come anticipate the masterpiece that will be terrence malick's TREE OF LIFE.

i wanna be a dirt doctuh

i only saw badlands this year, so amazing.

This movie.
Who made it?
Where did it come from?
What will it look like, when it comes?
What if there are two movies out there?
The space movie and the family movie within it?
Both at once.
In the holy light of morning.

― a modest crowd, not jammed (Eazy), Thursday, 15 April 2010 18:07 (Yesterday) Bookmark

A+++

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjNVhoWqSWY&feature=player_embedded

(hillcoat via malick)

that's....interesting. should malick be insulted or honored?

also this: http://criterion_production.s3.amazonaws.com/release_images/2971/536_BD_box_348x490.jpg

That's a really pretty ad.

thin red buttcrack tbh

"Go Fourth"? is that a misspelling or a reference i'm not getting?

oh yeah - "tree of life" not ready for venice or toronto.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jul/30/venice-coppola-schnabel-gallo-malick

what the fuck it does say "Go Forth". please, i'm hungover.

Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.

"Go Fourth"? is that a misspelling or a reference i'm not getting?

― jed_, Saturday, July 31, 2010 8:36 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

what the fuck it does say "Go Forth". please, i'm hungover.

― jed_, Saturday, July 31, 2010 8:38 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

haha i was gonna be like DUH its his fourth movie

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2010/08/19/waiting_for_malick_when_will_we_see_tree_of_life

"Meanwhile, Pohlad has also undermined some of his industry cred with the revelation that he plans to direct a movie"

idgi, why would this undermine his cred (i dont really know anything abt this guy btw)

fuck if i know, that article is kinda dumb

I wonder if Malick is stalling the inevitable: getting reviewed.

that whole aspect kills me. because Malick is normally so quick and forthcoming with his work.

and so publicly engaged with his critics

Back at the University of Texas at Austin, he lets film students take a crack at editing various scenes.

if this is true, it's kinda amazing. it's funny how someone's media persona (or lack thereof) can create such false impressions. can't seen stanley kubrick allowing this sorta thing!

based on all the breathless descriptions, im looking forward to some sort of general "WTF" response to this movie.

tbf, i have yet to see a blog post about this film that isn't dumb

kindof hard to write that many *smart* words about a movie that you havent seen i am looking at u zizek btw

wait zizek hasn't written about this has he?

lol no i just mean

or has he

hes prolly letting his students edit it right now

i'm editing it for my doctorate actually

tell zizek i think hes totally hot for me plz

Acquired by Fox Searchlight, 2011 release

May 27, 2011 is the release date.

going up against transformers 3, no doubt. the choice is yours, america.

seems way to far away but great news. i remember hearing that a lot of shooting was done around central texas in April/May which is an extremely gorgeous time of year here with the wildflowers.

http://www.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Tree-Of-Life-movie-poster-Terrence-Malick-434x600.jpg

looks like a poster for a planetarium show or a christian dvd

title sounds like one as well

u sound like one

looks like a poster for a planetarium show or a christian dvd

isn't that basically the premise?

aren't U basically the premise

sorry

you're sorry

we're trying to have a serious thread here about this imaginary film made by a green day fan. you need to be cool.

haah

Good time to repost this piece on Malick from '99?

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/classic/features/runaway-genius-199812

He sounds crazier than I even imagined, but there's some interesting stuff in there on the genesis of what I assume is now The Tree of Life:

Exhausted and bruised by Days of Heaven,Malick spent considerable time with his girlfriend, Michie Gleason, in Paris. While she directed a film called Broken English, he labored in their Rue Jacob apartment on his new script, tentatively entitled Q. Its prologue, which dramatized the origins of life, became increasingly elaborate and would ultimately take over the rest of the story.

Malick shuttled between Paris and Los Angeles, where he hired a small crew, including cameraman Ryan and special-effects consultant Richard Taylor, who worked intensely for a year or so to realize Malick’s vision. “He wanted to do something different, get images nobody had ever seen before,” recalls Ryan. In one version, the story began with a sleeping god, underwater, dreaming of the origins of the universe, starting with the big bang and moving forward, as fluorescent fish swam into the deity’s nostrils and out again.

“Terry was one of the coolest guys I ever worked with,” says Taylor. “He had a passion for trying to do things from the heart. The amount of work we produced was phenomenal.” Malick dispatched cameramen all over the world—to the Great Barrier Reef to shoot micro jellyfish, to Mount Etna to shoot volcanic action, to Antarctica to shoot ice shelves breaking off. “He was writing pages of poetry, with no dialogue, glorious visual descriptions,” Ryan continues. “Every few months, Paramount would say, ‘What are you doing?’ He’d give them 30 pages that would keep them happy for a while. But eventually they said, ‘Send us a script that starts with page one and at the end says, “The End.” We don’t care what it is, but do something.’ Terry’s somebody who always functioned very well from the underground position. Suddenly, everybody was looking at him.… He did not work well under those conditions. He didn’t want to be on the spot.”

Taylor adds: “Then one Monday, Terry never showed up. He didn’t call anybody, we couldn’t find him—we got worried that maybe something had happened to him. Finally, after about two weeks, we got a phone call. He was in Paris, and he said, ‘I’m not sure if I’m going to make this picture. Maybe you should just pack all that stuff up.’ He just stopped. It was disappointing. I had never put my heart into a project as much as I did that one.”

cool thanks

Also, he beefs with Andrzej Wajda.

doug trumbull is crackers these days too apparently, so this has that too.

there's no dinosaurs on that poster wtf

not sure if anyone has seen this or not: http://osagenews.org/2010/10/untitled-film-starring-ben-affleck-shot-in-downtown-pawhuska/

lots of pictures of him in mid-directing! and he's wearing those shirts everyone says he wears.

that vf article was great btw

Ok, and brad pitt is evolutionists

im still coming to terms with the second half of this movie (not sure i ever will) but i think up through the baby section in the middle it's incredible.

Kid stealing the slip scene didn't go exactly the way it did in my childhood, but the gist was the same.

Cant stop thinking about this movie, which is v out of character.

And this is a great thread, tho it crashed my phone three times.

I'm posting this article because it's the best analysis of Tree of Life I've read. Plus, it led me to watch "Melancholia," which is also great...

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/origin-and-extinction-mourning-and-melancholia

Grady and I went to Tree of Life when it first came out on the big screen. I remember saying after the movie "one too many shots of sea-foam, maybe?" Grady's reply was: "NOT ENOUGH shots of sea-foam," which seemed sarcastic but wasn't quite, and he was right. The sea-foam belonged right where it was in the movie... Man, now I want to view it a second time.

I love that the film can support such a smarty pants analysis, even if the essay links it to the less accomplished and less profound style of bullshitery favored by Von Trier.

I finally saw this, and I have to say that even though the 50s childhood stuff was often remarkably well constructed, the whole "process of life" universal stuff felt just like a more banal, religious version of The Fountain, right down to a tree symbolizing endless cycles of life, to images of cell-level biology bleeding into cosmic vistas, to the usage of practical effects instead of CGI. And I'm not saying The Fountain is the perfect movie or anything (it's kind of an admirable mess), but I found it curious that that movie was mostly panned and this movie was bigged up, even though Aronofsky found a more idiosyncratic (both visually and narratively) way of telling his "life endures" cosmic story than Malick did here with his naive imagery.

TBH, I was ready to forgive the movie because the 50s stuff was often so good, there the naivety worked because it was such an effective way of illumating the parts of childhood Malick focused on, but then came the final part of the movie with its religious pamphlet imagery, and that was such a turn-off. Like, after all the criticism of the father's authoritarian ways and downright abusiveness, do we really need to see these corny images of Heaven where he is forgiven and the mother is kissing him?

Also, I get it that the whole movie shouldn't be taken as a straightforward representation of anything, maybe all the images are really just Sean Penn thinkinking about Life and Stuff, but still you have to ask, is this guy's vision of the afterlife so banal and simplistic? After the carefully and often beautifully crafted childhood scenes, if was such a letdown that Malick's (or Penn's) vision of the afterlife was so dull, like screensaver images or something. Compared to this, The Fountain did the whole "triumph of life" thing much better, Daronofsky managed to find more potent and less overdetermined visual euphemisms to convey this theme. (Of course the difference is that The Fountains is not religious and The Tree of Life clearly is, but should embracing religion mean giving up imagination?)

I haven't seen any other Malick movies besides Badlands, so I'm not sure if its his signature style or something, but I have to say the incessant, rapid jump-cuts got really tiresome after a while, the speed of them almost made feel physically ill. I thought the technique worked in the 50s parts of the movie, because it's an effective way of illustrating how childhood memories bleed into each other, becoming a non-chronological amorphous shape of a sort, but I can't for the life of me figure out why the same sort of cutting was applied to the metaphysical stuff? Because, even though some of the images were corny, some of them were also beautiful (and some of them were both), but instead of letting the viewer focus on them and contemplate transcendence or whatever, Malick just bombarded us with them. It felt like he was trying to overprove himself, being like, "Didn't I do a cool shot there? Well, there's more where that came from! And more! And more!". If anyone has some explanation why these parts of the movie were cut that way, I'd be happy to hear it.

I saw an hour of this when it was screened on Film Four recently and was enraged I missed this at the cinema as Thin Red Line is incredibly boring. It looks like I missed the worst parts of it (?)

I think Thin Red Line is a masterpiece. Not boring at all to me, totally/tonally enrapturing.

Per Malick's editing, I'm not sure I was as distracted as you were (xpost) to the cuts, but I do know that at least since Thin Red Line his movies have more or less been made in the editing suite. That is, he has a loose script, but spends just as much time making his actors recite long speeches that won't make it in as impulsively stealing shots of nature that will (tons of Sean Penn were apparently excised from Tree of Life, just as Adrian Brody was more or less erased out of Thin Red Line). Out of the hours and hours of extraneous stuff as well as acting, the movie's themes and whatnot are shaped when he and his team start cutting things together. It's a very impressionistic style, and I can imagine it being frustrating for someone expecting something more linear. In fact, Badlands may be the only Malick to stick to a relatively conservative narrative filmmaking style. It's pretty linear/straight-forward in a way that none of his subsequent films are. Even The New World is a little loopy, and that one (iirc) trades in hyper-realism.

The lack of linearity didn't bother me, just the fact that he didn't let any shot linger for more than 5 seconds, even though some of the shots were quite beautiful and would've been more effective if he'd let them breath. I mean, if this movie is supposed to be a contemplation on life and universe and all, he didn't give us much time to contemplate before moving to the next Significant Image, and the next one, and the next one... The idea of shaping the whole movie in the editing room is cool, but I don't think that justifies the rapid cuts. Surely the shots of nature et al that he'd done were long enough that they would've allowed for a slower pace? The jump cuts felt like a conscious aesthetic choice, not something that was forced by the material he had, so it was baffling to me why he chose to do it that way.

your complaint is similar to dave kehr's, iirc.

not sure it makes sense to say the cutting isn't motivated by the material--the style is exactly the point, even more than the "material," no? Malick's thing is less making Significant Images to be pondered than a rush of images (he'd be a great music video director), a kind of flowing signification, let's say, rather than anything you can put your finger on. im not saying you're supposed to be frustrated, but any sense of Meaning is meant to be fleeting and transitory, i think.

the funny thing is that it's not a "contemplative" movie at all. quite the opposite! The Thin Red Line is contemplative, maybe, which is why it's my favorite of his. The Tree of Life is more immediate and overwhelming.

I mean, if this movie is supposed to be a contemplation on life and universe and all, he didn't give us much time to contemplate before moving to the next Significant Image, and the next one, and the next one.

You could make a case that this is the precise point.

^^^

Okay, fair enough, but what is the point then? What is quick pace suppose to convey? That Heaven is hectic?

No, maybe that you've got one life to live, it goes by fast, and the next thing you know everyone is dead, including you, and even as you juggle a jumble of memories, loves, experiences, mistakes and regrets, you're not one step closer to understanding the way the universe works or why.

OTM.

Tho I think the aesthetic experience is the primary driver, so if someone's not responding to that, I'm not even going to try to convince them otherwise.

Well, I did respond to it, but by feeling nauseous, I doubt that was what the movie was supposed to do...

the next thing you know everyone is dead, including you, and even as you juggle a jumble of memories, loves, experiences, mistakes and regrets, you're not one step closer to understanding the way the universe works or why.

Yeah, like I said, I was fine this when the movie was depicting memories, of childhood thoughts and images and experiences meshing with each other... But what I didn't get why the same technique was used with the cosmic/spiritual stuff. Like, in the beach scene in the end of the movie Malick keeps cutting within the same "Heaven" (or whatever it's supposed to be) imagery, he doesn't juxtapose it with memories or stuff from other parts of the movie, it's just jump-cuts within the same scene on the beach, and I seriously don't get what was the point of there. From what was actually happening in the scene, it felt like we were supposed to witness the state of grace mentioned earlier in the movie, of sins forgiven (hence the mother being all cuddly with the father again) and losses regained... But the way it was presented felt stressful and chaotic, closer to music video than anything solemn. And if that was intentional, I just don't get what the intention was.

The new Blu-ray/DVD release features two versions of the picture — the 139-minute, Oscar-nominated 2011 theatrical cut and a new, 188-minute extended edition. This longer edit, however, is not a “director’s cut,” although Malick himself prepared it.

http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/will-terrence-malick-ever-really-finish-the-tree-of-life.html

Same as it ever was. https://t.co/V4PiwEryqb

— Michael Oman-Reagan (@OmanReagan) October 30, 2019

Er, not sure what happened

Shout out to my friend who once tried to torrent Malick’s The Tree of Life, downloaded 3h 8m of the trailer on a loop, and watched that for thirty minutes thinking it was “experimental” before he caught on. I have thought about this approximately twice a week for ten years 🙏

— Megan (@mmegannnolan) October 30, 2019

I suppose you're also going to shatter my illusions by claiming that the film isn't actually scored to an extended mix of 'Yackety Sax'.

prayers up for this poor bastard mentioned in the comments

another s/o to @SomeNiceFun who inadvertently watched it thinking it would be a calming film to take the buzz off an acid trip, and who was also - unbeknownst to him - was simultaneously coming down with norovirus

— Stan The Golden Boy (@tristandross) October 30, 2019

prayers up for this poor bastard mentioned in the comments

another s/o to @SomeNiceFun who inadvertently watched it thinking it would be a calming film to take the buzz off an acid trip, and who was also - unbeknownst to him - was simultaneously coming down with norovirus

— Stan The Golden Boy (@tristandross) October 30, 2019

prayers up for this poor bastard mentioned in the comments

another s/o to @SomeNiceFun who inadvertently watched it thinking it would be a calming film to take the buzz off an acid trip, and who was also - unbeknownst to him - was simultaneously coming down with norovirus

— Stan The Golden Boy (@tristandross) October 30, 2019

prayers up for this poor bastard mentioned in the comments

another s/o to @SomeNiceFun who inadvertently watched it thinking it would be a calming film to take the buzz off an acid trip, and who was also - unbeknownst to him - was simultaneously coming down with norovirus

— Stan The Golden Boy (@tristandross) October 30, 2019

grrr

Thank u for recreating the experience of watching bootleg Tree of Life

Lol

I had totally forgotten Jack shouting at his father "SHE ONLY LOVES ME!"

Extended version throws in too much that truly is too much/not enough (Ben Chaplin as abusive dad in the neighborhood). Also Chastain's mother (Fiona Shaw) explicitly diagnosing Pitt's resentments, which we can see for ourselves.

Alex Ross's Criterion supplement on the musical selections is excellent.