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Showing posts with label Terrence Malick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terrence Malick. Show all posts
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
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There's an interesting piece in The New Yorker that compares Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (a film I did not like) and Miranda July's The Future (a film I liked very much).
"Miranda July’s film “The Future” opened only last Friday, and it has already become a commonplace to praise the relationship scenes but to deride the ones that feature a talking cat, Paw Paw (voiced by July). Similarly, I’ve heard lots of people enthuse over the family scenes in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” but dismiss the director’s more visionary images. It’s remarkable that two of the best films of the year to date offer a metaphysical element that viewers and critics alike stumble on."
In terms of Malick's "more visionary images" I loved all the creation imagery more than I loved anything going on with that blank slate of a Pitt family, while I hated all the Sean Penn is on a beach in heaven "visionary images" more than my sanity could bear. So there's an hierarchy slightly at odds with that comment, for me. I guess I'm good when your abstraction stays based in chemical reactions and leaves the god stuff out of it?
But not for The Future - I've been thinking about July's film a lot this past week since it came out and we've been hearing people's pro and con impressions, and my feelings have only deepened towards it with time. It's turning out to be a film that touched me deeply with its askew thoughts on relationships and... well, time itself. There's a nice passage in Anthony Lane's review of the film:
"The movie, which Miranda July wrote and directed, is pretty sharp, not to say acidic, on the silliness of good intentions, but she also takes care to slant the best lines toward the subject of time, and its terrible crawl. “I always want to follow the news, but then I’m so far behind, and now it’s just, like, what’s the point?” Sophie says.... Such moments are as bleak as those marshes of inertia through which characters flail in an Antonioni film; like his heroines, Sophie tends to be stylishly dressed, with a buttoned coat or a shimmering ruff, the better to intone her despair. (How she can afford the outfits is another matter.) There was something a little forced in July’s previous work, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005), and hints of archness linger in “The Future”; now and then, we hear from Paw Paw himself, who addresses us in what must, regrettably, be called a mew-over... What she is doing throughout the film, I think, and what allows it to pounce ahead of its predecessor, is to slide a serious tale of disconnection and distress under the cover of whimsy."
I suppose it's this air of soured whimsy that keeps me from bashing my skull against the wall when some of these same queries are raised that Malick's getting at in a way I found profoundly more annoying. Say what you will, Paw Paw the narrating cat is a vital strand of the story July's spinning and the whole monstrously sad and profound thing would unravel without it.
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Wednesday, 20 July 2011
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--- Ash Rises - Bruce Campbell's been confirmed to cameo or something in the Evil Dead remake or reboot or reimagining or whatever. That is a good thing. Very. BD has a couple quotes from the director Federico Alvarez that also attempt to head everyone's pre-panic off. Alongside Diablo Cody working on the script, these are all good signs for a project I never wanted to see happen, and I've gotta admit my abhorrence has leapt right past curiosity into I will most likely see this thing.--- Cool Chick Alert - Speaking of horror movie cameos involving old horror movie properties stretching their limbs here well into the new millenium, Marilyn effin' Burns has a role of some sort in the latest Texas Chainsaw movie. Marilyn Burns! That's Sally Hardesty aka the final girl of Tobe Hooper's original film for all you no-nothings.
--- Tree Mama - Jessica Chastain, who looked lovely standing there while the movie whispered at her in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, is maybe going to star in a Guillermo Del Toro-produced horror flick called Mama. I've never heard of the original short film, but the same director's extending that to feature length. Twitch says the original is fantastic, so I must watch it.--- Twas Beauty - Speaking of Guillermo Del Toro-produced horror movies, he's attached himself to a new version of Beauty and the Beast that is set to star the lovely Emma Watson. What, Beastly wasn't enough for him? Anyway I didn't even realize it until he came in he bathroom and gave me a thumbs up but Guillermo Del Toro apparently executive produced my bowel movement this morning, too.
--- Burning Hunger - I could just post the fiery motion poster for The Hunger Games movie, but I'd rather link to Nat's annoyed yelps at it at The Film Experience because they're amusing.--- Oh Boy Wizard - Curious about what got left on the cutting room floor or what they never shot in the latest and last Harry Potter film? io9 got the word from director David Yates himself. It's been so long since I read the book I turned to the boyfriend after the film and was all, "I'd completely forgotten that Snape and McGonagall duel briefly!" Turns out they didn't, and that scene was added to the film. My brains, useless.
--- And finally, there's the new poster for 30 Minutes or Less, the bank-robbery comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg and Danny McBride, plus those other two I am too lazy to write all their names out this morning even though this sentence is taking so much longer god make me stop. How have I not mentioned this movie before, is my point? It's from the director of the spotty but fun Zombieland. Of course you know all this because it's written in gigantic letters there on the poster. Anyway word's good on this movie? It's out August 12th..
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Saturday, 2 July 2011
Monday, 6 June 2011
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--- Slow Show - I'm having one of those days where everything I read is making me angry. Take this tag-team take-down by the NY Times critics of a recent piece in the New York Times Magazine about how that writer can't stomach "slow" movies anymore. I agree with most everything Dargis and Scott have to say in rebuttal to this ridiculousness - although I got a little eye-rolly at Scott's insistence on bringing The Tree of Life into it, til he allowed for some wiggle-room for those of us that found that film ponderous for other reasons - but mostly it just made me nuts that the original article even got published in the first place. I get enough of a defense of intellectual laziness from our politicians, thanks very much. I thought I'd be safe amongst art critics. Shame is a lost art in this world.--- Speaking of everything I just wrote, Slash rounded up a batch of "first impressions" of Green Lantern from Twitter, and I'm ashamed that I wasted my time reading them. Blake Lively is so hot with her brown hair 3D rules verbal barf kill me now!!!
--- Mutant X'd - Over at io9 they're offering a few reasons why X-Men Muppet Babies underperformed a little bit box-office-wise, including it's Michael Fassbender's fault for not being Hugh Jackman, and then the first comment uses the word "funnest." I am just gonna throw myself off a cliff and be done with it. I have no patience for anything today.--- Lil' Wizards - Okay, here's a palate cleanser via PopWrap - the first screen-test of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint before the very first Harry Potter movie
. Awwwww.
--- Fun Fact of the Day - I didn't know that the background sound in Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" song was her tapping her fake nails on a counter-top! Learn all that and more over at Low Resolution where Joe and Mark are taking on the Best Song category at the 1980 Oscars.
. Awwwww.--- Fun Fact of the Day - I didn't know that the background sound in Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" song was her tapping her fake nails on a counter-top! Learn all that and more over at Low Resolution where Joe and Mark are taking on the Best Song category at the 1980 Oscars.
--- And ending on a happy note, here's some behind-the-scenes footage from Ghostbusters 2
. Slimer puppetry ho! (via)
. Slimer puppetry ho! (via).
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Thursday, 2 June 2011
... you can learn from:
The Elephant Man (1980)
Merrick's Mother: Never. Oh, never. Nothing will die.The stream flows, the wind blows, the cloud fleets,the heart beats. Nothing will die.
Take that, Terrence Malick.
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Tuesday, 17 May 2011
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I considered leaving the extent of my opinion at that title for a brief dismissive second this morning, so frustrated do I find myself in the wake of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life... but I do have some thoughts. And cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's astonishing work deserves more than that. For you and for yours, Emmanuel, I will speak.
And there were passages that I found mildly affecting here not just because every single shot is a breathtaking wonder to behold. Brief spots where the visuals, so unbelievably lovely, hit a stride along with an echo of truth aligning with the music and something resembling sentiment was birthed. It feels mean to cast dispersions at such eye candy, like throwing pies at beauty contestants as they round the catwalk. But the film feels the weight of the time Malick's spent staring at it - it could've been and presumably was edited up into a thousand different concoctions, and why he finally sprang this one on us in the end I have no idea. I think the problem, my problem, with the film is any cut would've been as valid as any other. I got more of an emotional wallop from the trailer than I ever did any moment in the film itself.
The character slates are so blank, so stock, it's a film that relies upon the viewer's projection upon it more than most, but at the same time The Tree of Life seems intent upon repelling such an instinct through its formal chaos. I caught about half of The New World
on TV a week ago and was transfixed again by it - that film works, it casts a spell. Malick had a story there to hang his poetry upon. Before any of you doubt my Malick-fanboy credentials, I've loved everything he's done; seeing Badlands
on a big screen was akin to a religious experience, and if I ever get the shot to see Days of Heaven
blown up big my brains will surely leak from my ears. It's just everything here is drawn in such broad strokes that've been expressed many many times before, unto ruin, that I felt compelled more towards an eye-roll then I did much emotional connection. His themes are so big he forgot to fill in the spaces in between.
on TV a week ago and was transfixed again by it - that film works, it casts a spell. Malick had a story there to hang his poetry upon. Before any of you doubt my Malick-fanboy credentials, I've loved everything he's done; seeing Badlands on a big screen was akin to a religious experience, and if I ever get the shot to see Days of Heaven blown up big my brains will surely leak from my ears. It's just everything here is drawn in such broad strokes that've been expressed many many times before, unto ruin, that I felt compelled more towards an eye-roll then I did much emotional connection. His themes are so big he forgot to fill in the spaces in between.
It's an odd feeling, watching someone strain so hard for hitting the Universal, and hardly touching you. Is it that I was an only child in a broken home? That I don't have the the austere edges of sharp mid-50s modernism shaping my childhood remembrances? Is it that any reach for a spiritual expression faces an uphill battle from me, even one so nondenominationally friendly as this? It's "spiritual," quotes included, in the sense that "God" is inside of us, our memories, our ability to close our eyes to live inside the spaces of our heads... more like our ability to hire Emmanuel Lubeszki and some terrific CG artists to paint the big bang and the sweep of all existence in vivid spectacular colors, hang some starchy oedipal themes across it, and call it a pipe.
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