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

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.