I see dinosaurs. They're everywhere.

After seeing Tree of Life last night, I’m having a heavily Terrence Malick influenced kind of a day. Everything seems both significant and insignificant: the washing flapping in the sunshine; the blossom fragrances of early Spring; the wind blowing through the trees; folk in town greeting each other; the tactile experience of making bread; Red Chook, my very own modern dinosaur, scratching the earth and clucking contentedly; the cats coming up for a smooch; even writing this blog as I eat leftover movie Maltesers. And I’m not being facetious.

I’d heard a lot of bad and ho-hum things about this movie, but found it appealed to my love of the epic and my view of life, the universe and everything. An extremely aesthetic work that takes galaxies, star formation, planet accretion, life struggling back from the brink time and time again after multiple mass extinctions, evolution, zen-like dinosaurs living in the moment (from the reviewing hullabaloo about the appearance of these critters and the loudly expressed opinions of a lady on the train one night, I was expecting at the very least a Tyrannosaurs Rex to come crashing into the frame at some point rather than creatures of quiet grace and dignity) and the eventual annihilation of our solar system, and then interweaves all this vast grandeur with the personal triumphs and catastrophes of one family without making that human struggle seem bleak, inconsequential, worthless or overly meaningful, well, it struck a chord with me.

Before TOL, we saw Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, which had me foaming at the mouth and ranting about, among other things, war, justice, and governments reactively feeding the mob what it wants rather than exercising leadership and setting a better example, so all in all, it was a movie double that made for much conversation afterwards.