Over on Tablet magazine, my buddy Liel Leibovitz has an intriguing take on the new film, Tree of Life :
The movie industry, accustomed to delivering its encomiums loudly and quickly each weekend, was scrambling for superlatives when introducing Terrence Malick’s new film, The Tree of Life. The usual heaps of hyperbole—a masterpiece, brilliant, groundbreaking—melted into air, unable to faithfully describe a film that has very little dialogue, nothing by way of a plot, and a lengthy middle section devoted to the creation of life on earth, a sequence that includes colorful gaseous explosions and malevolent dinosaurs. That may be because The Tree of Life is less of a film—a medium we’ve come to associate with certain formalistic conventions and from which we have immovable emotional expectations—and more of a cinematic essay on theology. As such, it is an unusually meditative work of art; it is also, quite possibly, the least Jewish movie ever made.
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