The Thin Red Line (1998)

Terrence Malick's third film is the kind of brilliance you'd expect from him and more.  I never thought philosophy could be so visceral outside of drug trips.  Malick's philosophy is vital and far from ponderous, pretentious or tacked on, which is what makes his films so powerful.  He marries the subjective inner lives of his characters with the cosmic and objective, the average with the mystifying, the chaotic and confused with the harmonious and synchronous.  It's that contradiction that makes his work so hypnotic and mind blowing, why Kit Carruthers kicking a tin can around a dusty alleyway is so special.

The film begins with a shot of a crocodile (or alligator, whatever, I think it's a croc), submerging into a pool.  The birth of man's predatory nature?  Two men have gone AWOL and are living a carefree life with a group of natives by the sea, heaven on Earth.  Suddenly by chance a navy patrol boat appears off the coast and they're taken prisoner before Private Witt is reassigned to a company who then land on an island with the intent of securing an airfield.  Nick Nolte plays the one in charge who like everyone else is going to war for the first time.  In a quiet inner monologue that betrays his hard-boiled exterior it's revealed he's filled with doubt over his motivations and his role in the conflict, which is understandable given he's as green as the troops he commands.  The whispered monologues are a master stroke,  In a masterful scene the troops land on the island to find it deserted.  There is no music and the scene has an eerie, alien quality to it.  Not long in and the fighting begins out of nowhere, into a confusing but beautiful and horrific trip of fear, panic and decision beyond reason and time, of men falling into questioning and reasoning within and then forced to act as if by unseen hands.  The lack of reason or motivation with the clarity of the imagery and the free floating camera makes everything seem as if it's happening out of time, out of nowhere, manifestations of the void.

The film had a really strange effect on me that no film has ever given me before, and that is a kind of revelation.  As the camera seemed to fall down the hill and the men pushed up it I had this sudden sensation that I've rarely experienced sober and never experienced from a film, of time completely dying and the chaotic order of things attached to the very tips of my fingers, of existence itself emerging from me and yet meeting me at the very edge of my being.  The thin red line indeed.  Suddenly I had the strange sensation of floating in a fairground spinning cup in utter blackness and nothingness forever.  I felt the cause of everything that was happening on the screen, of the conflict inside and out, and yet at the same time tied up in it.  I could feel everyone standing in one another's light.  I experienced ego death watching a film.  I can think about that on an intellectual level watching a film, and I can think have a cleansing experience watching a film, but a film has never induced full blown ego death in me before.  It was only brief (yet eternal), but I'm still pretty mystified.  The soldiers themselves to come to terms with ego death in a way, as they're stripped of their identities as people and made into fighters and killers for a cause they thought they knew that eludes them in combat.

This film can only be described as "godlike" for the way it portrays both the physical horror and the existential horror of war; the doubting, the questioning, the disillusionment.  I don't think it's an anti-war film because I think it portrays war as just another part of the grand scheme of everything, and any judgement would ruin the experience.  The characters are great, from cool Private Witt who rides on faith to Nick Nolte's internally desperate and weak commander, to Sean Penn who is more cynical and hardboiled.  There is a whole host of characters played by stars in small roles, and yet they're all believable.  The film shows each of these characters' inner questioning and ideals which makes the sudden deaths particularly unnerving, and yet in the film's spiritual, metaphysical form one gets the sense that each voice in the monologue is one voice, and the death of one speaks through another.

Anyone, if there is anyone out there reading this, WATCH - THIS - FILM.

Days of Heaven (1978)

Days of Heaven in the second film Terrence Malick made.  It follows the same ideas as his brilliant first film Badlands but with a different story and a looser narrative.  Whereas Badlands seems hard and objective from start to finish, matter-of-factly showing two people destroy, murder and drift around a beautiful western landscape as if in their own private storybook, Days of Heaven almost entirely dispenses with story, and it's almost as if the film is directed by wind forever, which sounds like crap unless you've actually seen the film.  There are multiple beautifully photographed shots of vast fields, wheat blowing in the wind, a weathervane blowing.  The way it's shot too is less static and more free flowing and scattered.  I can't really describe it adequately but the genius of this film is in the way it feels like it's happening forever, beyond time and space.  It's set mostly in this vast field somewhere in America with a big house in the middle of it.  Having left Chicago, an itinerant trio consisting of a guy (Richard Gere), his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) who pretends to be his sister which raises eyebrows, and his young sister (Linda Manz, narrator) come off a train packed with people who all gather in this field to work for the rich guy (Sam Shephard) picking berries or something.  Everyone seems to drift in and out of the film like in a dream, and the narration (the young sister) tells how they just drifted around looking for nothing in particular and having adventures and entertaining themselves.  What people do basically, but like Spacek's cold narration in Badlands Manz' narration here is really flat, matter-of-fact and unpretentious so everything seems undefinable, cosmic and endless and yet confined to a child's perspective.  Malick's films are great for this kind contradiction, the small existing in the absolute and vice versa, and his artistry and eye makes it work, as does Ennio Morricone's great score.  

What story it has is simple.  The wealthy young landowner has only a year to live and the couple overhear this.  He takes a fancy to her, and hoping to get a stake in his fortune, the couple encourage his advances, until he takes them all into his home and they don't have to work any more.  He suspects the "brother and sister" of foul play at some point, but intervention in the form of biplanes puts it off.  It's like there is some tragedy in the film, but it's downplayed and takes a back seat for things to just happen which is more interesting.  Instead everything in the film is like intervention usurping the hopes and dreams of the characters.  The wealthy man is beset upon by the workers who helped make him, who hover around him like vultures awaiting his death.  His wealth is not in his hands.  All of a sudden a swarm of locusts eat all his crops.  All the crops end up burning.  He dies and the trio go on the run and drift again, before Richard Gere is killed.  Linda is sent to a school so she can build a better future for herself yet ends up running way down the tracks with a friend anyway.  Nothing in the film lasts and yet it has no time, and things just happen.

It's a great film with great, natural performances, and I love it.  It doesn't have the same haunting, uncanny quality as Badlands but it's still great and pretty amazing that someone managed to make a film with just people, land and wind.

X-Files Pilot In-depth analysis

                                                            "What the hell?"

                                                "Mulder...I have something to show you.."

The Master (2011)

What happens when a violent, alcoholic ex-marine drifter stows away on a yacht and is found by a charismatic, self-deluded cult leader?  The two become the best of friends of course, and form a symbiotic relationship.  The saint has found his sinner to cure, and the accident of it must mean that there are higher forces at work.  At least in the mind of the master, who has been chosen to do great work, and so the bond is forged.  Freddy undergoes "processing" a kind of suggestive hypnosis to recall past painful memories, some attempt to fix the present by changing the past in the mind...or something like that.  Getting his frustrations out with this guy over hard home-made booze makes him feel good and there's free food, drink and pussy all round so he sticks around and has a great time, belonging for a while.  His violent temper gives the master something to chastise, in turn giving the master opportunity to alleviate his mostly concealed anger, which he denies and covers up with pseudo-philosophical made-up ideas and rituals which only turn out to be self-defeating because they are simply denial, so when pesky critics start questioning him about his claims to cure cancer through mind time travel he hilariously loses his s--t, before quickly restraining himself, because he doesn't have the answers unless he's doing his song-and-dance and his followers are hypnotized.  Thankfully he has his beloved beast Freddy to go out and do the dirty work for him without tainting his reputation, roughing up the unbelievers.  He returns to tell the master of what he has done and is told off, giving the master his authority in a viciously logical yet kind of nice relationship.

If it sounds like Lancaster Dodd (the master) is a villain, fear not, there are no villains in the film, just humans.  He is a cynical charlatan, but like Freddy he's also basically trying to get by and survive, albeit misleading people along the way, or is he?  I think one of the ways to find some kind of truth within yourself is to exert yourself in absurd endeavours to the point of mad frustration.  And the rituals this group uses are indeed absurd.  In one sequence the cult tries to cure Freddy through a series of mind games.  Dodd's wife asks him what colour her eyes are, then commands him to "make them black," then "make them brown."  They're green, not any other colour, and yet they're also black, and brown because what is green?  He's asked to pace between a wall and a window and describe them in different ways, and he reaches a critical point of frustration because no matter how many different ways he describes them they are in fact just a window and a wall, because that's what he's been taught, and no matter what they might actually be beyond that, to him alone they are just a window and a wall.  The tree of possibility burns until there's just the trunk.  As he paces back and forth he posits that he could leave any time he wants, but he is trapped there because it is his choice.  His choice indeed.  And that's it.  Dodd preaches about rising above emotions, above the animal self, that we are not animals, but truly we are spirits exiting in eternity, and yet he cannot stop himself from lashing out when doubt and scepticism ruins his show.  Freddy improves greatly within the cult, and yet when out in public confronted by a naysayer he tackles him to the ground and slaps him around, and he's back right where he started, all over again.  So this cult is very useful indeed, if only to completely and utterly destroy all hope of being anything except what you are, which is a truth all spiritual paths can lead you to no matter how silly you find the practices.  Religion comes in many forms.  When a woman questions Dodd about his reasoning he can't say he doesn't have any so he loses it.  "Just because" is the answer but most people don't like that because there must be a reason.  He makes his own because he doesn't want to

I don't know whether this film is anti-religion or for, but I don't think it's either.  It's a double-edged sword for sure, on one hand Freddy is a martyr, whose very existence disproves everything that brings people and money to the cult.  He cannot be cured because there is nothing to cure and his life of hard drinking, scrapping and generally stumbling around being incoherent is holy and pure and needs no cleansing, so then what is organized religion for?  He could stay with the cult, and keep up the lie with the charade of trying to "get better," or he could leave and the cult would remain a charade.  What exactly is the cult?  For sure it does help Freddy in a way, by reassuring him that he's not wrong, and he even makes fun of the ritual in the end while screwing a prostitute.  In the end he's right back where he started, on the beach lying next to a pair of tits he's made in the sand.

The film is funny, compelling, interesting, and beautifully shot and put together, with loads of great images and ideas, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Jaquin (I don't know how to spell it) Pheonix.  I love it.  I'd forgotten that Paul Thomas Anderson makes great films.

Shane (1953)

Shane is a great film, and the titular character is one of the greatest trolls of the screen.  Basically he's a poker-faced chameleon who turns up in a small farming town town one day and immediately emasculates a local farmer and gains the affections of his wife and the undying and creepy admiration of his little boy, one of the most annoying kids in film history who repeatedly shouts "Shane, shaaane" in a grating monotonous twang.  Jake Lloyd is positively restrained compared to this kid, although thankfully he doesn't ask Shane if he's an angel, and thankfully it doesn't spoil a great film.  Shane immediately stirs up the local rancher land baron who wants to take all the land for himself.  In my favourite scene of the film, he walks into a bar and orders a soda pop.  Ben Johnson who is sitting drinking chortles at the choice of beverage and confronts him, splashing him with his drink.  Later in the film Shane, deceptively strong and vicious, totally whips him in a bar fight, before doing what the local townsfolk can't by killing Riker and his henchmen as the kid watches, before heading into the mountains to die.  I don't think he went to die though, and he probably made it to the other side to troll other territories.  

I feel like that little kid, in awe of Shane's charm and prowess at manipulating simpletons.

Quantum Leap (continued)

Season 4 is a step down compared to the first three.  That is, there are a few good-great episodes but they're just mostly just so-so.  A Single Drop of Rain, about a con-man who sells rain to hick towns in drought is great, but then there's a lame episode about a psychic and a TV news presenter tracking down a killer.  Running For Honor is a great episode because it finally brings to light what anyone watching Quantum Leap to that point had been pondering, Sam Beckett's sexuality.  He plays a navy sailor accused of being gay by an anti-gay gang at a navy academy.  Even Al suspects it when he sees Sam crossing his legs gingerly and drinking tea.  The signs have been there throughout the whole series, even God itself teased it when he leaped Sam to kneeling directly in front of a man's genitalia.  The Last Gunfighter is an alright western episode.  You can tell when they aim an episode at kids because it's preachy and has some kind of moral value.  A Song for the Soul is a nice episode about a young singer frustrated and trapped between her strict gospel preaching father and her desire to sing in success.  It features an obvious shady nightclub owner who thinks he's smooth with the ladies who gets totally owned in the end.

Aside from the previously mentioned "Raped," Season 4 is mostly just light, fun episodes.  The Curse of Pah-Ho-Tep, set at an Egyptian dig, and especially Ghost Ship, are great.  Ghost Ship is hilarious because Sam leaps in to a pilot mid-flight over the ocean and despite being a well trained, focused polymath he panics and doesn't even try to take control of the pain.  It also features a WW2 pilot who in a hilarious scene has Bermuda triangle U-boat flashbacks.  It's fun because it's set on a little luxury plane and there's a sense of adventure.  It's a Wonderful Leap is a take on It's A Wonderful Life and is pretty good.  Roberto is another good episode with a good story about news anchors trying to uncover a conspiracy at a fertilizer plant, and it's funny because Sam tries to make wisecracks and just comes off as robotic.  Stand-Up is fun, about a comedy trio in Las Vegas.  The last episode thankfully is pretty good, and it's about Al, although it's not particularly moving like MIA.  Al is accused of rape and murder and Sam has to clear his name.  It's notable because the timeline is changed and Al disappears only to be replaced by an insufferable British ponce.  Thankfully the timeline is put back right and Al is back.  It's funny too because it features a weirdo navy commander who gets off on watching his officers have sex with his wife.  One more season to go, and then I'll probably just watch them all again in one go, because I have an important job to do.

Spring Breakers (2012)

Hot, barely legal teenage girls in bikinis.  Neon lights.  This film is right up my alley.  Great images and impressions.  Another great film from Harmony Korine.  Great electronic score.  That is all.