Terrence Malick

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whaleallright
Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2005 12:56 am

Re: Terrence Malick

#26 Post by whaleallright » Tue Jan 08, 2019 11:11 am

It's not infrequently the people at the bottom who most vigorously defend the very rules that put and keep them there.
That's, sadly, a very timely insight.


Monkey Ballz
Joined: Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:14 pm

Re: Terrence Malick

#28 Post by Monkey Ballz » Sun Oct 31, 2021 8:12 pm


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hearthesilence
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:22 am
Location: NYC

Re: Terrence Malick

#29 Post by hearthesilence » Tue Jan 02, 2024 11:10 pm

Old news, but I was reminded that sometime during the 1980s Malick was writing or developing an adaptation of Walker Percy's classic 1961 fiction novel The Moviegoer. He eventually gave up on the project, but during a rare appearance at a preview screening of a not-quite-finished The New World on December 26th, 2005 in Bartlesville, OK, one fortunate admirer asked him if he was still planning to make it, and he replied “No, I don’t think the New Orleans of the book exists anymore.”

I thought this was news to me, but when I did a search, I found that Kent Jones mentioned this aborted project in passing in the very first paragraph of his essay for Criterion's reissue of The Tree of Life - I definitely read the essay when I bought the disc back in late 2018, but I wasn't familiar with the book yet, so it's likely that made it easy for me to forget. Nevertheless, one wonders if any ideas Malick was working on while adapting Percy's book were used or further developed for The Tree of Life. The book feels like a blueprint for a quintessential Malick film, where a man drifts from his daily trappings (either domestic or professional) and goes on an existential journey of sorts, wandering through different locations without any concrete direction while reflecting on the world around him. That's essentially what Sean Penn's character is doing in The Tree of Life whereas past characters would have some kind of narrative context that would ground such wanderings within a constructed plot (exploring a new land, escaping military duty, etc.)

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