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

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/