Terence Malick has never made a bad movie, so this looks like a good bet come Oscar time. All his movies are so beautiful and filled with a level of intelligence that is rare in movies these days.
__________________ Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
I'll probably end up seeing it. I kind of lost faith in Colin Farrell after seeing Alexander and being heavily dissapointed with it. I'm hoping this movie will be good, though.
I thank my lucky stars I caught this before Malick snipped twenty minutes out of it, and you have just a few days left to do the same. One thing I forgot to mention in my review is the soul-stirring use of Wagner's overture to Das Rheingold -- a piece of music that could easily come off as pretentious in the wrong hands. Here it sends shivers down the spine.
Sounds fabulous, can't wait to see the Wagner part. Gets a good write up.
I'm sure Mild has, but have the rest of you seen Malik's other movies? Badlands, Days Of Heaven and The Thin Red Line are all hypnotic. You should check them out...
__________________ Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Agreed. Badlands is astounding, and The Thin Red Line is so poetic. Days Of Heaven is visually in tune with all his movies - it's absolutely beautiful. It's also a heartbreaking film. I'm sure you'd love it.
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__________________ Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
__________________ Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
I’ve just returned from another world. THE NEW WORLD isn’t a film, it is a portal to time and a place and peoples that just no longer exist. The visual clarity and composition, the faces, costumes and make up, the sounds – both musical and alive… this was more than 24 frames a second… You could swear the air was cleaner, that the scent of pine hung in the air, that innocence still existed.
For the nearly three hours that I sat in that theater – the seats, the walls, my own breathing, the stillness of the air – it all just evaporated. My mind was busy dissecting, storing and absorbing the imagery and the performances. The cumulative effect of the film is like sitting in a lotus position for 3 hours at top of a temple in China. You come away from the experience renewed. It is a transcendent experience.
There’s no irony or cynicism at work. No forced or ham-fisted moments. In fact the only distraction at all in the film is that you recognize Bale, Farrell, Studi and Plummer. Not that they ever really speak or anything. The film is mostly about two cultures observing one another. First from the point of view of two tribes, then from the point of view of a man and a woman.
Have you ever traveled somewhere without a tour guide, off the beaten path… just embedding yourself in an alien culture? Finding a place with no English – and no language you know? Personally – it’s my favorite type of situation. I’ve done in Prague and in Beijing and as a child in that Mayan village that my parents and I stayed at outside Palenque. It’s magical. Communication breaks down to hand signs and body language. I remember in China – finding a restaurant on my computer that I wanted to try – but I couldn’t begin to tell a Chinese cabbie where I wanted to go – so I copied all the Chinese characters off the site – and then took a copy of my hotel stationary – so that I could find my way back… but, once there – I was just flying blind. No conception of what I was ordering. That’s a modern level of culture shock… this. This is something entirely different.
Sounds good...
__________________ Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
I just saw New World and was pretty disapointed. It was vusually rich and beautiful, but lacked narrative structure and character development almost entirely. It was, like you said, Krunk'd, like a moving painting, but really visual beauty isn't enough to hold a viewer for 2+ hours in a film, when we don't care about the events happening on screen. It seemed Malick was more focused on making the film visually stimulating and beautiful, rather then making the story coherent and exciting or interesting.
Many many beautiful landscape shots and other such things, though.
KMC Community Forums
Sep 4th, 2005 12:08 PM
