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45

I believe the reason why Terrence Malick's aggressive cutting and fracturing of his footage -- the self-destructive, almost imploding nature of his editing process -- neutralizes his narratives and consequentially makes them feel so complete (as opposed to traditional narratives), is because of the way in which our minds perceive, dissolve and rebuild experience through memory; our lives, some so deeply incomplete and yet still the most generally complete notion that we're capable of considering, are but fragments and deconstructions and reconstructions and, thus, the crafting of this sort of splintered cinema is what renders his films so conclusive and absolute, for all we have to compare them to are our own shattered and superglued existences.

9

this is the kind of film where rooney mara says "i love pain" and then two kids roll by on segways

36

I was in awe of this film. How can someone make something this beautiful? This poetic? This majestic? I didn't think I could love Rooney Mara more but holy shit what an actress. Ryan Gosling in his best performance since Drive. Natalie Portman is fantastic as always. Michael Fassbender is a legend in this film. Malick has never made a film this romantic, this intimate, this lovely, this heartbreaking, and this beautiful. I'm L I V I N G !

Review by samantha ★★½

me before watching: i don't really get the plot but WOW what a cast
me after watching: i don't really get the plot but WOW what a cast

2

surprisingly moved by all of these skinny people touching each other's tummies

1

i'm too poor and lonely to understand the meaning of this shit

Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★ Liked

Terrence Malick Instagram Story

8

Malick's twirling horndog period climaxes with an exasperating whimper (you know it's trouble when *i'm* restless during a movie that stars Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett), but this still might be my favorite of the post-TREE OF LIFE adventures, if only because the film's freeform approach can be a nice complement for its portrait of drifting youth.

but like… does Malick have a tin ear for modern music, or was he just forced to work with whomever he found hanging around Austin at the time? a little bit of both? Patti Smith aside (and i'll spare a thought for Lykke Li), the music in this movie is... just fucking wretched.

also, it's frustrating to think of all the incredible footage…

5

Where has blonde Natalie Portman been my entire life!?

4

There are a small handful of filmmakers I would describe as Joycean. Terence Davies, despite never shooting in Ireland, captures the physical reality of Joyce's books: the creaking interiors, the spiritual weight of real and emotional death, the way that alcoholism and rage is both the manifestation and perpetuator of lower-class misery. David Lynch reflects the author's pathologized sexuality, the warped, half-glimpsed chimera of lust and repression that distorts perspectives into horrorshow abandon. (In more ways that one, Lost Highway resembles Finnegans Wake converted to film noir, replacing that book's transcendent motion with more base impulses of murder.) Add to that list Terrence Malick, who (since The New World, at least) has tackled the more probing, elemental, associative side of…

13

Malick's post-TTOL deconstructionist narrative trilogy has very little do to with the notion of traditional "character" or "character development" and more to do with utilizing human bodies as avatars to convey psychological complexities of the collective unconscious, not so much representative of individual people as representative of models embodying a slice of the autobiographical pie. His method is fundamentally opposite to how we're meant, or how we've been taught, to perceive "character" or the presence of bodies & minds on screen; rather than observing the whole of an individual, a complete picture of a person, and re-tracing our steps to uncover the smaller, more intimate psychological details of the individual's inner clockwork (the popular "character approach"), we're instead presented with those…

27

god, imagine not living
for experimental films.