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The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick
- mitchbob 1y agohttps://archive.ph/2025.05.14-163421/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n09/david-thomson/cool-tricking https://archive.ph/2025.05.14-163421/https://www.lrb.co.uk/t...
- latentcall 1y agoI still remember seeing The Tree of Life in theaters. What an incredible experience that was.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoOh I remember that movie, very relaxing, put me right to sleep zzz
- CharlesW 1y agoAsk your doctor if TikTok™ is right for you.
- badc0ffee 1y agoThere's a wide range of attention spans between a 2-hour experimental film and TikTok.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- flyingcircus3 1y agoI remember being so bored during this movie in the theater. My expectations of any plot whatsoever were unreasonably high.
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- asdfasdfasdf33 1y agoI have to say that I'm jealous. I hope I get the same opportunity. His films are so moving to me. In the way that life itself moves.
- barelycompetent 1y agoDays of Heaven and The Thin Red Line are simply the most beautiful films ever made.
- ofrzeta 1y agoI don't know if I would call The Thin Red Line "beautiful" but I think it's a great (anti-)war movie.
- rdtsc 1y agoI think I would call it cinematographically beautiful, and parts of it were meant to be really be visually beautiful. But it all had to be contrasted with carnage, death, fear, and all the ugliness of war.
- nsxwolf 1y agoSeeing it in a packed theater with a bunch of teenagers on a Friday night ruined it for me the first time. They were expecting another “Saving Private Ryan” and got something totally different, so decided to entertain themselves through obnoxious behavior and mockery.
- meindnoch 1y agoI wouldn't call it anti-war per se. It's a deeply spiritual movie, against the backdrop of war.
- rdtsc 1y agoLike the first line says, he is probably the least known famous director. That is, he is not an activist and not flashy, doesn't make a lot of movies, and the general public simply doesn't know about him. But all the other movie directors and famous actors know him and kind of idolize him. When Thin Red Line came out in 1998 he hadn't done a movie since 1978 (Days of Heaven) and yet he snagged all the famous actors to play in it: Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel (though he wasn't as famous then), George Clooney, Jared Leto, Nick Nolte, John Travolta and others. It's like they were tripping over themselves to be in his film. But I can't fault the general public for not knowing him either. His movies are more "artsy" so he is like like an American version of Andrey Tarkovsky -- you have to really be in the mood for his movies, like watching Stalker or Mirror by Tarkovsky.
- alabastervlog 1y agoKind of like a "musician's musician"—ones whose names come up often in interviews with famous musicians, and often have covers of their songs by more-famous artists become very popular, but are largely out of the limelight, at least relative to their fame and influence in certain circles.
- PyWoody 1y agoIf you haven't seen it, A Hidden Life has the most Tarkovsky feel to it for me. It felt very inspired by Mirror, specifically. I say that as a person who loves both films, too. I can't believe the author of the article so blithely dismissed To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, and The New World. The New World is probably my favorite of all Malick's films so far.
- otherme123 1y agoIIRC Travolta was a furious that his role was brutally cut to almost nothing after shooting a decent amount of footage, and at least a couple of well known actors were fully out of the final cut. They were indeed tripping to be in the film, that's one thing I remember clearly, rumours of some actors begging to be in the movie for free.
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- haunter 1y ago>There is a new film in the works, The Way of the Wind, about the life of Christ. Géza Röhrig plays Jesus, Mark Rylance is Satan. It was shot in 2019. The word is that it will open at Cannes in May. But I’m not sure they said which year. Sadly not this year either :( Probably my most anticipated film of the decade, I loved all the Terrence Malick films I've seen so far.
- UncleOxidant 1y agoI hope he's able to finish it.
- ArthurStacks 1y agoThe guy to go to if you want an awful boring movie
- hondo77 1y agoSo, you've seen Days of Heaven, too? (actually, I only lasted through the first 20 minutes)
- ArthurStacks 1y agoHis secret to success was doing nothing for 20 years and letting idiots build him into a genius in the void of anything which would have demonstrated otherwise
- echelon_musk 1y agoWhile The Thin Red Line is fantastic, I share your dislike of Days of Heaven. Lauded as a masterpiece, when I finally watched it I couldn't understand how.
- linhns 1y agoI lasted through the film only because of the cinematography, the other parts are overrated.
- _m_p 1y agoThis book is particularly great about discussing the process of filmmaking, which in Malick's case often seems to involve a ton of experimentation through editing in order to shape a film after photography had finished. (Some of this editing work notably led to major actors having their roles cut from films. Adrien Brody, for example, apparently believed that he was going to have the lead role in _The Thin Red Line_ but ended up entirely cut.) For those interested, Richard Brody's book about Godard and Carrie Rickey's book about Agnes Varda are similarly detailed about the specifics of their filmmaking work!
- _m_p 1y agoThose interested may also really like this article about the cinematography of _Days of Heaven_: https://theasc.com/articles/photographing-days-of-heaven https://theasc.com/articles/photographing-days-of-heaven > My work became "de-illuminating," that is, removing the false and conventional light.
- julianpye 1y agoI watched Tree of Life in the cinema. I was spellbound. It spoke directly to me, no mental processing of a story, I was tuned to this film. I didn't feel its time. As the film ended a girl behind me said to her friends 'this was the biggest piece of shit I have ever seen'. I understood her and it was a perfectly fine opinion. She didn't 'get it', but it didn't have to do with taste or intelligence or anything like this. She was just not able to receive it - as if it was a signal sent she could not process. Our wedding rings have these words from the film engraved: 'unless you love, your life will flash by'. We married late - our kids were already almost at school. The love in the words is about the love of your family, just like in the film. And why the Thin Red Line is perfect - just view the "Swing Scene" as a work of religious art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s40YpEsVkxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s40YpEsVkxk The inner monologue of Ben Chaplin's private Bell about what the role of love is when you encounter war, asking 'Who lit this flame in us' is a visual prayer. (And yes, this is Miranda Otto, aka Eowyn)
- BizarroLand 1y agoI know what you mean, I had the same effect from the David Lynch Dune movie. I went in blind, had no idea what I was about to see other than that it was scifi. Put it on and didn't even make it to a chair before I was spellbound. I stood for the whole movie, feeling as if ages had passed while I was rooted to the ground like a mountain watching seasons pass in stop motion. I've watched it maybe 6 times since, nothing has quite recaptured that perfect first watch.
- krrrh 1y agoI love it too, I actually decided to never read the book because all the book readers I have talked to hated it. Highly recommend the upscaled to 4k fan edit on YouTube. They splice in lost footage that was cut from Lynch’s initial edit. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=faHQA_0d9Mo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=faHQA_0d9Mo
- BizarroLand 1y agoThe book is fine. I saw the movie before the book and there are some obvious changes but nothing so terrible that it ruins anything.
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- donniefitz2 1y agoThat article was so poorly written, I struggled to get through it, save for my interest in Malick. What a half baked analysis of Thin Red Line. There's just so much more going on in that movie than the author gives credit for.
- popalchemist 1y agoMalick's genius is his poetry. He is not a storyteller. If you are able to grok cinema as a spiritual tone-poem then you dig him, otherwise you will hate him.
- krrrh 1y agoIt’s fun to rewatch Days of Heaven once you’ve unlocked that each of the main characters is tied to a different element (earth, wind, fire, and water). That he could employ such a straightforward and have it all work so well is still astonishing to me. A nearly perfect film.