8. Tree of Life
Terrence Malick burst onto the movie scene in 1973 with Badlands, an avant garde view of a young couple on a cross-country trip filled with pointless murders. The reclusive director has followed this up with a number of other films of varying success. Perhaps most notably, he hired that Jesus-guy before he played Jesus. In 2011, Malick released his most audacious film to date, the Tree of Life. The movie, which won the Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival and is considered by many critics to be the finest film of the 21st century, spans time from the birth of the universe with the Big Bang to a modern day Sean Penn reflecting on his childhood. I can handle some bizarreness in my movies. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek dancing in the woods in Badlands was right up my alley. I was totally on board with the dinosaurs in the Tree of Life. But what I won't stand for is the ending of this movie with people ambling around on in the sand and Jessica Chastain talking at the sky.
"I give you my son."
Really? Is she really talking to God now? Who are those people and why are they just standing around? And most importantly, how did such an awful line of dialogue make it into the final cut of this otherwise superb film?