Woody Allen's 502nd movie, 12am in Paris, takes place in the present by day, and olden tymes by night. Owen Wilson, who shall hereafter be referred to as "Dicknose," plays Woody's surrogate (Wilson has this misshapen nose that looks like a man's ding dong, in case you don't know what he looks like). Apparently the director finally deems himself too old to appear in his movies with hot young actresses as love interests. Dicknose plays a romantic or something whose fantasy to live in 1930's Paris comes true each night, when he hobnobs with lotso historical artists, writers and painters. They talk a lot of art and philosophy and stuff, which is cool for a fairly mainstream offering like this. Woody makes Dali come off as a buffoon, which I didn't care for, since his screenplay gives cinematic head to all the other historical guys. I've always thought of Allen as a jerk anyway, so why act offended, right? It's an ok movie though, very cute. Lots of old ladies in the theater.
Tree of Life is this boring movie I was hoping would be a lot more sci-fi, since in the ads you saw gas giant planets, nebulas, dinosaurs and other neat things, but the bulk of it is slice-o-life rural Texas. There's this family with three boys, a cute mom, and a total asshole dad. He doesn't rape or beat the kids--nothing like that. He's just this stern father, and you get many opportunities to observe him being stern and dislike-able. It seems like you often see these dramatic flicks with dysfunctional people, but you never get a sense of, say, why the cute mom would have wanted to fuck this dour asshole in the first place, much less marry him.
Another good example of this is the movie called Take Shelter, which is about some psycho who hallucinates the world's coming to an end. Come to think of it, it's the same actress from Tree of Life who is married to the nut case in Take Shelter. He's this unsmiling, mumbling blue collar dude who dutifully performs his role as husband and father and all that, but doesn't exhibit anything resembling a likable human personality--you get no idea how he could have landed a hot piece of ass like the chick from Tree of Life. These movies expect you to just accept that these people love each other so they can get on with showing you all the bleak shit the filmmakers love so much.
This isn't to say ToL or Take Shelter are "bad" movies, per se. They're just both kind of a drag unless you really commit to engaging them on their own terms.
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