Review: The Tree of Life

       I don't think I've seen such ambition in a movie since Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like 2001, The Tree of Life is bookended by seemingly unrelated, bizarre, pretentious imagery. Both movies also make tremendous jumps through time. 2001 memorably jumps from pre-historic humans to a space age 2001 AD, while The Tree of Life jumps from the big bang to dinosaurs, to the 1950s, to modern day. However, The Tree of Life is much more of an experimental art-piece rather the mostly coherent 2001, which gave us a plot involving one of film's most memorable villains in HAL 9000. The Tree of Life tries to encompass all of existence, and while it is beautifully shot and has mind-blowing sound design, it comes off as pretentious because of it's deep ambition. The film simply tries to achieve too much as a result doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Official World War Z Trailer

This movie has been troubled by problems all throughout production, but it looks like it's finally going to be released this coming summer. While it is named after the book by zombie expert Max Brooks, it seemingly bares no other resemblance to Brooks' work, especially since these seem to be the fast 28 Days Later type zombies rather than the slow Night of the Living Dead type zombies Brooks prefers. Any way, it still looks pretty cool and Brad Pitt is in it, so how bad can it actually be? 

World War Z Has Problems, But Not The Fun Zombie Kind

The adaptation of Max Brooks' zombie tale World War Z has been mired in its own ominous dread interrupted by long, talky passages pretty much since it was announced, and a new investigation into its troubled production from The Hollywood Reporter suggests things are far from improving. After a rocky start that almost saw Paramount scrap it entirely before a last-minute intervention by investor David Ellison, the optimism expressed by star Brad Pitt that it could even be a trilogy dashed by reports of Pitt becoming "livid" over the film's endless production and mismanagement (epitomized by the confiscation of 85 stunt weapons by a Hungarian anti-terrorism squad), and the emergence of a fan-enraging  PG-13 rating and synopsis that indicated the film was turning Brooks' unique faux-historical take into a sanitized, by-numbers horror movie,THR, not surprisingly, says that things really haven't gotten much better. In fact, the production has been called "a nightmare from top to bottom," and not the fun zombie kind.

For one thing, the budget (which nearly killed the project in the first place) has already ballooned to over $170 million, with "five weeks of complex reshoots" still to come. And as part of those,Prometheus screenwriter Damon Lindelof was recently drafted to completely redo the film's third act—an indication of how overall "not fully baked" and directionless the project has been from the beginning, with THR terming it a "seemingly headless enterprise" that is, again, not in a fun zombie way. Much of that can apparently be blamed on director Marc Forster, the Quantum Of Solacedirector whose reportedly shaky experience with overseeing special-effects-laden tentpoles is already drawing negative comparisons to Andrew Stanton's John Carter, with many in Forster's crew expressing frustration and even threatening to quit

As a measure of Forster's inability to take charge, THR points out that, as late as three weeks before shooting began, the director had yet to decide "what the zombies would look like and how they would move," which is a fairly crucial part of any zombie movie. Instead, as one source put it, "There was a lot of spinning of plates, a lot of talking. [But] they did not have a plan"—something that may fly onThe Walking Dead, say, but not in a big-budget Brad Pitt movie. So as a result, Paramount has already moved the film from its intended 2012 release date all the way to next summer, even though it maintains it's confident that it can be salvaged. "It’s a great first 45 minutes, maybe even an hour," according to one source's faint praise—though as of now the prospects aren't looking so good for getting much further beyond that.


Via The AV Club

Review: Snatch

      This movie is fun, funny, violent, and complicated. The spiritual follow-up to director Guy Ritchie's earlier film Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch deals with the same world of English gangsters and criminals. The pacing is frantic, the plot almost needlessly complex, and the characters have names like Franky Four-fingers, Bullet-Tooth Tony, and Boris the Blade. It's a uniquely British thrill ride, plain and simple.

      I'm unsure I could do an adequate job in describing the plot of this film. There are so many characters and overlapping plots that it becomes almost impossible to recount. There's a diamond heist, underground bare-knuckle boxing matches, which are the main stories in the plot. There are also some kidnappings, some assassins, some dismemberments, a delightful group of incomprehensible gypsies, and a dog that tries to eat everything. It's a manic mish-mash of everything we love about English gangster movies that Guy Ritchie has so perfectly crafted.