Terence Malick's forthcoming films, 2015-2017

What is known?

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/what-we-know-terrence-malicks-725908

I've got to admit, I love the idea of giving an actor a 19-page monologue and then telling them to start it in the middle if they want. Totally subverts ego while simultaneously embracing ego.

Banderas also describes Malick interrupting his free-wheeling performance with "torpedoes" — or unannounced appearances by actors breaking into the middle of a scene, forcing Banderas to improvise mid-monologue.

predicting right now that if one or all of these projects are artistic failures then malick will be lambasted by the entertainment media for letting his artist's ego get away with him.

can't have a director wasting his producer's money...

What is known?

Are you speaking only of the known knowns, or are you including the known unknowns?

i'm not the biggest malick fan but i'm charmed by this sudden twist in his career, bring on the failure

poor attitude, z

i mean it in a good way tho

Malick has made three or four of my favorite films of all time and I still haven't watched his most recent movie. I'm scared.

I haven't seen To the Wonder either. Did it even get a theatrical release? Is it on demand or itunes? what happened to it? everyone hated it and it vanished.

it's my favourite of his, you should watch it, everyone is a bozo

It's on Netflix already, or was.

if you like malick at all you'll love To the Wonder. it's his euro art film imo.

I love malick and find to the wonder to be almost laughably bad

I stand corrected.

it's prob the first time in his movies something like modernism shows up so ymmv.

i like Malick, and yeah TTW is maybe his most 'problematic.' Still some great stuff in it.

sometimes i just watch ttw on mute and play music in the background. it's such a rhythmic movie... very much like ballet or something.

Malick has made three or four of my favorite films of all time and I still haven't watched his most recent movie. I'm scared.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, September 8, 2014 8:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this. it sounds awful!

and all his movies are completely modernist (whatever that means)--esp. the first two!

I mean it in the "loss of the referent" sense. anyway that's why I say it's his euro film--closest thing he's made to something like Antonioni.

Reviews painted TTW as Malick reaching full self-parody, women prancing through fields etc., but the end result is something much different than that. Less gooey, more... idk, cold? I got Antonioni vibes as well. I have a distanced respect for it, but not sure how much I actually like it, which is pretty much how I've felt about every Antonioni I've seen.

malick has always been inches away from self-parody, even in his great films, but the movies all had something there to justify it. ttw doesn't. it's just boring.

I prefer "ennui"

anyway I think TTW works on a lot of levels, not least of which is a sort of Protestant investigation of ritual and its relationship to feeling. reading the article above it almost seems like a philosophy of art is at stake as well--in that he seems to be abandoning "method" altogether and just trusting to chance.

To The Wonder is somehow both the best and worst Malick film. I'm not sure I enjoyed it while watching it, but at the same time images from it stayed with me for days afterwards.

loved Reverend Bardem

btw the topic is his next 3 films; where are all the Val Kilmer orgasms?

otm
even if the films are never released, & all that remains is a single frame that originally accompanied the youtube of val cutting his hair off on-stage: this is the best terrence malick film

two intersecting love triangles does sound like it'd require a kind of narrative focus & definition that the relationships in the previous couple didn't need. i think a cinematographer said they were slightly more traditional than the last, i forget.

Why anyone would put Antonio Banderas in a film is beyond me.

gere/affleck/farrell/&c&c&c

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. :(

it's up (down?) there with blueberry nights as the most deflatingly bad film by a (once?) major director i've seen.

still think it's the only fully realized malick film. camera swirls, actors recite poetry and it has 'wonder' in the title.

To the Wonder has been under-appreciated. The way he films Oklahoma is kind of incredible. The only scene I thought was outright bad was the one where her Italian friend comes to visit.

i guess the nicest thing to say would be that it isn't my cup of tea

i guess this is where i part ways with terence malick; don't think i'll even bother seeing his newer ones. he's got his new working method, and it's pretty clear that anything he makes will be along similar lines, so i'm out.

The last 1/4 has a few of my favorite scenes in his whole filmography.

heh not that i think it'll make amateurist persevere next time, but the ending of TTW is esp. strong - despite all the twirling and poetry and wonder and whatnot, it's actually quite a bleak film in some ways

Much more excited about the documentary Voyage of Time (2016), as frankly my favorite bits of all of his film are the shots of sun through leaves, and I'm not a huge fan of improvisational meandering.

TO DA WONDAH!

http://therealrevo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Sean_Penn.jpg

when watching the supermarket scene i kept thinking someone ought to say "To the Wonder Bread!" but then afterwards i noticed that J Hoberman had already made that joke.

i was also thinking, "you know, they have big supermarkets in paris" (more in the suburbs, but still). but i think it's key that malick is basically shooting a version of his own experiences, which took place in the 1980s when france did have significantly fewer (and smaller) supermarkets.

no buffalo in Paris though.

i can't really begrudge the dude making barely-veiled autobiographical films but the reliance on his own life in the last two films can't help but feel (to me) symptomatic of a general lack of inspiration or new ideas. say what you must about his first three films in particular but there is a real reaching out to try to understand a multitude of experiences and worldviews. in the last three films it seems like all the "characters" (I use that word pretty loosely when it comes to To the Wonder) speak in the same voice (something that's already present in The Thin Red Line, but there it's not dominant). which i know some people think is a kind of breakthrough but kind of flattens the movies for me. i hope i'm making a little sense.

no buffalo in Paris though.

― ryan, Wednesday, September 10, 2014 3:30 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wasn't it the rachel mcadams character with ben m'affleck among the buffalo?

I think that's fair to an extent but I'd never accuse the last two films of a lack of curiosity about other people. if TTW is autobiographical at all it would seem to push him to the edges of the story in order to try to empathize with the unfortunate woman who fell in love with him. to the extent that all of his films are obsessed with seeing thing through someone else's eyes (God, obviously, first of all) then I think TTW does that as well--I just think his feelings about Oklahoma, being "home," are pretty conflicted.

his idea of women seems kind of narrow and blinkered and heavily indebted to some very questionable notions. watching To the Wonder i kind of wonder what sort of relationships he's had with women and whether he ever really got to know them or if they had some kind of relationship where there was a kind of mutually uncomprehending adulation rather than a kind of adult partnership. obvious who the fuck knows but it's hard for me to imagine taking a real-life relationship with a real person and transforming her into this ethereal creature who speaks (thinks) in unending romantic cliche.

i don't know that i'd say that he's not _trying_ to see things through other eyes--i guess i'm diagnosing his failure at doing so. which suggests a real insularity/solipsism to me.

I don't know that 'autobiography' is the problem, or *A* problem, with the last two films. Maybe read less about his life.

hell U2 proclaimed their new album "autobiographical." It means they measure out their lives in room service trays.

I don't see the solipsism, myself. esp given that the end of TTW has one of the more powerfully compassionate passages in any movie I've seen. But even more than that I think you'd have to pass over the passivity of the gaze that strikes me as one of the more dominant characteristics of his movies. There's a reason (iirc) that affleck always seems to be on the edge of the frame.

I mean yeah we can surmise that terry is a daydreamer lost in his own headspace a lot! I can certainly identify.

I'm all for artists being prodigal with their time, especially as the end approaches.

There's a reason (iirc) that affleck always seems to be on the edge of the frame.

well there's a sense that he's trying to displace his own avatar from the center of the film. which is interesting in theory. (or maybe he just hated affleck's performance?) but what /was/ in the center was just not compelling or interesting for me -- the female characters didn't seem to be much more fully conceived.

the lines and contrasts that are drawn in the film, to the extent that you can make them out, seem so stilted and sentimental to me. i sense that he's repelled by dialogue, so he tries to find visual correlates for the drama. but the visual language just struck me as impoverished. that was the biggest disappointment to me. even tree of life, which falls into many of the same traps, has a number of indelible, inventive, just-right images...and sequences of images that are more than the sum of their parts, that get something going in the montage. by comparison almost nothing in TTW felt purposeful, and in the absence of that sense of purpose and import the filmmakers fell back on a raft of visual cliches. at one point I wanted to yell, STOP SHOOTING INTO THE SUN!

https://pagesix.com/2018/10/31/terrence-malick-helping-make-lil-peep-documentary

The acclaimed filmmaker behind “Badlands” and the “Thin Red Line,” who is a friend of Peep’s mother, is executive producing a documentary about the late rapper’s life

This dope beat.
This sick beat.
Where did it come from?
What was the point of origin?
The hi-hat. The trembling bass.

lmfao

xxp Josh otmfm, although I will forever be glad he came back to give us THE NEW WORLD because damnnn

Badlands and Days of Heaven were so special and sui generis. Remarkably strange and haunting. They’re perfect. Diamonds.

The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life are imperfect and messy but have stretches of real transcendence. I think his highest highs are in these films.

I... talk myself into appreciating elements of the films after that. But really I think they diminish the magic of what came before.

late period malick is like season 25 simpsons

“to the wonder” is maybe my favorite film ever

A Hidden Life, about a Nazi conscientious objector, premiered at Cannes last night. Apparently it "will have a more structured narrative than his previous works", which can only be a good thing. Also, it was Bruno Ganz's final film.

what was the reception like?

idk I wasn't there

Fox Searchlight bought it

Terrence Malick’s ‘A Hidden Life’ Snapped Up By Fox Searchlight In 8-Figure Deal After Late Night Bidding War — Cannes https://t.co/xupu1cD4rz pic.twitter.com/DIzMMRCm5R

— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) May 20, 2019

they distributed Tree of Life, expect an Oscar campaign

it got panned in sight and sound. this piece of information is particularly bizarre:

Most peculiar is the use of languages. Whenever anyone shouts or has bad things to say it’s always in German, whereas the voiceovers and anything gentle or kind are in English. This problem is particularly pronounced in the trial scenes where the Nazi prosecutors scream in German while the more reasonable Judge Lueben (Bruno Ganz, who got a sigh of sad appreciation when he came on screen) speaks English to Jägerstätter. (To be clear: both are meant to represent Germans and Austrians speaking their native language.) Obviously, to Malick, good and evil speak different languages.

and then:

If anything A Hidden Life is more God-adoring than Malick’s run of films since Tree of Life. But I don’t sense any attempt to convince or convert. Malick is just vaunting an ordinary farmer from the wrong side of the war who’s been beatified by the Catholic church. It’s almost as if Jägerstätter’s then-unsung death holds more import than the millions being slaughtered in cities and at the front, not to mention the death camps. A Hidden Life is above the clouds in the worst possible way.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/hidden-life-terrence-malick-franz-jagerst%C3%A4tter-anschluss-story

A Hidden Life is above the clouds in the worst possible way.

sounds like a Malick movie!

"The war, in fact, barely intrudes on the proceedings" Hm yes, how weird that this film about a guy who doesnt go to war doesnt have a lot of war stuff in it.

If only we knew what Terrence Malick thought about WWII combat, imagine what a movie that would be

lmao

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/05/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malick-cannes-1202142833/

here’s an encouraging rave

Anne Thompson also really liked it I think

I didn't get this one.

has he been trying to get got?

Bresson used to film these Explorations of Faith in Dark Times in 88 minutes.

A Very Hidden Life

I loved it

I thought this was riveting and incredibly moving. Probably my favorite of his since The Thin Red Line.

I'm torn on seeing this one. I don't like Malick at all, but I feel a need to see everything he does. I really respect what he did after Tree of Life, trolling everyone with three completely indecipherable masterpieces and making the lives of a few hundred die hard fans. That's awesome. but it's cold as shit here and it's 3 hours and I've already seen Thin Red Line and didn't like it at all. Should I put on the gloves?

Well it will definitely kill three hours!

I am struggling to articulate to myself why this felt so much different/better than the last few (which I admired as experiments without really loving). The flow of the images in this one just felt totally necessary and purposeful and very often I was moved just by a simple cut.

I’ve been checked out on Terry even though I love everything pre-To the Wonder unreservedly. This is probably enough to make me go see this today.

I was half joking about its length, but, really, I get what you mean, ryan, by how scene for scene the film impressed its theosophy, but by the two-hour mark its banality also wore me down. Malick still thinks wives and children romping through the fields is paradise lost?

I know what you mean, but I actually think there's not a lot of romping? There is, however, a lot of toiling. I don't think I've seen so much manual labor in a movie in a long time...it's constant (and weirdly mesmerizing).

And I think a lot of the malicky stuff in the town (which, again, for me felt different...those shots of the moutanins aren't "aw" they're like that shot of the bison in To the Wonder...the strangeness!)...is necessary to set off against, say, the empty prison montage with the anguished roving camera searching for light and space, which felt like a high point.

I freely admit I may have been in the right mood for this movie! Which often happens with Malick.

In any case, while mileage with Malick may vary, I felt grateful he's around, that this movie exists...because no one else can do this quite like he does.

Also quite appreciated how maddening and mystifying Jaggerstatter's (sp?) beatific stubbornness was, the seeming gratuitous senselessness of it being the whole point-. "You'll be free if you sign this." "But I am free."

he's Melvillean.

I thought this was riveting and incredibly moving. Probably my favorite of his since The Thin Red Line.

― ryan, Saturday, December 21, 2019 1:07 AM (eleven hours ago)

ok, I'm sold. I was disappointed brody didn't like it because we tend to be on the same page about malick

ryan why do I remember you loving TTW

I did love it! That's one I'll really go to bat for. Probably went on about it in this very thread but I won't look since seeing my old posts makes me feel like Adam Driver on Terry Gross.

I also admired Knight of Cups but definitely felt "done" with that approach and did not see Song to Song. Wasn't even that interested in this but Nick Pinkerton's essay on it piqued my interest.

I do think set and setting are important for Malick consumption. But I dunno I'll have to figure out why this worked so well for me. It has a bit of that quality of TTRL where there feels like there's another movie going on off camera but on a much larger scale. I found myself wondering how their donkey and cow were doing.

sorry, a much *smaller* scale than TTRL

I wonder if Paul Schrader would hate this like he did with Song to Song.

he's Melvillean.

took me a minute to realize what you meant but this is a brilliant observation

MF Doom and Madlib?

Bartleby!

yep

I really liked this but it definitely felt like almost an hour too long. Found my mind wandering off in the last third. Think the two leads (and those kids!) were perfect, glad he didn’t stick marquee names in there. More than a few moments that really fucking struck. The village and mountain vista were almost enough to justify a movie on their own, stunning but alien and surreal in a way, as Ryan suggested above.

Still can’t help but think this would have been something greater if it was more concise. But idk, this was good. I’m glad he’s still capable of doing this.

saw this today and agree completely with that post

I was also struck by the amount of physical toiling in this movie: in the first half, as ryan notes, the labor that seems incessant -- I thought it was notable that on the screen franz and his wife are constantly at work, even when speaking to each other or to others, really emphasizing the the toll that their chosen path takes on their bodies and their minds. and in the second half, the violence.

good point

The length, and arguable repetitiveness, will really be a sticking point for many, I think. I was locked in for some reason. I loved those long fades to black that punctuated the movements of the film. And, I think this is true of all his later films but the rhythm of the editing was really wonderful this time. There's something he does that feels musical, not repeating the same exact shots but a kind of repeated motif of relationships between shots, that reminds of a musical theme coming up again and again in different registers throughout a symphony or something. Hard to take it all in on one viewing but the shot of a doorway followed by a wide vista is one I noticed that occurred a few times. But the sublimity of repetition can be super subjective.

I was also happy with the leads...really hope he can avoid using stars in the future...though I wonder how many movies he has left.

Also yes the kids! The little blonde one with curls...when the mother was kissing her goodnight and she gives this totally disarming grin...I feel like Malick must have leapt up in the air when that happened.

def better than the last two

also should have its own thread like many worse new films do

There's something he does that feels musical, not repeating the same exact shots but a kind of repeated motif of relationships between shots

Thinking the same thing... symphonic

I read more than one review of “to the wonder” that described is as a ballet, yes

I liked this one. The length is appropriate to convey the obstinance and weight of his choice. And for everyone who complained about Malick's twirling women, here's lots of grueling manual labor.

I'll also remember that news of Kobe Bryant's death broke right as this was starting and I found out while walking out 3 hours later.

I still think about this one a lot. Had a chance to see it a third time in the theater and almost went for it, since I don't know if seeing on anything less than a giant screen will be the same, but it was sold out. They had a special screening here in Austin, where it's been out of theaters for weeks. Half thought the man himself might show up!

this is so good:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/08/14/the-unbearable-toward-an-antifascist-aesthetic/