks and deep valleys.

It is a breathtakingly scenic surprise that sharply contrasts with the passengers crammed into the train, exhausted, heading home for a day or two after a week's wait at the city train station.

Lixin Fan's film of three consecutive New Year's migrations provides startling insight into modern China and the devastation that recent industrialization has wrecked upon a country once steeped in family-centered culture.

A young girl offers prayers for her grandfather. He has raised her and she doesn't really know much at all about her parents.

They have spent her lifetime in Guangzhou's factories making jeans for the world and sending money back home in hopes their children (they also have a younger son) will receive a strong education and rise above the menial factory work.

It is an aching portrait of modern China that should be seen.