The Tree of Boredom and Despair

Oscar readiness continues. I just put myself through watching The Tree of Life. I loathe Terence Malick’s work. He’s put me through a lot and now the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has allowed him to put me through even more.

This film is largely about a man’s reminiscences of his childhood and the different pulls his mother and father had on him. It could have been a compelling story, but instead of actually telling the story, Malick just shows us 2 hours and 20 minutes of disjointed scenes, each lasting a few seconds. I felt like I was watching somebody’s old family movies. Have you ever watched a stranger’s family movies for 2 hours and 20 minutes? No. Of course not. Because you’d have gotten up and left.

It was a classic Terence Malick film: visually stunning, but packed with heavy-handed symbolism (which I assume Malick thinks is deep), and also butt-numbingly dull. I constantly checked the timer on the DVD player, willing it to count down faster.

I like to call this movie “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as I think that story accurately describes the reason why The Tree of Life was nominated for Best Picture. Terence Malick has this aura of genius around him, presumably because he makes films sparingly and lives as privately as JD Salinger. I think people are afraid they’ll look silly if they say they think Malick is a hack, so instead they panic and nominate him for awards. 

For my part, the credits are rolling and I feel like I’ve just been released from being kidnapped.

Well, this is going terribly.

So I had all these plans to learn some German before leaving for Germany and Austria. I listened to some tapes in Italian before going to Italy and it really helped my comprehension while we were there, so I figured it would be the same with German. Oh, nein.

I thought I'd pick this up with no problem. I was imagining something like this:



But what really happened was closer to this:

Except that I have better hair than either of these people.

For one thing, lots of German words are very similar to their English counterparts (one is ein, weather is wetter, etc). Even more, German sentences are constructed just like English ones. Adjectives precede nouns, adverbs precede verbs, that sort of thing. But the differences, if not numerous, are emphatic.

For example, nouns can be not just masculine or feminine (as with Spanish and Italian) but also neutral, and each of these three requires a different modification to the adjective used to describe them. So if you want to say "beautiful weather" it's "schönes wetter" but if you want to say "beautiful evening" it's "schöner abend." The word for beautiful (schön) changes from schönes for a neutral noun to schöner for a masculine noun. I don't even know what it would be for a feminine noun. So you have to learn four times as many words for adjectives and in addition to that there's no indication of what gender any given word is. You just have to memorize them. Heilige kuh!

And all of this is nothing compared to my pronunciation problems. For some reason, if you slap down an Italian or Spanish word in front of me I have no problem pronouncing it correctly immediately. It's hardwired into my brain. But German? I cannot even tell you. Yes, "W" sounds like "V" and "D" at the end of the word sounds like "T"; that I've got. But I don't even know where they're getting the pronunciation for stuff like "schlechtes." There are extra letters thrown into that pronunciation just for fun, I swear it! And then there are words that are so intimidating in their very appearance, you can totally understand why this was the language of the Nazis. Verschiedenen, zuständigkeiten, geschwindigkeitsüberschreitung*... are you frickin' kidding me?

To mitigate this problem, I had planned to learn the German for "please excuse my horrendous pronunciation," but it's "bitte entschuldigen sie meine schrecklichen aussprache" and I'm pretty sure I can't pronounce that.

I am going to fail like the Atlantic Wall on D-Day. So at least I have that in common with the Germans.

*Despite appearances, I swear I did not just make that word up by randomly hitting a bunch of keys on my keyboard. That is an actual German word.

Hola! Vamanos! Me estoy volviendo loco.

This really is an outrageous level of enthusiasm.

I'm currently watching episodes of Dora the Explorer in order to get ideas for a treasure hunt I'm creating for Julia's birthday party. Things I have gleaned thus far:

1. Dora really does scream every single word she says. If she were ever in serious danger, I doubt she could communicate her peril to anyone because her alarm would just sound like her regular voice.

2. Dora encourages her young viewers to become screamers themselves. They have to yell things like "Map!" and "Backpack!" at the screen constantly. Frankly, it's exhausting.

3. Swiper the fox is easily deterred from his kleptomanic ways. He simply stops when he is told to. Hardly a worthy opponent.

4. Three episodes in a row of this is my limit. It does not have the charm of Fraggle Rock.