The 2012 Oscar Reviews, Part the Second

 I'm coming up against deadline here, with five titles left to complete before the red carpet shows up on the screen tonight. So without further introduction....

● It's a few months ago now that I watched Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" and so I did a read-through of Roger Ebert's review. I am a forgiving viewer and will wait for a good while for a director to get into the meat of a story, but even for me there are limits. When Ebert writes that it reminded him of "2001: A Space Oydessy" I immediately knew I was in good company because that was my comparison as well, from the initial 20 minutes being an exercise in "Am I in the right movie?!?" and shortly joined by a dis-temporal, ethereal and often confusing mish-mash of story. Malick was simply trying very hard to be artsy and deep, playing with camera movement and effects, and  hoping that this would catch Oscar voters like "2001..." did. I get the use of the cosmos, of natural history with dinosaurs and geologic formation with volcanic lava steam clouds, then the story of the O'Brien family with its normalcy and tragedy and coming-of-age of not just the boy, Jack, but of a whole family --- not least of which, a father (Brad Pitt) whose strict nature sometimes sends him over the edge (but which, as we glimpse in another family's home, isn't wholly uncommon) who must still learn what is important, what is not and how to let go of envy and a sense of injustice. This is not lost on me in reflection of my own life, which I volunteer could use more of the grace described in some of the early voice-over narration. [I would just like to note at this moment, after having written about George Clooney's hack job at the start of "The Descendents" that this is how narration is done --- with feeling and as if it were not being recorded literally the first time the actor was reading the words.] Then we have a grown version of Jack (Sea Penn) seen coping with a death anniversary of one of his brothers --- I never figured out which --- and following through a doorway and a faint blip into a version of a re-connective family-outing afterlife on a beach, in sculptural desert caves like we saw in "127 Hours" last year, and finally more cosmos. Of course, this did not happen linearly but it was mostly coherent. But I keep coming back to a basic question: What was the point of this film? What was it really trying to say? I never got a firm grasp on an answer to that. I'd probably have to see it again.

● I found Steven Spielberg's "War Horse" to be a trite piece in the tradition of "Old Yeller," shot with modern equipment and with a much larger budget. It's among a number of recent films ("Hugo" for example) where a big-name American director brought his show to England. I suppose this is what happens as the American industry and economy is retracting and --- depending on whom one listens to, believes and sees with ones' own eyes --- is falling apart. What we do know is that films from the Continent are regaining traction after a long period of barely being noticed beyond a few directors that critics feted but large audiences here didn't watch.

As for the story: boy raises horse, boy loses horse, horse gets anthropomorphized on-screen, boy finds horse. I'm not going to say this movie wasn't entertaining, that it didn't have some very poignant moments (perhaps most of all, as the young officer's eyes project the absolute fear of 'Oh Lord, I'm going to die' as prancing showmanship in training, outmoded tactics, and naked bravado was mowed down without mercy by WWI machine gun technology. Not the first time this truism has been shown, and certainly not the last.

I am not a clock-watcher when it comes to movies and yet, there I was opening my cell discreetly to see how many more handlers on both sides of the conflict would steer Joey (the horse) through the war. It didn't help anything that I chose a hard seat. Of course, there is the obligatory German army officer unmoved by the loss of life of horse or man, as long as his heavy black machinery of destruction is dragged up an astoundingly steep hill. But, so too, we get to see a German grunt who hates what's being done to the horses but can offer little or no protest. Spielberg, even in a movie about WWI, cannot help but establish a Germany that by its nature is a destroyer of life in its quest for dominion above the suffering and small cries of some. I am in no way a Holocaust denier; I merely dislike narratives that try to smack viewers upside the head to belabor a point.