Terrence Malick poll

Badlands, but The Thin Red Line is really excellent too.

The Thin Red Line, which is probably one of my handful of "favorite" movies. Been a while since I've seen badlands, but TTRL was sort of a perfect storm of time/place/sensibility for me. I saw it 4 times in the theater. the way it sounds, especially, the quietness. i wish it was longer and even more diffuse than it is.

I really, really admire The New World, and the last 15 minutes or so never fails to move me very much.

We should be seeing The Tree of Life this year, no?

here's a quote from an old interview with Malick that i always liked: "When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's most personal about them they could only come up with what's most public."

voted badlands - they each pwn 4 all time tho

yeah TNW is my 4th favorite, but the last 15 minutes are as good as anything in the others

I would love to know how much his studies of Heidegger, and especially his relationship with Stanley Cavell, and thus Cavell's important readings of Emerson, inform his style...but alas we'll probably never get any word on that from the man himself.

The New World is a movie that was never going to quite recover from it's male lead.

he does like his pretty boys.

strangely didnt really bother me \(O_O)/

difficult

I found his tattoos pretty distracting also, but that's a nitpick, I guess.

martin sheen
richard gere
a bag of dicks
colin farrell

you wouldnt think thesed be the stars of one of the great directorial oeuvres of all time

Richard Gere's kind of the worst thing about Days though too.

I think the roles in all of the movies require a level of dickatude though

that's to say, I'm not sure it would be a better movie if someone I liked was in that role?

i really like gere in that movie alot - he seems genuinely desperate and bewildered

He probably was genuinely desperate and bewildered, but I find his performance distracting. The female lead, whose name I can't recall, isn't great either though. iatee is correct that the movie succeeds despite this.

no he nails the failed attempt at manhood - hes great

This Breakfast.

Who Made It?

These Eggs.

This Toast.

This Bacon.

Where Did They Come From?

These Eggs?

This Shining Morning.

This Vessel.

The Might Sun.

er, Might.

The Thin Red Line is one of my favorites.

Mighty.

has anyone seen the short entitled "lanton mills"

no, but I've always wanted to
someone needs to youtube this stuff

Days of Heaven - let's hear it, Malick-haters!

The Official Linda Manz Appreciation Thread

Days of Heaven is my favourite some way ahead of Badlands although both are masterful. The Thin Red line is half good and half bad and The New World is about 90% bad or even awful.

My housemate has been obsessing over this motherfucker of late so I have watched all of this Malick films over the last few weeks.

Badlands ftw

The only way to be sure your vote was counted is to try to vote again and be refused, as Terrence Malick might say.

TRL FTW

god so hard to choose
days or badlands

We should be seeing The Tree of Life this year, no?

lol @ this btw... that would be a miracle

is there a thin red blu-ray

I say: Days, then shortly after 'Lands, then a long while after shortly after, Line, and waaaaay after, anything that passes as "good"

Haven't seen anything else of his work though, and while TRL is quite good, the first two are just too exceptional, Days of Heaven to the point of all time favourite.

lol @ this btw... that would be a miracle

would it really? i thought i heard it was finished shooting...

all these need to be released on blu-ray soon.

i want to believe ryan

HOLLY (v.o.)
In the stench and slime of the feedlot, he'd remember how I
looked the night before, how I ran my hand through his hair and
traced the outline of his lips with my fingertip. He wanted to
die with me, and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms.

i love badlands, days is ok, red line has a good midsection, new world is mostly unwatchable. one of those guys who got ruined by people calling him a poet or whatever. why people who sneer at meg ryan movies fall for malick's horseshit i will never know.

you do not belong here

ah well, then i shall wander. to the woods. into nature. midst the leaves. the moss 'pon the fallen trees. hark! what sweet trill rings through yon pines, what birdy throat calls to us of the ineffable oneness of it all, the sad slow descent into decay, yea the very gold of the sun setting always a reminder of our own journey into that night?

i'm sorry, but dude is an art-house thomas kinkade.

and how is that a bad thing?

owned

it may not be a bad thing. it just isn't my thing.

you can feel free to hate him, but that's not an accurate comparison at all. Malick is pretty obsessed with some dark themes...he isn't presenting an idealized version of anything really. he does, however, often recontextualize suffering in a larger natural (ie, non-human) environment but that doesn't make him a misty-eyed sentimentalist to my mind, but a pretty thrilling and unique filmmaker.

birdy throat!

no i don't think he's a sentimentalist, i think he's a soft-headed Romantic (Romantics are always obsessed with dark themes). badlands is the only one that doesn't feel soft-headed to me, partly because of the content, partly because of sheen and spacek, partly probably because it was his first major movie and he hadn't had time to stew in his own juices yet. but he's gotten nothing but more elegiac as he's gone on, and not even elegiac for anything in particular -- elegies for their own sake.

Yeah, you're right, I think he sees through the sentimental -- while acknowledging it along the way -- far beyond into something chilling and distant. Like his cameras dwell, for instance, on the latticework of a leaf eaten by bugs, which is reminiscent of a stained-glass window in a cathedral, but slightly decrepit, like it's in ruins, or ruined, which takes us beyond the nature-however-beautiful-is-at-war-with-itself thing into a kind of harrowing sense of the vast scope of universal time and distance in which these wars are tiny and petty and only meaningful to us in the current eyeblink or even gaze. Not meaningless, though. Just... limited? I love Malick, but I can see why others, less inclined toward elegiac melancholy, wouldn't.

Anyway, I voted TRL.

I get fascinated by how he treats humans, animals, and landscape as equals in his movies.

Like in the (unknowable) big picture, they really are equals?

well yeah Romantic definitely works. (one of the reasons I connect him to Emerson above...who often inspires the same kind of criticisms...)

perhaps part of the soft-headedness that turns you off is what i consider a virtue...his movies are emotionally generous (as in excessive) to what some might consider the point of bad taste. like the quote above, he trades in big seemingly obvious themes because these are the terms by which ordinary people try to find meaning in their lives.

yeah, I think the last episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz is the best part!

Yeah, I've only seen Holy Motors once and loved every minute of it, iirc, but while I've recommended it to plenty of people I'm not sure I've felt the need to watch i again yet. Probably (fittingly) because so much of it has stuck with me. Same with "Tree of Life," though I watched a bit of "ToL" with my daughter recently and it was like seeing it for the first time. Maybe I was watching the director's cut? Same thing happened with "New World," iirc.

Karl, I respect this ambition also, but I feel, in the cases I have mentioned, it is verging on directorial hubris. All of the films I mentioned except Casanova have good to great scenes or elements. Holy Motors was surely a better film than Pola X, but not because it was a better story.

One of the films that I think has successfully used this toss-everything-in approach is The Last Movie by Dennis Hopper, which is hated by most people who have seen it!

The greatest strength of ToL is that the jumbled nonlinear emotive elements approach does in fact work without a story

Obviously as an approach its going to rely very heavily on the viewers engagement with that (not necessarily in the active sense either)

Would it be improved by,say, a chris nolan bullring wrapup aha!? jesus, no.

xpost The Last Movie was great iirc! Although I haven't seen it in twenty years so my recollection may be suspect.

Yes, KM OTM re: Tree of Life (and Inland Empire, as both are among my top five of the century and I try to space out my rewatching in order to keep them special).

And deems OTM. ToL is for me a largely emotional experience (I wept like a baby in the theater, never experienced anything like it) and that easily trumps the dearth of plot.

(Leading questions:) Do you feel the same way about Malick's follow-ups? Do you feel he pursued the same methods to diminishing returns?

If that question to everyone, I think I posted in this thread that never have I gone from three movies I loved whole heartedly (Thin Red Line, New World, Tree of Life) from a filmmaker batting more or less 1000% to three movies I've still never seen nor ever had any interest in seeing (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song). Part of that may have been because those former three *do* have stories they're telling, however disjointed or arty or experimental or whatever, but I got the weird feeling those latter three kind of *don't,* and for that reason seemed more guilty of the indulgences their predecessors transcended.

I still need to see A Hidden Life!

most directors have pursued the same methods to diminishing returns. Malick's later films have been way better than most

To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song all had stories, just told in fragments and in a more abstract way.

A Hidden Life is worth watching. In some ways although not completely it's a return to more conventional storytelling

“to the wonder” is my favorite malick

I'm trying to recall why, after that run, I was so resistant to it. It may have been as simple and surface as seeing Ben Affleck in what appeared to be a romantic drama, which is not what I wanted to see after its predecessors. Then when Knight of Cups came out and afaict it was a semi/mostly improvised story about a Hollywood producer's dark night (accidental double/triple pun!?) of the soul, which was not what I wanted to see, either. Is Song to Song the SXSW one? That seemed like more of the same indulgence, only about the music industry.

I havent seen anything later than ToL, went on a binge where I caught everything from badlands through half of the new world thereafter and never went back for the second half nor anything else

Re:story -- Tree of Life seems to have a clear plot to me, or its at least engaged with a familiar plot structure that we all know. I havent seen Wonder or Cups since their original release so I'm a little fuzzy but I feel like TtW at least gestures towards a plot - the characters are involved in a story, the details of which are sometimes shared with us & sometimes withheld, but theyre at least visibly engaged in a series of dramatic incidents. My memory of Cups is such that I think you could fairly say that he'd fully left 'story' behind at that point. Whatever plot there is seems to mostly just exist within these poetic mytho-archetypal identities of the characters - a man, a woman, a father, a brother, a friend, etc. At some point I guess it comes down to where you draw the line with your own personal definition of what can be a plot, but onscreen its definitely mostly just a bunch of different people walking around slowly, alone or in pairs. (I still liked it.)

I really enjoyed tree of life in the theatre but it was also the only showing I've been to where people walked out

I'm sure I posted it in the respective thread after I saw it, but there was someone who literally sneered out loud something like "Well, I'll never get *that* time back again." But the movie is just a little over two hours long! Not much of an ask, imo, especially considering it's always pretty and hardly confrontational. I was far more bored watching "The Irishman."

same

Maybe he was just really pithily summarising the central point of the movie tbf

But we can have the irishman and tree of life come come

most surprising thing i learned managing an art theater was that the percentage of people who go to the movies with zero prior knowledge, choosing based on the poster or what starts next, is amazingly high

Its a great way to see a movie though!

i agree tbh but you also kind of forfeit your right to complain about the movie being exactly as-advertised

for example, shoutout to the droves of old people who angrily walked out of slumdog millionaire because they thought regis was going to be in it. most walkouts of anything during the time i was there, incl stuff like shortbus

Boomers with money to burn, mostly, right?

If a movie didn't cost 10-20 bucks, I'd go to a hell of a lot more of them.

for example, shoutout to the droves of old people who angrily walked out of slumdog millionaire because they thought regis was going to be in it.

this rocks

srsly every showing i would have someone arguing with me for a refund, couple times no joke ppl shuffled out urgently to tell me we were showing the wrong movie. always wondered if it was a general or localized phenomenon

The funniest walkouts I ever saw were at a screening of Marguerite Duras' India Song, where people started leaving before the first shot was done.

Ouch.

I generally don't walk out of movies, but there have been one or two times I left early for some reason and just didn't come back. Like, for example, the first Deadpool, I think, I got a call in the last few minutes, went out to the lobby to take it, then after the call decided, fuck it, and just went home. Though come to think of it, I've definitely walked out of movies if the crowd sucks, or if the projection is off, too. Never because I was outraged or whatever, though.

I want to say there were at least a couple of walkouts when I saw Uncut Gems.

I'm not opposed to anti-narrative filmmaking, but I object to stories being omitted to make way for a parade of a director's cliches.

― Halfway there but for you, Sunday, December 20, 2020 10:39 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This was a very otm post! I just watched "Days Of Heaven" for the first time and it's very good. "The Thin Red Line" remains my favourite war movie tho, I'm gonna watch it again tonight

Thanks, I just didn't want to be mistaken for Syd Field.

watched the criterion featurette about the editing of The New World yesterday. a great moment where one of the editors tells a story about watching an assembly of some footage with Malick, who is ruefully shaking his head back and forth the whole time, until finally sighing "this is the last time I make a movie with a plot!"

ha! that's awesome :)

watching this now thanks

this is hilarious

had never seen Badlands until I saw it tonight on the big screen

fuckin'...wow

Hard to deny it’s his masterpiece

It’s kind of a perfect film. I’ve seen it countless times and it never loses its luster.

Recently rewatched Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). I loved Badlands, the chemistry between Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen was really something, and Days of Heaven was also phenomenal, the scenes in wheat fields in the Texas panhandle and the performances of Richard Gere, Sam Shepard and Brooke Adams were pretty great. It would be hard to choose between them

Just rewatched "The Thin Red Line" for the first time in a long time, long enough that I had forgotten lots of it. What a beautiful movie. I am not a spiritual person, but it makes me appreciate that perspective. Interesting to watch Jim Caviezel, given his current bent. I think he's really good in it, but I also think it's the same faith and conviction that's sent him off the deep end that supports his performance in this.

Jim Caviezel was really beautiful as a young man in that movie

You’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you don’t watch films he wrote like Deadhead Miles and The Gravy Train/The Dion Bros. I’ll take both over any of his post-The New World films

oh man, I was about to say I'd never even heard of those, but I just checked letterboxd and Deadhead Miles is in my watchlist...so clearly I've had this conversation before at some point. maybe I'll give one of those a try this weekend

This image is burned into my memory from the first time I saw it:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/pv-target-images/509696072345a56258d112d99a43164e3fc5b48870ff68a86c64b31827c06ef2._RI_TTW_.jpg

I watch The Thing Red Line pretty often and I'm always astonished by it. So many shots that you just have to slap your forehead in wonder when you see it. I love The New World almost as much but TTRL catches him at this really interesting point between slightly more traditional narrative/composition style and the more improvised/floating-camera stuff later on. The later stuff, especially A Hidden Life, is really special, but TTRL and New World are exactly what I want from movies.

I mean....if I ever get a chance to see this on the big screen again I'll be so happy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53izlopOth8

you are making me feel like watching all of these again, particularly A Hidden Life because I've only seen it once I think.

otm re TTRL i think i could watch it every month

I've never seen this before, an actual Malick appearance and interview from a few years back!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPULlLJ1g9I

my heart stopped for a moment when I saw this revive

Sorry! I know the feeling.