Tag Archives: terrence malick

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

“Upstream Color” Ups the Dose but Not Much Else

Upstream Color opens Friday, April 12, at SIFF Cinema Uptown.

I went into Upstream Color expecting something metaphysical: that is, based on the swirling words around the title, some exploration of the unseen; more specifically, some kind of constant, over-arching organism connecting us, connecting it, all.

What I got, over the first thirty minutes, anyway: A woman abducted, electrically shocked into unconsciousness, drugged through being forcefed a worm, woken into a worm-induced state of acquiescence, forced through said state to sign over money she doesn’t really have, and then dumped,a discarded cheeseburger wrapper from a buffet of bizarre crime.

Shane Carruth, director, writer, star, and everything-else-big on this shoot, shows a simultaneously lively and panoramic view of everything. Injecting the divine, the overarching, into the quotidian, remains important work attempted by all too few. Problem for Carruth, though: Terrence Malick showed up with To The Wonder (see its own SunBreak review here), gobbling up the whole game plan.

So Upstream gives you a fair amount about pigs, and synthesizers, and obsessively recording outdoorsy sometimes-ambient noises; and the pitfalls of modern dating—hell, the pitfalls of modern living, especially when you’ve got a past you can’t escape and you have to choose how much of it to hide, and until when. And more pigs. And the suggestion, at least, that it’s all interwined.

What’s missing here, what Malick caught instead: An underlying reason for something. Anything. Motivations here seem either opaque or stunningly obvious. When you open your metaphysics with a person deliberately, systematically, doing harm to another human being who’s done nothing to warrant any of it (nothing revealed at least—same thing), you dig yourself a deep hole. Hell, even psychedelic rangers who dose people—which I do not condone, which I find grossly neglectful and irresponsible—have their reasons. They want to throw people through the French windows of reality.

That’s bad, but it slimly beats out a nothing, however gloriously pulsing.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Malick’s “To The Wonder” Demonstrates Power in the Union

To the Wonder opens Friday, April 12, at the Egyptian.

Key word even the well-intentioned keep missing here: Play. Sexual variety sure, but that’s not even the point. The point, as I see it: How play keeps you evolving the rules to exhilarate yourself. Two people in love across from each other across a train compartment table; Terrence Malick tilts his camera so the scenery outside the train’s window tilts — a jet caught right at takeoff — and the two people don’t seem to tilt at all. Malick plays with perception to catch giddiness, those arms-thrown-back-eyes-closed moments where you splash in your own absurdity. Where you do something increasingly tough as adulthood solidifies: Forget that somebody else is watching, or could be watching.

Malick does a decent job of de-idolizing Ben Affleck; you wouldn’t even guess he’s Ben Affleck for the first twenty minutes or so, until he starts talking. Without his distinctive voice, and shot only in profile or from a distance, his odd resemblance to a young Bruce Springsteen, notable from Dazed And Confused days, sometimes resurfaces. But it’s Malick’s intent, I think, to show that he could shoot this with almost anybody. We become subsumed into the young couple’s constant movement, their constant unselfconsciousness, and the ride we’re going along for trumps conventional ideas of star power.

With Javier Bardem, the director/writer pours such wine into a somber bottle. Bardem’s priest is disconnected from the Almighty, and wonders what he has to do to get it back. Sometimes he wonders if it’s God’s fault. These musings and those of the effusive Romina Mondello, might seem ponderous, but Malick wants us to worry at extremes. Mondello’s conviction that her point-rocket-push-button adventurism can’t fail (“I am my own experiment”) could well smash into an existential barrier, leaving her very much like the priest.

The subtitles are too small for the screen, unless the director put them in that way as a knowing hardship. Everything else inhales and exhales as a gestalt. The lovers eventually lose play, but unlike a lot of people, they keep trying to find it again, testing out angles, shapes, attitudes, convolutions, and belly-flop silliness.

Malick makes it look easy. But he’s almost 70 and this is only his sixth feature, so maybe not so much. Tune in, drop in, open yourself to the macrocosm.

 

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Choose Your Own Adventure: Spend the Holiday Weekend with Tom Hanks or Terrence Malick

It seems unnecessary to name Larry Crowne after the movie’s main character, our hero in this Recession Era fairy tale who loses his Walmart-ish job only to find himself. Just call it Starring Tom Hanks as Tom Hanks as Directed by Tom Hanks and be done with it.

Because that’s exactly why people will see this movie. Who doesn’t like Tom Hanks, for managing to become an Elderstatesman of Hollywood while still staying a Nice Guy? And apparently, who doesn’t want to work with Tom Hanks? Big-time Hanks gal pal Julia Roberts plays Mercedes Tainot, a jaded community college professor-cum-love interest who teaches the speech class Crowne enrolls in as he makes over his life. (Roberts actually does a good job of playing against type and is admirably, aggressively unlikeable for most of the film.) Pam Grier and George Takei play other professors; Bryan Cranston is a caricature of a bad husband (the next season of Breaking Bad debuts July 17); Cedric the Entertainer, Rob Riggle, and Taraji P. Henson all have small parts; and hey look, someone gave Wilmer Valderrama a job.

There are a few oddly provincial touches, as when characters rail against Facebook, Twitter, and smartphones, and the one scene in which post-makeover Tom Hanks donned a wallet chain made me CRINGE. Still, the film stays summer-light and fancy-free, and is definitely recommended for Your Mom.

Meanwhile, what else can be said about The Tree of Life that hasn’t been said already? Malick’s fifth feature in thirty-eight years, his first since 2005’s The New World, debuted at this year’s Cannes to a fiercely divided audience and still ran away with the fest’s Palme D’Or. Having actually seen the film, I can confirm: yes, it’s very Malicky. Which is to say it’s ruminative and slow, lovely to look at and heavy in timbre, portentous and pretentious, the kind of film that easily garners a description as a “tone poem.”

Ostensibly, it’s about a family in Texas in the ’50s with Mother (Jessica Chastain), Father (Brad Pitt), and three sons (one of whom grows up to be a scowly Sean Penn), but it ends up being about nothing less than life, death, the creation of the universe, and God as the ultimate Stern Daddy. Yes, there is a scene with CGI dinosaurs; yes, everyone you have ever known and loved will die, and then you will too. If you like Malick’s tenor and style, you will appreciate The Tree of Life for what it is, but if you just want to see that new Brad Pitt and Sean Penn movie, you may ask for your money back.

Tree of Life is still playing at the Egyptian. Larry Crowne opens today at the Meridian, the Metro, Majestic Bay, Thornton Place, and Lincoln Square.