Posts tagged Brad Pitt
Moneyball – Movie Trailer
Sep 29th
Based on a true story, Moneyball is a movie for anybody who has ever dreamed of taking on the system. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s and the guy who assembles the team, who has an epiphany: all of baseball’s conventional wisdom is wrong. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane will have to outsmart the richer clubs. The onetime jock teams with Ivy League grad Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) in an unlikely partnership, recruiting bargain players that the scouts call flawed, but all of whom have an ability to get on base, score runs, and win games. It’s more than baseball, it’s a revolution – one that challenges old school traditions and puts Beane in the crosshairs of those who say he’s tearing out the heart and soul of the game.
“The Tree of Life” The Film of Pretentiousness
Jun 22nd
“The Film of Pretentiousness”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Tree of Life won the Palme D’or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, which says something more about the French than it does about this film.
Written and directed by Terrence Malick, well-known, reclusive, but slow-working filmmaker, this is only his fifth feature-length film, his first being the 1973 Badlands, which has a cult following, as do most of Malick’s films.
I believe it is safe to say that Malick’s films are an acquired taste, and I found his latest one to be distasteful.
No, “distasteful” is such an ugly word. Let’s just call it boring and pretentious.
The film contains very little dialogue within scenes that are part of what little story there is, and most of the dialogue is voice-over narration, such as when Mrs. O’Brien says at the beginning of the film, “The nuns taught us there were two ways through life–the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.”
Then we see the first of the scenes that will develop this theme, which involve the O’Brien family, Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien, played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, and their three boys, the oldest of whom, Jack, is played by Sean Penn as a grown-up.
Although most of the scenes about the family take place in the 1950s in Texas, sometime in the Sixties Mrs. O’Brien receives a telegram that one of the boys is dead, when he was 19.
So, then we see scenes of grief, hear lots of voice-over spiritual narration, and then we experience a long sequence of images that actually depict the beginning of the cosmos, the planet, the beginnings of life, and, yes, even dinosaurs.
Two women in the theater walked out at this point, before the film got back to the story of the O’Brien family in the Fifties, beginning with the birth of Jack.
Mr. O’Brien is a strict disciplinarian who demands that everyone obey him, but also profess their love for him. He represents nature.
Mrs. O’Brien plays wildly with abandon with the boys when Mr. O’Brien is away on a business trip. She represents grace.
However, the story is weak to begin with, and the film is made even weaker with all the spiritual visual images.
The Tree of Life is the film of pretentiousness.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
The Tree of Life – Movie Trailer
Jun 22nd
From Terrence Malick, the acclaimed director of such classic films as Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life is the impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950’s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick’s signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.