Terence Malick's forthcoming films, 2015-2017

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!

i know that only schmucks make these kind of comparisons, and i'm inviting all kinds of attacks, but i recently rewatched film socialisme, and while i fully grant that late godard has his longueurs and silly aspects and is certainly an acquired taste, there is so much energy and invention in the images and sounds that the experience, for me, is ecstatic. TTW just felt so enervated, bereft of visual ideas by comparison. even things that should have been startling--the two characters surrounded by buffalo, kuylenko and afflect bouncing on the marfa flats--seemed engulfed in the overall sense of repetition and torpor.

I can't really argue with you if the images don't move you. they moved me quite a bit! I thought TTW went places he hasn't gone before, even working within the same visual grammar he's been working on since at least the thin red line. but it's easy to see how that can fall over into torpor or boredom for others.

well honestly i should just shut up until i watch that last 30 min! i certainly was getting bored with the New World until the last reel, which is beautiful.

Ugh, you had to go and bring up Godard.

do you hate godard as well as hawks? you're like the anti-me :)

I'm an unrepentant sensualist w.r.t movies, so probably yeah.

(Don't hate Godard, btw. Weekend is all-time.)

godard is a sensualist too! esp. in his post-1980 phase.

actually i have no idea what you think my tastes of sensibility are/is. not that i care, really.

HYPED

any actual news about knight of cups other than it'll premier in Berlin?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-3rnv_b3o, right?

some article i'm reading mentions that it's about celebrities and excess but i feel like maybe that could have been deduced from the trailer
the reach & variety of what's in the trailer are wild

oh no! I'm about to take off and I can't watch that for 2 hours.

i would try to describe it to you but

Somewhere II

I haven't watch the video above, but on a personal level, at least, I think I'm one film past "peak Bale".

peak gere peak farrell peak affleck &c&c&c&c&c
really excited to see him in this

that trailer is everything

looks prrretty dumb

it is probably unfair to accuse a trailer of humorlessness but

A Mann-Malick joint.

it *looks* amazing. not sure im terribly enthused to see malick's take on a life of excess but hey it's a trailer who knows what the "plot" or themes will be.

Maybe he'll edit Bale out of the final cut.

Brian Dennehy's gotta be Bale's dad, right?

any of them not about Christianity?

I'm really thankful that Malick's having his Christian period. I find his recent crop to be his most challenging work so far, and particularly loved To the Wonder. I think that late-period Malick has been defined by a sort of unleashed sincerity where he's been liberated from the shyness that comes from playing to an audience. He's doing away with craftsmanship and making art, and I admire that.

It feels funny seeing a trailer for a Malick movie - I find my Pavlovian conditioning where trailers automatically get me hyped up for the movie in question conflicting with the seriousness of the Malick experience that naturally resists silly feelings like excitement and hype.

Knight of Cups screens in Berlin on Sunday

"The Voyage of Time" seems to be actually happening too.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/terrence-malicks-voyage-of-time-officially-announced-2-versions-of-the-documentary-on-the-way-in-imax-35mm-20150203

man, once upon a time--like, three years ago?--i would have been so psyched to get this information. but now... i can scarcely think of another figure whose talent seems to have shriveled up so quickly and thoroughly than this dude. i know he still has his passionate defenders and some smart people really genuinely admired "to the wonder," but it seemed almost completely devoid of interest to me, to the point of being nearly unwatchable.

FWIW i was not a partisan of "tree of life," though I liked a lot of it.

as with michael mann I'm sure I could find a way to appreciate his last film a little more, but in light of their towering achievements earlier in their career it can't help but seem like a waste. even in The Thin Red Line, which in retrospect seems more and more to contain the seeds of malick's undoing, there are so many poetic juxtapositions of extraordinarily incisive power, something he just doesn't seem capable of anymore.

These last two were my least loved, but ToL improved on second viewing, so for all i know TtW (which i did not hate) may as well.

also editor Weber said Knight is more linear, so we'll see

yeah, maybe it would. at a certain point you gotta just make a decision though, and i think it's time for me to write this dude off. YMMV as always.

xpost

man i really need to watch TNW on something other than a laptop screen some day

TNW: highly recommend the blu-ray on a big as hell tv on a day you are sick or have a hangover. anyway, that's how it "clicked" for me.

overall I think it's clear that his films have become more process-oriented than anything else. I admire the risk inherent in this approach, it's really the opposite of a Kubrick like approach (as the increasing pace of his films shows). there's this weird tension between trying not to overthink things and Malick's obvious intellectualism. anyway that contradiction or paradox is the source of my enduring interest in what he's doing (whether or not that's what he thinks he is doing).

at least voyage of time will be full of beautiful images, right?

yessssszzzzzzzzzzzzz

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/