Word: trees
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...taking up small-scaled, yet emotionally resonant issues, but does not actually define them sharply or bring them to firm conclusions. It has a certain incidental inventiveness when it comes to narrative development, none of which feels organic to the story. There is for example, a rotting tree in the yard, which Margot climbs and gets stuck in (cue the fire department) and which we know, from the first time we see it, has to fall in some embarrassing way. The film aspires, I suppose, to sober Chekovian comedy - could that tree analogize to a Cherry Orchard...
...more than $50 billion in 2005, a figure expected to grow to $94 billion by 2015. And politicians on both sides of the aisle compete to look greener - David Cameron, the young leader of the Conservative Party, even changed his party's traditional freedom-torch symbol to an oak tree to trumpet his environmental credentials. Green living is "just higher up on the agenda," says Alex Harvey, a Canadian environmental activist who moved to Britain four years ago. "People are looking at lifestyle and consumption, across-the-board issues...
...pragmatic one: awareness campaigns are collectively self-defeating. The more campaigns there are, the less effective they become—there is only so much a person can be mentally aware of at a given moment. Activism on campus has now become like the Magic Faraway Tree from the Enid Blyton stories. Every so often, a new themed-land emerges at the top, a silly, fanciful, senseless thing like the Land of Do-As-You-Please, or Take-What-You-Want. Like at Harvard, these then disappear and are forgotten...
...There are, Faraway Tree aside, two cases in which awareness campaigns are neither useless nor self-interested. For underreported incidents like rape, campaigns are a reasonable method to spur more reporting. Events like Take Back the Night, however smug or shrill, may in fact be serving a useful purpose. For crucial public health measures too—the shortage of Asian bone marrow donors comes to mind—such campaigns might also be helpful...
...parental perfectionist, disapproves strongly of sister Jennifer Jason Leigh’s engagement to scatterbrained starving artist Jack Black. Throw in Kidman’s own extramarital affair with the local literary savant, a family of bizarre survivalist neighbors, Pais’ puberty issues, and one ubiquitously symbolic elm tree, and you have something close to the film’s narrative. The character dynamic, from the beginning of the film, is in a perpetual state of breakdown. Kidman finds Leigh and Black in a delicate emotional equilibrium that’s quickly thrown into disarray upon her arrival. Every...