To The Wonder Review

I’m going to try to do more written movie reviews for things we don’t cover on the podcasts.  The first of these is the new Terrance Malick movie which was just released on a limited basis throughout the country, “To The Wonder.”  Here is my review of the movie:

Let me just start off by saying, I am not a fan of the Terrence Malick movies that I have seen. I have great respect for him as a filmmaker, he just doesn’t make movies that I enjoy.  His previous work, the Academy Award nominated “Tree of Life” bored me to tears.  Because I wasn’t going to get anything out of the nonexistent storyline, I ended up “watching” it on 10x fast forward on Blu-Ray.  While “Tree of Life” was a beautiful movie it makes a better screensaver or visual effects demo reel than movie.

This movie was not much different and really felt like deleted scenes from “Tree of Life” pieced together with some footage of Ben Affleck and labeled a new movie.  While this was on a much smaller scale than “Tree of Life” which basically told the tale of the beginning of the Earth to death, this covered mostly just the lives of Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) from their meeting in France to their journey to his home in Oklahoma.  What happens from there is your normal series of romantic ups and downs of a couple that probably shouldn’t be together.

To be perfectly blunt that just by describing this movie, I’m practically giving away everything that happens.  For Malick fans this ok, since you are just in it for the experience of the movie and for a deeper meaning rather than pure entertainment value.  It seems like Malick stockpiles as much footage as possible of these actors wandering around aimlessly and tries telling the story in editing.  The astonishing thing about Malick’s movies is there are always actors that he shoots footage of and then they don’t make the final cut of the movie, in this case Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet and Barry Pepper were all in it at one point but gone by the time the movie was released.  To be fair, Javier Bardem, who plays a conflicted priest, and Rachel McAdams, who plays Neil’s ex-flame who briefly comes back into his life, also could have been completely cut from the movie with little being missed other than running time.  While I do respect Malick as a director sometimes I question whether or not he really knows what story he is trying to tell until he gathers all of the footage and decides from there.  For as much as I didn’t like “To The Wonder,” there’s no doubt that Olga Kurylenko carried this film and absolutely loved the material she was performing.

It was ironic that Neil and Marina spent part of the opening of the movie drudging through mud flats in France as this seems to be an analogy for the pacing of “To The Wonder.”  Terrence Malick’s films are the movie equivalent to jazz, to some they are beautiful and compelling, while others just experience an incoherent mess that seems to go on for too long.  This film tends to explain itself through its actions and not its words.  Too much is told through montage sequences with random poetic lines of narration.  While there is one scene where emotions are actually explained through dialogue and not scenes that look like a perfume commercial, this three minutes of movie is not enough.  There tends to be an interesting story in this movie, however Malick would rather show you random shots of interesting things.  While ultimately much more focused than “Tree of Life” and by therefore much more watchable, this classic case of style over substance disappoints.

2 Stars out of 5

Thor: The Dark World Trailer

Thory I didn’t post this sooner but the Thor: The Dark World trailer was posted online this morning and it looks like a slobberknocker.

The Wolverine Sneak Preview

The sequel to X-Men Origins: Jimmy Logan the Wolverine, just titled, The Wolverine is clawing up theaters on July 26, 2013.  To amp up for this Fox just released a six second trailer for the movie that they released on Vine, which is a really cool and interesting way to release this sort of content.  Needless to say you don’t get much but the six seconds you do have look pretty cool.  Check out the trailer here.

Kick-Ass 2 Trailer

Here is the trailer for Kick-Ass 2.  While it’s sadly not coming out until August 16th, it’s amongst my top movies that I’m excited for this summer and this first trailer definitely has me anxious for that date.  Please be warned this is the red band version of the trailer so it does feature profane language and some violence, but that’s what Kick-Ass is all about!

Movie Review: The Way

So, I’ve decided to try to cut a few minutes out of the podcast by limiting the movies I talk about on the podcast.  I will still probably pull one recent DVD release to talk about that I think is interesting but considering I can watch anywhere from 2 to 7 movies a week, I figured the Tumblr would be a good way to talk about all of the extra things I’ve watched that aren’t extremely podcast worthy.



The first of these is the movie The Way.  This movie was a limited release in theaters in October 2011.  As podcast listeners probably know, 2011 was one of those years where I literally tried to watch pretty much everything released in theaters for the entire calendar year, whether in the theaters or later on DVD release.  I’m also trying to do the same thing for 2012 (and hopefully onward as time permits).  To prove how insane I am this is my 173rd movie watched from 2011.  I have two more on my list (Sherlock Holmes 2 and Arthur Christmas) to end it at a nice even 175.  Enough about my insanity, let’s go on to The Way.

The Way was written and directed by Emilio Estevez and stars his father Martin Sheen.  This is the sequel to D2: The Mighty Ducks and revolves around the character of Tom, played by Martin Sheen, who is a California Doctor that unexpectedly gets a phone call that his only son, played by Emilio Estevez (Charlie Sheen does not exist in that universe, which is awesome), was killed on the first day of doing this 2-month long walk called the Camino de Santiago. Tom goes to France to pick up his son’s belongings and instead of going back to California, he decides to complete the walk that his son started, sprinkling his son’s ashes along the way at memorable points.

I really enjoyed this movie far more than I thought I would.  This was a powerful and inspirational story that didn’t rely on beating you over the head with a religious theme. There were some undertones but considering how the walk is steeped in religious iconography, it could have gone more that way (pun intended) but instead focused on the characters.  Martin Sheen gave a tremendous performance and the supporting cast of trekkers, who were all doing the walk for different reasons, were all were interesting and provided rich, deep characters to surround Tom.

I would whole heartily recommend this flick if you’re looking for a movie that warms your soul and feel like backpacking across Europe but are far too lazy to do so.