637. Days of Heaven (1978)

Running Time: 95 minutes
Directed By: Terrence Malick
Written By: Terrence Malick
Main Cast: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz, Robert J. Wilke
Click here to view the trailer

Been re-watching Oz on HBO on Demand with my wife, since she's never seen it and am being reminded of just how awesome that series was! I still remember discovering it for the first time, on recommendation from my brother (add another one to that ever growing list) and just binge watching it like a junkie. Seriously, if anyone ever wonders why I'm a fan of professional wrestling, it's because when it's great wrestling can be just like Oz. Great characters, good guys/bad guys, feuds, build-ups and great climaxes. I kind of wish the creators hadn't decided to end the show after only six seasons. They could've easily interchanged characters in and out and kept the show running for as long as they wanted to. It would never be hard to introduce new characters and thus, create new feuds/interactions. If you haven't seen the show though, you need to...like now!

A DOUBLE SHOT OF MALICK: 2 of 2

So after revisiting Badlands the other night and taking to it, I was eager to check out Days of Heaven for the first time - a film that I'd heard many great things about, which included it having mind blowing cinematography. Anyway, the wife worked night shift again last night, which gave me the opportunity to check it out. Let's not dawdle...

This shot literally made me snap my head back and mouth "WOAH", not unlike Joey Lawrence.

Richard Gere stars as Bill, a steel mill worker in Chicago who, in the very beginning of the film, intentionally kills a boss at the mill where he works. Fearing prosecution, Bill takes his girlfriend Abby (Adams) and his little sister Linda (Manz) and hits the road - destination: Texas. They hop a train, deciding to tell anyone who asks that Abby is also Bill's sister ("because otherwise people will talk") and eventually arrive in the Texas panhandle and don't waste time getting jobs as laborers on a rich man's farm. While looking for some medicine for Abby's blistered hands, Bill overhears a doctor talking about the farm owner (Shepard), saying that he has less than a year to live - dying from an unspecified illness. Other workers begin to question whether Bill and Abby are really sisters, seeing as how they are so publicly passionate with one another. After a while, the farm owner begins to eye Abby and talk to Bill about her, asking how he knows her. Bill sticks with the brother/sister story and keeps listening while the farm owner tells him that he likes her. Bill goes back to Abby with this information and convinces her to pursue a relationship with him, so that when he dies (which is presumably soon), they can inherit his wealth - granted the two marry. She reluctantly agrees and the rest you'll have to witness for yourself, because we're getting into spoiler territory here.

Loved every image of that giant house towering over everybody, everything. Great house!

Boy, where do I start? How bout with, I didn't care for it. First of all, the damn thing LOOKED amazing - there's no questioning that. I wanted to like it so much because the cinematography coupled with the Ennio Morricone score was enough to make any film snob cream their pants. However, I'm big on story and that's where Days of Heaven left me hanging. I'll even go so far as to say the acting wasn't anything worth writing home about either, a young Richard Gere and a seemingly talentless Brooke Adams in a movie that looked way too good for what they deserved. In regards to it's dialogue and story, the film is just TOO quiet. At times, I felt as if I was intruding on conversations between the characters, intimate ones that I wasn't meant to barge in on. There weren't any pronounced exclamations, the kind of words that make cinema - just muttering that we were happening upon. And as much as I appreciated the Sissy Spacek narration in Badlands, I felt the exact opposite with the Linda Manz narration here. I don't know how old she was supposed to be in the movie, but THE BOOK says she was seventeen at the time. Maybe, I'm crazy but I was viewing her as a twelve or thirteen year old and thinking the whole time that these narrations were WAY too adult for this character - adolescents wouldn't be having this deep of a perspective on the human race.

I'm pretty sure ever single shot in the movie was blocked to perfection and perfectly calculated. Here, a simple shot of a scarecrow in a wheat field is magnificence. 

On the IMDB message board for this movie, someone brought up an excellent point. Why did Bill and Abby lie and say they were brother and sister? I know that they give the whole "people will talk" explanation, but if that's the case, you could just as easily lie and say Abby was your wife, if you were Bill. The first response to this poster's query? Because without that lie, there is no movie. EXACTLY! It's a pointless lie and yet, the entire movie hinges on it. Someone else mentioned that if they actually wanted people to believe they were bro/sis, why were they so openly affectionate - because obviously they were, as other laborers noted it. It's just sloppy storytelling and again, it's so disheartening to say that, because everything else is etched out to perfection. The thing that really gets me though, is the fact that the IDEA was superb! If you could figure out a believable way as to why Bill and Abby had to pretend to be siblings, then the IDEA is a fantastic one. They meet a wealthy man, he takes a liking to her and so that they can inherit his dollars, they stick to the bro/sis story and Abby marries him, so that when his impending death strikes, the real couple can inherit the whole shebang. WONDERFUL IDEA! It's just the execution of that idea that is lacking and it's a real travesty, because otherwise, we'd be talking about 10/10 picture.

What was the deal with the locusts? Was there some kind of religious message in the background that was going totally over my head?

One has to wonder if Terrence Malick disappeared for twenty years because he was on the lam with his girlfriend after killing someone. Seriously, what was his fascination with the whole love on the run gimmick? Something else occurred to me while I was watching this movie and I'll leave you with this thought/question: Have a group of director's ever teamed up to make a single movie, where each of them tell the exact same story, just their own interpretation of it? By "teamed up" I'm thinking like New York Stories or Four Rooms - where director's get together to make one movie, but different sections of that one movie. The only time I can think of one story being told two different ways is Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda and that was just him telling a story twice. If this has never happened, I think it would be a really cool idea. You get together three directors, you give them a generic script and let them run wild with it and add their own artistic genius. They can make it a comedy or drama, cast men or women in different roles, whatever it is they wanna do and then put them all together in one film and let the audience decide which they like best. Has it been done? I don't think so.

RATING: 6/10  I just can't bare to rate this one any lower and yes, the camera work is THAT GOOD! I seriously want to rewatch this one someday, because I still want to like it. This film is like a beautiful woman with a terrible personality.

MOVIES WATCHED: 830
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 171

July 20, 2014  6:13pm

560. BADLANDS (1973)

Running Time: 93 minutes
Directed By: Terrence Malick
Written By: Terrence Malick
Main Cast: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates, Ramon Bieri, Alan Vint
Click here to view the trailer

Note: Finally finished off Fargo (TV Series) and I have to say it was fantastic! Seriously, this was a great homage to the film and you could really tell that the creators of the show had utmost respect for the Coen's film. I've heard mixed reports on whether or not this has been picked up for another season, but I for one would LOVE to see it run in the same vein as American Horror Story, where we get a brand new story each season, perhaps even using some of the same actors. I think their challenge next time will be separating it from this series and the movie. I think anyone who's seen the series will admit that it shared many similarities to the film, in that each character was seemingly patterned after one of the characters from the movie. They obviously can't do that every time, so can they make another, separate series? Apart from that, you just had to love Billy Bob Thornton in this. I said on Twitter that I'd rarely seen him better and I meant that. Martin Freeman was also fantastic and really there wasn't a bad apple in the bunch as far as the cast went. The other outstanding factor of this series was the camera work. Just unbelievable, too good for free TV stuff. If you missed it, pick it up on DVD when it comes out, especially if you're a fan of the film and keep an eye out for all those hidden references to the original movie. Now then...

A DOUBLE SHOT OF MALICK: 1 of 2

My wife's working one of her rare evening shifts tonight, which means I had about four hours to kill between the time I got off work and the time she gets off work, which meant...MOVIE TIME! And hey, I even I had a spare hour or so to get the review taken care of too. This is of course an ode to the final two Terrence Malick films in the BOOK. If I'd been thinking, we could've made this a "hat trick", but I'd already watched The Thin Red Line last year, so that was out. Badlands and Days of Heaven are supposedly his finest two works anyway, so better to lump them together.

At it's bare bones, the film is your typical love on the run film - a more realistic approach to the Bonnie & Clyde scenario - with a little more poetry via a Sissy Spacek narration, Martin Sheen giving the performance of his career and a talented cameraman grabbing one of a kind shots. It all kicks off when Kit Carruthers (Sheen), an uneducated garbageman meets and immediately falls for Holly (Spacek). The only problem is, is that he's twenty-five and she's only fifteen. Holly's father (Oates) obviously disapproves and during a scene where Kit goes to ask for his approval, her father blatantly tells him to stay away. That night, Kit sneaks into the house and begins packing a bag for Holly. When her father sees him and questions his actions, Kit becomes a bit irate and shoots him, killing him. Holly is, at first, upset with Kit, but ultimately decides to go with him, as the couple plan to exit South Dakota (where the film begins) and go where the road takes them. They first take refuge in a wooded area, building a labyrinth of treehouses and elaborate traps, to catch anyone that may be after them. They live like savages for a while, a Tarzan and Jane couple with shades of Bonne & Clyde (Kit fishing using a pistol) and things seem to be hunky dory for a while. They're eventually found and Kit has to shoot his way out of another situation, killing three this time. It becomes a widely publicized story, the fugitives Kit and Holly and the two are officially on the run, killing anyone who get in their way.

I had seen this once before and according to a combination of my memory and IMDB, I wasn't THAT crazy about it - barely remembering it and only having it marked as a '6' on the movie site. I actually took to it quite a bit more this time around and even wondered why I hadn't recalled this one more fondly. I was dog tired when I got off work (as per usual), so coming out of the shower and plopping down on the bed with a good movie was just what the doctor ordered. Also, sort of a risky move, as sometimes I'm so dog tired that I just can't keep focused on a good movie and my eyelids become like anchors. This one was really easy to slip into though, providing an easy to follow plot, interesting characters, real life dialogue and a backdrop that was relatable. In fact, I applaud the way Malick was able to slip in the real snobby elements - you know, the ones that make the film snobs gush. At first, Spacek's narration is just like any other narration, a girl reading from prospective diary entries. And then you realize how literary they sound and honestly, I was shocked to read that this WASN'T an adapted work, as the narration seems like Spacek just reading lines out of a great novel:

"He needed me now more than ever, but something had come between us. I'd stopped even paying attention to him. Instead I sat in the car and read a map and spelled out entire sentences with my tongue on the roof of mouth where nobody could read them."

Tell me that's not brilliant writing...

And then, of course, there's that camera work, which provided me with a multitude of shots to choose from for this very post, but ultimately I had to decide on three. It's funny because the characters don't really deserve this good of a movie. When you think of this heathen Kit Carruthers, poetic lines and visual artistry don't spring to mind and maybe that's why this film stands out as such a great one - because it creates a mash-up of such beauty and such ugliness.

I should stop to say something about the fact that these characters become celebrities from being violent, but is it worth even mentioning this in a day & age when this sort of thing has become so commonplace? Even today people who take guns inside fitness centers and schools get glorified by the media, whether this is the media's intention or not. Kit Carruthers has good intentions, yet by the time he's carried out all of his "work", his intentions seem to be lacking anything good. This would be a fine time to mention Martin Sheen and the stellar performance he turned in, turning his thirty-something self into a twenty-something, transforming his voice into a drawled dialect and a character worthy of dissection, a sort of dirt road Travis Bickle, with far less complications. I won't go into the dissection at this time, because it probably wouldn't turn out that good and in fact, I think I'll call that a review. Certainly a film worth your time for all the reasons I mentioned above. It has few flaws, not even any really worth committing to paper though. For some reason, Malick would make Days of Heaven five years later and then disappear from the movie scene altogether until 1998 and The Thin Red Line. Has he ever given any explanation as to his disappearance?

RATING: 7.5/10  Can't go '8' because then you're talking a whole other ballpark, but it's damn close and perhaps come recap time it'll win me over by sticking with me.

MOVIES WATCHED: 829
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 172

July 17, 2014  7:05pm

934. The Thin Red Line (1998)

Running Time: 171 minutes
Directed By: Terrence Malick
Written By: Terrence Malick, from novel by James Jones
Main Cast: Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Elias Koteas, Ben Chaplin
Click here to view the trailer

LIFE AND DEATH, BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

Right now the current goal is to put in a little extra effort and finish up this season on Wednesday. Whether or not I get to that point will have to be seen, but I did knock off the longest picture I have left last night and from here on out, it's basically smooth sailing.

Terrence Malick's first feature film came in 1973, with the release of "Badlands" and his third feature came in 1998 with the release of "The Thin Red Line". In the span of those twenty five years Malick made one other picture; "Days of Heaven", and then disappeared for about twenty years. Apparently during his absence, he was off somewhere in the boondocks pondering the meaning of life, because while "The Thin Red Line" is a war film, it's just as much a philosophical examination of life, nature and spirituality. The film is set during World War II and starts out with an inner monologue by Private Witt (Caviezel), an American soldier who's gone AWOL and has holed himself up on an island, inhabited by natives in the South Pacific. He ponders a bunch of stuff - ideas and dialogue that totally lost me and left me with an "oh my God, this is going to be a long movie" feeling. From there we get some other inner monologues, from different characters - really deep stuff, that usually doesn't come up in basic conversation and just came off as mumbo jumbo to this viewer. Then we get into the real meat of the picture, as C Company is commanded to take control of a hill - a hill that is being heavily guarded by Japanese troops, where they've placed a bunker, barricaded themselves up and have machine gun artillery at their disposal. Any attempt to climb the hill can easily be seen by the Japanese. It's a scene that lasts well over an hour and is really well done, as Malick mixes the ugliness of war, with the beauty of nature: blood streaking across blades of green grass;  dozens of men climbing a hill, while swaying grass envelopes them and the sky, filled with smoke, half orange and half blue.

I guess I sort of delved into my own opinions while writing that plot synopsis didn't I? Oh well. Like I said, the beginning and end is a bunch of crap. Sure, there are some moments tucked away in there and the film has the tendency to sort of drag your ears in, whether you want to hear what's being said or not. But all in all, I can tell you that this film lost me before we even got into the taking of the hill. Once we got there, I had mentally prepared to dislike this movie, but they started to slowly win me back. There's no denying the beauty of the picture. Malick obviously knew what he wanted and worked in conjunction with his director of photography to get the shots that would transform this film from just your typical piece of WWII fodder into something really special. Yes, I'm admitting this film is something special, despite not fully being on board. The photography is gorgeous, the cast is brilliant, the score is moving and the action in the middle is really well done. Had they been able to fill the beginning and end with something more engaging, I'd have been gaga over this movie. It's my own fault, as I guess I'm just not your philosophical type. I don't ponder the meaning of life or the relationship between man and nature. No, I definitely don't do that. I also don't buy that soldiers do that, as a matter of fact. Listen, I don't want to knock any soldiers with this review, but usually these guys are a lot more gruff and gung ho. They're not your life pondering types.

The film was a good war film and one that I could give a moderate seal of approval. I didn't love it or anything, but nor did I hate it. It really made you wonder about war and life, I guess and wonder how many of these little moments were created on the battlefield. How many men drew their last breath, while being held by their brothers in arms? How many men begged their fellow soldier to write home to their wives, knowing that they were done for? How many men died alone, with no one to tell their final secrets to? Maybe it goes a little way in helping me to understand why there are so many war movies, because maybe I'm finally starting to realize how many war stories are out there and yearning to be told.

RATING: 6/10  Can't go any higher than that and I highly doubt (unless I have a severe change of heart) that it'll be making any TOP 20 list.

MOVIES WATCHED: 693
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 308

May 30, 2013  12:19pm