The Sea of Trees

The Sea of Trees. Gus Van Sant. 2015.

I started watching Restless, another Gus Van Sant movie:

But then I remembered that I’d somehow seen that one recently, so I bailed and went with this Van Sant movie instead.

I hope I haven’t seen this one as well. Hm… nope!

Hey, it’s McCaunnegheyheyhey.

Oh, how weird. The sound is all fucked up… Oh, there’s three mpvs of the main feature here and two are fucked up… I guess makemkv isn’t perfect.

Van Sant has done some movies that were all about some people walking about in the wilderness, and the first fifteen minutes of this was McCaugnegwhatever doing that in a forest, so I assumed that that’s what all this was going to be, and I was absolutely fine with that. The forest cinematography is gorgeous.

But we get extensive flashbacks to explain why McCounewhat is in the forest, and while these scenes are good, they’re just not as interesting as the forest scenes.

I assumed almost from the start that Van Sant was going to go all Shamalayamana on us and I was just sitting waiting for it, and… I’m not going to give it away whether that was right or not, but that certainly coloured my viewing of this.

Everybody hates it, but I think
that’s pretty harsh:

The interest that once greeted every new Gus Van Sant film has been evaporating for some years now. And this latest movie, which can aptly be termed pathetic, only strengthens that feeling.

Lik, one third of the movie is really good, but the other three fourths are really bad. I can understand why many people hate it sooo much, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. But I did really like the first er twenty minutes, so there’s that.