Terrence Malick's films make Wong Kar Wai's looks downright compact. Malick is famous for shooting hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage and then editing until the last possible minute before the premiere. After starring in a more recent Malick flick (To The Wonder), Ben Affleck tellingly said, "Terry uses actors in a different way- he'll [have the camera] on you and then tilt up and go up to a tree, so you think, 'Who's more important in this- me or the tree?' But you don't ask him, because you don't want to know the answer." Earlier in the same interview, Affleck had also mentioned, "...I realized that he was accumulating colors that he would use to paint with later in the editing room." Painting in the editing room seems to be the name of the game for Malick, who often cuts away from "action" (little that there is) to scenery or wildlife. He also loves to utilize voiceover, which adds to the surreal dreamlike quality of these movies. His films are highly stylized art pieces, often hewing closer to visual poems than narrative fiction with clear distinctions between beginning, middle and end. For the most part, somehow, he can usually make it work.
And say what you will about the guy, but damn can he put together an impressive cast. Over the years he's worked with Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Jessica Chastain, Martin Sheen, Ben Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Richard Gere, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Adrien Brody, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Jared Leto, John Travolta, Nick Stahl, Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem and more. And that's just in 6 or so movies, and sometimes his A-list actors end up on the cutting room floor! It's mind-bending.
ANYHOO, going into this project I had seen The New World (I didn't enjoy this movie but it was lit naturally and looked beautiful) and The Tree Of Life (I actually denied having seen this because I couldn't make heads or tails of it or my emotional response to it. I think it was... good...maybe?). After decades of incredibly sparse output (2 movies in 30 years), Malick would release 3 movies and schedule 2 more in the 2010s. These new ones were not on my must-see list. Rather, I went back to the beginning and watched his first three movies: Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line.
Badlands was very good, and you can tell it was made in 1973 because it somehow has a PG rating despite being about patricide (although I guess some Disney movies are as well). Martin Sheen is a great Rebel-without-a-cause-style Canadian-tuxedo-wearing badass, and Sissy Spacek is good as his impressionable young love interest. The song from True Romance is at play here too, which my old roommate Andy was shocked to discover. The movie meanders a bit. Days of Heaven was less enjoyable to me, although it's fun to watch a young Richard Gere and the scenes at the farm (especially with the fire) were all beautiful. The movie meanders quite a bit. The Thin Red Line is the meandering-est of all and was pretty difficult for me to follow closely. Apparently the movie went way over-budget, and I feel like most of that is because Malick assembled one of the greatest ensemble casts in movie history but spent hours filming iguanas. But that's his style and the movie was nominated for 7 Oscars, so what do I know? Anyway it was nice to finally watch these but I doubt I'd ever feel very compelled to rewatch them. Cheryl Gibson said to me they're a bit more like computer screen savers than movies, and depending on the moment and the movie I pretty much agree with her. They're damn poetic screen savers though.
- Badlands (1973) - 7.5
- Days of Heaven (1978) - 6
- The Thin Red Line (1998) - 7
Next up is the weird wacky world of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
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