Archief - Welke film heb je vandaag gezien en wat vond je ervan ? (20)

Spiros zei:

Iemand die mij een film in de aard van Side Effects of Limitless kan aanraden. Qua genre was het mss wel wat verschillend maar zo "drugs, pillen" etc vind ik wel leuk in een film. Maar nu ook weer niet van die gangsterfilms met drug squads..

Klik om te vergroten...

!nsomn!a zei:

Over To the Wonder:

Spoiler

To The Wonder (2012) - Terrence Malick

http://i42.tinypic.com/1jnfwl.png

I'll start of by saying that this definitely is Malick moving further down the direction he took with Tree of Life, though this is more like a minor, more abstract cousin. It's far less bombastic and its thematic scope is more contained. If you found yourself unwilling to engage with ToL, or unable to care about its characters, this might not be the film for you.

The way I saw this film was as a ballet about love, Oklahoma and modern displacement. And I think I have some things to back up that claim.

Firstly love. Well the whole thing revolves around some romantic entanglements involving Affleck, Kurylenko and McAdams. However I think it's broader than that. Going to quote part of a kind of snide response that Malick seems to invite with his complete lack of irony. It's easy to scoff but not particularly interesting, apart from this:
A point made about Javier Bardem, who plays a priest in one of the tangents of the film. I think he misses the point here. Love and spirituality are the same thing to Malick. This film has some of his most blatant pantheist flourishes, in particular the already often ridiculed line 'what is this love that loves us', which I think works better in the spoken French than subtitled English. It's one of Kurylenko's voice-overs and she says it twice. The first time she goes on to say that this love comes from everywhere. That love is the all-encompassing environment, is nature, is god. Then there's the scene with Bardem where they're touching the glass and the cleaning guy says he feels the spiritual light on top of the rays of the sun. Near the end of the film Kurylenko stretches out her arms to do something similar only there's no glass this time. She just seems to be trying to touch the air and her face. All during the final voice-over of Bardem's priest. He also gives us multiple viewpoints again, the priest who seems crushingly lonely and disturbed, against Kurylenko who goes through all kinds of romantic ups and downs twirling away. The outlook at the end isn't particularly hopeful, clouded weather, no beautiful magic hour sunset anymore and then the brooding Mont Saint Michel shot, which somehow seems significantly like the last shot of Tree of Life with that steel bridge. I think it's quite obvious what he's going for and not a half-baked analogy at all. Whether you agree with Malick is a different matter of course.

Then the ballet. Firstly there's the obvious part where Kurylenko is constantly gracefully moving around, dancing, twirling. At some point she even picks up ballet shoes! Then there's what I think is Malick's fundamental structural base, at least since ToL. Namely music and poetry. I don't know much about musicology so I'm a bit at a loss for terminology here but bear with me. He put this film together like you would a musical arrangement with different movements, ups and downs. That's why a lot of it stays abstract, why there was no script. Music swells, camera movement and editing becomes frenetic, emotions on screen are high. Cut to a different moment in time, emotions are low, the relationship is going badly, cutting is slow, music is absent or moody, camera is largely static. The different 'subplots' are movements in a symphony.

Then Oklahoma. This is quite straightfoward. I thought this film gave a very good sense of the place and culture of where it played. I've also read comments by natives of the state who were particularly impressed so I don't feel like I noticed something that wasn't there.

Then modern displacement. Malick's films have always drawn significantly from the past, this is a first where characters don't seem to be part of or trying to regain some kind of mythological past. Tree of Life is, imo, very much about this same alienation but Jack again looks to the past to find solutions. None of the characters here seem to be able to do that. Unless, I guess, you could link Mont Saint Michel to that, but I'm not so sure about that at this point. I think that's a significant turning point for Malick, I wonder if he'll stay in the present with his next projects. Anyway in TTW you have the outsiders Kurylenko and Bardem, foreign in a strange country, you have modern life entering and disrupting relationships (the visa expiring, the girl at the counter when Kurylenko tells Affleck about her infidelity).

I think my main beef with the film is Affleck. He's an abstraction, a cypher. And I don't find him compelling enough as an actor/entity on screen to overlook not knowing anything about the character he's playing. However I had the same problem with Penn directly after I watched ToL and he turned out to be the one thing holding the whole film together after closer inspection, so yeah. The difference here is that I don't see most of this playing in Affleck's head.

Klik om te vergroten...

!nsomn!a zei:

Kun je me dan iets vertellen over Affleck z'n personage? Hij kijkt wat nors, is Amerikaans, heeft ladyproblems en een job. Wat weten we nog over hem? Waarom heeft hij die ladyproblems? Why should I care? Daarbovenop krijgen we vooral de vrouwen hun gezicht te zien wanneer we hen samen zien, Affleck is meestal met z'n rug naar ons gekeerd. Dus het is niet alsof dat gebrek aan psychologisering gecompenseerd wordt door bepaalde mannerisms en dergelijke. Daarbovenop komt dan uiteraard dat Affleck gewoon geen compelling presence is voor mij. Daar tegenover; Jack = Tree of Life, alles komt uit hem voort. Die hele film reflecteert hoe zijn gedachtegang werkt. Affleck is maar een onderdeel van TTW en een behoorlijk onderontwikkeld onderdeel wat dat betreft.

Die brug en MSM lijken mij allebei shots van zaken die een overgang naar een soort mystieke eenheid reflecteren. Die brug tussen Jack's mentale toestand aan het eind van ToL en dat mysterieus licht, en dan MSM als het wonder (inderdaad mss romantisch verleden zoals ge zegt) uit de dialoog wanneer ze daar zijn en titel. Die stalen brug mag dan wel een typisch moderne constructie zijn, ze is ook redelijk apart als constructie die specifiek dient om plaatsen met elkaar te connecteren. Laat nu net postmoderne en individuele fragmentatie een behoorlijk grote rol spelen in ToL.

Klik om te vergroten...

PBR Streetgang zei:

Over de brug en MSM... Oke, dat de eindshots van ToL en TtW verwijzen naar iets mystiek, dat begrijp ik wel. Maar verwijzen ze dan voor jou naar een zelfde special mystical entity? Want in mijn ogen totaal niet en hebben ze een tegengesteld effect, hoewel ze allebei in the realm of the symbolic vertoeven.

Klik om te vergroten...

Zorba zei:

Django Unchained eindelijk gezien. Genoten van de eerste tot de laatste minuut Die cast maakt de film gewoon, heerlijk.

Klik om te vergroten...