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

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.