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

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.