Sunday, October 02, 2011

The Tree of Life

Movie of this week was The Tree of Life. I watched it Vivy. Haven't seen her since March. Anyways, the movie was kinda painful for me. I read the wikipedia entry before watching this movie and so I knew it received such polarizing reviews but I also knew it won Palme d'Or at this year Cannes film festival. So I thought it's a movie to watch. It turned out to be a rather painful experience for me :( At 2 hours plus, it felt really long. I checked my watch a few times and I remember thinking when it reached the 1 hour mark, that I still had another hour or so to bear :( There were actually people leaving after about 15 minutes and I think the lady next to Vivy wanted to leave as well but I think because of her friend, she preserved. I remembered reading in wikipedia that there are scenes with dinosaurs and so I was hoping it would come soon so that there's some excitement, however the T-rex was just a baby T-rex and again it was another scene which left me thinking, what??!?!

Watching the movie is like watching installation art for me. More often that not, I don't get installation art and don't like it. If the movie has some kind of message that people should get, I don't get it. I don't understand it. I understand it in the way that your brain can be weird though. Your brain can move from one place to another, relate certain things, experience, and emotions to certain images. So in a way, I get the weirdness of the movie because my brain works that way too sometime. The movie started with a news of the middle son of a family died, then it went fast forward to the present day when we saw the adult older brother (Sean Penn) grappling with the anniversary of the death of his brother. Obviously it still affected him a lot. Then the movie moved back to the lives of the brothers with their loving and expressive mother and their strict father (Brad Pitt). Along the way, some imageries not unlike things you'll see in national geographics were being inserted. It's kinda hard to make sense of all this and they seriously made you wonder, what are you trying to say? I just see it as the imageries and the selected memories from the older brother reflected how the older brother felt and saw his life. I think that after all this time, he's still quite visibly broken, he needed some therapy :P

The last scene was rather weird again. I don't know what this supposed to mean. It showed the adult brother walking through a door in an unknown landscape and he met people from his past lives in all the different ages. For this scene, I saw it that when we finally die, we're going to meet ourselves and all those people from our past in all the different ages that we were and we're gonna reconcile with all of them. In this scene, everybody looked happy. Some had tears, but they were happy tears. Since I think of it that way, this scene was really really comforting for me :) I always believe what you are now is your past, present, and future combined. I always feel that you shouldn't do things that's gonna disappoint your past and future. Try to fulfill the dream of your young self and don't make your future self has regrets in life. Anyway, so that's that about the movie. I'm not really gonna recommend this movie because I don't know how you're gonna react to it :P It is rather disheartening that right now there aren't many good movies in the cinemas. Some of them are actually pretty dumb :( I actually feel rather disappointed that I don't have much things to see :( I'm waiting for The Help but it's still quite a long wait :(

On life, it's same old same old. I don't like being older but I kinda want next year to come soon. Geez, I need to slow it down and just enjoy these last few months of 2011. The previous post was pretty long that I forgot to write something that I wanted to write. There's been an addition in the household, I'm just gonna call him Max here. This year we had Chloe and Max back. While Chloe left, Max stays. I kinda like the kids but as they grew older, they do come with their teenager attitudes. On one side they are teenagers so they are allowed to be teenagers with all their way of thinking and attitude. It's just it's been a long time since I was a teenager and God knows I don't deal with them a lot. The last time I had to deal with them, I was more in a place of authority so my relationships with them, which I still call kids regardless of them being older, was perhaps rather different. Now having Max around, I do get stumped sometime seeing how he behaves. Last night at 1 am something as I was about to go to sleep, he got into trouble with his aunt. I don't know why they always have such bad timings. Even last time when Chloe was around, I got awoken at 5 am something with all the shouting :( I was quite fearful that someone would call the police :( So anyways, I had my dinner today and Max was at the table. For some reason he started the conversation in french, which was good because I could ask him what happened last night. He explained it to me and he said sorry when I complained to him that I was trying to sleep. That was kinda sweet of him :) I do think that it's all good between me and him. Between our love for The Big Bang Theory and my lack of authority over him, I guess he sees me as someone who he just could talk to as a friend. I'm not sure if he sees me as an older sister because he has one. Just like me who don't really see younger guys as my younger brother just because I already have one.

I do feel that the boy needs some discipline going on. I think he may even have a slight ADD. I don't know, it's been awhile since I'm a teenager and when I was a teenager time was really different than now. I feel he needs to find his center and be anchored a bit and not have his mind float all over the place. Am I asking too much from a teenager? I'm not sure I fully agree with how his aunt deals with him but it's not my place to say anything. I just hope that the boy is not too damaged and all will be good between them. As I said yesterday when we were all sitting at the table, it's like a battle of will power among them and the aunt was really sure she has stronger will power. The boy agrees as well but it's just been less than 3 months so we'll see. Anyway I do have my paranoia having him around. It could be nothing, just my paranoid self, but I could also be right as my senses usually are. Anyway, I can only say prayers to God so that what I fear will not happen *please God!* I seem to have written such personal stuff about someone else here so perhaps I should stop. Let's hope for a great week ahead *amen!*

:) eKa @ 7:24:00 PM •