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Reviews
Scenes from a Mall (1991)
It was okay, I guess
-Contains some mild spoilers-
Whether or not you like this movie seems to hinge entirely on whether you're a fan of Woody Allen's neurotic stand-up persona. I'm a casual fan so I thought it was alright. Nothing horribly wrong with the movie except for that stupid mime. When he get's what's coming to him towards the end of the movie I came close to standing up and cheering, and the lighthearted glory of that moment almost made up for the soul-grating awfulness of every other moment the mime is on screen, which is too significant to discount. Also it feels about ten minutes too long, even for its short length; the movie mainly focuses on Allen and Middler's relationship, and the chemistry between them is perfectly adequate for an old stereotypical Jew-y couple, but the cycle of love and hate between them goes on for too long.
The Tree of Life (2011)
Sloggish and tiresome
This movie was a slog. At a little under three hours it would take a master filmmaker to avoid stretching my patience over such a long amount of time--a filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick, whose "2001: A Space Odyssey" is borrowed from liberally by director Terrence Malick, however inefficiently; there are long periods without dialogue, which I understand turns off many viewers immediately. 2001 is one of my favorite movies, so I tried to keep an open mind during these stretches. I thought of it as a marathon, with its payoff at the end. For me, at least, the payoff didn't come: Malick's 'style', for those who aren't familiar--and I definitely wasn't, having never heard the name before and watching the movie based on praise from Roger Ebert and Cannes--is to create very distinct, separate segments of a movie, with each of those segments running together with an active, moving camera and one drawn out thread of focus on one character or another, often being severed abruptly when that segment ends.
You might be wondering why I haven't even mentioned what this movie is about. The answer is because I don't know myself. The IMDb summary does as good a job as I could. Without a plot, do we have a movie? We certainly don't have a story, and I don't know about you, but that seems like a must if I'm going to take the three hours of my time to watch this creation.
So if it's not a movie, what is it? It's everything else that goes into a movie, minus the plot: the acting*, music, especially the cinematography are all fantastic and masterful.
A screensaver. That's what this beast is. A long, wonderfully rendered, unspeakably expensive screensaver that moves and speaks (in non- sequiturs, of course). To me, that's not worth your time or money.
*Oh, yes, and if you're seeing this because you're a fan of Sean Penn, don't bother because he's in it for literally five minutes and all he does is walk around with a big dumb look on his face.