To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

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Professor Wagstaff
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#51 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Sat Sep 01, 2012 3:28 pm

Ben Affleck is still in it. :D

Suspect
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#52 Post by Suspect » Sun Sep 02, 2012 6:41 am

First responses on Twitter:

Peter Bradshaw: The usual storm of sneering, jeering and booing, I'm afraid, for Terrence Malick's flawed, passionate, idealistic To The Wonder #Venezia69

Nick James: To the Wonder has its moments but not many; how many pouts and pirouettes does one need at sunset? #venice2012

Xan Brooks: To the Wonder: gorgeous, crawling offshoot of Tree of Life. Problem: hard to give a toss abt stolid Affleck & pouting Kurylenko #venezia69

Neil Young (UK): TO THE WONDER (6/10). Malick-by-numbers? Oppressively virtuoso god-bothering mega-haiku of enchantment at dusk. #venezia69

Guy Lodge: TO THE WONDER (B+) Malick's Tree of Love, at once less substantial and more satisfying than its predecessor. A thousand Christina's worlds.

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eerik
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#53 Post by eerik » Sun Sep 02, 2012 7:26 am



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bainbridgezu
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#55 Post by bainbridgezu » Sun Sep 02, 2012 3:27 pm

Guy Lodge's very good review.

While Badlands is the only Malick film I love, these early notices have really cemented my interest by (unintentionally) evoking L'Eclisse and Red Desert, my favorite works of Antonioni. I'm thinking specifically of Kurylenko's character, alongside the "positively apocalyptic construction sites" and "cavernous, hard-lit supermarket."

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#56 Post by Brood_Star » Wed Sep 12, 2012 3:59 pm

Recently saw it at TIFF. I'm quite new to the film game (bare with me), but I'm a Malick fan through and through, being one of the only directors who I've seen most everything from Badlands to Tree of Life.

There was just something missing from To the Wonder for me. Maybe it lacked the grandness of Tree of Life, or the spiritual feel of all his work, but something didn't quite resonate as Malick usually does. A common complaint was that the romance wasn't convincing, but that really wasn't a factor for me. The cinematography, the music and the overall film felt like it was muted. One major gripe is that Ben Affleck is definitely not suited for the monologues. I've read vague rumors that his part was reduced, and he's like a silent lumbering rock in this film. The two supportings were excellent, however.

Overall, it was still enjoyable but it left me with the impression that upcoming films might be more focused on quantity than quality.

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eerik
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#57 Post by eerik » Fri Sep 28, 2012 12:42 pm


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eerik
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#58 Post by eerik » Wed Dec 19, 2012 9:09 am


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Niale
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#59 Post by Niale » Thu Dec 20, 2012 12:08 am

Everyone talks about how Malick never does interviews, always keeps mum... Wants people to experience his movies without being biased... But in a way, these narrations undermine that. Its always apparent to me that Malick is the one doing the talking. With each movie he gives a three hour interview. Everything he wants you to feel,he tells you to feel, or some character does. Same with thoughts and with conclusions. The Tree of Life has grown to be one of my all time favorites, its an incredible achievement-I like watching it with the volume turned off- and much of this trailer reminds me of that film. Ben walking outside some industrial place you assume he works at, the beach, girl walking into a sunset with her arms up, the flashback relationship scenes from The Thin Red Line are there. Ill see it anyways, but it looks like we are in VERY familiar territory. Still some incredible, fresh visuals on display in this trailer.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#60 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu Dec 20, 2012 12:56 am

I really dislike the McKee workshop cliche that narration automatically means that the director or the author or whoever is lazily telling and not showing- with Malick, as with a lot of other movies that use the technique, the narration in no way explains what's going on in the screen, or what the author wants you to think, or anything along those lines- it's tangential, a way to combine sound and image in a way that can't be borne out literally by the characters saying something.

In Tree of Life. the narration acts effectively as overheard prayers or innermost thoughts- they're not Malick's ideas, they're the character's, the things Jack is thinking that he may not even be able consciously to verbalize to himself. It gives the movie a sense of poetry, and a thematic way to link Jack's experiences together as memory, and if anything, it adds an additional layer of complexity; instead of a simple (if beautifully shot) series of of growing up scenes, we get something like the growth and formation of a soul.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#61 Post by MichaelB » Thu Dec 20, 2012 6:06 am

matrixschmatrix wrote:I really dislike the McKee workshop cliche that narration automatically means that the director or the author or whoever is lazily telling and not showing.
In The Butcher Boy, Neil Jordan deliberately has the near-constant narration occurring a beat behind the action - so we see something happening and immediately form our own rational interpretation, which is then completely undermined by the increasingly unhinged protagonist Francie Brady's very different take on it. Which not only creates a near-constant tension in itself, but it also allowed Jordan to retain as much of the book's gloriously vivid prose as he could cram into the film without ever making it seem self-consciously literary.

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eerik
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#62 Post by eerik » Thu Dec 20, 2012 6:34 am

eerik wrote:Trailer
In HD

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eerik
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#63 Post by eerik » Fri Dec 21, 2012 2:25 pm


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Roger Ryan
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#64 Post by Roger Ryan » Fri Dec 21, 2012 4:21 pm

eerik wrote:French trailer
The French trailer makes the film look a lot more interesting than the American one!

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Kirkinson
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#65 Post by Kirkinson » Fri Dec 21, 2012 4:55 pm

I think the first trailer is British, not American. But yes, I agree: the French trailer is much stronger and even feels sort of like a very short film unto itself. Somehow the title seems less clunky in French, too.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#66 Post by accatone » Fri Dec 21, 2012 5:23 pm

Not that its spectacular, but the only interesting shot is the super short cell phone image dans le metro. Obviously it gets its yield from the sheer contrast to the Tree of life advertising imagery. Mont St. Michel is a very nice place (i wonder(!) how they managed to get rid of all the tourists?) and i will give it a chance on the big screen…even though Tree of life was The Horror

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John Cope
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#67 Post by John Cope » Fri Dec 21, 2012 5:51 pm

accatone wrote:Not that its spectacular, but the only interesting shot is the super short cell phone image dans le metro.
Wow. I think every shot in there is exceptional. I can only assume you're saying that because you think that the majority of what's there is too derivative? And not just of prior Malick but of the advertising industry? There is a cross pollination you know and one can and does appropriate or draw from the inspiration of the other.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#68 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Fri Dec 21, 2012 6:00 pm

I get the "derivative" comments this is getting, but honestly if you're being derivative of greatness why stop?

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John Cope
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#69 Post by John Cope » Fri Dec 21, 2012 6:01 pm

Exactly. And it may very well be far more than that. If an established aesthetic form helps enable a philosophical/aesthetic investigation why desist?

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#70 Post by accatone » Fri Dec 21, 2012 6:44 pm

Whooops…i had to check what "derivative" means through a transaltion book first….The advertising industry? I do not know where to start and i have a major language barrier here but i think the images tell everything. With these tight (visually) images and the off text the only thing that breaks out is the cellphone "scene". Exciting things only happen in "breaks", thats all i can say.

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Murdoch
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#71 Post by Murdoch » Sat Dec 22, 2012 11:07 am

Malick could copy a McDonalds commercial for all I care as long as it looked as gorgeous as that trailer does.

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John Cope
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#72 Post by John Cope » Sun Dec 23, 2012 12:15 am


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feihong
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#73 Post by feihong » Sun Dec 23, 2012 1:08 am

I think I end up in the detractor's camp here. I liked The Thin Red Line, loved The New World, taking in just the Malick movies that have come out recently and which have relied on a sort of communal narration to tie together and abundance of rapturous imagery, but Tree of Life turned me off considerably. There are great images in it for me--I think primarily of Jessica Chastain hovering in the air, the way the boy sees his mother--but I share Sean Penn's confusion when he wondered why he was in the movie, and if the dinosaurs were real, and you put them in charge of editing the picture, I think they might have seen their way to cutting themselves, just as I would have. But more than that, I guess I feel...how do I put this....

I think The New World speaks to me very strongly because while the narration and the cinematography came together like poetry, the film was grounded in the actuality of the events it portrayed--and not just their actuality, but their specificity was important as well. So I could imagine in my head, "THIS moment belongs to THIS couple, John Smith and Pocahantas, at THIS time and place. That was helpful, because Malick's style really deliberately dismisses precise or measured time sequence. It was something to hold onto, and it grounded the poetic movement of the mis-en-scene; it enabled Malick's style to have purpose and movement. So John Smith's passage into the world of the "Naturals" and out of it felt like movements in a narrative structure, and there were corresponding thematic concerns--those of freedom and restriction, discovery and exile from an ideal or idealized state. Tree of Life felt far more amorphous to me. I couldn't find many specifics to lean on. I think it would have been better if we had no escape from the family and their experiences--no high-flown dinosaur analogies, for human behavior, or divine mercy, or whatever, no older man walking into walls, or roaming heaven, or whatever. There were lengthy passages of that movie that felt fully-realized for me, but I didn't feel the equation of "hard, real family life" to "purposeful design of the universe," or whatever was supposed to be happening there.

Watching this trailer for To the Wonder, I feel a similar lack of grounding elements. The photography looks great, but Bardem's sermon seems ridiculous to me, and it is so grandiose that it hardly seems like suitable accompaniment for Ben Affleck trailing after one woman or another. There had better be some adultery in this movie, is all I was thinking. Because really, the level upon which Malick has been dealing with love, intimacy and passion since The Thin Red Line has been very shorthand. I generally felt as if he was dodging the issue of people in relationships. Again, the specificity of The New World works in its favor here; you knew that John Smith and Pocahantas were getting together, from the common legend and from the historical record you knew she married John Rolfe. So the by-now-patented Malick "camera dance" between characters in a natural setting was clearly some kind of mating ritual. But sensuality was dodged almost completely in The Thin Red Line, where the love scenes could play on daytime television without a squack from anyone, in Days of Heaven as well, and in Tree of Life. If this new movie spends its time following Ben Affleck from one relationship to another, I would like to think that those relationships will be dealt with in more specific detail than Malick is accustomed to employing. It's funny to think of it, for Malick's style is so caught up in capturing sensory experience, but I really want his pictures to be more grounded in the specifics of characters, space and time. I think it will actually enrich his perspective. As it is, the new movie does look like another of his attempts to engage us in rapturous shooting and editing, of people pursuing each other through verdant fields, of women spinning around in circles and laughing at the sheer, overwhelming joy of life, people watching each other watching the sun setting, and a voiceover that describes love as some kind of holy encounter. The style has developed such a mimeographed collection of images--it begins to seem as if Malick is more content shooting generalized content, and I would rather his films develop more specifics than divest themselves of what few they had. Badlands and The New World, his most successful movies in my mind, benefit from very exact situations. The parts of The Thin Red Line that are most effective, from the beginning to the end of the initial combat engagement, draw their strength from a similar specificity of place, space; and you get a sense of people and their actions having presence and effect. But when Malick is less grounded, his style becomes arbitrary and ill-fitting. Days of Heaven is gorgeous and has almost no dramatic charge. The second half of The Thin Red Line virtually disintegrates--if that was Malick's point, then how, his style being what it is, are we to know what he has to say? Tree of Life seemed almost without dramatic thrust to me, and philosophical concerns at play seemed almost inaccessible to me--as if I now have to understand Malick's philosophical preoccupations without his articulating them. And in Tree of Life I began to see how heavily Malick has always relied on unrealistically isolated groups of people for his subjects. The family in Tree of Life seems almost completely withdrawn upon itself--are there really no other people in their neighborhood fit to be characters? The dead Japanese soldier that speaks briefly in The Thin Red Line serves to point out in a very heightened way just how little perspective we get on the Japanese at Guadalcanal, or the island's native population. Perhaps the slackness of that film's second half could have been avoided if we had then followed that Japanese narrator into the Japanese camp, and seen a story similar to that in the first half play out amongst the opposing soldiers. In every instance, Malick depends on his characters sequestering themselves outside of communal life, and the passages of rapture in his movies always involve characters deserting society and spinning into wheat fields with delirious freedom. Or something. I'm not always sure the actors know just what they're supposed to be experiencing in those shots. And I begin to think that the claustrophobia of being focused on three or four individuals almost entirely isolated within their films is an effect that Malick does not notice. He arranges scenes almost like someone with autism, obsessively repeating setups, dodging intimate confrontation between characters, and ignoring the possible existence of the larger world waiting outside his narrow, often very shallow focus. Are Richard Gere, Sam Shepard and Brooke Adams really the most interesting people to be picked out of the masses in Days of Heaven? Could we have followed a more interesting couple off the train than Gere and Adams? Whereas when John Smith and Pocahantas do their "camera dance" of flirtation in The New World, the presence of their factual connection to one another allows us to read the scene as a concept, a filmic idea of how these two characters from history and legend might have behaved. The conceptual, or notional nature of the scene construction is made explicit in The New World, and the film seems richer because of it. Yet in Tree of Life, I had to go to Wikipedia to discover that much of the story was culled from Malick's own autobiographical material. Would autobiography have been a more moving premise from which to begin Tree of Life? I think so. That being the case, we could gladly lose the dinosaurs. They were amusing, but they all died long before the story in the film really began.

I suppose I am rambling rather severely by this point, but these thoughts have been building up for a long time here. I guess what I feel most strongly is that the supposed "mastery" of Malick has lost a lot of luster since he got back into directing. What I see in its stead is a filmmaker with a unique and remarkable eye, but perhaps without an enormous wealth of creative resources--or some kind of fixation that frequently curtails his need for innovation; someone who is generally indifferent to drama, or character, and a filmmaker who needs more structure in order to ground him. His experiments in search of what is in his own head are starting to seem all of a particular and limited piece. And both previews for this new picture reinforce that feeling in me.

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Niale
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#74 Post by Niale » Sun Dec 23, 2012 9:05 am

I did not care for the dinosaurs either, I get that he was terribly clever with them... He used them to show the begining's of mercy rather than violence, a sort of reverse 2001 (side note I dont believe we evolved from cgi dinosaurs)
But that felt false to me. Felt like a dinosaur in the Creation museum... A bit of a stretch. As for the people who say his narration's are not literal... Thats a laugh!

Take Noltes character in the thin red line... The man spends the entire movie spouting exposition, even his little
ditty about reading Homer in greek is -although very slight and affecting- exposition. He barks not only what's going to happen, but why its going to happen, and what it will mean for him, why he is who he is, how that influences each moment... And so on. He even tells us what his son does for a living at one point. There is an entire scene to set up that the man is on his back and dangling promotion, only for him to loudly re-iterate this point for anyone who cares to listen, "You had your war this is my first". The narration covers all of this, all over again! It would be effective if it did not co-exist with scene after scene of spoken exposition. If you want to sketch someone through prose... Dont obliterate the point by dubbing it over a scene that does the same thing, only though literal means. So even though the narration is not a blow by blow, its obviously a reflection of everything we see, and it clearly exists to reinforce points already made by powerful images that themselves lack nothing in terms of poetry, and of practicality. The little poem Nolte reads off is not even that good, I think Malick would just dash this stuff off on his typewriter in one go and rush it to the booth... Although, I do like the line about sacrifice being like water poured out on the ground. In length... Everything about this man we know is first told, and then when the soundtrack is too busy with rifle and mortar... Its shown! A real shame it could have been more the latter. Not that Im in the movie only for the dances of death.

Watching the trailer for "To The Wonder" again, has made me more optimistic. But at the same time... Everything the priest says... Malick SHOWS... Take each line and compare it the image, there is almost always a literal accompaniment. Its like a romantic novelization of the movie playing alongside the actual movie. But hell, Malick is a master... He can do whatever he wants as long as he does not photograph any more sunflowers.

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whaleallright
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#75 Post by whaleallright » Wed Dec 26, 2012 6:14 pm

You folks do realize you just watched a trailer and not the entire film, right?

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