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

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