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solaris72 wrote:

MyNameCriterionForum wrote:There is also reference to

cell phone snapshots captured images of a business-suited Sean Penn standing in the desert, or of crew members constructing a lone doorway in the desert

which I distinctly remember seeing myself, and which has troubled me since. Assuming the doorway was indeed for the film, I can imagine a few of its uses in the movie: Malick is very fond of empty or disabused houses (Thin Red Line especially has several, including the shot where the camera tilts up and out of the mother's room to the sky) and if the doorway is simply used as a sort-of-symbolic or metaphoric nudge, then that's fine. But what worries me is I also remember reading the suggestion that the doorway is one which Penn literally walks through to pass through time. Dear lord, please, no. That sounds incredibly clumsy and gimmicky, and I can only hope those reports were the silly thoughts of an uninformed fan.

Can we hold off on our critiques until we've actually seen at least two consecutive frames of footage?

domino harvey wrote:I can't even tell which one of you missed the joke

Tom Hagen wrote:If anyone actually believes this is going to get released this year, I've got a plot of wetlands and an ornithology field guide to sell you. Even if the business end of things were completely stable, it still wouldn't speed up Malick's postproduction.

Ropes of Silicon wrote:Today's MPAA ratings deliver one of the most interesting updates to date and not because of the rating but because Terrence Malick's long delayed The Tree of Life has an MPAA rating and instead of listing Apparition as the distributor it lists Cottonwood Pictures, Inc., which is actually the production company.

I put a phone call into the MPAA and they were able to confirm this is Malick's picture, it is finished in terms of music, effects, etc. and it was screened for the Ratings Board within the last of couple of weeks.

Mr. Malick is contractually obligated to bring in Tree for release this year - or else, to put it bluntly, he'll recieve no money.

Regarding the runtime, latest talk puts it "closer to 3 hours than 2.5," as may be expected from Mr. Malick.

A recent elaboration of a (vital) shot of the 2-minute montage from the film, shown last year and at this years Berlinale to distribs and such, describes a panning shot of the namesake, The Tree of Life, up into a starlit sky (with the tree still in the foreground), as to suggest the connection through the (metaphorical) tree as a gateway of sorts, depending on the interpretation of the scene."

Hollywood Elsewhere wrote:A friend has read an early draft of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life script "and here's what I can tell you, other than that it's wonderful," he writes. "Of course, there is a very good chance that the finished film will look nothing like this, given Malick's track record. But it really does appear to have borrowed not just a page, but several whole chapters from 2001: A Space Odyssey's book.

Fierias wrote:MyNameCriterionForum, I wish I didn't have those words in my head before heading into this movie. I avoided the article so I could avoid details like that, whatever it means. Please spoiler tag for every little detail on this movie. Please?

aox wrote:Jeffrey Wells is advising Malick to dump any and all dinosaur segments in the film saying that there is no way Malick can pull them off.