A wonderful review. He hits the nail on the head a few times. I hadn't thought of the distilled-through-memory angle on The Tree of Life before.

Well, I'm one of those who thinks the Oscars are as likely to be a guide to what to avoid as what to watch. Still, I'm glad to see ToL honored. Certainly well deserved.

I didn't see many of the nominees this year, but I thought that 'Hugo' and 'War Horse' were both quite good (esp. the latter.)

War Horse is worth a trip to the theatre for. It's a big old-fashioned adventure movie of the John Ford/David Lean variety, with lots of great scenery.

I'm talking about The Tree of Life.

I'm pretty sure past Oscar awards show a pattern of not being won by long obscure vaguely plotted mystical reveries.

Yeah, as I said above I'd be surprised beyond belief if it won best picture, but it wouldn't be as surprising to me if Malick won best director.

Just in case it's not obvious, I was tweaking Art's use of historical precedent to predict the future. Although I would in fact be surprised if ToL won, not necessarily because it's odd but because it's not odd in a way that would appeal to Hollywood leftism. Wasn't that movie that won a few years ago, Cars or Crash or something, sort of odd?

I liked Crash very much and was glad it won best pic that year. It wasn't so much non-linear, as it was a collage of intertwined stories. Each of the small stories was a sort of parable which were all interconnected in some way as parts of one larger parable. It's not an exercise in realism (although many elements, and several of the imbedded stories, are certainly realistic), it's more of an exercise in the moral imagination. I remember that Roger Ebert had a pretty perceptive review of it at the time.

Of course, many complaints about it had to do with the fact that it beat out 'Brokeback Mountain' for best pic that year. The PC crowd didn't like that, and attacked 'Crash' accordingly.

Yes, I expressed myself badly: Crash is multi-threaded, as Rob says. I think the reasons I didn't like it were (a) it was structurally sort of similar to Magnolia but not nearly as good, (b) it felt like a self-conscious "issue" film ("race") that was a bit didactic, and (c) it starred Sandra Bullock. Prejudices all around, I know, but that's how it was with me!

I think 'Crash' could very loosely be called PC inasmuch as the overarching theme of the film was racial and national prejudice, but many of the sentiments expressed (black racism against whites, for instance, or the prejudice of certain Middle-Easterners against each other) are not PC at all. In addition, many of the characters talk and behave in decidedly un-PC ways. It is an "issue" film (as I said, Ebert wrote that it was made up of parables) and in that sense could be called didactic, but it's not a "preachy" movie imo. Remember that I'm a bit of an unreconstructed Northerner and I tend to balk at knee-jerk PC-ness. Can't say I found anything to balk at here, as the lessons were spread around rather evenly!