"The thin red line":Classic or dud

The absolute worst thing about it is - as you say - the cameos. Because you know that George Clooney is going to rock up to do thirty seconds somewhere you know the film will not end until he does. So when you hit hour three and he still doesn't poke his head round the battlements you know the films is nowhere near ending. Finally he appears and there is still another twenty minutes to go. I saw it at a lunchtime screening the day it came out with lots of old people who grumbled that it felt longer than WWII itself.

again.

as a sensory experience first and foremost

The line: "Oh my friend of all those shining years" is one of the most sorrowful heartbreakers ever.

Yes, the cameos are a bit jarring (Travolta with a ridiculous mustache!), but the lyricism -- visual, auditory, verbal -- wins me over every time. It's basically a gorgeous classic, and even the dull parts have touches that can engage you -- the tall grasses moving in the wind and silent soldiers creep agonizingly slowly forward.

Penn and Nolte are massive in this film, as is the guy who plays Witt (the latter to the former: "Do you ever get lonely" Penn: "Only around people"). And isn't that Ben Chaplin who gets the letter from home? His stunned nausea in that moment is wrenching.

Um, yeah, classic.

yeah, it's ben chaplin who gets the dear john letter.

this film is among other things a very interesting *adaptation*. it's easiest for reviewers to talk about malick largely dispensing with the source novel, but that simply isn't the case. he does however alter its tenor and focus radically, and integrates ideas and even situations from other war novels (and movies). i'd really advise anyone who likes this movie to read jones's book as well.

there are at least four or five cinema bookstores in paris

I think that Nolte/Travolta scene is great, too (and in the way you describe, which is OTM) -- I just think it would have been greater if the actors were less contemporary "Hollywood celebrity" types.

Having said that, Nolte is actually funny later on, as well as nasty, which is quite an amazing achievement all told, and one which few actors would've managed to pull off.

But, yeah, I'll try and read Jones's book. This movie had a massive impact on me.

this hit me, so many great performances. preposterously glib travolta and clooney cameos are surely consistent with the rest of the movie imo. nolte was a revelation.

I need to see this again. I loved "Tree of Life", which most folks found even more pretentious than TTRL

i'd tend to have a low threshold for pretension, i think, but i didnt get it from this. i'm not even sure about 'profound' but it was complex and didn't lead you too much and seemed to have a p light touch in areas i didnt expect it

caviezel crazy goodlooking in this too, i was berating gf for not acknowledging his beauty

uncharacteristically good score
love the hilarious jared leto chewing gum cameo
adrian brody with no lines
good movie

sometimes i get lines
from this movie
in my head
not the lines themselves, nah
but the way the voice can speak
with the weight of the ocean

ha otm

For some reason unknown even to me, I once sat and wrote out, longhand, every line of the narration. Then I sent it to a friend. It's a very long poem.

this sounds kind of amazing tho

Reportedly, the first assembled cut took seven months to edit and ran five hours. By the final cut, all footage of the performances by Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Jason Patric, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke had been removed.

shit, do i ever feel like i've missed out

they should have a dvd version where it shows you a random assortment of the 5h cut for 2h everytime you put it in

or you just select the actors you want to see this time round, the combination of scenes would run into the millions

that 5 hour print has to be sitting somewhere right?

it was so disappointing when the bluray deleted footage was so choppy and poorly preserved in places

This is probably my least favorite Malick. I love it, but it's at the bottom of the list.

saw this for the first time last night, its impact severely diminished by having been subjected to his work from this decade. wayyyy better than Tree of Life, Knight of Cups, etc., but having just seen The Deer Hunter for the first time last month, my reaction was sorta muted... and just knowing where all of his "lyricism" and looseness and absence of any script went made me kinda sour on it.

did you prefer the comic-book melodrama of The Deer Hunter?

Both are great

i'm deliberately avoiding the rest of the thread before posting this, but I remember feeling very strongly that this film was absolute wank when I saw it about... oof, ten years ago?

What do I remember? Not a lot. high focus on background detail (floral/natural/peripheral to human action) as some sort of counterweight to *war* and human death, which seemed to me bogus at the time (warning: many things i thought then feel clearly wrong now). overlong and ponderous and pompous. saying that how humans experience war and how war might look with some interpolation of other concerns, aesthetic concerns, is *different* doesn't seem inherently interesting. this is 'nature' and 'humans'.

All that said I remember *nothing* about the plot, just remember being angry leaving the cinema. F' i must have seen this in Poland, which would make it nearly 18 years ago rather than ten? is that right?

ok gonna post and then see what thread says.

read thread. lol darragh you let me down.

The Deer Hunter sucks. Michael Cimino is unequalled in taking a metaphor and really working it out cinematically, without having any idea what it means.

The Thin Red Line is awesome and visceral.

XP......mum?

xp please expand on that frederik

Which part?

What could the Russian Roulette stuff in Deer Hunter possibly mean? No idea what Cimino is up to.

Which part?

― Frederik B, Friday, April 14, 2017 3:26 AM (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

taking a metaphor and executing it without knowing what it means

Well, both Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate are build around metaphors that are cinematically great, but nevertheless falls apart. In Deer Hunter it's the contrast between the almost sacred hunting scenes and the roulette scenes, sacred violence versus almost hellish violence. Both types of scenes are carried out extremely effectively, but the roulette stuff is so overblown it becomes kinda racist, and whatever it says about the war becomes unclear. In a way it's not the Vietnam War as much as it's Vietnam itself that is hurting the US soldiers.

Heaven's Gate is both better and worse. It's more abstract for once, and the three central 'dances' are actually pretty damn masterful. The upper class waltz in the long weird prologue, the lower class rollerskate swirl in the middle, and the dance of death at the end, with the horses and the barricades. On a purely filmic level it's quite amazing, and I could watch especially the rollerskate scene again and again. But what on earth does it say? The feeling I get is a sorta nihilism, that both classes are playing their part in the dance of history, but that's a shitty way to depict the story of one class drawing up death-lists and massacring people for profit, and the other class struggling desperately to stay alive.

He superimposes his metaphors on History, rather than taking the stuff of History and making it metaphorical.

fwiw Cimino said that the Russian roulette was a metaphor for the experience of war - waiting, waiting, waiting, horrible awful anxious waiting, then instant chaos and violence and death.

How do you dramatize war? The main element of combat is waiting, because usually a firefight is fierce, unbelievably insane, and is over in a very short space of time. And then you're either dead, you're a paraplegic, or you're alive. One of the three, there's no in between. And it happens like lightning. The rest of the time you're waiting for random death. So as a purely dramatic problem, how do you demonstrate the terror of waiting for random death? You can't do an Andy Warhol thing, like 'Sleep,' showing 12 hours of somebody sleeping, you can't show 12 hours of somebody waiting, I mean they'll leave the theater... What better way to show the tension of random death than Russian roulette? Because you don't know - one pull of that trigger and you're gone. Or you're not. It's as close as I could come to dramatically being as powerful about combat, real combat, as possible.

11:27
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZwE30yr-Xw

not trying to get sidetracked, I liked Malick's film, it's certainly better than 'Saving Private Ryan' (didn't they come out within a year of each other? a Deep Impact/Armageddon situation?) I don't dig Malick's dreamy, transcendent bent, but it's much more appealing than Spielberg's disgusting propaganda.

it's also a lot easier to make a movie that condemns war when it's about Vietnam rather than WWII.

Yeah, it's that random, meaningless violence. Problem is just, it doesn't really work in context.

Now Spielberg, there's a guy who knows how to use a metaphor so that it fits his message! Just sad that his messages are mostly platitudes. But on a recent rewatch of Saving Private Ryan, it is sorta okay. Nothing compared to Thin Red Line, imo.

I think one thing that's really wonderful about TTRL that tends to disappear in the more agitated style of his recent work is the longueurs (not the word maybe, but maybe it is?) that are interspersed throughout and give the feeling of a disintegrating narrative. Perhaps a kind of gentle quietude remains as a holdover from his earlier work, but I always find those moments incredibly moving. Thomas Jane on the hilltop, just hanging out, "it's nice and quiet up here."

It's in my personal canon of "movies that feel even longer than they are, in a good way."

otm

hey i can go to sleep now that you guys have bashed Spielberg, ticktock

please do

His three nineties historical films, Schindler, Amistad and Ryan were really much better than I recalled. I used to just be annoyed at the wild swings in tone, but now I do sorta appreciate the mixture of small morality plays with sequences of stark realism, be they the liquidation of the ghetto, the middle passage, or the battle scenes in Normandy. It's a nice little trilogy of sorts.

Flappy Bird lives to stir things up a bit. This reminds me of his "Why should anyone care about Jawbreaker when Green Day exists" bit in ILM.

ha I've come around on Jawbreaker, that album rules... I never intend to piss ppl off or troll them, I write something on here and it just happens... cf. Turrican

The Russian Roulette stuff was fucking hilarious hence didn't really land - but 'kinda racist' sounds 'kinda dumb'? idk, haven't seen DH in a long time.

I haven't seen DH in maybe ten years, but I always wondered home someone makes a, uh, living playing Russian roulette. Was that really fleshed out?

The good stuff happened back home iirc.

Just watched TTRL for the first time in a couple of years today because of this thread and because I had to miss that screening Flappy attended.

Always ranked this one at the bottom of Malick's run from Badlands to Tree of Life. Still do. Feels... mildly compromised? That said, it's legitimately great and miles ahead.

Might be one of the few who likes The New World more.

Huh. Watching the special features on this Criterion disc kinda confirm my feelings about it. Making a war movie wasn't exactly something he was excited about.

I think with Malick it kinda is best to divorce your watching from his intent, if you can even hunt down that latter?