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Telly O’Mally’s RADEGUND

Started by Twit 2, May 23, 2019, 05:50:40 PM

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Twit 2

Or 'A Hidden Life' as it now is. Story bout a pansy, set in Sound of Musicville.

https://youtu.be/HWC4dVB8n1s

'Departure from my usual style' my ringpiece.

PB seems to agree:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/19/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malicks-rhapsody-to-an-austrian-conscientious-objector

I think he's a crap critic but he got it right when it came to The Tree of Life being a harrumphing masterpiece of a film.

peanutbutter

Sounds like he's doubling down on a lot of his usual things with this one?

Have to say, as someone who liked Song to Song and (kind of) felt like I got the wavelength he's been going on, I'm pretty excited about this one.

Shit Good Nose

I got VERY excited about this when production stills were first released four or five years ago.  I thought (and still think) there's a great film trying to get out of Tree of Life (though several critics now consider it as his masterpiece, and Criterion has recently released the extended cut of course), but then I saw and absolutely HATED To the Wonder (it almost seems to be Malick taking the piss out of himself, but without a single shred of humour), and still haven't seen Knight of Cups or Song to Song, neither of which fared particularly well even with the most loyal Malick fans (of which I considered myself as one, at least until To the Wonder).

Unlikely that it will come to a cinema anywhere near me (Knight of Cups lasted a day or two in one indie, with all showings sold out, and Song to Song seemed to go straight to DVD), but I feel safe in saying that Malick's best is well behind him.

Equally willing to eat those words if this ends up being amazing...

Only ever seen Tree of Life and New World and basically both changed my outlook on life and hit me emotionally harder than perhaps anything except looking at photos of me and my brothers as little kids. I'm scared to watch either of them again. The use of the Wagner prelude, in particular, from New World with the dizzying imagery (it's far beyond words, dizzying is just the tiniest element of how I felt), I'll never forget it. It made me feel that giddy nausea and delirious restlessness of realising you're in love for the first time. I mean that. It was painful to come back to reality and realise that I'd never feel that way again about a person, with such a blank emotional canvas, because life and experience and baggage and culture weigh so heavily and crush the essence of desire and the freedom to feel something true and pure. I'll be forever grateful for a glimpse of what this life could be.

chveik

Quote from: The Boston Crab on May 23, 2019, 10:45:03 PM
Only ever seen Tree of Life and New World and basically both changed my outlook on life and hit me emotionally harder than perhaps anything except looking at photos of me and my brothers as little kids. I'm scared to watch either of them again. The use of the Wagner prelude, in particular, from New World with the dizzying imagery (it's far beyond words, dizzying is just the tiniest element of how I felt), I'll never forget it. It made me feel that giddy nausea and delirious restlessness of realising you're in love for the first time. I mean that. It was painful to come back to reality and realise that I'd never feel that way again about a person, with such a blank emotional canvas, because life and experience and baggage and culture weigh so heavily and crush the essence of desire and the freedom to feel something true and pure. I'll be forever grateful for a glimpse of what this life could be.

watch his first three films they're even better imo.

Twit 2

Quote from: The Boston Crab on May 23, 2019, 10:45:03 PM
Only ever seen Tree of Life and New World and basically both changed my outlook on life and hit me emotionally harder than perhaps anything except looking at photos of me and my brothers as little kids. I'm scared to watch either of them again. The use of the Wagner prelude, in particular, from New World with the dizzying imagery (it's far beyond words, dizzying is just the tiniest element of how I felt), I'll never forget it. It made me feel that giddy nausea and delirious restlessness of realising you're in love for the first time. I mean that. It was painful to come back to reality and realise that I'd never feel that way again about a person, with such a blank emotional canvas, because life and experience and baggage and culture weigh so heavily and crush the essence of desire and the freedom to feel something true and pure. I'll be forever grateful for a glimpse of what this life could be.

+1

peanutbutter

Quote from: chveik on May 23, 2019, 10:58:37 PM
watch his first three films they're even better imo.
The Thin Red Line ain't great...

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: peanutbutter on May 25, 2019, 06:14:17 PM
The Thin Red Line ain't great...

That's right.  It's a masterpiece.

Peru

The last act is a real mess. Loses focus really quite badly. Caviezel gets lost and then comes abruptly back, the film wanders around a bit without the direction of the first 2/3rds. Then George Clooney turns up for 3 seconds. The first two hours are sublime, though.

Twit 2

The whole thing is great. 'Loses it in the 3rd act' doesn't apply when the film grammar is operating on a level far removed from the 3 act structure of the theatre.

The first bit of that film (croc - ship turning up) literally changed my life. I can divide my life into 'before I'd seen that' and 'after'. Sublime.


peanutbutter

Quote from: Peru on May 25, 2019, 09:30:33 PM
Caviezel gets lost and then comes abruptly back
This was another thing, because some other guy had an extremely similar accent I was in total confusion for a big chunk of it RE: Caviezel.


New trailer has just reminded me how weird it'll be to see a Malick film with an actual full fledged plot of sorts for the first time in a while, even if it's' in a very modern Malick delivery

Peru

Quote from: Twit 2 on May 25, 2019, 09:37:34 PM
The whole thing is great. 'Loses it in the 3rd act' doesn't apply when the film grammar is operating on a level far removed from the 3 act structure of the theatre

But it does have a three-act structure. A pretty clear one. And the third part doesn't really work coherently with the first two.

Twit 2

Quote from: peanutbutter on August 16, 2019, 09:26:54 PM
This was another thing, because some other guy had an extremely similar accent I was in total confusion for a big chunk of it RE: Caviezel.

I can't find it on YouTube right now but there's a clip of Scorsese discussing his top films of the 90s, of which TTRL is one, and he talks about how the actors with similar voiceovers is deliberate and supports the themes discussed in the film ("one big soul, all faces of the same man"). Can't remember if the Michel Chion book on the film goes into this, probably does (good enough book, poor translation).

Quote from: Peru on August 17, 2019, 07:41:35 AM
But it does have a three-act structure. A pretty clear one. And the third part doesn't really work coherently with the first two.

I don't doubt you can impose a 3 act structure on it. It is not a lens through which I see the film (and based on everything I know about Malick's approach I doubt he does either) so 'it falls apart in the last bit' seems irrelevant to me. For me personally, it works all the way through, every minute. To be honest, I don't even analyse why so much, all I know is that I absolutely adore the film start to finish and could watch it on a loop.

Shit Good Nose

The new trailer has blown my socks off.

Fuuuuuck me, the cinematography...

peanutbutter

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on August 17, 2019, 11:53:46 PM
Fuuuuuck me, the cinematography...
This is an interesting one with this film too, it's his first since the Thin Red Line to not have been shot by Lubezski iirc? And his first not to have been shot by an acclaimed DP since Badlands too.


Shit Good Nose

Saw this last Friday at my "local" (takes me half an hour to get there) Vue which, amazingly, was showing it on the biggest screen. 

Two walk outs - one after about 20 minutes (I'm thinking some idiot that didn't bother reading up about it too much and just thought it would be a standard biopic), and the other about 2hrs 15mins in, which I though odd given that the bulk of the film was done at that point so you may as well stick around for the rest.

Absolutely mesmerising though.  A definite return to form (although I STILL haven't seen Knight of Cups or Song To Song, but I know the consensus is that they're both a pretty shit failed experiment). 

Stylistically and tonally it's most like The New World, and it's his most straight forward narrative (in relative Malick terms, of course) since that.  Definitely his best film since then as well (I'm still on the fence with Tree of Life - and I have seen the extended Criterion one - and I absolutely hated To The Wonder).  Performances are great throughout, although some may struggle to get their head around the changing spoken languages between German/Austrian-German and English (think that bit in The New World where the tribe leaders are talking to John Smith in their native tongue and, fully understanding them, he's weirdly answering in English).

The cinematography is absolutely mental.  Off the scale good.  It will be a genuine crime if it doesn't get at least a nomination at this year's Oscars.#

9 disjointed voiceovers out of 10.


Twit 2

What I love about Tezza is that all his films look like him, no matter who the cinematographer. Badlands had 3 DPs, yet the film is seamless. Days of Heaven had two of the best DPs of all time, again you wouldn't know one did half and the other another half, as both are on record saying TM meticulously designed the visual dogma of the film and pushed them to places they didn't think possible. Similarly, Lubezki was shitting himself on TNW, even called up John Toll in a panic due to the maverick approach of shooting in all natural light being too daunting. Look at Lubezki's films without Malick and you see how much he took from working with him. And isn't the DP on this the camera operator on his other films? Not to play down the expertise of all these DPs or the collaborative nature of filmmaking but ultimately the visual genius of Malick is down to Malick, as his DPs have been the first to attest. Astonishing.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Twit 2 on January 20, 2020, 10:15:44 PM
What I love about Tezza is that all his films look like him, no matter who the cinematographer. Badlands had 3 DPs, yet the film is seamless. Days of Heaven had two of the best DPs of all time, again you wouldn't know one did half and the other another half, as both are on record saying TM meticulously designed the visual dogma of the film and pushed them to places they didn't think possible. Similarly, Lubezki was shitting himself on TNW, even called up John Toll in a panic due to the maverick approach of shooting in all natural light being too daunting. Look at Lubezki's films without Malick and you see how much he took from working with him. And isn't the DP on this the camera operator on his other films? Not to play down the expertise of all these DPs or the collaborative nature of filmmaking but ultimately the visual genius of Malick is down to Malick, as his DPs have been the first to attest. Astonishing.

Oh, absolutely.  Very similar to Ridley Scott and Kubrick in that respect.  Malick is also (again, like Scott and Kubrick) one of the few major league directors who still regularly operates the camera as well.

Twit 2

Incidentally, I rewatched Days of Heaven the other day and was a reminded of why it's maybe my favourite film of all time. The wistfulness and poignancy of the ending with Linda Manz's character walking down the train tracks just makes my heart burst. The authenticity, the pathos, that accent. You can see why a studio guy saw that in the 70s and decided he needed to pay Telly millions of dollars (?) as a stipend/reward/"keep on doing stuff like this" deal.

Twit 2

Kermode: "It's like a perfume ad." Fuck off. Or at least try to be more original than a YouTube comment. You don't deserve cinema.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Twit 2 on January 22, 2020, 11:12:50 PM
Kermode: "It's like a perfume ad." Fuck off. Or at least try to be more original than a YouTube comment. You don't deserve cinema.

Too right - it's more like a beer or Hovis ad!

kittens

this is perhaps the worst titled thread about a specific movie i've ever seen. i assumed, as i am sure most others have, that it was about a film called radegund by a director named telly o'mally, rather than a film called a hidden life by a director named terrence malick.

i have yet to see this film.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: kittens on January 23, 2020, 04:31:38 PM
i assumed, as i am sure most others have, that it was about a film called radegund by a director named telly o'mally

Legendary Irish director O'Mally's Radegund is about a Northerner who loves vaginas.

Malick's A Hidden Life is a bit more sobering.

Blinder Data

Whenever I see the thread title, I want to sing à la Basil the Great Mouse Detective: "Oh RADEGUND, oh RADEGUND..."

Anyway, I saw this last night. It does indeed look stunning. I could have watched a whole film of scenes of the villagers going about their business in the mountains.

However, I did not love it. I think this is his longest film at 2 hrs 54 mins and it really felt like it, especially when you consider the breadth of topics covered in The Tree of Life and The Thin Red Line. The content in this felt slight and spun out for too long, though it picked up when he left the village. It could have lost an hour and I don't think anything substantial would've been missed.

I found that all the scenes had the same energy to extent that it became repetitive. There was little actual dialogue between two people; most scenes featured one person speaking didactically while the other looks away in an intense manner. It almost felt like melodrama to me, and while not comical in its po-facedness it certainly took itself too seriously. In the many scenes where there was no dialogue, the silences were imbued with an absurd level of tension. There were so many scenes like that they lost their overall power.

I didn't mind the switching between English and German as the dreamlike quality means you pay less attention to such things, but it did undercut the believability of some of the actors whose expression wasn't quite fluent enough. The dialogue felt like they were reading lines off a page and kept going round in circles, making the same point over and over. The characterisation I found pretty weak overall, with most characters relegated to caricatures almost.

I realise that this sounds like I hated it, which isn't true - I'm just disappointed. Some moments really clicked like
Spoiler alert
the moment he was heading towards his death, especially that final shot facing the guillotine, which felt alive, real, proper top-tier Malick
[close]
. But it did not have the dynamism of his previous films. The cinematography was astonishing but I could've done with more shots that weren't from waist-height.

This is the first of his I've seen since Tree of Life and I've never rewatched a Malick film, so maybe I'm less of a fan of his than I realise. I heard a few sniffles towards the end so clearly others found it moving. But this was probably the film of his I enjoyed the least :(

Bad Ambassador

Quote from: Blinder Data on January 24, 2020, 12:31:51 PM
I think this is his longest film at 2 hrs 54 mins

*pedantry klaxon*

On original release, yes, but the extended cut of The Tree of Life runs three hours and eight minutes.

I note that Malick's next film is in some way about Jesus (played by Son of Saul's Géza Röhrig) and is called The Last Planet. Already intrigued.

peanutbutter

Liked this a lot, definitely overran and it felt like a lot of points drifted into saying roughly the same things that had already been said a few times, presumably trying for something more specific and failing but there's some amazing moments and I think there's a lot to be said for Malick aggressively pursuing some hyperspecific ideal of what he thinks film is even if it's to detriment of his reputation and how well these films might hold up. He's seemingly always trying for a level a sincerity that I feel like younger directors just wouldn't even be allowed to go for