{"id":3257,"date":"2013-09-16T00:00:05","date_gmt":"2013-09-16T04:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=3257"},"modified":"2013-09-15T20:19:18","modified_gmt":"2013-09-16T00:19:18","slug":"to-the-wonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/to-the-wonder\/","title":{"rendered":"To The Wonder: Fuck You, It\u2019s Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wonder\"
\n

\nTo The Wonder<\/a> (2013)
\n<\/b><\/span><\/b>Written & Directed by Terrence Malick
\n112 min.<\/p>\n

Everybody likes Malick. Anyone who says they don\u2019t is full of shit. There are moments of pure transcendence in each one of his films, whether you like the whole thing or not. Shots where the light coming from the sky is godly, or where an actor or actress looks better than they\u2019ve ever looked, or where the camera makes a perfect yet seemingly impromptu motion. You can\u2019t love movies and not go crazy over that sort of shit.<\/p>\n

However, he can be quite frustrating at times. This is almost entirely due to the fact that he\u2019s a very subjective editor. Most films that exist are edited fairly objectively\u2014and I don\u2019t just mean linearly<\/i>, I mean that most of the cuts are for purpose, not for feeling. Malick, on the other hand, cuts mostly for feeling and vibe. This gives each one of his films its own personal wavelength, and you\u2019re either riding it gleefully, or watching it pass you by, wondering what the hell is going on.
\n
\nTree of Life<\/a> is one of his films where I definitely felt the latter. It\u2019s a mess of a movie, but I also think there\u2019s a great movie trapped inside it, and we see glimpses of said great movie during the middle 90 minutes or so. I think I could cut a movie out of his footage that, to me, would be a perfect, five-star movie. As it stands, I\u2019d give it about a two-and-a-half, but I\u2019m sure this version is something Malick considers perfect. And fine, whatever, all the power to him. It\u2019s his footage, not mine.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t loved a Malick movie since The Thin Red Line<\/a>. The New World<\/a> didn\u2019t do much for me, and as I said, Tree of Life didn\u2019t either. So I was fully expecting to feel lukewarm about To The Wonder<\/a>\u2014especially since the reviews were atrocious. This one sits at 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, whereas Tree of Life sits at 84%. All signs pointed to Malick having gone full retard.<\/p>\n

When it went to Netflix Instant, I decided to give it five minutes just to see what the negative fuss was about, roll my eyes, and move onto something else. Well, color me surprised. Not twenty minutes into it, I had to pause and catch my breath because I was so goddamn shocked that there wasn\u2019t anything<\/i> I disliked yet (which is a lot to say for a movie that Ben Affleck is in). I was gripped. What movie had these other people seen?<\/i> It certainly wasn\u2019t the one I<\/i> was watching.<\/p>\n

Let me try and describe To The Wonder\u2019s wavelength for you, in the hopes that maybe it\u2019ll help you aboard it. Wavelengths are hard to describe though, because they\u2019re so damn vibe-y, but here goes. Basically, the movie is about trust and love and commitment, and relates falling in love with somebody (some seemingly knowable version in your heart of a person that, ultimately, is unknowable) to having faith in God. It\u2019s about how romantic relationships can be quite spiritual, and how crises of faith are not at all unlike crises of love. So the whole movie is this swooshing, sweeping poem about all that, with no real answers, just questions for you to possibly relate to. There\u2019s a lot more to it of course, but that\u2019s the basic gist.<\/p>\n

Everyone\u2019s relationship history is different, so I can\u2019t promise any of these themes will mean anything to you. But I definitely related to many parts of this film. And even further than that, it helped me understand love between Christians. I was raised pretty secular\u2014never really set foot in a church until my late teens\u2014so a lot of that huge facet of many Americans\u2019 lives is a total mystery to me, including what romantic relationships are like between church-going folk. This movie shines a light on the specific temptations and difficulties they may go through, and it does so not so much in a fly-on-the-wall way, but more a fly-inside-the-head<\/i> way.<\/p>\n

This is accomplished most blatantly through voiceover, but a great deal is nailed through clever visuals. Malick has a way of making you feel as though you\u2019re observing the world through the characters\u2019 eyes, and I don\u2019t just mean POV shots specifically. It\u2019s more about his rhythm and the way he treats surfaces. My favorite example of this is the wonderful approach he takes to shooting floors. He doesn\u2019t treat them like floors at all. Sometimes they\u2019re damn near like walls or ceilings. He removes the gravity from them through the angles in which he shoots people sitting on them or rolling around on them or whatever. You really feel like you\u2019re there, and it tugs at your emotions by bringing back childhood memories we all have of floor as an amorphous play area.<\/p>\n

Similarly, he has a childlike fascination with structures, and shoots them with earnest wonderment. A middle-american carnival ride becomes as jaw-dropping as a living, breathing dinosaur. Cookie-cutter suburban homes take on a similarly awe-inspiring quality. There\u2019s no cynicism to the way he shoots them, just genuine respect and appreciation. This is not to say that Malick paints suburbia as idyllic. This film is teeming with conflict. I just mean that he\u2019s not so shallow as to think there\u2019s something inherently amoral about the setting itself.<\/p>\n

All this is well and good and interesting and intriguing, but I have to say, my favorite aspect of this movie is that it I enjoyed Ben Affleck in it. His character is constructed in such a way that even if you don\u2019t particularly like him as an actor, his character works, because he plays a guy you\u2019re not supposed to like or trust. A seemingly phony and shady dude. As the gorgeous Olga Kurylenko experiences romance with him, you feel pangs within you like she\u2019s left you and is now dating some guy you hate and who will break her heart. It\u2019s a wonderfully suspenseful experience, or at least it was for me. For a person who loves Ben Affleck, it\u2019s probably confusing. (By the way, I don\u2019t hate him or anything, I just think he\u2019s kind of whatever and I\u2019ve never been wowed by him as either an actor or filmmaker.)<\/p>\n

Anyways, that\u2019s about it. If you like Malick, you\u2019re definitely gonna watch this movie at some point, so me saying \u2018hey, you should watch this\u2019 is kinda useless. That\u2019s the thing about him\u2014I can\u2019t foresee myself ever skipping one of his movies. It\u2019d be stupid for anyone to. There\u2019ll always be some cool stuff. If, however, you\u2019ve never seen a Malick film before, don\u2019t let this be your first. I suggest watching, at the very least, Days of Heaven<\/a> and The Thin Red Line, before delving into this one.<\/p>\n

4 out of 5 Codys.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"wonder\"
\n

\nTo The Wonder<\/a> (2013)
\n<\/b><\/span><\/b>Written & Directed by Terrence Malick
\n112 min.<\/p>\n

Everybody likes Malick. Anyone who says they don\u2019t is full of shit. There are moments of pure transcendence in each one of his films, whether you like the whole thing or not. Shots where the light coming from the sky is godly, or where an actor or actress looks better than they\u2019ve ever looked, or where the camera makes a perfect yet seemingly impromptu motion. You can\u2019t love movies and not go crazy over that sort of shit.<\/p>\n

However, he can be quite frustrating at times. This is almost entirely due to the fact that he\u2019s a very subjective editor. Most films that exist are edited fairly objectively\u2014and I don\u2019t just mean linearly<\/i>, I mean that most of the cuts are for purpose, not for feeling. Malick, on the other hand, cuts mostly for feeling and vibe. This gives each one of his films its own personal wavelength, and you\u2019re either riding it gleefully, or watching it pass you by, wondering what the hell is going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,1],"tags":[1742,434,32,2363,2715,104,185,2364,2716,2361,2362,2714,2713,2717],"class_list":["post-3257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-codysreviews","tag-badlands","tag-ben-affleck","tag-cody-clarke","tag-days-of-heaven","tag-olga-kurylenko","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-terrence-malick","tag-the-new-world","tag-the-thin-red-line","tag-thin-red-line","tag-to-the-wonder","tag-to-the-wonder-review","tag-tree-of-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3257"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3268,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions\/3268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}