Match Cut Directors Consensus - Terrence Malick

[StanleyK]

Five years ago I wouldn't have hesitated to call him my favorite director, but he's lost me during his recent experimental phase. Still, I have hopes for his next movie, Radegund, which is supposed to be a return to his previous style.

No guarantee I'll actually tally the results, but post your lists.

In case tallying does eventually happen, please follow the format of the original threads to make the job easier: chronological order with a rating from 1 to 10 (half-points allowed) next to each movie.

[StanleyK]

Badlands - 10
Days of Heaven - 10
The Thin Red Line - 10
The New World - 10
The Tree of Life - 10
To the Wonder - 5
Knight of Cups - 5
Song to Song - 5

[Winston*]

Dude has directed maybe three of my favourite films of their respective years and I have little interest in seeing any of his last three. A bit sad.

[Spinal]

Badlands - 7.5
Days of Heaven - 8
The Thin Red Line - 8
The New World - 8
The Tree of Life - 10

[transmogrifier]

Badlands - 5.5
Days of Heaven - 9.0
The Thin Red Line - 8.0
The New World - 5.5
The Tree of Life - 5.5

You couldn't pay me to watch his last three four (forgot about Voyage of Time).

[Stay Puft]

Days of Heaven - 9
The Thin Red Line - 10
The New World - 10
The Tree of Life - 8.5
To the Wonder - 8
Knight of Cups - 7
Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience - 9
Song to Song - 5.5

[Winston*]

Badlands - 5.5

Hmm

[transmogrifier]

Hmm

Don't remember much about it, to be honest. Just going off my score in my movie spreadsheet. Saw it about 15 years ago now.

[Winston*]

Don't remember much about it, to be honest. Just going off my score in my movie spreadsheet. Saw it about 15 years ago now.

Give it a revisit maybe.

[Dukefrukem]

The Thin Red Line - 5
The Tree of Life - 1.5
To the Wonder - 2

[baby doll]

Badlands (1973) - 8
Days of Heaven (1978) - 10
The Thin Red Line (1998) - the first two hours 9, the last hour 5; average grade 7.666667
The New World (2005) [second theatrical and extended versions] - 7
The Tree of Life (2011) - 7
To the Wonder (2012) - 7

[baby doll]

Five years ago I wouldn't have hesitated to call him my favorite director, but he's lost me during his recent experimental phase. Still, I have hopes for his next movie, Radegund, which is supposed to be a return to his previous style.

I don't see too big of a difference in style per se between 70s Malick and what he's done lately; the main difference between early and late Malick seems to be more a matter of method. Apparently, he no longer bothers with a detailed script (I remember seeing a junket interview with Olga Kurylenko where she says Malick gave her a reading list of 19th century Russian lit rather than a script), but instead shoots acres of footage and then "finds" the movie in the editing, which may explain why all his post-70s movies are so choppy as storytelling. I still like all of his films I've seen but the overall trajectory of his career is starting to seem more and more like a cautionary tale about the dangers of convincing everyone you're a genius who can do no wrong.

[Lazlo]

Badlands - 8
Days of Heaven - 9.5
The Thin Red Line - 9.5
The New World - 9.5
The Tree of Life - 9.5
To the Wonder - 8
Knight of Cups - 4
Song to Song - 8

[Peng]

Badlands - 9
Days of Heaven - 7.5
The Thin Red Line - 8
The New World - 9
The Tree of Life - 9.5
To the Wonder - 8
Knight of Cups - 5
Song to Song - 6

[Mysterious Dude]

Badlands (1973) - 10
Days of Heaven (1978) - 7.0
The New World (2005) - 8.5
The Tree of Life (2011) - 10
To the Wonder (2012) - 6.0

I've been meaning to revisit The Thin Red Line. I haven't seen it since it was new.

[Grouchy]

Badlands - 9
The New World - 8
The Tree of Life - 6? A hard film to rate, since I don't like it at all but it has its merits.
To the Wonder - 1

[PURPLE]

Personally, I love that Malick is experimenting not just with the form and structure of films but with the basis of filmmaking. This is not to say he is alone or unique - Greenaway has a great many diatribes about the poverty of cinema due to the dominance of the screenplay. That Malick not only doesn't work from a screenplay but doesn't even work from a synopsis is I think exciting. This is not to say that every film will work flawlessly, but it is to say that its flaws will be different from the flaws that come about from using the same rigid structure.

In this way, for me to criticize one of Malick's new films is essentially me saying, "Yes, I really disliked a lot of things that I was delightfully surprised by." Like, is that even a complaint? Turning that another way you can always say," I was delightfully surprised by a lot of things, and while I didn't necessarily like these things at all on first glance, I also can't say that I could readily process what was in the film as easily as a boring, unsurprising structure which can at times create something great."

I could also say, "I can't say I liked it, but I can say I'm an ignorant, unimaginative boor - but I'm working on it!"

All this is to say - it's better to explore than to fail predictably.

1. The Tree of Life - I love the moments that linger after things that have been said, or seem to have been said but weren't heard...
2. Song to Song - I love the way the film is crafted around a barrage of little moments, and I especially love the structure-less stream around 4/5 of the way through, even if I was disappointed when a structure crept back through for the finale.
3. The Thin Red Line - I love the way
---
4. The New World - I adore the way I doubt all of my memories of this film, and the compulsion to watch it again, and the knowledge that I have nothing of value to write about it and yet you still read all the way to this point...
5. To the Wonder - I adore the expressionist passages, and how at other times the film is almost a melodramatic tone poem - does that even exist anywhere else?
6. Days of Heaven - I adore the way the world exists to lash out against the lead duo's mad struggle, and the completeness of the world, but more and more miss the scattered pieces of the later works...
---
7. Knight of Cups - ...and yet here the pieces seem too obvious, and lack mystery and spontaneity and the joy of the creative process. I can see the strain to break further afield, and I love what's on the other side... but I feel the splinters of the breaking fence...
---
7. Badlands - Is a film, like many others. I have no superlatives, and no negativity.

[transmogrifier]

.
In this way, for me to criticize one of Malick's new films is essentially me saying, "Yes, I really disliked a lot of things that I was delightfully surprised by." Like, is that even a complaint? Turning that another way you can always say," I was delightfully surprised by a lot of things, and while I didn't necessarily like these things at all on first glance, I also can't say that I could readily process what was in the film as easily as a boring, unsurprising structure which can at times create something great.". .

"Delightfully" and "disliked" do not work together at all, so honestly I don't really know what you are trying to argue here except "I'm told he's good so he must be even if I actually don't like what he does."

[StanleyK]

I don't see too big of a difference in style per se between 70s Malick and what he's done lately; the main difference between early and late Malick seems to be more a matter of method. Apparently, he no longer bothers with a detailed script (I remember seeing a junket interview with Olga Kurylenko where she says Malick gave her a reading list of 19th century Russian lit rather than a script), but instead shoots acres of footage and then "finds" the movie in the editing, which may explain why all his post-70s movies are so choppy as storytelling. I still like all of his films I've seen but the overall trajectory of his career is starting to seem more and more like a cautionary tale about the dangers of convincing everyone you're a genius who can do no wrong.

I see some significant differences between his first two films (much shorter and focused mostly on a central character and narration), his next three (more fragmented, longer as a result, more scattershot but there's still narrative progression), and his last three, in which he seems to have lost all interest in anything but immediate emotion and none of his shots seem to last more than 4 seconds.

[StanleyK]

Don't remember much about it, to be honest. Just going off my score in my movie spreadsheet. Saw it about 15 years ago now.

Man, I wouldn't assign a rating to a movie I've seen five years ago, let alone 15. I just don't trust my younger self that much.

Yeah, you should definitely revisit Badlands. I find it hard to imagine someone liking Days of Heaven but not Badlands, or vice versa.

[Thirdmango]

Tree of Life - 3

[Melville]

Badlands - 9
Days of Heaven - 9.5
The Thin Red Line - 9
The New World - 10
The Tree of Life - 6
To the Wonder - 5.5

Although my ratings of Tree of Life and To the Wonder are almost the same, my reactions to them were totally different. To me, Tree of Life felt overly constrained to hitting its thematic points. I owe it a rewatch. But To the Wonder, despite some moments of beauty, mostly felt like a lot of repetitive, vacuous twirling devoid of emotion or resonance (and I love the sound of a melodramatic tone poem). So much so that I haven't had much interest in seeing his later stuff.

[baby doll]

Personally, I love that Malick is experimenting not just with the form and structure of films but with the basis of filmmaking. This is not to say he is alone or unique - Greenaway has a great many diatribes about the poverty of cinema due to the dominance of the screenplay. That Malick not only doesn't work from a screenplay but doesn't even work from a synopsis is I think exciting. This is not to say that every film will work flawlessly, but it is to say that its flaws will be different from the flaws that come about from using the same rigid structure.

In this way, for me to criticize one of Malick's new films is essentially me saying, "Yes, I really disliked a lot of things that I was delightfully surprised by." Like, is that even a complaint? Turning that another way you can always say," I was delightfully surprised by a lot of things, and while I didn't necessarily like these things at all on first glance, I also can't say that I could readily process what was in the film as easily as a boring, unsurprising structure which can at times create something great."

I could also say, "I can't say I liked it, but I can say I'm an ignorant, unimaginative boor - but I'm working on it!"

All this is to say - it's better to explore than to fail predictably.

Ideally filmmakers would succeed unpredictably.

In any case, there's a difference between experimenting with form and mere formlessness. The early Malick films, and the first two hours of The Thin Red Line, develop and cohere; the last hour of The Thin Red Line and Malick's subsequent three features are little more than a series of loosely connected episodes in search of a form.

Incidentally, Greenaway may talk a lot of guff about how much he hates screenplays but he's also clearly obsessed with structure and form.

[dreamdead]

Badlands - 7.5
Days of Heaven - 10
The Thin Red Line - 10
The New World - 10
The Tree of Life - 10
To the Wonder - 6.5
Knight of Cups - 5
Song to Song - 5

It's been depressing to see how much Malick has de-emphasized narrative in his last few features, where profession of a main character dissolve, so that whatever tension that could be drawn from their work absolutely retreats from narrative focus. It's what makes his last two features especially feel formless. I'd have held up Malick as my favorite director as recently as 2014, but his emphasis on 20somethings have hindered any sense of progression. I think he could do something drama-less like Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, but the retreat into post-adolescence isn't helping him.

I'm tentatively optimistic that this next project could at least move into something interesting. Song to Song is worth seeing if only to imagine how it could be re-conceived into something with more form (beyond Lubezki's push-ins and quick editing).

[Yxklyx]

Badlands - 10
Days of Heaven - 9
The Thin Red Line - 8
The New World - 10
The Tree of Life - 5