To the Wonder -- Terrence Malick's eventually forthcoming romantic film with Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, and Javier Bardem

Whenever....

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2011/02/malicky_painter.php

What the heck.

i hope its like The Notebook 2 or something

more like Wordsworth's Notebook.

Isn't Malick having one film about to open and another in postproduction a sign of the endtimes?

Weird that actual Oscar-winning leads Bardem and Weisz get second billing ...

not really

wait, WHO has an Oscar?

Isaac Hayes. But not Jack Benny.

In case you didn't know:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZLz7Fdoxj8

Weird that actual Oscar-winning leads Bardem and Weisz get second billing ...

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, February 24, 2011 10:13 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark

i. they're not the leads
ii. affleck has an oscar too tyvm

Isn't Malick having one film about to open and another in postproduction a sign of the endtimes?

I think so. When I saw the title of this thread I thought it had to be a joke or a typo.

Not endtimes, just a demarcation of another seven year stretch.

lol, have NO memory of Rachel Weisz winning that Oscar, but Academy rewarding of babes just became a big blur to me around Jennifer Connelly's time.

also, two Rachels in a movie v.confusing

x-post "Oscar-winner Ben Affleck" will be a billing you shall never see on a poster, whether he won one or not.

By "Oscar-winning leads" I meant generally, in that Bardem and Weisz are regularly cast as leads in films.

Who is Rachel Weisz?

graduated from Mummy movies to The Constant Gardener

Bardem as a priest, probably:

http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/images/column/november/whacktrio.jpg

Priests can't get the girl.

MYSTERY SOLVED.

ha, & another

hope it's w/mia

I am cool with terrence malick making movies

keep on rockin', terrence malick!

http://www.pitchfork.com/news/45860-neon-indians-alan-palomo-shoots-scenes-for-terrence-malick-film-with-rooney-mara/

now called To the Wonder

http://thefilmstage.com/news/title-revealed-for-terrence-malicks-next-film-with-ben-affleck-rachel-mcadams/

I wonder if Voyage of Time is actually just vaporware

at toronto, in september, & maybe at venice
http://screencrush.com/toronto-film-fest-lineup/

TIFF synopsis

“After visiting Mont Saint-Michel—once known in France as the Wonder—at the height of their love, Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and Neil (Ben Affleck) come to Oklahoma, where problems soon arise. Marina makes the acquaintance of a priest and fellow exile (Javier Bardem), who is struggling with his vocation, while Neil renews his ties with a childhood friend, Jane (Rachel McAdams). An exploration of love in its many forms.”

Plot sounds awful frankly, but with Malick I can't imagine that it's going to be much like Sweet Home Alabama.

it is highly autobiographical, like tree of life.

Premiering at Venice

The one about the love and betrayal set amidst the austin, TX music scene sounds really awful :(

He's shooting his 3rd one, Knight of Cups, right now. Not many details out, but it looks about as questionable as the other two.

what all of a sudden he wants to work like peter jackson?

getting ready to throw my Days Blu under a steamroller a la Milli Vanilli betrayal

i'm kind of suspecting this is the one where he definitely jumps the shark (at magic hour, with one arm reaching outward to feel the passing breeze)

i feel like malick's been swept up in the adulation, just wants to surround himself with peoplem who worship him

or maybe he's gonna be all "lol i'm just messing around can't believe u pointdexters took this twaddle seriously here's Affleck"

Knight of Cups!

i'm kind of suspecting this is the one where he definitely jumps the shark (at magic hour, with one arm reaching outward to feel the passing breeze)

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Friday, 27 July 2012 22:22 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wasn't some of the first discussion of this, maybe from his cinematographer, that it was more abstract, less narrative than TTOL?

tbh i think trying to gauge the success of these on their premise or casting or themes or w/e is a fool's errand - they're probably gonna be in the ballpark of straining-for-transcendence more than under-the-skin-realism, & the backdrop he pitches against that isn't a huge thing. sure "knight of cups" & rock n roller lives are in weird territory but i think his films are generally pretty separate, in effect, from that - ie 'life on the farm', 'on the run', 'at war', &c.

i feel like malick's been swept up in the adulation, just wants to surround himself with peoplem who worship him

― Hungry4Ass, Friday, 27 July 2012 22:28 (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah but ... who wouldn't cast a film like this, if your fans are super-visible actors in the archetypes you've always preferred (ie neo-richard-geres)? idk if i get a huge ego vibe from tm. who knows but his behaviour doesn't exactly scream CRAVES ADULATION

someone told me this and tree of life were part of a prresumed trilogy?!? that's bullshit, right?

is Affleck gonna recreate the universe?

malick is at least deserving of adulation rather than idk danny boyle or oliver stone

both are prequels 2 badlands if u can believe it

Badlands: The Phantom Menace

ft. charlie sheen

Charlie Sheen is BADLANDS

idk if i get a huge ego vibe from tm. who knows but his behaviour doesn't exactly scream CRAVES ADULATION

― , Blogger (schlump), Friday, July 27, 2012 6:02 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark

hes easily flattered by the attention of movie stars, and i know a guy who knows a guy who was one of terry's assistants on ToL and who said TM only liked the underlings who kissed his ass. *bangs gavel* case closed

isn't that what underlings are for though?

http://i.imgur.com/A2Ai2.gif

*bangs gavel* *posts gif* case closed

http://i.imgur.com/ZBhfx.jpg

who is that

idk if i get a huge ego vibe from tm. who knows but his behaviour doesn't exactly scream CRAVES ADULATION

― , Blogger (schlump), Friday, July 27, 2012 6:02 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark

hes easily flattered by the attention of movie stars, and i know a guy who knows a guy who was one of terry's assistants on ToL and who said TM only liked the underlings who kissed his ass. *bangs gavel* case closed

― Hungry4Ass, Friday, 27 July 2012 23:47 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha. maybe so! i just don't get what the downside to this is. it's like "man that guy only takes work from people who pay him extravagantly" or something.

haha yeah i hear you, i was half-kidding, i just found myself developing a little bit of an irrational distaste for him after hearing the stories.

wouldnt be surprised if these dont end up coming out for like forever

both are prequels 2 badlands if u can believe it

― johnny crunch, Friday, July 27, 2012 5:20 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's revealed that the christian bale character is actually the son of christian bale and natalie portman's characters in knight of cups, and that badlands actually took place in a postapocalyptic America of 2060. in the next film malick is shooting martin sheen (playing the president of the united states, now a world-governing body), rather than being sent to the electric chair, is actually sent back to the year 2012 where he has to prevent the time-travelling cyborg played by javier bardem (in priest disguise) from assassinating his own father.

dammit let me try that again:

it's revealed that the martin sheen character in badlands is actually the son of christian bale and natalie portman's characters in knight of cups, and that badlands actually took place in a postapocalyptic america of 2060. in the next film malick is shooting martin sheen (playing the president of the united states, now a world-governing body), rather than being sent to the electric chair, is actually sent back to the year 2012 where he has to prevent the time-travelling, remorseless cyborg played by javier bardem (in priest disguise, but actually the same character as the one he played in no country for old men) from assassinating his own father.

his own father, played by emilio estevez

yes forgot that point

actually it is both christian bale and emilio estevez--who are actually two halves of a split personality, one of which initiates an underground street-fighting club co-sponsored by sean penn.

Weisz, 3 other cast members reportedly edited out

http://www.deadline.com/2012/08/terrence-malick-leaves-venice-rachel-weisz-barry-pepper-michael-sheen-and-amanda-peet-on-cutting-room-floor/

nooo not barry peper

Uh..... http://www.deadline.com/2012/09/venice-ben-affleck-has-almost-no-lines-in-terrence-malicks-divisive-to-the-wonder/

Description makes me think he might have finally tipped over into cloying self-indulgence that all the h8rs complain about.

oh boy.

The film often employs circles and moving objects spinning in rounds – including ferris wheels and a rollercoaster – for symbolism. But, after the screening, people were talking about the constant twirling that Kurylenko’s character engages in. She almost never stops moving – leading folks to wonder if she wasn’t dizzy for half the shoot.

McCarthy saying same things

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/wonder-terrence-malick-venice-367295

Good god, that whole thing sounds like a trudge.

There is one type of viewer who will definitely go for the film in a big way — those with a literally unlimited appetite for watching Olga Kurylenko prance, waft, twirl and cavort through sun-flared handheld shots to exult in being carefree and happy. There is truly no end of shots like this, quite a few of which also involve various soft fabrics she can touch or pass; Rachel McAdams gets to partake in a bit of this too, although Ben Affleck does not. In fact, he doesn’t get to do much of anything except look sullen, grim and/or blank in the back of or on the edge of shots while the camera emphasizes the woman.

so is he basically making screen-savers timed to a playlist

finally classical music has it's russell mulcahy

Haha

dude's lucky he has spiffier taste in tunes than, say, Pink Floyd, or the backlash might have come a movie earlier

Guy Lodge liked it: http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/review-to-the-wonder-is-terrence-malicks-typically-enchanted-tree-of-love

One could wonder why a director as famously indifferent to actors as Malick (Rachel Weisz's role has been given the old Adrien Brody shaft here) continues to cast such big-name stars: you might think he of all directors would be in favor of non-professional casts.

The same reason Woody Allen does: it gets your movie made.

I really like the phrase "typically enchanted"

Malick’s last picture, Tree Of Life, certainly had its fans and detractors, but people I spoke to today felt that film had “more of a story” and “real characters.”

lol, jeez

o_O

i could watch olga twirl and prance for a while i think

Lots of twirling in "Tree of Life," iirc.

Good question:

One could wonder why a director as famously indifferent to actors (and commerce) as Malick -- Rachel Weisz's role, incidentally, has been given the old Adrien Brody heave-ho here -- continues to hire such big-name actors. (You might think he of all directors would be in favor of non-pro casts.)

haven't seen ToL yet but it sounds malick's making a wondrous, ecstatic, naturally-lit eternal tracking shot over the shark

I wonder how Malick's recent movies would work with casts of complete unknowns? Which I guess "Tree of Life" is not totally unlike; could it have still worked with nobodies in place of Penn and Pitt? I don't think "New World" would have worked without a name as John Smith, though. "Thin Red Line" has a perfect balance of well-knowns, half-knowns and unknowns, which works parallel to its theme.

i think "thin red line" and "new world" are his best. how small of a minority am i in?

i like the first two but they're just too "americana" for me

I consider "Thin Red Line" his best, "New World" most underrated (or, alternatively, a thematic post-script to "Thin Red Line.")

"Badlands" is its own sort of masterpiece, I think, perhaps best viewed in isolation from the rest of "Badlands." Obviously there are lots of ur-Malick ideas at work in it, but "Days of Heaven" (my least favorite Malick) seems like a ground run for what he would achieve a couple of decades later.

"new world" i think has the most interesting "message" of any of his movies i think

too many "i think" there

but yeah as far as history of colonization goes don't think there's a better movie out there except maybe "the mission" and "aguirre" which are not the same thing at all (i.e. not so much about colonization of america)

whats the message of teh new world

come over and we'll watch it together and i'll show you

that's why i said "message" and not message , it's not something i could easily break down. i would say "best themes" or whatever but you would just deconstruct that too and then eat my ass

but it has to do - in my mind, anyway - with the complexity of colonization and the two-way nature of it. colonization changes the colonist and colonized in equal amount. which is i think kind of an ongoing theme, like in "thin red line" how war gives us equal access to moments of unbelievable violence but also moments of transcendent peace

there is also a "love conquers all" disney pocahontas story in there that i find quite affecting

maybe i am tripping though

not sure if somebody said this upthread but "to the wonder" must be the most comically "malick movie titles in character" of all time

that's why i said "message" and not message , it's not something i could easily break down. i would say "best themes" or whatever but you would just deconstruct that too and then eat my ass

haha no way dude, i barely know what i think of TNW. i like your colonization take! i just remember that you hated it when it came out, so your POV on it now is interesting

TNW a lot about adaptation and death/rebirth

Directors really should get in the habit of posting summations of their forthcoming films on ILX and confirming that they're awful before they go wasting time and money making them. The downside, I guess, would be no more movies ever being made again since every idea is stupid and lame.

oh old lunch, there you go again

there's a whole religion vs spirituality thing that is writ large in thin red line, new world and (i assume) tree of life

also the war of sexes thing in the new world was great

yeah i had a hard time adjusting to the filmmaking style, i was reading about russian formalism and into marxist movies at the time (like pasolini and godard or whatever) and it just seemed to "pretty" to take seriously (esp the rowr native americans) it seemed (as i said at the time) like pocahontas done by calvin klein, and i had problems with bale and whatshisface too

but i had a hard time forgetting it too, and then i got older and lightened up, and i watched "thin red line" and then re-watched "barry lyndon" and i was like oh huh natural light etc and retried "the new world" at a time when i was getting over hardcore lit crit and LOL cultural studies and getting really into basics of "american" history (not USA) and it just clicked

and i also realized how fucking good the woman who plays pocahontas is, her performance was amazing

TNW's ending also one of my favourites in recent years. *SPOILERS*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhj4b5CzyhU

yeah the ending "going to god" part is so amazing, it practically brings me to tears thinking about it

i am still not crazy about the middle third but the beginning part with the native americans seeing the british boats creeping up those estuaries and following them through the treelines is so beautiful and foreboding, sui generis

Not sure why people seem to be pegging this new one as a shark jumping moment--I guess because it's appeared so soon? It's not as it there are any major stylistic changes from TTRL to ToL. Diminishing returns, I guess?

Like the discussion of TNW here. It was a weirdly passed over film given how much an event TTRL was.

i'm pegging it that way only because i'm just reading a lot of complaints and not much positive press

I mean I know Malick is gonna be Malick, and I'd be as interested as anyone in seeing him push or adapt his style in unexpected ways--but I'm not sure if that's because it'd be worthwhile art or just something to talk about besides "oh a new malick film like the other ones."

i seem to be reading "oh a new malick film like the other ones ... except this one sux"

I think TTRL was the first one where people started to fall off because of it's perceived hokey/bullshit poeticism. Some people couldn't get past shots of light coming through the tree, and a dying bird, and then "What laaaaiiights this flaaaeemmee in uuuuuuss". Since then it's just been a series of escalations on Malick's part.

I remember Mark Kermode (i know i know) talking about The New World, and those criticisms of TTRL which he always scoffed at but then you had Pocahontas talking about spirits and trees and whatnot and he felt it was a cornball bridge too far. ToL doubled down on that sort of thing.

So I guess it's fans/critics finding how much they can take before they feel it tipping over into self-parody.

that sounds right

anyway native americans really did talk like that! you can meet their white descendants in sedona and taos.

I hope before he retires he directs someone else's script--or at least another adaptation. He has such a distinct and powerful sensibility that it would be really interesting to see clash with someone different a la James Jones.

I hope he signs on for the final Hunger Games

Yeah that take on "escalations" strikes me as right. I tried to argue elsewhere that Malick is being intentionally provocative and out-of-step with the seeming cliches and naïveté. A sort of Dostoevsky-esque idiot making movies and putting them in multiplexes.

terrence malick's should do a superhero movie

come to think of it that's almost what the new superman looks like

New Superman looks like that John Hillcoat ad for Jeans that was blatantly ripping off/"paying homage to" Malick

forgot it used Wagner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=635XItRDU7g

haha i thought the same thing gukbe. that commercial's better than any malick film though

Will give TNW another chance someday, but for now it's def my least fave Malick.

i guess i dont really mean that. i do find it interesting how easy it is for commercial/music video directors like hillcoat and snyder to passably imitate malick, and also how amusingly suited to trailers malicks work is. tree of life's trailer gets my blood pumping, but then i watch the movie and im asleep lol

same w/ "the fountain" amirite

new world is my fave malick. totally into that earnest poetry love story

i fell off on him with TTRL which i liked about half of but thought the bad parts utterly ridiculous. TNW i loathed, pretty much, so in all honesty i went to see Tree of Life for the LOLs and was completely blown away by it. I think it's a beauty.

i guess i dont really mean that. i do find it interesting how easy it is for commercial/music video directors like hillcoat and snyder to passably imitate malick, and also how amusingly suited to trailers malicks work is. tree of life's trailer gets my blood pumping, but then i watch the movie and im asleep lol

I wonder if this isn't because of a similarity of intent! i.e., short-circuiting critical faculties or self-consciousness in service of straight "feeling." (tho the very weirdness of the movies saves them from being big long commercials for me. He's as direct about fear as evil too.)

Fear AND evil.

I think if i had a different sense of Malick as someone intent on impressing or trying to con or manipulate his audience by appealing to lizard-brain "aw pretty" reflexes then maybe I'd be more cynical about his movies. But he strikes me as an intellectually distant, even kind of angry, dude in search of Emersonian moments of grace and firmly believing in the most direct path to get there.

i think he's just a chill dude who wants to show an audience what he sees when he feels so happy he can cry

cf "thin red line" chilling on the beach scenes

sometimes anyway

‎"Christ Almighty, faith no more. The problematic elements in The Tree of Life go forth and multiply in Terrence Malick’s latest opus dei, which transposes Tree’s five-editors-and-a-Lubezki flowing Steadicam/tilt-pan to the heavens, wall-to-wall orchestral style—and according to the credits, some of the footage—onto the most unconvincing depiction of a romantic relationship I’ve seen in a long, long time."

Oh nooooooo

"ravishingly beautiful doodle"

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2012/09/venice-film-festival-2012-to-the-wonder/

ravibeaudiedoodle

Seems like maybe Malick should just release these as Imax movies, where audiences expect visual wonder and scant story, rather than in venues where audiences expect story. I mean Beavers is a great Imax movie, but mostly you're watching beavers build a dam.

"story" in the eye of the beholder, by same standard where would Hou Hsiao-Hsien be?

(Malick wd be a good bet to make his last films abroad, cept he keeps geting enough name casting and Oscar attention to stay on the radar)

lol at jeff wells:

It's basically The Tree of Life 2: Oklahoma Depression. It's Malick sitting next to you and gently whispering in your ear, "You wanna leave? Go ahead. Go on, it's okay, I don't care...do what you want. But you can also stay."

Ha that almost makes it sound pretty awesome. I have a lot of affection for movies that don't make a lot of demands on your attention.

he also quotes Affleck saying it makes Tree of Life look like Transformers.

"To The Wonder doesn't precisely fart in your face."

Loving Tree of Life apparently a predictive factor for not liking this.

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/09/11/malicks-to-the-wonder-the-twee-of-life/

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/val-kilmer-wields-chainsaw-uses-walker-is-val-kilmer-in-set-pics-from-terrence-malicks-latest-20121104

what the christ

http://workawesome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Head-in-Hands-e1298825206674.jpg

maybe he should go back to making films about farmers at the turn-of-the-century

If the Black Lips end up in a Malick movie I will be *pissed*.

If Jim Morrison were alive today...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QSa9PoKFVG8

So much weirdness.

Fassbender and Portman at UT football game. Ryan Gosling wandering around in front of the Alamo Drafthouse. I just hope they don't end up at the Stevie ray Vaughn statue.

Is this the one with Rooney Mara? I can't keep them straight.

I don't know either, actually. He may be shooting two at once. Apparently using digital too?

http://pitchfork.com/news/48262-terrence-malicks-mysterious-music-centered-movie-set-in-austin-what-we-know/

"The musicians who may or may not appear in the film: "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MGyHS8jwY0

At the Broken Spoke!

Without the beard he looks like Peter Boyle.

new Man Of Steel trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csstykAOQKI

*runs out, buys levis*

Backlit shots of clouds, trees or people: take a drink.
Fields of grass or grain: take a drink.
Voiceover: take a drink.

Looks lovely.

Are there dinosaurs in this one, too? Should be.

Adagio movement from large symphonic work composed between 1870 and 1920: take a drink

(just guessing, haven't watched)

stoked 4 buffaloes

Looks lovely.

Bah. Looks like he's continuing his evolution into an art-film Thomas Kinkade.

I do have a hunch other people do a lot of the shooting and editing for him, at least to an extent.

I like the idea of a Malick assembly line. Departments include Beautiful Sunsets, Animal Close-Ups, Lyrical Strings, Portentous Narration, Furrowed Brows.

Also, Trees and Grass.

Looking Up into Lots of Leaves Dept.

I do have a hunch other people do a lot of the shooting and editing for him, at least to an extent.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, December 19, 2012 11:37 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uhh this is true of basically all movie directors...

"i have a hunch he doesn't do all the acting himself..."

s1ocki w/ the inside scoop on how movies get made

looks good. im looking forward to a relatively short and compressed malicky tone poem.

Olga Kurylenko + Malick? there.

xpost I mean I get the hunch he totally delegates. "Go shoot some nature footage, edit it together, then let me know when you're done. I'll be off watching birds."

i can watch malick's trailers all day, i'll say that

i think i can rationalize why i like his movies all day but perhaps it just comes down to the fact that his movies always seem interested in their surroundings. i always liked the idea of a camera that loses interest in what the characters are saying and doing and sorta looking away and day-dreaming to itself while the incidents happen off screen. TTRL is really special in that regard because it feels like the the movie is only happening to catch bits and pieces of the stories going on around it while it's off looking for butterflies.

xpost I mean I get the hunch he totally delegates. "Go shoot some nature footage, edit it together, then let me know when you're done. I'll be off watching birds listening to Green Day.

i think i can rationalize why i like his movies all day but perhaps it just comes down to the fact that his movies always seem interested in their surroundings. i always liked the idea of a camera that loses interest in what the characters are saying and doing and sorta looking away and day-dreaming to itself while the incidents happen off screen. TTRL is really special in that regard because it feels like the the movie is only happening to catch bits and pieces of the stories going on around it while it's off looking for butterflies.

― ryan, Wednesday, December 19, 2012 12:22 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

i like the effect he gets with that in TTRL, where its contrasted with the perilous war stuff. these guys are in mortal danger, but this random monitor lizard doesn't give a fuck about that

I hang on to the image in my head of Malick having A-list actors in place, ready to perform, cameras and mics in place, and he's squatting down looking at an insect on a leaf and motioning for one of the camera guys to come closer, and that's the afternoon.

Javier Bardem's 'you shall love' line really sounds like 'inch'allah'.

Bilge Ebiri says it's "a ballet"

http://ebiri.blogspot.com/2013/01/to-wonder-i-write-on-water-things-i.html

one way i often defend malick to doubters is to argue that he's not naturalistic filmmaker (some idea of "naturalism" something most people have an unconscious bias for in movies) so the mannered affect is intentional. but anyway for that reason i liked this bit from that link:

Despite the fact that I’ve revisited all his films many, many times, I still can’t tell if we can call his work melodramatic, or minimalist: It's a cinema that occupies an in-between space where florid bursts of emotion live alongside the slightest, quietest gestures.

I like Ebiri, so I'm going to hold onto his praise like a piece of flotsam in a sea of scathing takedowns.

so this is out tomorrow in the uk

haha what, already?

yep. saw the trailer for it before 'Hitchcock'. surprise, it looks v. beautiful.

SPOILERS i guess

the predominantly French voiceover, religious iconography and sweeping classical music reminded me v strongly of godard's je vous salue, marie - film opens w/ some brief crude cameraphone-quality video footage that also recalls godard's modern experiments with early digital etc cameras - there's also a strong antonioni vibe in places - affleck is like richard harris in red desert, a not very convincing 'working man' w/ very little dialogue, and at one point Olga goes for a drift down a street that brought to mind jeanne moreau in la notte

weird to see malick shooting on 'modern-day' streets, partic the short sequence in Paris (almost a vision of hell, here) - amidst all the lovey-dovey metaphysical twirly-whirly stuff, there are a few slightly odd attempts to connect to 'the here and now' (via affleck's job, and via bardem's 'good works' in the community - this stuff doesn't really go anywhere)

oh, daniel lanois gets a credit, and this certainly has the most 'treated' soundtrack of any malick film - lots of whispers, echoes etc - there's ALMOST a supernatural edge to it, in places

lol just read philip french's review and he ends with a mention of red desert too, so it must be true!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/feb/24/to-the-wonder-review-malick

affleck is like richard harris in red desert

waht!

wonderful moments, mostly visual

sounds perfect! how soon is this released in the us?

april 12

weird to see malick shooting on 'modern-day' streets

Sean Penn's office in The Tree of Life felt this way, too.

That's nothing when you see the TWO scenes that take place at a Sonic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g-t3l6T53V8

giving Affleck little dialogue is a plus

well

bardem was really good. i have to admire malick's commitment to all these child-women characters. (see: Tree of Life.) i tried very hard to appreciate it for what it was, but toward the end i found myself wondering... when these two go out to a restaurant does the guy have to ask the waiter to bring her some crayons so she can be excessively giddy and delighted by drawing pictures for a while, instead of throwing a tantrum? how does she know four languages and yet seem to occupy all her time with nothing but dancing, skipping, jumping up and down and wandering aimlessly? am i supposed to not be at all bothered by this? what would it look like if he made a film where there's a guy who behaves this way all the time?

Like that Affleck wasn't really a character at all. Interesting and possibly not-good gender stuff happening through perspective.

i just can't get past it. my goodness. visual style + almost no dialogue = i love this kind of thing, i thought the minor characters in the film were great but.. he doesn't seem aware that women are people and i have a very hard time believing that a director with this point of view has anything all that significant to say. it's a serious problem. why does this happen? i've only seen his last two films but wow, i wonder if he thinks women should have been given the right to vote

I'm slightly concerned on that aspect as well, but I do think the whole thing is from the passive perspective of the man so we only get his impressions, even if I think Olga is the most fleshed out character in the whole thing. That said, it isn't really about character.

Also I've heard that Affleck had no idea what was going on and there wasn't really a script so in a way it's just cobbled together from what he had shot.

if those are his impressions no wonder he gets fed up with her, i sure did (not faulting olga kurylenko here, this is what she was asked to do obvs)

i know monica vitti in red desert was unstable from time to time, but at least she seemed like a grown adult

what would it look like if he made a film where there's a guy who behaves this way all the time?

― seriously, THIS GUY (daria-g), Sunday, March 24, 2013 12:15 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

haha, great point

he sorta did though, maybe, depending what you think of caviezel in The Thin Red Line. you should see his earlier movies and post your thoughts

rolling out on video on demand services this Friday. also playing in "select" US cities.

Zacharek shaking her damn head

http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-04-10/film/terrence-malick-releases-the-heartfelt-to-the-wonder-into-the-world-unpolished/

my fiancee and her dad walked out of this movie. mostly because he started openly and loudly mocking it. and he is right in the target demo

glad to see the village voice critic following my lead and invoking godard

i don't know if dads who talk loudly at movies in the theater are Malick's target demo. was considering seeing this out, but might be better to stay in.

saw rachel mcadams promoting this on kimmel the other night. the clip they showed was her silently standing in a field surrounded by buffalo

haha, not even a huge fan but stoked zacharek got that job, kinda amazed the voice hired someone qualified for that position in 2013

ebert's last review fwiw: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/to-the-wonder-2013

"makes Malick's Tree of Life look like G.I. Joe: Retaliation." - Peter Travers

"if anything, it makes Malick's The Tree of Life look like a Noël Coward play." - Owen Gleiberman

Looking forward to seeing it again. People not seeing it in a cinema are missing out.

Pretty negative reviews from David Edelstein and Dana Stevens (with a qualifier: "but I admire the rest of your work so much that I nonetheless feel the need to defend To the Wonder against the mockery it’s receiving from some quarters"). Actually, Edelstein's sarcasm grated a bit on me, too, and normally I think he's excellent.

I will see this at some point.

L.A. Times very positive:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-to-the-wonder-review-20130412,0,4379174.story

i don't think this is as nearly disastrous or mockable as some have branded it, but it was difficult to connect with. cold. i see this being compared to Antonioni and i think that's pretty OTM. i'm still hashing it out.

I was really into it after 20 minutes. More positive reviews than I expected though.

I love Malick, have loved every Malick, and consider three of his movies masterpieces and two others flawed near-masterpieces. But boy do I not want to see this.

watched this tonight. i think ebert's review nailed the aimlessness of it, how it is a narrative film only in the loosest sense as nothing much happens and we don't really get to "know" the characters on a deep level. i think this works well for the film though. there is a lightness to the work as a whole which parallels the barren oklahoma landscape where most of it takes place. you really get a strong sense of the characters' existential confusion, their lostness, which is driven home by the voiceovers of javier bardem's prayers and sermons which clearly do not mean much to the main characters, much as they would like them to (especially bardem). however, this dilemma is not presented as a crisis, really... the lack of explicit "meaning" in the characters' lives opens them to a more sensual type of spirituality, maybe. idk, i think i want to watch it again. it's visually stunning.

good post ^. there was a pretty nasty several page write-up about this film and how it supposedly casts an unflattering shadow on Malick's previous work in last month's Artforum. not particularly enlightening, but it's there. "he went from being an Emerson to a Kinkade" etc.

hear that KInkade type shit a lot, but it just seems massively stupid. the films are more difficult than they ever were before.

i like malicks kinkadeness & the way his movies can seem kind of like perfume ads. i think it makes them more challenging!

I thought the Slate and Denby (!) reviews made some good points, I think, about the lack of information in this movie:

But how could these two have remained a couple? Apart from flitting through golden fields, Kurylenko’s character is given nothing to do. Finding work isn’t a possibility, and, after taking her daughter back to France, she allows her to remain there with her father. The diminished connection between Affleck and Kurylenko is Malick’s fault, not theirs. They don’t belong together in Oklahoma in the first place. The movie is pervaded by a cataclysmic sense of loss, but we don’t need to be chastised with the ideal of Christian love to understand that sex isn’t enough. And someone might tell Malick that beauty isn’t enough, either. Only a major filmmaker could have made “To the Wonder,” but nothing in it adds up.

I thought the elliptical qualities of "Thin Red Line" and "Tree of Life" worked amazingly in each movie's favor. They're about man in the context of bigger things. But if you're making a movie about a terrestrial relationship, full stop, you need the sort of stuff he likes to leave out. It doesn't have to make sense, but it needs more than twirling.

Man people are really down on Malick's twirling fetish.

passing a kidney stone is 'difficult' and 'challenging' too

all i can think about is Sarah Jessica Parker in LA Story

xpost, yeah but this movie, unlike passing a kidney stone, is really pleasurable.

I saw the preview for that britishes movie starring Annette Bening and Elle Fanning, in which one of them twirls and the voice-over says "And she just SEIZED life!" or something

i like malicks kinkadeness & the way his movies can seem kind of like perfume ads. i think it makes them more challenging!

haha yes it's like Kinkade refracted through Picasso or something.

it's funny I think the sentimentalism and the naïveté of the voiceovers (and that characters are rather more "sophisticated" in their actual dialogue seems significant to me) really is Malick directly challenging the audience--and it seems particularly American to flirt with Kinkadeness this way as a kind of polemic against sophistication.

I said on twitter it reminds me of Alyosha not engaging Ivan's beautifully expressed argument but simply kissing him and remaining silent. That Malick's characters are so unguarded in their inner lives and the strange feeling that "I should'nt be hearing this," is really kinda what keeps you on edge in his films.

bill ryan had a really nice review of To The Wonder that said "he's not telling you how to feel, he's telling you how he feels"--and I really liked that way of thinking about it.

that's a good insight. the film seemed "stripped down" -- like layers of character development, plot, "sophistication" as you said -- were stripped away, and what is revealed through this process is a kind of naive, golden-hued, impenetrable yet beautiful world, where people wander yet still "belong" in some sense. i know it is kind if a cliche in discussions of malick, but to what extent do you think his background reading heidegger informs this film? it does seem to be a film broadly concerned with "being in the world."

I do like the idea of his films being essentially plot free. They've very impressionistic, like he shot a lot of footage around a very loose idea then assembled it into a movie. I'm sort of surprised he nailed "The New World" to the specificity of history. It would have been something if he just told that story without ever acknowledging he was telling that story. He could have called it "The Garden of Eden." I wonder how "Thin Red Line" would have played if it was never clear what war was being fought, or where?

BTW, I can't think of of the names of any of his characters off hand, short of those on "The New World." Did they have names in "Tree of Life?"

The parents were only ever identified as Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien iirc. I think the main kid's name was Jack.

Some good writing on this film, but I don't wanna link bomb. Also I'd probably slant it to the "pro" side.

several friends on twitter hated it, one of which was saying that pretty much everything Kael wrote about Marienbad was relavant, which is a view I understand. He was complaining about it being "in search of" a structure and a narrative, but I thought that missed the point (not that I'm saying that if his method "didn't" work for you it's an invalid criticism).

I'm curious to see if it's really as loose and unstructured as some say. It would be a major departure I think. Thin Red Line seems the loosest so far but even then it basically has a three act thing going on.

Ebiri's point that "it's a ballet" is intriguing and even applies backwards to The New World (with the ever-rising Wagner prelude) and maybe even the Tree of Life (a sonata?). Anyway it seems clear that musical structures have influenced him a lot and even if TTW is "in search of structure" that sounds totally interesting to me. I've been wanting Malick to push his style to greater extremes, just to see what would happen, and maybe I got my wish.

Sounds on par with all of his other movies as far as embodying the parts of being human that aren't so different from being a dog or a bear or a bird.

I think, storytelling wise, it's pretty straightforward (which is why I think the Marienbad comparison is off), but he almost completely excises plot details on how they get from A to B to C, even if they do always get from A to B to C. It seems an extension of what he's been doing all along, or at least from Days of Heaven, where he'd have a whole scene of dialogue but he would just cut it down to one line to push things forward or establish character motivations.

I can't see his next film being as autobiographical as this one or ToL, so I wonder how his style might change.

ha looking up "sonata form" and I'm gonna go ahead and say Tree of Life is definitely a sonata!

Surely ToL is freer from plot than is TTRL?

I definitely think so. TTRL is almost linear--even if that "plot" appears glancingly or off to the side.

Yeah, plot is there but the camera is on the guy thinkin bout somethin else.

curious about this, what i've read makes it sound boring but reading the wrong reviews of his other stuff would make all of them sound p boring i guess. Watchin the new world tonight for first time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR94GBgSl6U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKP1CAE1smY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwM5x7WT_5Q

i should probably wait to see this in the theater instead of doing on-demand, right?

depends on what kind of TV setup you have. i watched it on demand in HD and it was pretty good.

I would suggest seeing it in the cinema, but On Demand will probably lessen your resentment if you really hate it.

on demand is almost as pricy as a ticket, or at least it was for me.

Well a friend of mine didn't want to pay the gas money to get across LA and he went on and on to me about how glad he was that he didn't. Gorgeous film, though, and really should be seen on the big screen if possible.

Some good writing on this film, but I don't wanna link bomb.

― Gukbe, Sunday, April 14, 2013 12:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

why even make this post then. just link them dude u know we wanna read em

http://www.reverseshot.com/article/wonder

ty

here's the piece i quoted above:
http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/we-walked-up-steps.html

So when are we getting that other one with Christian Bale and Val Kilmer?

Spinning?

would love to see the "syllabus" that Affleck jokingly speaks of in that video

can't sleep and been occupying myself by thinking more about malick's films in general. in particular a line from another "great american weirdo" (to borrow max's great phrase in another thread) C.S. Peirce: "Thought is more without us than within. It is we that are in it, rather than it in any of us."

I wonder if this turning inside-out doesn't explain the (to use an Emersonian word) "impersonality" of affect in Malick's films. the sense that on some fundamental level it doesn't really matter who's talking, and maybe not even what they are saying, so much as the thoughts/feelings the words signify. they do not belong to us so much as pass through us, happen to us--as Peirce puts it a feeling is in search of a vehicle, a mode of determination and specification--but these modes of determination are never exhaustive.

always loved that scene in The New World where the budding romance between the leads is shown as born between two people but then it transforms even the natural world--or is it vice versa? i love that you can approach it from either angle.

Still haven't seen To the Wonder, but many of the reviews make me wonder if it doesn't represent a further refinement of Malick's "late style." a further paring away of the incidentals of personality and plot in order to focus more directly on the birth and evolution of a feeling. apparently there's a van morrison-esque voiceover to the extent of "what is this love that loves us?"--or even perhaps loves through us? its remarkable the extent to which such an idea is a kind of mobius strip--much as in the Tree of Life where you are left to wonder if an individual life is the framework for the universe or the universe the framework for the individual. what's so interesting about malick is that he's such an optimist in some ways, as if the more he pulls away from the specifics of character the more invested he seems in giving the interiority of our individual lives some measure of dignity and meaning by refusing to fully naturalize our feelings or posit them as self-willed and isolated. he leaves that knot in place.

I thought what you observed manifested itself first and foremost in "Thin Red Line," as a sort of literal collective subconscious. These men are going through some terrestrial charade, shooting and killing each other, but their souls (or whatever) are operating on a different plane. There's a brief bit in that movie where even a dead Japanese soldier gets a little philosophical internal monologue. I think he did that stuff brilliantly in his last three. The reason I'm wary of seeing the new one is that it sounds like more of the same but less of what made the previous same so profound. Maybe there'll be an alternate version that intercuts all the twirling and stuff with scenes of the universe being born?

So, folks who have seen it: what's this I hear about Bardem as a faithless priest or something? How does that play into the aimless relationship snapshots?

ryan, fwiw, to the wonder struck me as quite a pessimistic film - or, the work of a romantically disillusioned optimist, at least.

oh interesting. and yeah his previous movies have that sort of "pessimist willing themselves into optimism" that, to my mind at least, is characteristic of a lot of sophisticated religious types a la kierkegaard.

so predictably I thought this was extraordinary. The mentions of Antonioni above seem really apt to me. Halfway through I thought "he's made his euro art film."

there are obviously dark moments in his previous films but nothing so extended and filled with sadness as this. There's a lot of pain in this movie and what reconciliation there is seems quieter and gentler than previous films.

Does anyone know the music playing about halfway thru during mcadams' long voice over? She was wearing a red dress. It begins with a really unusual swirling string section and continues to crescendo with brass coming in.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/04/how-terrence-malick-wrote-filmed-edited-to-the-wonder.html

this movie looks like the fucking pits. it's amazing that in the span of a decade i've gone from anticipating a new terrence malick movie with wild wonder to absolutely dreading one.

also now that "terrence malick" has been boiled down to a few visual signatures, he's being imitated everywhere... not least in the new trailer for "man of steel" of all places.

i think it's fair to say that malick's first two (maybe even three) films were inimitable.

i mean, all power to those who love this new one, and maybe it'll catch me by surprise. i hope so. but i don't expect it.

I think there's a certain quality i havent yet put my finger on to the images in this one that are rather far from the typical "perfume ad" criticism that's typically leveled at him. there's one shot of a buffalo staring head on at the camera that by no means gives off a nature as god vibe but something altogether alien, unknowable.

there are some similar shots (fleeting but they're there) in days of heaven when bill is out exploring the wheat fields. it's neat b/c they aren't really POV shots or reaction shots, the connections between shots are more elusive

I think we're so conditioned to think of nature as beautiful that it's easy to miss that a big part of his images are moving towards something more complex, a more essential strangeness. hence his obsessions with dualities and transience.

You should give this a chance! I'd love to read your reaction, anyway--good or bad. It's been buzzing around in my head quite a bit--it's got a lot of familiar Malicky elements but seems less top-down conceived than Tree and more in line with the earlier films.

i just don't know if i can handle the twirling

i was so prepared by reviews for it to be wall-to-wall twirling and mystical pantheistic nature shots i was rather surprised by it so maybe my expectations played a big role. there's not even that much twirling, like a handful of times, maybe?

there's one shot i can't get out of my head of the two leads embracing--and their already in the corner of the shot but the camera glides off of them and starts to track ever so slightly down a desolate suburban street with children's abandoned playthings lying in driveways (and of course the eerie light of dusk over it all).

most twirling is her with her daughter, but yeah, there's not as much as lazy critics like to zing it for.

There are great moments in this, but I'm probably more frustrated with it than I was on first viewing of The Tree of Life.

Bardem's role seemed cribbed from Bergman's Winter Light and similar tales, but that last montage of his ministrations worked for me.

The recurring line "Something is missing" would be an ideal headline for a pan.

Enraged is a good look on Affleck, tho, esp when he lets his mouth hang open, cavemanlike, first.

bison were awesome, it's true

Olga twirling might have made Oblivion significantly better.

I had to make sure the antic Italian chick wasn't Parker Posey showing off bilingually.

Richard Brody's "Catholicism vs Protestantism" read on it is characteristically overdetermined but at the same time it does get at something interesting about the film in its, I dunno, conflict between "duty" and "feeling."

Did love the prayer scene leading into that final (silent?) montage back in France. Felt like the movie was building to just that moment and feeling.

wish I could figure out what I find so compelling about that post-prayer montage too...it's somehow beautiful yet more distant than anything else he's done--it's like this yearning for transcendence but at the same time things remain stubbornly themselves.

it's really the only thing he's done that I'm tempted to compare to Bresson or Tarkovsky or Dreyer. (He's always been Emerson via Godard until now.)

ppl invoking Antonioni on this one which i don't quite see.

i was indeed irked by the Days of Heaven look to some of the rustling fields scenes. also a few too many 'goofy frolicking' Ben-Olga scenes.

I got Antonioni in some of the interiors with people subtly avoiding each other.

As for the rest: I guess what I'm saying is that following that urgently and terribly moving prayer you get...what exactly? An answer? God's silence? Funny given Malick's rep as woolly headed spiritualist that he puts forth such radical ambiguity at that moment. God, after all, never talks back in his films (except the rebuke quoted from Job at the beginning of ToL which boils down to "who are you to judge me?") and nature for all it's beauty presents itself essentially as a mystery without an answer.

I know it's inherent in the landscape of exurbia, but I thought the framing of (at least 3) scenes w/ banks in the background seemed significant.

oh I didn't pick up on that.

fwiw maybe he's repeating himself but it did feel like there was some deliberate callbacks to previous films. This, ToL, and the New World somehow seem a trilogy.

i liked this! more than anything else he's done since ttrl. i mean it felt 3 hours long and my attention wandered a lot, but it kinda worked for me. i hate to say that his films 'resist analysis' but it seems instructive that everyone ranks his shit totally differently... like his movies are so idiosyncratic that it's almost random which one an individual will respond to

olga doing her twirling (and there was a ton of twirling in the film, if you include acts such as skipping, frolicking, manically jumping up and down on a bed in that category, which imo is reasonable) in front of a Sonic almost felt like self-awareness on malick's part. also i loved that the second time they went to Sonic it was during happy hour - affleck's guy was fiending for that cherry limeade

very little dialogue, and the movie was indifferent to the dialogue that was there. almost any time someone started talking you could count on the movie disinterestedly fading out the audio on it. usually it was banal stuff but sometimes it was something i thought i wanted to hear and i'd start leaning closer to the screen to try and get it. some of the dialogue scenes, and scenes that were meant to dramatize a moment, were amateurish in an almost surreal way. there were a few parts where i felt like i was watching After Last Season:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7qCOe8WG4I

also, in the buffalo scene (those were some intense buffalos) theres some kind of birds squawking in the background, and then the movie embarks on a montage where the birds keep squawking over it for like the next 5 minutes

i was so smugly convinced that i had malick pegged that it opened me up to be surprised by this film, which i was. i didnt think it was gonna be the kind of movie where skinny pete from Breaking Bad has sex with olga kurylenko in an econolodge, but it was (spoiler). i didnt think OK and rachel mcadams were gonna get their sweater puppies out, but they did, and it was a cool thing to happen. i legitimately enjoyed the novelty of malick & lubezki shooting everyday scenes - i felt so numbed by the capital-b Beauty of ttol and tnw that it was cool watching olga just walking past a Golden Corral and through a grocery store aisle, skyping on her Macbook Pro. nobody owns televisions in the malickverse (i think affleck might have smashed a flat screen at one point but the camera was moving so fast that im not really sure)

its interesting that the movie seems mostly concerned with the feelings of kurylenko's character. the mcadams interlude didn't work for me at all. affleck's character is like this stony golem with no apparent interiority or personality. i guess that could be seen as an evasion, or as revealing in its own way

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/p480x480/66671_10151308722151479_1061059852_n.jpg

good post h4a
yeah i really liked this too. it's kind of a great position to go into it from, anticipating the montage of twinkling sunlight that people described it as, because it isn't that at all, really. thought malick had a really great understanding of contemporary american scenery, the allure of a supermarket to a child, the kind of egglestonian radiance of an econolodge car-lot, the bare texture of flat pre-fab homes, the possibility of ditching a bag in the sidewalk greenery of an empty street. & sunlight's part of the guy's license to depict these places meaningfully - it isn't that there aren't twirling-in-cornfield-scenes, because there are, but it's that it's a film about western kansas (right?) & couples in the early days of relationships, & setting their time against these backdrops, where they could take a walk and where their meaningful interactions are foregrounded against these urban & natural scenes, like ours constantly are, it's a way to attach an appropriate sense of significance to these fixtures. that they're beautiful. i have had beautiful times looking across parking lots in the evenings. i guess i find it really appealing that the guy's mandate extends in this textural way to try to link the individuals' lives to our constant attachment or lack of attachment to our scenery - to walk around trailing fingers against the walls of a new home is the same as watching the caged horse try to follow its kin running, somehow, like it's some of what conditions our mood, it's to some degree representative of who and where we are & what we can occasionally feel akin to & at other times fail to even register. the artforum argument that it attempts to inject profundity into each scene seems really cynical to me; i don't know that as a film it differed radically from a contemporary ozon or hansen-love flick, tracking an unspooling romance, only that it was so progressive in its choice of what to depict - the non-verbal weight of relationships, the meaning of touch and space, the reality of relating to somebody in every moment, not just the grandstanding speechifying ones - & that it was committed to looking at light, yeah.

really couldn't believe how strong the ontological, documentary scenes of the village in this were - the priest's conversation with the guy cleaning the window, anything with badem on the road, all of which could have veered into directorial-affleck's cheap ethnography but which was done with such a clever, open, kind of holy eye. malick at the supermarket, with the marching band, watching kids race around, stray cops and criminals just rooted to their spots in the town streets. it made me want just malick's video diary of going to disneyland or something.

& yeah i liked the affleck performance. seems strange to report on this as he barely has ten lines when he's playing ... a guy who is conspicuously quiet & not at all overbearing, a marginal, reticent figure in his own life.

nice post. and agree with a lot of it.

need to see this again but it sits very fondly in my memory. maybe my fav since TTRL as well.

i keep thinking about this. it made the last couple of days richer to have seen it, i think; it is newly spring or summer or you know is bright, here, & people are around doing stuff and in your field of vision. it made a lasting impression in thinking about space and the connections you feel, i think.

another thing that seems interesting about the film, with reference to it being, in a bunch of ways, malick's modern film, is how it compares & differs from a couple of other ostensibly comparable things. when i look at how it's different from a mia hansen-love film that thematically works around the same narrative, there are these differences in approach, style i guess, and when i pitch it against something maybe similarly expansive, like post tenebras lux, it seems to have this kind of traditionalism that makes it seem distinctly unmodern. it has the tradition of being more straightforwardly enamoured with its female lead. i read some things, maybe in this thread?, about how malick doesn't seem able to attach any character to his female characters, & it didn't ring true, to me - i think specific character is something he isn't interested in across the gender spectrum. but at the same time he's happy & intent on celebrating women the way films sometimes have, as their illuminate leads, for these displays of femininity, as radiance. the leads are bacalls & the guys are bogarts, only these leads are nervous & mute, or they don't need to talk to promulgate their traits. it's tradition but rethought, to me; there is an ordinary narrative arc but one rethought to incorporate a camera that approaches subjects in an evocative way, cuts that mimic our gaze and attention instead of forcing it. i don't know. i like it more and more the more i think of it, anyway, &'ll probably catch again to see what else i pick up, of everything it dropped.

i was gonna see post tenebras lux last nite (w/reygadas Q&A) but i couldnt find parking and said fuck it and got a hot dog instead

I liked it a lot, though I can't think of anything to say as it was a month ago. Mont St Michel was a nice choice of location. My friend and I were having a laugh at the huge gaps between his films and suddenly in his sixties he's blasting out the films. Especially given the fact he appears to have bunch more in the pipeline, including this for 2014:

Voyage of Time: an examination of the birth and death of the universe.

iirc voyage of time is a kinda imax spin-off of tree of life? i don't know that that clarifies anything but just fwiw.

wish you'd caught PTL, h4a, I loved it. I saw him do a q&a for battle in heaven with its nervous lead actress & he was v compelling, looked like Godard. satisfying.

more and more I think a big part of this movie is about the paradox of sacrament--and that's an especially apt thing for a Malick movie, themselves so intent on the production of feeling through the "techne" (forgive the term) of cinema, to be about.

I really like how he reads it through one angle as the tribulations of a romantic relationship and through the other as an explicitly religious commitment that's gone "cold," so to speak. In so many other Malick films, even the relative darkness of circumstance that surrounds TTRL, there's an effusiveness that irresistibly bursts through, but here it's clear he's working for it. the movie is in so many ways about achieving a relationship of feeling with others and the world, a relationship that's not always present for the individual characters in earlier films but does seem taken for granted by the film as a whole. and there's something beautiful about the comparison of a failing relationship and a crisis of faith--and how both are organized around desiring infinity, or projecting a desire into a void. either those final moments are impossibly generous (like the end of The New World, say) and thus brought into life by a private prayer or they simpy represent a quiet expectation. either way it's devastating.

also im borderline angry about some of the critical dismissals of this movie.

the lazy ones, that is. of course everyone is entitled to hate it--just tired of the condescending and cynical approach to reviewing films. Malick really brings out the worst in some critics.

Yup.

http://vimeo.com/65398956

A+

this film is such just a total profound masterwork & like nobody cared, except i guess richard brody, richard brody cared, thank god richard brody is attentive enough to care

there was a nice film comment article, recently, using this & the shane carruth movie to talk about ~complex modern films~, & it frustrated me to reach the end & read the author kind of plump for upstream color as preferable on account of it being the more 'modern' of the two, which i can kind of understand it appearing to be, for carruth scoring it with very au courant minimal synth music, feeding into it various voguey buzzwordy motifs, some guy playing a synth in a farmyard, people wearing shirts, being transported while wearing headphones, &c. but i think the most striking thing about to the wonder is its totally assimilated, unsuspect modernity, all phrased quite classically, just of content; it is a movie that starts with cellphone footage, realistically uncomplicatedly without weird zig-zag-line-superimposed-tv-effects skype conversation (with the hang-up blooping noise), a film with sections in which somebody talks through having an iud removed, it's the first movie i've seen in a long time featuring any kind of real-feeling cross-section of society, there are the recipients of charity, i don't know when i last saw a film passingly featuring anybody with down's syndrome, it's razor sharp, set against traffic islands, ugly new manicured housing complexes, wide american streets, flatscreen tvs. like it's crazy the disconnect between the film we watch & the way it was received, described. malick's treatment of love, & his vocabulary for showing it, is just so stirring & fresh & so fucking crazily economical. THIS FILM SURE HAS SOME TWIRLING, HUH! is just ex-communicatingly reductive, to me. more than anybody i can think of he's just so dedicated to this really elemental view of what male & female physicalities are like - a kind of platonic, exploded sort, sure, like old greek statues or whatever, but still something sort of familiar & archetypically-applicable & rich. that female beauty is this thing the guy can't not reach for, pull at, put his hand toward the chest of, drag close, & which twins with some kind of grace that frustrates his clunky alternative. & that the guy is this just solid stoic frown. affleck's so good in this! he reminds me of this guy who sits near me at the library, sometimes, comes in just so well dressed he mustn't even know it's cold outside, removes with one sweeping gesture his armour of correct clothing & then surveys the powerpoint slides at hand seemingly without distraction (i think he actually studies something eco-related). he's like some handsome guy you see buying shit at ikea. peacoat. goes to fix something, fixes it, has this single strain of attention. shot close-cropped so you just feel his kind of rushmorian bulk, the reassuring solidity of the planes of his face. it's like any recent michael fassbender performance, only better for having the dignity not to pretend that such handsomeness is sexy. & the film is just so bold. the phases of the relationship we see them in are so quickly, sharply rendered. A Scene At Which The Couple Suppress Their Unresolved Frustration While Eating With A Wholesome Family Whose Perfection Prompts Shame. light falling on a superior paterfamilias's face with oppressive beauty. a scene showing the time when you have to try to mutually handwave away the legitimate outbursts of an angry child rejecting an awkwardly-unmonikered-stepfather as if it's just generic, baseless childhood tantruming. all the scenes of a woman framed by a man's gaze, kind of moving, just remind me of ways i looked at people or what sex felt like. the models involved aren't really important, it's like Bresson, but at the same time a lot of the lazy criticisms - why are they in a field; ben affleck has no personality - are answered by the screenplay: they live next to the meadow; he is described as a man who doesn't say much. the hybrid of malick's explicit focus on beauty, which was i think indulged more unapologetically in the last film, with an incorporation of the actual built urban environment, feels so powerful, here. the leaves are whipping beautifully across the park but that's because a dude is walking around blowing the leaves with a leafblower. light is refracting beguilingly through a glass bulb that feels like the most generic windowsill ornament of a well-lit but generic new home. i watched this again & felt so taken with it - how perfectly composed it is, using a mix of ordinarily-wrung-dry classical standards with evocative natural sound, visually edited to just actual perfection, every segue flowing like dance - i really can't understand what feels like a kind of rejection of it. was it really the twirling? did people hear there would be twirling in it, watch it, see those parts & mistake that confirmation as a signal of something insufficient?

yes! lovely post.

I have a hard time fathoming the rejection of it. I am weirdly protective of malick even tho my main argument for his films is that they are formally and intellectually rigorous and really the naive vulnerable things they appear to be and even tho malick is prob hella smarter and tougher than I'll ever be. at the same time, despite all that, his films *are* vulnerable and naive and serious and rigorous. I really cherish them, even and especially when they feel awkward. feels like a privilege to be addressed in that way--to have your own inner life and the life of these characters (and presumably malick's own) cherished in that way.

really *not* the naive, etc.

yeah absolutely. i think i was thinking of this through the lens of true detective criticism; that there's a compulsion to handwave anything that shoots to consider things philosophically as sophomoric, mainly just because it's satisfying to elevate oneself uncredentialed to being in a position to diagnose that. like the thrill of getting to pft-. & then conversely i feel like with the parts of this that aren't, visibly, ~philosophical~, that are elemental & immediate, instead, it seems to miss the point to take issue with them intellectually when they're often just kind of light & motion you're meant to be responding to. what i'm saying is that i'm pro-twirling.

to have your own inner life and the life of these characters (and presumably malick's own) cherished in that way

also - yes!, absolutely. i remember when i saw tree of life, finding it so wild to feel like my suburban northern english '80s childhood was being rendered so faithfully on-screen in ~50s west texas. & the distillation of like sense-memory-familiar romance in this, its understanding of the various faces of being in a relationship with somebody, intimate in this kind of just animals-close-together way, was so powerful.

It was Reverse Shot's number 1 of the year: http://reverseshot.com/article/reverse_shots_best_2013

that's a p good top ten, ty

i wasn't entirely intending to press the self-aggrandising ~am i the only connoisseur in the building~ angle, it obviously doesn't matter what attention it got, but it does just feel like a kinda conspicuously good film in a landscape that doesn't seem so attentive to it, doesn't seem to be rippling in its aftermath the way we actually do seem to be existing in at least an occasionally-mentioned-wave of post-upstream color zeitgeist shaping or whatever

malick came to mind a few days ago because I was reading about the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch--and while that bit is literally all I know of Bloch that won't stop me from saying that he'd love malick intensely because while his films are sometimes undervalued by criticism that proceeds from an (often unacknowledged) materialist/realist bias they are sorta profoundly materialist in a holistic blochian kind of way. thin red line especially, but in all his film you see a sense in which life persists only at the expense of other life, that Anaximander kind of process of exchange.

sorry, dithering a bit here.

I think if you don't like Malick, his films increasingly lend themselves to the criticisms that you'd probably have had 12 years ago. To the Wonder didn't even have the hooks of CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE/TRUMBULL/A FILM ABOUT THE ENTIRETY OF EXISTENCE that probably gave Tree of Life a lot more critical leeway than it would have otherwise received. Now he's dealing with some silent mopey dude at an Oklahoma Sonic so the levels of "pretension" that people saw in his work already are doubly as offensive.

iow people tutting, rolling their eyes and mouthing "y so serious"

ryan dither at me, my subsequent wikipedia rollercoasters are the best exercise i get

& yeah i kinda see that, gukbe; i can kinda see that whatever notebook-esque aesthetic salad dressed this film on posters, &c, might not usefully prepare people to be open to it. but i do feel kinda frustrated by the reach for pretentious when it's mainly, to me, a very kinda immediate, sensory, enveloping film. it really is pieced together like dance. even the cuts between some static exterior shots are really breathtaking, to me.

realised, yesterday, that i'd been meaning to read more about the last shot. is there a good kinda kent-jones-on-tree-of-life piece about this all, anywhere?

i kind of wanna just look him up, call &: kent you're leaving me hanging whatdymake of it

I can't remember if this was "good" but I certainly remember it being "long": https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/conversion-experience-terrence-malicks-to-the-wonder

anytime I get started on a unified theory of malick I catch myself coming up short because his relationship to signification is always so tenuous. in that respect Tree seems like better comparison to Upstream because of it's hermetic and kubrickian "meaningfulness," even if that meaning is hard to assign at times. the other films are somehow more open, as content to be as to signify. or better: to signify by being; Peircean icons that have to be determined and in being determined escape meaning. but again all this feels reductive to me ultimately.

I mean malick's movies are emotionally moving to me every time I watch them, but the moments at which these feelings occur are often changing. sometimes a shot *clicks* and your destroyed; other times it just drifts by.

I am bad at grammar today.

also malick is reliably great at big moments in his films but the prayer at the end of this film just kills me. maybe it's my own unhappy atheism reflected back at me but it feels like a great big sad hug and a sigh.

also as I write this I am staring out over the Pacific Ocean so...yeah.

Love Malick, yet haven't seen this. But may see this.

Netflix instant

The way it was meant to be seen.

so wait do I have to see this? I have been dreading it.

This was definitely unfairly received, and still probably my #1 from last year. Only sequence I felt was lousy was the visit from the Italian friend.

the only time that Dostoyevskyian ranting thing has totally worked was the thin red line. It's in all the later movies tho, even briefly in Tree.

I mean malick's movies are emotionally moving to me every time I watch them, but the moments at which these feelings occur are often changing. sometimes a shot *clicks* and your destroyed; other times it just drifts by.

― ryan, Sunday, March 9, 2014 3:48 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah i never have this response to his stuff (except TTRL last time i saw it; maybe revisiting them is key). i respond to something like TTW like i do to a lot of herzog's narrative features (esp of recent vintage), where there's enough fascinating images in it for me to go 'well that was worth my time' but im not like, stirred by them or anything

also as I write this I am staring out over the Pacific Ocean so...yeah.

― ryan, Sunday, March 9, 2014 4:53 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha i loved this
& yeah absolutely; i mean it's a strange film to feel defensive about in some ways, because i'm begging everybody else to share my exact personal relationship history so as to be able to inhabit it as intensely. but i think that's why it's meaningful, for him having kinda committed to that poetry that isn't born of like her's generic relationship stock imagery of like Sad Dude Staring From Window. i just take its most specific moments as being circuitously universal; the really beautiful quick fragments of some kids talking about clothes, the window cleaner shooting the shit with the priest, &c. & i actually loved the friend being in town, the distance between them. one of the kind of unexpectedly modern tonalities of the film for me was this kind of semi-~illicit~-seeming tendency the characters had, pronounced against the backdrop of the small town; there is this totally physical, sexual strand to a lot of it, there are - seriously it totally wasn't just me - so frequently scenes like on the train or when they're at home where the frenetic editing cuts around the guy going down on the woman, or scenes when she's at the grocery store kind of playing with the guy's conservative inappropriateness threshold of what would be too much, scanning around for people pushing trolleys & pulling up her shirt. it just locks so precisely into so much life. affleck doing this kinda non-commital hangdog face while the daughter is like are you gonna MARRY my MOM. it isn't ~characterisation~ but it's totally redolent. & the scenes with the friend are really good in a similar way. she's the embodiment of the stiflingly residential neighbourhood, not just in like actually calling it out & seeming to pop from it but for actually seeming too loud, malick putting you in the lead's shoes & watching her friend say do you think i'm a monster. i wasn't re-watching so attentively, this time, & the prayer you talked about wasn't the thing that popped for me like i can imagine that it might at other times (though badem's just downbeat anomie really did touch). but i think that's part of the film's richness. there's just so much available. re: H4A i don't think you necessarily have to be reeling to this personally but it can still be just so involving and connective throughout.

btw ryan, which peirce is this?:
Peircean icons that have to be determined and in being determined escape meaning. but again all this feels reductive to me ultimately.

I still have a screener for my second viewing to come

re-scanned the thread again to see what you thought; Enraged is a good look on Affleck, tho, esp when he lets his mouth hang open, cavemanlike, first is otm!, & i want to tether it to the description of each lead inhabiting sorta platonic male/female roles, as well as being more specifically drawn, modern, &c. curious what you think seeing it again. i've only seen tree of life once.

schlump, do you think you could use line breaks? it's hard to read your posts.

(shrugs)

ryan, which peirce is this?

Charles Sanders Peirce. certainly a major figure for what max calls that tradition of "great American weirdos"--along with the the likes of Emerson and perhaps Jonathan Edwards--to which malick seems to belong to more than any continental tradition (ie, Heidegger).

also that reminds me that I wish malick would do a movie about the life of a saint. like Porete or someone like that.

sorry not a saint! she was burned at the stake. a mystic!

I think the facts that

1) in his 20s Malick translated some Heidegger lectures into English
2) a few semi-quotes from Heidegger in voice-over of Thin Red Line

has led some critics to assume that Heidegger is somehow the "master key" to interpreting Malick's films. Which seems wrongheaded to me. Not just to put Heidegger in the center, but to assume that the films can be fruitfully interpreted as "illustrations" or even "wrestlings with" another philosopher.

I found "Tree of Life" half awe-inspiring and powerful and half an embarrassment, and from the reviews it always seemed that "To the Wonder" basically isolated most of what I found embarrassing about "Tree of Life" and amplified it. Which is why I've stayed away. I can already tell that my tastes in cinema (and how one might discuss it) differing from what I grasp of you folks from this conversation...

building on what I said earlier I think what's most precious about his movies for me is that they eschew a lot of that intellectual armor we wear when we talk about big meaningful things. things like losing a child or a sibling; mom and dad; fear of death; the passing of a relationship. somehow there's nothing didactic about how these things are presented. they are, to borrow schlump's wore, immediate and then you see/hear the characters working those things out intellectually after the fact (but then always falling short: not for nothing do his films seem to end in silence quite often).

there's a bit in the thin red line that always slays me. the "we were a family" monologue and then it cuts to a human family, a chicken and it's chicks, and then, miraculously, a group of coconuts! I think many people will (possibly rightly) see this as a kind of "do you see?" type of moment but it always feels amazing to me because in the context of the movie it doesn't feel like a cute analogy but a very earnest search for the meaning of family. it's like a beautiful and fanciful passing thought that's promptly forgotten.

ams I think it's that embarrassment thing--it's a risk that either pays off for the viewer or it doesn't.

schlump, do you think you could use line breaks? it's hard to read your posts.

(shrugs)

― espring (amateurist), Tuesday, March 11, 2014 5:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha- the real defence here is that i'm trying to cultivate a similarly fresh & overwhelming orthographic style, form resembling content. but sure, i will try. they will just be arbitrary spasmodic raps at the return key but okay. i always liked your film posts. i am kinda bristling at you talking about ~your tastes~ jarring with the vibe we are grasping at, here, though. i think having that not-unusual-ratio of liking & disliking a malick film in equal measure is okay, this almost proven by how much less satisfying some other, ostensibly-not-dissimilar films are for not traveling quite as far out. like i'll take really enjoying 40% of a malick film over feeling just boringly embroiled in the hazy premise of upstream color. finding tree of life half embarrassing isn't a problem. & there are lots of ways to discuss cinema. i'm reading nice things by richard brody about this & they are all just straining to get at the space it works around.

& hm i haven't seen the thin red line for so long, & never the director's cut.

I'm enjoying what you guys are writing about To The Wonder here, and I usually don't like reading about movies. I watched this very late into the morning a few weeks ago and it's stuck with me. I'm going to watch it again soon. For the longest time, The New World was my favorite Malick, mostly to just watch the images wash over me. But To the Wonder has the beauty of images and a elemental story that I connect with more.

no directors cut of TTRL. I wish!

maybe I wouldn't argue it's his best but it's def my fav for personal reasons. also it's the closest he ever got to a genre film. action scenes! plus caviezal just nails that "Christ responding to the Grand Inquisitor" thing.

oh! perhaps i just meant some of the excised footage; isn't there that whole story about rourke's career best performance, cut, & then languishing as a dvd feature.

but i'll check it again. i saw so much stuff, like love streams & a bunch of ozu, when i was too young to really click with it, & i think this was back then, too.

yeah there's a legendary first cut that supposedly went 6 hours. there's some of it on the criterion but I never get too interested in extras unless malick was gonna so a commentary track. can you imagine.

i wanna see mickey rourke's deleted scenes

I was 18 when it came out and had no idea what I was about to see. kinda kickstarted my subsequent movie love for the next 10 years of my life. sadly passed now.

you're in a good city for movies though, at least; i feel that change, i can't really watch things at home, now, or kinda laboriously pay tribute to dvd extras, but movies at the cinema are a really vital dietary thing, still, i think. this film a good example of that.

& i feel like i must've posted it elsewhere, but you read this, right?
http://www.lavideofilmmaker.com/filmmakers/terrence-malick-interview-rome-film-festival.html
just wrt the impossibility of a TM commentary track. i love that he was able to pretty sensibly square this with not wanting to talk about his films, but still reveal himself as somebody clearly receptive & at the mercy of cinema he loved.

oh yes I saw that. I actually saw him in Austin (with Ryan Gosling) at a Tinariwen concert, of all places. and apparently the episcopalian church he supposedly attends was not far from where i lived.

really hope we get a lot more movies from him. he's definitely due to have a failure or two, his style is too risky to be as consistent as he's been, but I'll happily watch them.

in Austin (with Ryan Gosling) at a Tinariwen concert

a+

Sounds like the answer to a game of Clue.

in Austin (with Ryan Gosling) at a Tinariwen concert

wkiw

i like this movie because it looks like whey you drop acid and everything looks new and beautiful.

i finally worked up the stomach to watch to the wonder, and i made it about 3/4 through before bailing. it was too depressing. maybe i'll give it a shot again some time, but i wouldn't count on it. :(

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, September 10, 2014 1:37 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's up (down?) there with blueberry nights as the most deflatingly bad film by a (once?) major director i've seen.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, September 10, 2014 1:37 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

still wrong (re MBN too)

I'd suggest Which Way to the Front? or Inglourious Basterds

i hope you're a happy guy, morbs.

I felt totally embarrassed watching this. I felt bad for the actors having to strain so hard for profundity, or something without having a clue what they were actually supposed to be doing. It's not their fault, really, it's more like "I'm in a terrence malick flick so I have to look like this (inscrutable). Having said that, why would anyone put Ben affleck in a film in the first place? Apparently Antonio Banderas is in the new one which is like "why would you do that?" X 1million.

feeling embarrassed during a malick film (for malick, for the actors, for yourself) a key part of his aesthetic imo.

No one knew why they were the character they were or what they were supposed to be doing. I'd guess they all independently decided to do "I'm in a terrence malick film" acting.

haha. I'm a big defender of this movie but yeah "acting" as such is not much in play in this one. (saw the thin red line last weekend on tv tho and that's a very different story wrt performances)

Totally but he also ruins that, IMO, with the cameos from travolta (again, why would you do that?) and cloony which jerks you out of the denouement of the film and into the machinations of celebrity "guest appearance" bs. Totally ruins the mood. He should really only use unknown actors.

im for that. or really committed method-type actors. i thought bale and farrell were really good in the new world.

I caught the first 40 mins (for non-Ukers this was screened at 1am last night), plus I got home just b4 after seeing another/drinks with friend (but was also conscious not to have any more as I wanted to see a stretch of this in a semi-sober state, and oh yeah night buses).

I was liking it simply because he got all these ppl on it while you know it he could have got a pile of wood to act in front of the camera for all that it mattered (rly thought i was going to not be able to stand Affleck but as it turned out it was more like Affleck who?) Looked great and liked how it kept cutting abruptly from thing-to-thing. Just fragments so it never dwelt in whatever grief anyone was going through.

i am rewatching the thin red line; the weird democracy of actors involved - like the sheer number, as well as the variety in age, the overall fabric in which like a third of everyone your eyes pass across is a recognisable name - is a real part of its effect, i think, of it managing to impress the randomness of death on the audience. there's something about the temporary investment of "hey look it's woody harrelson" that inflects the economy of the deaths on-screen, like the diminishment of the currency we expect of film actors. the film's breadth & the minimalism of its characterisation feel really deliberate to me, like it's doing something very economical in service of some sweeping, dos-passos-scale portrait of what happened.

i feel so uncomplicatedly positive about to the wonder that i can't really speak about it in the same way, but i guess i think the performances operate in as distinct a mode as bresson's models, who act unrreally & kind of glacially, or as the performances in melodrama or whatever, feet away from naturalism & way closer to expressive types of cliche. & it's a dance film; ben affleck is most immediately dedicated to playing a broad, strong male in the film, his jawline framing some of the shots, whose back arches as he destroys furniture, inexpressive per his partner's commentary about how he's an inexpressive guy, & olga kurylenko is a lighter-than-light airborne presence who he's perpetually in the wake of. i also think it has like ... two hundred more distinct well-observed fresh straightforward scenes about interpersonal dynamics, & their relationship dynamics, than pretty-much any other american thing i can think of. i always think of the scene in which ben affleck & the kid are following her around the supermarket, & she's provocatively lifting her top, & he's awkward with the publicity of the exposure, & she's doing this specifically knowing the edged discomfort of his propriety.

really interesting to watch the thin red line & see some of the same settings & material explored without his refreshed camera vocabulary. it's a really beautiful film in itself, but i think he's got to something so much more direct & expressive in the last couple.

I think you are right but something about the more, say, classical or disciplined style of the thin red line and the new world put his more expressive moments into relief--there's something intense about the lyrical flights of those films specifically because of their more restrained form (for malick, let me stress). like, the meditative serenity of the ttrl, which I find so terribly moving, may have the same impact if it wasn't engaged in a dialogue or happening within a star studded "war movie."

may not have, etc.

that's, for me, why I am always obsessed with the idea of malick doing genre--I like the idea of malickian forces emerging from with a more quotidian movie experience.

yeah i think that's true, & i think maybe the thin red line's a novel & to the wonder's a poem in terms of how much terrain they cover. i am watching it occasionally finding scenery or people uncaressed; i don't think this is a bad thing but it's very different from the kind of relentless probing camera, & feels just slightly stiffer by virtue of being generally familiar territory. the longueurs & the sort of peripatetic drift of ttrl is terrible moving.

ps true detective season 3 ryan gosling & richard gere dir. terrence malick is so never gonna happen

breaks my heart!

also worth noting perhaps that the way war in characterized in that film--as a kind of relentless and brutalizing churn, a chewing up of the earth--only appears in passing in something like To the Wonder, which seems to have an idea of the earth as something being slowly poisoned and left for dead. and I think that difference alone gives the the lie to those that take the "environment" to be some stable presence in his movies and not a changing character in its own right.

re: longueurs, literally my favorite scene in the ttrl is when Witt finds Thomas Jane just chilling out all by himself on the top of a hill and they talk about how peaceful it is up there--like it's the alternative universe hill that they struggled so hard to conquer in the earlier part of the movie.

more and more I think a big part of this movie is about the paradox of sacrament--and that's an especially apt thing for a Malick movie, themselves so intent on the production of feeling through the "techne" (forgive the term) of cinema, to be about.

I really like how he reads it through one angle as the tribulations of a romantic relationship and through the other as an explicitly religious commitment that's gone "cold," so to speak. In so many other Malick films, even the relative darkness of circumstance that surrounds TTRL, there's an effusiveness that irresistibly bursts through, but here it's clear he's working for it. the movie is in so many ways about achieving a relationship of feeling with others and the world, a relationship that's not always present for the individual characters in earlier films but does seem taken for granted by the film as a whole. and there's something beautiful about the comparison of a failing relationship and a crisis of faith--and how both are organized around desiring infinity, or projecting a desire into a void. either those final moments are impossibly generous (like the end of The New World, say) and thus brought into life by a private prayer or they simpy represent a quiet expectation. either way it's devastating.

also im borderline angry about some of the critical dismissals of this movie.

― ryan, Tuesday, April 30, 2013 3:39 PM (3 years ago)

this is such a great post

hey thanks!

i need to watch KOC again since i think a lot of those concerns may carry over.

projecting a desire into a void

;_;

k3v otm

https://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/To_the_Wonder_Terrence_Malick_31.png