pgruendler-1

... as Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself for it. Oh that I had seen this movie before I married the woman of my dreams! Oh that I had spent more time walking with her! loving and cherishing the best thing who ever happened to me! Alas! . . . The Tree of Life is yet guarded, still safe - safe from the amateurish story of a delightful, beautiful woman with a fatal brain disease who writes it for her love. My wife, too, thought to build her fantasy world in her career; but her love for her husband was not as strong as the love of Izzy Creo (short for CREDO - "I BELIEVE"?)for Tommy. The quote from the Book of Genesis at the film's beginning is in her careful hand, and the book is never finished. Aronofsky asks us to finish our own chapters.... I actually saw this movie hot on the heels of "Apocalypto". The same night! Mel Gibson's take on the Conquistadors chimes perfectly with this one. Izzy's fictitious hero is frustrated by the Tree of Life as guarded by the Xibalban priest with the flaming sword. To me this symbolized the misguided passion to connect with non-Christian religions which falsify and pervert the original Mosaic revelation.... Izzy and Tommy represent Humanism in rebellion against Divine Providence: fiction and science make no inroads on mortality - they only help us poor dying souls cope. The hapless lab monkey represents Nature itself - manipulated for man's feeble, selfish ends. The barren tree in the ascendant bubble represents the purgatory of waiting for the transfiguration of Xibalban - which will never come. A naked tree 'sprouts' in the body of the conquering hero - myths need men to give them life. ... The lotus pose represents the atheists' religion - a contemplation of nothingness, of infinity, but no escape from the self... the Bubble? the created universe of the Tree. We are all destined to move out of it eventually and into immortality... the Conquistadors in Mel's movie, represent the Roman Catholic Church which, for all its militancy, has failed to lift any nation or people above barbaric superstition and poverty of land and resources for two thousand years... I suspect that Mr. Aronofsky felt compelled to make certain concessions (the title should have been 'The Tree') to his financial backers in order to get the movie made, but hey - that's what we all do; life is a series of compromises... but to get back to the symbolism: the RING to me was the heart-breaker. See, I still wear my wedding ring in fading hopes that She will come back to me - back from the Dead, as it were. The ring will not come off, and I have no desire to take it off. It symbolizes a promise and a vow made in deadly earnest to my God before many witnesses. Tommy tattoos rings on himself as punishment - he wants the permanence of matrimony - of monogamy - of a woman's unconditional love. So do I , Tommy; so do I... this is an evangelical film, to me Aronofsky is searching and his script shows it, but I have hope that, bringing whatever world-view one will to this movie, that the powerful performances of Hugh and Rachel will absorb you as they did me. I left the theater in tears of lament, but willing to 'bury' the last symbol of the woman I love and to move on, my world-view of Divine Providence intact... Thanks to brother DAaron for a wonderful picture.

This is a good, entertaining kind of B war movie potboiler with lots of stars and young actors that was in vogue in the easy cultural period between Korea and Vietnam: late Fifties - early Sixties.... Others covering WW II are as the above (with many of the same themes, AND racism), and also The Longest Day; Morituri; The Young Lions; The War Lover (McQueen); The Bridge Over the River Kwai; The Enemy Below; Run Silent, Run Deep; No Man Is an Island; Never So Few; < insert Roger Corman 'd' movies here>; and of course, "ATTACK!".... Korean War movies The Hunters, Pork Chop Hill, The Bold and the Brave; War Hunt, Battle Hymn, and especially MEN IN WAR. There are other wars represented in this period by the likes of "War and Peace" (Henry Fonda) and Chuck Heston's "The Private War of Major Benson".... not to mention Kubrick's PATHS of GLORY . . . .

Eight of Ten Stars. I was so enamored of this movie as a teen that my Northwestern University freshman dorm wall was papered with big B&W posters of mssrs. Eastwood, Wallach and Van Cleef in the Fall of 1968. I was quite the little existentialist then; "If it feels good, DO IT!" was the mantra of my high school Senior English teacher. Well, it felt good, and bad, and ugly. I ended up dropping out of Northwestern after Kent State and, taking the soundtrack of GBU (in my head) with me to Vietnam in 1971, I proceeded to get a real-world education in the old 'ultra-violence' as an infantryman in the AMERICAL Division... WHAT you may ask does this have to do with an American Civil War movie, directed and written by an Italian Communist? (Sergio Leone's daddy may have been more of a commie than Sergio was, but the fact is that "A Fistful of Dollars" was STOLEN from Kurosawa, while "The Magnificent Seven" was PURCHASED years before. The end justifies the means? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?) http://www.fistful-of-leone.com/classic/articles/prof.html I found out firsthand the moral ambiguities of war. If only I had paid attention to the subtext in GBU! If only I had studied the Matthew Henry battlefield dead tintypes as Leone so obviously had! His hideous, rotting carcases of Union and Confederate soldiers, bloating in direct sunlight, would have sufficiently revulsed me from any notion that I could 'play soldier' and survive! But here I am, having just barely survived.... and I just got out of the fabulous Fox Theater here in Atlanta where the restored GBU was projected in all its Technicolor/Technirama glory at fully loaded, screaming Morricone volume.... there must have been at least a thousand people there, and hardly anyone moved. INCREDIBLE. It is said that the movie was made to the tunes Morricone made prior to production's start; i.e. Leone played the music while shooting the scenes! Hence, these epics are giant music videos - fantasias - symphonic cinema- they are huge, elegiac tone poems! And, God help me, I still love this movie.