Recommend a movie

Tetro (2009)
Francis Ford Coppola



I dled this movie because I was impersonating Vincent Gallo a couple of weeks ago. Then I grew out of it.

Tetro (Vincent Gallo) is a loser, a frustrated writer who lives in Buenos Aires with his doctor gf (Maribel Verdu). He has given up writing and works at a theatre as a lighting technician. His half-brother is working as a waiter for a ship or some shit like that and goes to visit him in BA. Not surprisingly Tetro doesn't take this visit from his faggot poor brother lightly, and makes his life a living hell. The little brother (I don't remember his name, I was very drunk when I watched it, let's call him Pepe), Pepe, finds Tetro's unfinished masterpiece, a play about his relation with his father, a famous composer and a total prick, which can only be read with the use of a mirror (this is probably a very deep metaphor for something) and finishes it and sends it to the greatest critic in all Latin America, without the permission of Tetro. The critic reads the whole thing, because internationally reknowned critics always fucking read everything 18 y.o. kids send them, decides it's fucking awesome and invites both brothers to the Patagonia International Festival she (the critic) is hosting. This is when SHTF, Tetro is the typical movie character who does completely rational things like hating recognition for his work or hating people handing him enormous amounts of money for his work, so he gets very angry when he realized his brothers plot, and he's like u steppin brah? He accepts going to the festival tho (I don't remember why, at this point I was engaged in a flame war at the phora sb with Mexberg), and they travel there with Tetro's wife and two hot argentinian actresses who, in a completely believable meange a trois in a hotel, take away Pepe's virginity. When the festival starts the critic announces that tetro's play has won the first prize, but Tetro refuses to show up, Pepe goes out, finds him, Tetro is very anguished and confesses Pepe he's not actually his brother but his father. At this point I stopped watching. The movie is very bad. The only good thing is Vincent Gallo, especially when he's not on the screen because when he is he overacts all the time like the hystrionic POS he is.

Bibliography:
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, by Herbert Marcuse.

I watched Manhattan again tonight. Most of you have probably seen it so I'm not going to review it. I just wanted to add a couple of observations.

Firstly, I noticed that Diane Keaton's character is a variant on a common Woody Allen trope, the overbearing pseudo-intellectual who throws the protagonist's hard-edged yet sentimental authenticity into contrast and makes him lovable despite his own neurotic, intellectual quirks. In Annie Hall it's the Columbia professor who is shown up by the subject of his own lecture (McLuhan), in A Midnight In Paris it's the protagonist's pompous friend who holds forth on Parisian art and history with all the depth of a Wikipedia article, and in Manhattan it's Diane Keaton, a socialite who enthuses over trendy liberal causes, passes shallow judgment on seminal creative figures like Mahler, Fitzgerald, Van Gogh (pretentiously pronounced as van Go ch ), and Bergman (too 'bleak' and 'Scandinavian'), and when confronted by Allan for being too cerebral spits back defensively with "Where would we be without rational thought?"

Why does Allen include these characters? Is he merely poking fun at academic liberals and their parochial worldviews, or is he trying to excuse himself from the criticism issued by people like Allan Bloom that it is he who is shallow and pretentiously intellectual? Both? I don't know, although I'm more inclined than Bloom to give Allen the benefit of the doubt.

Another thing I noticed is that Allen is not a visual director, despite the faux-arty decision to shoot the movie in black-and-white. A lot of people have commented on this, but it became obvious when I started minimizing the movie window in order to check email and browse the internet. I realized that I missed hardly anything at all by listening to only the movie's dialogue. With the exception of a couple scenes (the bridge scene, a scene where a skeleton is used as a prop), the visual elements are almost wholly irrelevant and inert. They are just backgrounds, like the stage at a stand-up event, by design unable to distract from Allen's verbal wit. MacDonaldites have always pointed out the non-visual, verbal-oriented nature of Jewish creative types, so this isn't surprising.

The movie is still a classic, though. It manages to be heartwarming and at times sentimental without the treacly aftertaste of your average romcom, and it even has a few genuine laughs, also unlike your average romcom. But any praise from me is unnecessary, since everyone knows it's a great film. Anyways, those are my thoughts.

Roland, your analysis is interesting, but I think you're overstating Heidegger's influence. The father isn't just an icon of the inauthentic, he represents one half of the film's dialectic between nature and grace. You can guess which. This is really the central meaning of Malick's film, how grace perfects nature by in effect commingling with it, as with the raptor dinosaur (nature) who spares its prey (grace). The family dynamic, with the kind, indulging mother (grace) and the stern, careerist father (nature), is intended to represent how fragile this union of nature and grace can be. Recall the lines of the oldest son: 'Father, mother, always you wrestle inside me.'

Malick doesn't interpret life as 'compassionate and filled with love' -- in fact, one of the most common criticisms of the movie from Christians was the opposite, that in portraying nature as evil and grace as fragile and unstable he was offering a very pessimistic theology. The Jobian themes would be obvious even if Job weren't quoted at the beginning of the film. This is a film that wrestles with some troubling questions, and I don't think it resolves them in a sentimental way...in fact I don't think Malick wanted to resolve them, he is more interested in posing the question and letting the audience think about it for themselves.

Hmm...I don't see the conclusion as anodyne unless love and compassion are intrinsically devoid of any tragic elements, which is untrue especially in the context of Christian theology. It isn't assumed that life is 'compassionate and filled with love', I think, but rather the converse, that because nature is ontologically separated from grace, full of postlapsarian sinfulness and so on, there is an absence of graceful virtues such as love, compassion, and mercy, and that by embracing these we can somehow come closer to perfecting nature. It's a little too Pelagian for me, but it's not quite guilty of the trite sentimentality that characterizes other films with a superficially similar message.

I watched The Tree Of Life at the theater three weeks ago. I almost fell asleep. Yes "the cinematography is superb" , who the fuck cares? Faggot movie for faggot spergs to discuss Heidegger.