Junebug

A couple basks in enriching romance their union potentially a success, effervescent wondrous innocence characterizing their lithe shenanigans. 

The wife (Embeth Davidtz as Madeleine) runs a caring gallery which genuinely looks after its unsung artists, discovering unknown local talent then helping to find an adoring audience.

Her work takes her to the down-home town where her agile husband (Alessandro Nivola as George) was curiously raised, which means it's time to meet the fam while engaging in bucolic expenditure.

George's brother's (Ben McKenzie as Johnny) become somewhat nasty having grown tired of his steady routine, even though his chill wife's (Amy Adams as Ashley) pregnant and looking forward to starting a family.

He has no time to reminisce but his better half's still warm and friendly, Madeleine sincerely responding to her lack of conceit and freeform enthusiastic reckoning.

There could be more cutting tension arising from prejudicial misconceptions, but thankfully observations aren't frequently shared within the offbeat household's public sphere.

In fact Junebug creatively presents endearing heartfelt loving characters, thoroughly interested in the lives of others as they go about their interactive quibbling.

The arts devoid of stout pretension and destructive distasteful foul snobbery, search freely far and wide for newfound novel uncanny yens.

At the same time homegrown peeps hold back none of their natural spirits, a husband certainly most distressing, his wife like an ebullient summer's bloom.

The buzz around Amy Adams's performance is bang on like nothing else I've seen, her facial movements and inherent fascination far beyond what's oft described as memorable.

It's like there's a range of depth within which multidimension nimbly materializes, and her zags and cascading zigs ethereally flow towards its striking zenith.

Davidtz shouldn't be overlooked either I hope her character has persuasive fluency.

They're an incredible combination.

In a film that promotes compassion and understanding.

Tree of Life

Smoothly flowing gently falling slightly billowing lightly floating metaphors, a series of remembered events stitched together through fluid dreamlike sequences, delineating foundations, from which identities are constructed. A father, a mother, a family, a routine. A strict routine, a strict father, a housewife, a code. Mr. O'Brien (Brad Pitt) unwaveringly sticks to his code whereby his rule is absolute and his every whim, non-negotiable. His wife acquiesces, his children grow, he arrives at work on time, tithes week-in, week-out. A subjective interpretation of a governing structure attempts to supply youth with a disciplined set of ground rules from which a reasonable degree of economic stability can be confidently expected, through the years. No discussion, no questions, just stilted secure repetitious order blindly and diligently recreating itself, again. There's a lot of depth to the scenes in this film and Malick poetically intertwines manifold transitions with incredibly versatile images which in themselves create a byzantine subtext whose hydra-like character challenges the narrative's status quo.

But I don't think it's meant to do this, it seemed more like Malick was supplying as much beauty as he possibly could to suburbia, to a conservative way of life, using a surrealist form to structure his traditional content, with instinct guiding the positioning of his imagery as opposed to planning, whereby Tree of Life develops a naturally secretive grace, as it bids farewell to one dramatization of the North American middle-class.

On the one hand, it elevates patriarchal dispositions to a cantankerously coy precipice, taking content that has been recycled ad nauseum and demonstrating that it can continuously be insightfully replenished if you're willing to put in a little time and effort.

On the other, it eclipses sundry previous manifestations of this particular vision to the point where it seems possible that it's trying to put an end to this storyline once and for all, playing the ultimate winning hand, the graceful capitalist end-game.

Don't mean to be applauding Tree of Life too much. I found the seemingly random quotes which accompany much of the imagery to be irritating (especially since they're supposed to have some sort of ethereal quality) and was happy to comfortably rest my eyes here and there, as Mr. O'Brien and his children had yet another coming of age moment.

It would be a great film to study more closely and definitely leaves the door open for multiple critical accounts which can be situated within various intellectual markets in order to facilitate conceptions of particular ethical viewpoints from which the effects of diverse cultural phenomena can be momentarily diagnosed.

Naturally graceful, or a graceful nature, either way Tree of Life has me examining this dialectic, and has, for me anyway, instilled it with a remarkable life force that I'll find difficult to ignore for some time to come.

This is where film can be different from reading yet just as powerful. In a book like In Search of Lost Time you come across these dialectics constantly to the point where you've been bombarded with so many you suffer from intellectual overload. Sometimes it's nice to take one and use it as a general frame in order to study its vicissitudes specifically, and so on.