To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

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Black Hat
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#76 Post by Black Hat » Wed Jan 09, 2013 4:23 am

I must have watched the French trailer for this at least fifty times since it's been posted here along with the accompanying Max Richter track a few dozens more. I can't a remember a trailer ever striking this strong and deep a chord with me. Absolutely salivating to see this.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#77 Post by AMalickLensFlare » Thu Jan 17, 2013 1:42 pm

I'm excited for this for a couple of reasons, one being the simple fact it's a new Malick film. However, a bigger reason I'm looking forward to it (with cautious optimism) is because of how quickly the film was made. It's a break from the usual Malick style in that he didn't spend a whole year in the editing room. Seems like it was put together very quickly this time. I'm curious to see the results of this faster-working Malick.

He has like, what, two other films almost in the can already since this one was finished? It's like a new Malick.

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

#78 Post by John Cope » Thu Jan 17, 2013 3:06 pm

AMalickLensFlare wrote:I'm excited for this for a couple of reasons, one being the simple fact it's a new Malick film. However, a bigger reason I'm looking forward to it (with cautious optimism) is because of how quickly the film was made. It's a break from the usual Malick style in that he didn't spend a whole year in the editing room. Seems like it was put together very quickly this time. I'm curious to see the results of this faster-working Malick.
But I think he did probably spend a year editing. Didn't he start shooting this well before Tree of Life premiered, like in 2010 or something?

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

#79 Post by eerik » Thu Jan 17, 2013 9:15 pm


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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#80 Post by eerik » Tue Feb 19, 2013 5:25 pm


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

#81 Post by Finch » Fri Feb 22, 2013 12:07 pm

The film was a frustrating experience for me and it strikes me as Malick's weakest film: the opening Paris scenes are dreadful and the montage of Affleck and Kurylenko at Mont Saint Michel contains one of the ugliest cuts I've seen in a film in some time (I think I counted five (!) editors in the credits). For a good while it felt like a self-parody and offputtingly-mannered, and while it improves about 20 mins in or so, there continued to be stretches of the film where Malick lost me. Lubezki's cinematography is exquisite although I often wished the editing was less hurried and allowed us to take in the images a little longer. I get that the editing is meant to show the fleeting nature of her/their memories but to me it almost felt like those gorgeous images are, for the lack of a better word, presented in a throw-away manner. Kurylenko is great, McAdams is in it for about 10-15 minutes, Affleck barely says anything (and the framing cuts half of his head off in many shots). It's certainly watchable by all means but it didn't click with me as most of his other films did.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2012)

#82 Post by HJackson » Sat Feb 23, 2013 3:38 pm

Finch wrote:the montage of Affleck and Kurylenko at Mont Saint Michel contains one of the ugliest cuts I've seen in a film in some time (I think I counted five (!) editors in the credits).
Could you elaborate on this? I just saw the film for the second time in two days and I didn't really find anything to fault in this montage.

My response to the film was the opposite of yours in a number of ways. I think it's an absolutely incredible piece of work - a sort of pessimistic counter-point to The Tree of Life, and much harder to swallow because of that. Bardem and Rachel McAdams steal the show for me - especially McAdams, who features in a very short but devastating passage as an old acquaintance of Affleck's who falls in love with him, but cannot escape a past that haunts her.

Kurylenko, however, is often unbearable, most notably in a scene in a supermarket, soon after one of her inexplicable tantrums, in which she prances around throwing packets of kitchen towel and twirls about with a mop. Nick Pinkerton wrote in this month's Sight & Sound that 'viewers will fall into two parties - those who think no one acts like that and those who shut up and watch.' I tend to shut up and watch, but there's only so much one can glean from watching an irritating woman act like an irritating child.

I take issue with Pinkerton's review on other counts, although it's very much worth reading (and a much more fair and substantial treatment than the film has recieved elsewhere). Firstly, can anybody justify the claim that Malick thinks 'that the sun is God'? This seems like a strange claim to make, as does Nigel Andrews' accusation of a 'cloying, bliss-out pantheism' (made in a one-star review in the Financial Times), given the explicit distinction Malick makes between Nature and Grace in both this film and The Tree of Life. I also have to question the idea Pinkerton puts forward that Malick is merely a passive observer with no judgement to make about modern life or the new world. Yes, his treatment of America and Europe is more complex than a simple binary opposition between the two - one being bad, the other being good - but shouldn't he at least recognise that America is overwhelmingly presented as a cesspit of poverty and dislocation, with poisoned drinking water and enough deformed, criminal, and emaciated people to cast doubt into the heart of a Catholic priest?

It's a difficult film and I'm not really sure I understand it at all, but it's certainly a bold and meaty piece of work. I'll probably see it at least once more before it leaves cinemas, hopefully after I've re-visited The Tree of Life (which this seems to be intimately related to).

On a different note, does anybody else find James King's imitation of Mark Kermode incredibly unnerving? It's bad enough that one Kermode exists, we don't need people aping him.

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

#83 Post by Finch » Sat Feb 23, 2013 5:16 pm

Re the jarring cut: Affleck and Kurylenko are inside Mont Saint Michel, specifically a small courtyard with a garden and there are two shots from very similar angles of the couple walking through the garden from left to right, and if I recall correctly, the second shot looked like a particularly ugly jump cut to me. If no one else noticed it, then it may have been a very brief projection hiccup.

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

#84 Post by Finch » Sat Feb 23, 2013 5:20 pm

HJackson wrote:Kurylenko, however, is often unbearable, most notably in a scene in a supermarket, soon after one of her inexplicable tantrums, in which she prances around throwing packets of kitchen towel and twirls about with a mop.
Now that you mention that, that scene got on my nerves as well but I'd blame Malick more so than Kurylenko for that.

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

#85 Post by John Cope » Sat Mar 02, 2013 5:42 am

Finch wrote:
HJackson wrote:Kurylenko, however, is often unbearable, most notably in a scene in a supermarket, soon after one of her inexplicable tantrums, in which she prances around throwing packets of kitchen towel and twirls about with a mop.
Now that you mention that, that scene got on my nerves as well but I'd blame Malick more so than Kurylenko for that.
You might want to look at Bilge Ebiri's piece for some clarification on just what may be going on here in this supposedly seeming "self-parody".

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#86 Post by Zumpano » Sat Mar 16, 2013 11:56 am

Malick to curate Philbrook "Films on the Lawn" series in our hometown of Tulsa. Films include "Badlands", "The Lady Eve", and "Zoolander".

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#87 Post by jindianajonz » Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:34 pm

Zumpano wrote:Malick to curate Philbrook "Films on the Lawn" series in our hometown of Tulsa. Films include "Badlands", "The Lady Eve", and "Zoolander".
You'd think they would at least spell his name correctly in the title.

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Finch
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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#88 Post by Finch » Sun Apr 07, 2013 12:36 pm

Ed Gonzalez on the film
Throughout To the Wonder, the new and old are incessantly twinned, blurred into a package that suggests an experimental dance piece. The film's themes—among them the panic of the spirit, the precariousness of land and human interaction—are familiar sermons for Malick, and given his propensity toward religious sentiment, that shouldn't be read as insult, especially to parishioners of the Church of Terrence Malick. But To the Wonder, which is cut from an aesthetic cloth far wilder in construction than The Tree of Life's, is close to folly, an undisciplined doodle lush with big ideas, but dully imitative of Malick's previous high notes and cringingly reductive of immigrant experience. To say so feels like a confession, but doubt, in the words of German-American theologian Paul Tillich, "isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith."

(...) To the Wonder fails because its deliberately forceful artistry feels completely unhinged from Marina's point of view. Her spiritual hunger need not be embedded in the same stern religious upbringing that informs the relationship between Mrs. O'Brien and God in The Tree of Life, though it should be embedded in something. Without any sense of what the gorgeous divorcee left behind in Paris, and Ukraine before that, and without any understanding of what befuddles and transfixes her about America beyond the obscene cleanliness of supermarkets, she simply feels as if she's pantomiming someone else's spiritual yearning—namely that of Q'Orianka Kilcher's Pochahontas from The New World—as she perpetually flits about, reaching for the sky and sun with outstretched hands, chasing after lines of birds who have the freedom to fly that she ostensibly does not. Which is to say, Marina is not unlike the film itself: a false prophet.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#89 Post by Finch » Mon Apr 08, 2013 7:50 pm


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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#90 Post by Finch » Thu Apr 11, 2013 3:45 am

It's reviews like Reverse Shot's that make me want to revisit this film in the hope that perhaps it might grow on me.
This is ground zero for cinema as living, breathing, evolving thing. I was constantly surprised and elated by this disorienting and obfuscatory yet emotionally direct film, which achieves something like mysticism without explicitly making it its subject. For the sake of playing to his critics, and of getting niggling matters out of the way, let’s check off Malick’s apparent sins of repetition here, i.e, the images and sounds that for some too easily resemble those we’ve seen in his other films: women prancing and twirling in fields, effulgent vast skies, countless inserts of locations shot at “magic hour,” sparsely decorated rooms flooded with natural light, wall-to-wall voiceover speaking abstractly and generally to credence and skepticism rather than narrative specifics—let’s add trees, grass, birds, whatever rankles. One shouldn’t have to defend an artist’s decision to return to the same motifs time and again. (Did Monet’s contemporaries gripe about his preoccupation with haystacks?) If one steps back from narrative preconceptions and tries to meet Malick on a purely visual, visceral level, it becomes clear that the director is using his raw materials—those oft-repeated glimpses of nature and snatches of awestruck narration—for rhythmic and emotional more than literal cause-and-effect purposes. To the Wonder is a supremely musical film, as much as The Tree of Life was—but without that film’s guttural, chambered bursts and more clearly compartmentalized movements and crescendos. To the Wonder is more like a lightly trilling opus that glides and glissandos on waves only made clearer to the viewer upon multiple viewings. It’s also important to note that the highly musical structure of Malick’s later films is largely possible through the use of digital editing; the director’s idiosyncratic methods on the set—forcing improvisation and creating physical spaces with the actors rather than eliciting conventional performances—result in untold hours of footage. From this, Malick and a host of editors cull something like a narrative, but more like a series of nature ballets. Like the name of the aching Henryk Górecki piece that figures prominently on the soundtrack, To the Wonder is a symphony of sorrowful songs.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#91 Post by Finch » Thu Apr 11, 2013 7:23 pm

A rave from Richard Brody:
“To the Wonder” is very much a story, even a simple story, and Malick’s first to be set in the contemporary world. Unlike “The Tree of Life,” it doesn’t feature scenes in Heaven, in prehistory, or the distant cosmos—yet it is no less a metaphysical extravaganza, which is all the more remarkable inasmuch it is a movie of life at hand. Malick’s art—and it is an art as original and distinctive as it is profound and heartfelt—is that of looking at situations and settings that are so classical as to risk banality and to restore to them a full, even overflowing, aspect of (yes) wonder, by means of the conception of the action and the way that he films them. Malick, judging from the evidence, knows a lot about love and its pain. As he brings his love story to the screen, he also brings out serious ideas about the trials of the artistic life, about the conflict between the Catholic heritage and the Protestant one, about the tense mutual influence of Europe and America—and, most amazingly, he does it with images and sounds, not with speeches and drama. Malick here turns the very act of cinematic vision, of filming, philosophical.

“To the Wonder” looks like no other film—almost every shot features a wandering, floating, probing, tilting camera. Its attention to light is unique, and Malick’s way with his story is equally distinctive. Most of the moments in the film are interstitial; the story is conjured and suggested rather than shown, and the emotions are evoked and induced rather than performed. Malick’s very idea of character and action is as radical as his vision and, for that matter, as his philosophy, and that comes through in even the barest attempt to summarize the plot.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#92 Post by The Narrator Returns » Thu Apr 11, 2013 7:31 pm

Not only is it the subject of Ebert's final review, Scott Tobias's final review is about it (it's mostly positive);
Bardem’s dilemma is the central one in To The Wonder, and Malick does his best to make it ours, too. The film can’t be judged by the usual metrics—it has figures rather than characters, movements rather than acts—because what it’s really attempting to do is give expression to the ineffable and show us something beautiful, reminding us that we live in a world that’s larger than ourselves, and crafted by that invisible hand. Pitt resists it in The Tree Of Life, Affleck resists it here, and mankind carves up the earth and violates it. (Affleck’s profession has him presiding over the slicing and dicing.) But there’s great poignancy in the effort to find that connection—Bardem has a devastating bit of narration toward the end that could double as a thesis statement for Malick’s career—and plenty of moments when the film is ecstatically beautiful.

Still, there’s no doubt that To The Wonder is a fans-only proposition, continuing Malick’s evolution (or devolution, for some) from the narrative grounding of Badlands to much more abstract, poeticized notions of the human condition. The performances are mostly physical, more modeling than acting, and there’s approximately 10,000 percent more naïf-like frolicking here than would normally be expected of workaday Oklahomans. The symbolic blankness of the characters can be a distraction, and what words do escape their lips tend to clank in their defiance of naturalism. (A sequence where a close friend from France visits Kurylenko, dancing around inanely and making her problems explicit to anyone within earshot, may be the worst of Malick’s career.)

To The Wonder invites mocking and derision—and has received plenty of it at film festivals in Venice and Toronto—but Malick persists in refining his style to the barest essentials of sound and image, caring little whether he’s out of step with the times. As a result, there may be some significant distance between the experiences and actions of those onscreen and those in the audience, but Malick is reaching for essential truths about how all of us yearn for happiness and transcendence, and often find it difficult to reach. We don’t often notice the brilliant, red-streaked sky behind the Sonic joint—not when the chili-cheese tots command so much attention.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#93 Post by karmajuice » Fri Apr 12, 2013 2:15 am

The film's primary problems is vagueness. The voice-overs drone about generalities, locations comes and go without context, and characters without names perform actions which lack any specific meaning or intent. I can appreciate that the film is striving to achieve a sense of universality, but I don't see its methods achieving those ends.

The film also suffers from a tonal monotony. Malick's other films hit a wide spectrum of moods and moments, sometimes lyrical and soothing, sometimes brusque and passionate. The film flows forward at a frustrating, placid pace. Even the spats and passions of the film hardly ripple the surface -- which may be the point, but it makes for a tepid viewing experience. It diverges from this tone occasionally -- the sequence with Rachel McAdams, the conversation with her friend, and a few other moments -- but not with enough frequency or purpose to affect the whole very much.

McAdams and Bardem are serviceable, and can't be described as much else. Affleck is a non-entity here, and I can't decide if that's a flaw in the film or a deliberate strategy. I loved Kuryenko, though, and I can hardly fathom the complaints against her, particularly the griping about the supermarket scene, which lasts all of fifteen seconds. Has no one in the film-going community ever known a woman who is, on occasion, playful? Those complaints are absolutely absurd; she is the heart of the film, and she brings a lot to it.

Some parts of the film I really admire: the aforementioned sequence with McAdams, the moments of intimacy, the lighting (everything Malick's camera sees is, by some miracle, immaculately lit), the musicality of the editing, and the pregnant, yearning ambiguity of the ending. Unfortunately, the overall experience left me feeling frustrated.

Edit: The contempt for Kurylenko's behavior seems especially undeserved when one considers a single detail which appears in the film: the ballet shoes she briefly toys with, which quietly suggests that she may have been a dancer who gave up dancing, probably due to her having a child. If we take this to be true, it gives her physical exuberance throughout the film a cause and a purpose, and watching her in the supermarket is akin to watching a caged bird struggling to fly.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#94 Post by Dylan » Sat Apr 13, 2013 2:37 pm

IndieWire's recent discussion with Olga Kurylenko reveals who Rachel Weisz played before she was cut:

“I met Rachel, and we ended up having some great scenes together. She played Ben's sister in the film, and there was quite an interesting story between us, some very cool things, but now it feels somewhat wrong to lament and build up what was cut.” The actress also shared with THR that she had shot a scene with Rachel McAdams that also didn't make the movie.

This is interesting because when I saw the film yesterday, I thought the woman who briefly enters the webcam discussion between Kurylenko and her daughter may have been Weisz.
Edit: The contempt for Kurylenko's behavior seems especially undeserved when one considers a single detail which appears in the film: the ballet shoes she briefly toys with, which quietly suggests that she may have been a dancer who gave up dancing, probably due to her having a child. If we take this to be true, it gives her physical exuberance throughout the film a cause and a purpose, and watching her in the supermarket is akin to watching a caged bird struggling to fly.
Yes! I avoided this thread before seeing the film but I'd already read some complaints about Kurylenko (for me, she is by and far the greatest thing about this film) and one thing I wished to address on here was that it was obvious to me by the way she was behaving that she was or had been a dancer. Yes, the movie never actually tells us that, but it points to pretty specific visual clues like the ballet shoes. Malick does observe her as a playful woman, and her specific playfulness is extremely apt to some dancers and particularly ballerinas I've known. Part of the reason they (again, the ones I've known) become dancers to begin with (and for a few, continue to be through economic struggles) is an early overwhelming awareness of their physical being's potential and the rather intense desire to express themselves through movement. I dated a ballerina whose every other movement was like the grand gesture, and who would certainly dance around the apartment - and sometimes, yes, even in in public - while doing anything. I was never embarrassed because I found it all enchanting, her movements always so graceful that even when seeming "out of place" she moved so spectacularly that it didn't matter. Like Kurylenko's character, she had a kind of child-like (not childish) drive and approach to activities/situations and even looked maybe 15 years younger than how old she actually was. Maybe that doesn't speak to every man's personal taste, but it doesn't mean that Malick's character isn't well-observed. Kurylenko's performance really signifies this type of woman and it's sort of profound to me that this kind of character is the heart of the film.

I think the first thirty or forty minutes of To the Wonder is Malick's very best work as a filmmaker. Not only is it spectacularly, uniquely gorgeous (the Mont Saint Michel is amazing and those shots really do look like something out of a dream), it observes the energy, playfulness, discovery and romanticism of a new family in a way I just haven't seen before. Had the the film stayed on that level and played out the family's dynamics with each other, their neighbors, and the surroundings, I think it would be one of my favorite films. But it does drift off into cloudy and even bizarre territories that, like many other viewers, I don't fully understand. It seems to me that when the characters themselves come to a halt and start to meander and suffer emotionally, the film also halts and meanders with a portrayal of emotional suffering. I think this is intentional on Malick's part, but I'm still trying to understand it.

Some of my spoiler filled "reservations" about the film:
SpoilerShow
Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem are both very good, but those parts confound me the greatest & I perhaps wish that either both roles should've been left on the cutting room floor or used in another movie (and it does sound like Malick shot enough material to get two movies out of it). The McAdams section mostly because I felt that showing what Affleck does after he and Kurylenko break up was less interesting as he was more or less a roaming void on the screen to begin with (a testament to what Ebert called Malick's "Bressonian" directing of actors) and it was difficult for me - having invested a good deal into this film at that point - to watch the most icy character essentially mess up another woman's life while the two characters I cared about (the mother and daughter) left the film entirely. But with that said, the McAdams scenes in and of themselves are amazing to watch, and I'm glad we have them, but I'm not sure how they work in the film.

My real disconnect, however, was pretty much everything with Javier Bardem. I believe I understand the point of his character & that the absence of love in his life is contrasting with those who had love and are losing it (or what have you), and I can appreciate his occasional appearance (mostly because he's always such a great presence), but there's a long section toward the end of the film that follows him visiting prisoners, the mentally ill, and those seeking faith, that I just wasn't sure what to make of. Is it that Bardem's only way to act out or express love is to offer comfort and/or salvation to those in need? And I couldn't wrap my mind around why Affleck silently follows him around for some of those scenes - is Bardem taking him around to these people in an attempt to show Affleck how a priest like him sees/feels love? In any case, I haven't been able to wrap my head around that section. But maybe another viewing will put it in place for me.

Kurylenko has maybe 9/10 of the narration, and the film ends on her, and I feel like perhaps it shouldn't have departed from her point of view. Then again, perhaps there's more to the Bardem/McAdams interludes than I got from this viewing. Maybe, on some level, the film never really leaves Kurylenko's point of view.
It is also interesting that
SpoilerShow
Affleck's coldness and inability to express himself emotionally seems to play a large part in what takes down both relationships he's in. There's a line in Kurylenko's narration early on where she admits that she never really knew him all that well. I'm curious if Malick intends Affleck's character to be a stand-in for anyone who has ever let their relationship with somebody fall apart without knowing what to say or do. Again, maybe...
Any theories about the final succession of images (and particularly, the final shot)?
SpoilerShow
The final shot of Mont Saint Michel is chilling. I almost feel like the entire film is Kurylenko functioning like Sean Penn in Tree of Life, re-examining her past experiences and how they relate to a bigger, greater picture of the world as she knows it. I'm not sure it's optimistic. That final shot may point to a reawakening or "a new beginning," but it's also quite possibly her looking back at how the pain she's been through began in a fantastic and beautiful place now literally and figuratively shrouded in darkness. At least, that's what I can come up with now.
Even with my "reservations," I found this film fascinating and rewarding, and I'll watch it again. Definitely worth seeing on a big screen if your city is showing it.
Last edited by Dylan on Sun Apr 14, 2013 12:02 am, edited 5 times in total.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#95 Post by kiarostami » Sat Apr 13, 2013 5:02 pm

I absolutely loved it and cannot wait to see it again. Barring any further thought on it now, the end credits reveal that there is footage from The Tree of Life in the film. I cannot recall any direct moments, so I wonder if footage shot for TTOL that did not end up in the film could be spoken of here, since there is one brief sequence underwater with a turtle that seemed like it could be at least an outtake from TTOL.

One thing that struck me was the intricate sound design. Malick has done wonders with sound before, but nature sounds would bleed into images far removed from nature and as the credits ended a train could be heard, maybe hinting back to the beginning of the film and its ultimately circular narrative.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#96 Post by domino harvey » Sat Apr 13, 2013 8:10 pm

Despite not being a Malick disciple I've somehow seen all of his films and was surprised to find this his best work yet. While I remain unsold on Malick's genius reputation, I have never objected to his stylistic flourishes, just that they rarely seem tethered to anything narratively corporeal. But To the Wonder directly addressed my specific concerns with Tree of Life, namely in that this one isn't too long and has a fairly straight-forward narrative. I agree that Bardem and McAdams' roles are at a tangent with the rest of the film, but Bardem's figure at least makes sense in connection with Kurylenko's storyline, and indeed Bardem seems gifted with an equally sobering but somewhat more optimistic conclusion to the same essential problem of loneliness. As for McAdams, I feel like Malick hesitated to cut her entire presence in order to shoehorn in that amazing footage of her and Affleck amongst the bison (and, perhaps I'm reading this cynically on my part, her nude scene)...

This is Kurylenko's film and she handles it well-- she should, since she had a dry run at the "Build a whole movie around aesthetically pleasing shots of my person" style of film-making with L'annulaire-- and Malick uses Affleck's more cavemanly qualities to somewhat cruel effect. But what's ultimately the draw here for me, and I'm interested to hear about the film from the OK Contingent, is how Malick captures the physicality of Oklahoma in a way that feels truer and more accurate than anything I've seen prior. From Sonic to the night sounds to even the fences between houses, Malick "gets" the state and what such flat clarity does to a person. I have no idea how well this sort of thing transfers to a non-Okie but how lovely that a successful attempt has been made to relate it to a larger audience.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#97 Post by karmajuice » Sat Apr 13, 2013 11:28 pm

I'm not especially familiar with Oklahoma, but I'm pretty familiar with middle America in general, and I think he captures it in a way which is both fresh and engaging. I also like that he generally gives his characters a reason for being in the places where he's shooting: Affleck does some kind of work involving the testing of the chemical content around industrial sites, and McAdams's character owns a ranch. At the same time, there's still lots of wandering around in nature which is rootless and seems to be present solely for the sake of appearances.

Also, a scene that fascinated me, maybe about halfway through the film: a series of shots underwater in a coral reef, briefly following a sea turtle. This footage is non-diegetic -- it certainly has nothing to do with whatever narrative context Malick has established -- but it does correlate to the voice-over. I forget exactly what the voice-over says, but it relates to the unconscious or hidden emotional states. It's an interesting moment, solely because it diverges so much from the rest of the film. For the most part, everything else fits within the realm of these characters' lives.
I'm not sure I have anything to say about that, beyond the fact that it's a lovely scene yet also a problematic one, because I'm not sure it meshes with the direction of the film as a whole. It would have fit better into something like Tree of Life, whose visual strategies aren't as closely tied to one particular place and time.

And regarding what Dylan said, I can sympathize entirely. I know a lot of dancers (and in some cases, even people who aren't dancers) who exhibit the same sort of behavior, and I don't think it is necessarily childish or immature, it just indicates a restlessness of spirit, an urge to move beyond the normal bounds of human movement. I feel it myself sometimes, and my sister is a dancer, and I definitely see it in her as well.

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Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#98 Post by knives » Sat Apr 13, 2013 11:38 pm

It's not really fair to say 'middle America in general' as there's no general for that huge swath of the country. Certainly even just within Michigan or Illinois there's a great deal of difference.

karmajuice
Joined: Tue Jun 10, 2008 10:02 am

Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#99 Post by karmajuice » Sun Apr 14, 2013 2:38 am

The landscape can vary considerably, but there is a degree of consistency one finds, especially in states like Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Dakotas, etc. And the suburban setting (housing developments, fences, a few rundown neighborhoods) adheres to a uniformity which spans not only much of middle America but many parts of the country.

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

#100 Post by knives » Sun Apr 14, 2013 3:38 am

It's reasonable to say that much of OK is similar. But saying all of the non-costal states are the same is ridiculous. Just going by my own experience Ohio and the Dakotas are very different (if not as different as say Virginia and California). Every state has very much their own culture (to give an example from Dom I had never heard of Sonic until I moved out west). The broad picture may be the same, but that doesn't say much for what a native may find interest.

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