THE NEW WORLD - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Malick's Last Real Movie on Criterion Blu-Ray

Terrence Malick's last real movie.

The New World (2005)
Dir. Terrence Malick
Starring: Colin Farrell, Q'orianka Kilcher, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale,
August Schellenberg, Wes Studi, David Thewlis, Yorick van Wageningen, John Savage

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The New World is the last real movie made by Terrence Malick prior to descending into his "I Talk To The Trees" cinematic dementia which began with the pretentious The Tree of Life and followed by the risible To The Wonder, Knight of Cups (Malick's nadir) and Voyage of Time (it has two versions, both awful, though happily the IMAX edition is very short). For this reason, one must be truly thankful to the Criterion Collection for issuing the gobsmackingly gorgeous "Director-Approved Special Edition" (3-Disc Blu-Ray, 4-Disc DVD) of Malick's haunting and moving take on the Pocahontas story. (This edition includes a terrific documentary by Austin Jack Lynch, especially illuminating in the sections devoted to training the indigenous Native actors in period body language.)

The New World has had a curious release pattern with no less than three different versions of the film. There is a 150-minute cut which played briefly in America to qualify for Oscars (and long available on an Italian DVD), then the contractually-obligated 135-minute cut which was the only one most of us saw for awhile and finally, a 172-minute extended cut that has never been theatrically released.

Luckily, this lovely box set (with gorgeous new cover artwork by Robert Hunt) has all three cuts. I like them all, frankly. The shortest version was all I knew for awhile and it's the sleekest of the lot, while the slightly longer version expands on both poetic qualities and sharpens narrative clarity. The longest is a real treat. Though it has far more early hints of Malick's tree-staring and soulful voiceovers, they are all in service to a compelling narrative.

Pocahontas: Lost in Love.

Many of us are familiar with the historically-rooted story of Native Princess Pocahontas via any number of literary and film renderings (the most horrendous being the animated Disney musical), but Malick has definitely delivered the most vital and successful dramatic look at this fascinating figure.

After some lovely underwater nude swimming shots of the gorgeous Pocahontas, we're introduced to the dashing figure of military man John Smith (Colin Farrell) who arrives, in chains, with a boatload of various rough-and-tumble types from England, all selected to establish the colony of Jamestown, Virginia and to set up a tobacco trade on the rich, fertile expanse of land in America. Smith is about to be executed for insubordination, but saved by the kindly (and in his own way, equally dashing) Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer).

To the dismay of Wingfield (David Thewlis), a snooty bureaucratic martinet with a major hate-on for our hero, Smith is promoted in rank and charged with overseeing the colony. As the new settlers are beleagured with a lack of food supplies, Smith journeys deep into the wilderness to establish positive relations and trade with the Algonquian "naturals".

Enter Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), Princess and favourite daughter of the tribe's Chief Powhatan (August Schellenberg). She not only saves Smith's life, but engages in much cavorting through nature with him as they fall madly in love. This allows Malick plenty of opportunity for shots of nature, sky and trees.

There's a whole lotta voice-over goin' on, too.

As Smith "goes Native" and learns the ways of the "naturals", there's a whack o' delicious romance and humour in the proceedings.

There is portent, too.

Powhatan warns Pocahontas to never take sides with the colonists, not even Smith. He fears they are all wolves in sheep's clothing (which, uh, they ultimately are). Smith, though, seems true to his commitment to the "naturals" and between he and Pocahontas, both sides are well served.

Until, there is war.

The dashing Captain John Smith.

Smith is eventually charged with leaving on a long, perilous expedition. The glories of exploration are dangled before him by kindly Cappy Newport and he takes the bait. Smith feels, in his heart of hearts, that his destiny is greater than his happiness. Knowing he'll never return, he asks a trusted associate to eventually lie to Pocahontas that he has died at sea so she can move on without him.

When she is informed of his death, she plunges into a grief that borders on madness. She's "rescued" by the ladies of Fort James who begin a process of colonization in earnest and she's transformed into a "proper" Englishwoman. She eventually meets John Rolfe (Christian Bale), a sweet, gentle and oh-so handsome tobacco plantation magnate. He's smitten with her, but she's still pining for the "dead" Captain John Smith. Eventually she acquiesces to Rolfe's marriage proposal.

When Rolfe and his "Indian Princess" bride are invited to England in order to meet royalty and high society, they journey across the pond. Accompanied by her Uncle Opechancanough (Wes Studi), they become the toast of Dear Old Blighty. Whilst gambolling on manicured British lawns, an old flame from her past materializes. John Smith, it seems, is not dead. Will the peace and love she's come to know with Rolfe now crash and burn?

Malick's screenplay, for all the film's poetic meanderings, carries a surprisingly solid romantic narrative arc and the whole experience of watching the film is filled with genuine wonder. The political implications of colonization and indeed, the gradual assimilation forced upon Pocahontas are always present, even though Malick's approach is never political.

He is clearly at the peak of his powers here as a Master Filmmaker and he's smart enough not to let politics get in the way of spiritual rumination on the beauty of nature, the power of love and creating a world that is richly steeped in history. All of this is bathed in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's stunning work (he paints with what appears to mostly be natural light), ace production designer Jack Fisk's muscular work creating both the colonial and old world settings of the early 17th Century and James Horner's lushly romantic score (nicely supplemented with plenty of Wagner and Mozart).

The greatness of The New World is paralleled only by the greatness of Malick's best work. It soars with a most remarkable spirit and it's dappled with more than its fair share of pure passion.

And yeah, the picture gives us an amazing opportunity at the end to squirt copious tears, ever-so Old-Faithful-like upon the screen. When he made real movies, Malick sure knew how to move us.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

The New World is available on a sumptuous Criterion Collection 3-Disc DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION Blu-Ray with a new 4K digital restoration of the 172-minute extended cut of the film, supervised by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and director Terrence Malick and featuring material not released in theaters, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-rays. Included are high-definition digital transfers of the 135-minute theatrical cut and the 150-minute first cut of the film, supervised by Lubezki, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks on the Blu-rays. PLUS: new interviews with actors Colin Farrell and Q’orianka Kilcher, new program about the making of the film, featuring interviews with producer Sarah Green, production designer Jack Fisk, and costume designer Jacqueline West, Making “The New World,” a documentary shot during the production of the film in 2004, directed and edited by Austin Jack Lynch (this is especially illuminating in the sections devoted to training the indigenous Native actors in period body language), a new program about the process of cutting The New World and its various versions, featuring interviews with editors Hank Corwin, Saar Klein, and Mark Yoshikawa, Trailers, A book featuring an essay by film scholar Tom Gunning, a 2006 interview with Lubezki from American Cinematographer, and a selection of materials that inspired the production.

KNIGHT OF CUPS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Terrence Malick's Cinematic Athletic Cup

Terrence Malick's Malodorous Gems of Wisdom

Knight of Cups (2015)
Dir. Terrence Malick
Starring: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman,
Antonio Banderas, Brian Dennehy, Freida Pinto, Imogen Poots,
Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Wes Bentley, Armin Mueller Stahl, Ben Kingsley

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Athletic cups come in pretty handy. They hold onto the crown jewels for dear life, protecting them from injury, sealing them in and collecting pools of nourishing, cheese-like smegma, the nectar of the Gods. This is the grand achievement of filmmaker Terrence Malick.

With Knight of Cups, Malick's created cinema's first-ever motion picture athletic cup, encasing his sweaty, salty, malodorous gems of wisdom so they can mummify and be preserved for all time. In fact, his new film might go well beyond that of an athletic cup - it's not unlike a jar of sour pickles in a brine of horse piss. The contents ain't Kosher, but they're ripe and juicy.

Knight of Cups is the scintillating portrait of a screenwriter (Christian Bale) who spends far more time wandering the beaches, streets and garden parties of Los Angeles than actually doing any writing. He is searching, you see. But for what? For what is he searching for? When he looks up at the sky, which he does quite often, he is greeted with the voice over of God (sounding suspiciously like Ben Kingsley).

"Pieces, fragments of a man," intones the voice.

"Where did I go wrong?" asks the screenwriter. "I'll throw my life away."

"Don't go back to being dead," is the retort of portent.

The screenwriter does what any screenwriter who looks at the sky too much would do. He heads out to Sunset Boulevard and visits a psychic. She begins to do his Tarot cards, but her reading confuses him even more.

"Which way should I go?" he asks.

Well, quicker than you can say "athletic cup", the screenwriter is back on a beach. He's not alone. There are frolicking babes with him, but alas, they offer little solace. He walks away to be on his own, to do what he does so well. He broods. God knows we can all relate to this. Who needs babes when brooding is so much more satisfying?

In fact, the picture contains a few barrel-loads of Christian Bale brooding.

"Howdy Doody!
Terrence Malick is the name.
Terrence Malick is my game.
I once made great movies!

Malick also breaks the movie up into chapters based on tarot cards. You don't really need to know what the cards represent, though. Malick provides explanations for you with his visual poetry which, for the most part attempts to be simplistically obtuse in all the ways Malick's become famous for since he stopped making movies people might actually enjoy.

In the chapter entitled "The Hanged Man", the screenwriter wanders through skid row and ogles alkies. "I just wanna feel, something," he intones. With a blank face, he meets up with his brother and informs us: "I loved my brother. I hated him too." This is first rate story telling. Instead of showing us the hows and whys, Malick just has the character tell us what the conflict was (and is). We also get to meet the screenwriter's father played by Brian Dennehy. He's a ranting and raving prick, though he keeps his ire to himself in what appears to be an endless monologue directed at nobody in particular. Oh, and we see some chick playing a harp. A fucking harp!

Thanks to the aforementioned, Malick has fully explained what a Hanged Man card means.

In the chapter entitled "The Hermit", the screenwriter continues to be surrounded by babes, but tellingly, he is so alone. Luckily, Malick clears matters up for us by having a bunch of dogs dive into a pool in slow motion to retrieve balls. Luckily, they are not Christian Bale's balls. Malick has encased the Bale Crown Jewels with an athletic cup.

Malick also makes this whole business abundantly unclouded by revealing that the screenwriter is attending a seemingly endless garden party with a bunch of rich assholes diving into a pool - just like the dogs! Only there are no balls for them to retrieve.

The screenwriter has been brooding this whole time and eventually he thinks he's floating. Alone. Hence, "The Hermit" and hence, the next chapter entitled "Judgement" wherein the screenwriter's character moves considerably forward by brooding. Then again, you'd brood to if you discovered that your wife was the insufferable Cate Blanchett.

Malick astutely hired the insufferable Cate Blanchett

"Do you remember how happy we were?" Cate asks. "You became so cruel and unkind."

The aforementioned is another example of Malick brilliantly avoiding any drama by having the characters talk about past, present and future conflict. Especially poignant is a scene where the couple appears to have been arguing, but the screenwriter seeks solace by staring at some guy blowing dead leaves around. In direct contrast to all this Bale-brooding, we learn that Blanchett wanted babies, in spite of the fact that she specializes in providing palliative care to people with infectious flesh disorders/diseases like leprosy.

This is no Isle of Molokaii. 'Tis only Los Angeles, but man, leprosy runs rampant.

Blanchett pointedly accuses Bale, as they walk around endlessly, looking at everything but each other: "You didn't want to be inside our marriage or," she adds with considerable heft, "you didn't want to be outside it either."

Have I mentioned that the running time of this movie is just over two fucking hours? Hell, it could have been twice the length for all its heady hardware. Witness: The screenwriter is constantly surrounded by women, yet he broods. At several points, he finds hissef in the company of nekkid broads and yet, he broods. "That's what damnation is," he opines. "Pieces of your life never coming together."

He might be looking for love, but it's in all the wrong places - mostly like the cheesy lint collecting in his sweaty navel which, he gazes at constantly (when he's not looking up at the sky).

One of the women he avoids loving asks, "What do you want from me?" The screenwriter replies, "To weave the spell of you. To make you dream." Then, as an aside, presumably for us, the audience, he adds, "Dreams are nice."

Malick shows this to be true, not by actually visualizing it, but by having Bale say, "Nobody cares about reality anymore." He follows this up with our screenwriter having empty stage-whispered conversations in a strip club. He astutely tells one of the strippers: "You live in your own little fantasy world, but you can be anything you want to be." The stripper retorts: "You can be an asshole, a saint and God."

"There's no such thing as forever," the screenwriter asserts as proceeds to push a chick around in a shopping cart.

Then he stops to look at Palm Trees.

Ever-so briefly, you stop watching the screen to check the time.

You say to yourself in an internal voiceover: "Fuck, there's still an hour left of this shit."

Unlike the rest of the sparse audience, most of whom have long-ago staggered out of the cinema, you stay in your seat, nailing your feet to the floor. If Christ had to suffer on the Cross for Our sins, the least you can do is suffer for having believed Malick is still capable of making movies as great as Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: THE TURD DISCOVERED BEHIND HARRY'S CHAR BROIL AND DINING LOUNGE - LOWEST RATING

Knight of Cups plays at select cinemas via Broad Green Pictures.

THE BETTER ANGELS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Malick protege's gorgeous rural period piece

1817.
Indiana.
Log cabin.
Deep woods.
A boy's love
for his mother.

The Better Angels (2014)
Dir. A.J. Edwards
Starring: Jason Clarke, Diane Kruger, Brit Marling, Braydon Denney

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In life and even after death, our real angels are indeed, as the title of this great film tells us, The Better Angels.

Fading up from a pitch black silent screen, one simple, powerful quotation from President Abraham Lincoln, tells us, and in retrospect, corroborates that this is the very core and essence of the dazzling directorial debut of Terrence Malick's longtime editor A.J. Edwards. It reads:

"All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."

As the text fades down, we're left with a silent black screen for a few moments until a stately, ravishingly composed and arranged orchestral score envelopes us in the dark. Once the piece ends, we're greeted by harsh monochrome light attempting to break through an overcast sky and resting upon a set of steps that lead upwards to a series of majestic columns.

Moving inside and beyond this brief exterior shot, we're treated to a series of images by a camera aimed along the massive columns as they try to reach beyond the ceiling to be nourished by the light of the heavens. We get a brief glimpse of a bronze plaque embedded into the back wall and try as we might, it's impossible to make out what the words represent since the camera turns itself around as if from the point of view of these words, the plaque flanked by sculpted doves.

From within the darkness of this perspective we finally get a glimpse of the light pouring through the massive columns as the voice of an old man asks, "You wondering what kind of boy he was?" And then, we're gloriously winded by a smash cut to a river at dusk, the still water defined on either side by banks of majestic trees casting dark shadows upon the shimmering beauty, at once beautiful and alternately not unlike a visual representative of a lamentation for a time long passed.

This transition from the cold stone under grey light, representing something long dead, but worthy of the sort of worship its architecture demands, to the stunning beauty of the natural world is not only cinematically powerful, but in fact, is part of the film's overall style and storytelling techniques which, far exceed the cerebral pretence of Edwards' mentor, colleague and producer of this film. Terrence Malick's Tree of Life and To The Wonder were both such ludicrous wanks that it's kind of cool seeing the wankier inspirations being transformed into simple, emotional storytelling.

Our narrator gives us few details about "the boy", but then, we don't need too much more than what we actually see ourselves. What we do see is delivered in the measured pace of rural existence and though there are many Malick-like bits of cerebral looking-up-at-trees and so forth, it's all rooted in character and narrative (albeit a smidgen off the regular beaten path) in addition to the film's extraordinary tone.

The picture is ultimately so gorgeous, so inspiring and often heart-wrenching that this story about a little boy growing up in a little log cabin in Indiana in 1817 is compulsively watchable.

We learn from our narrator that the lad's name is Abe (Braydon Denney) and that he'll eventually leave home at the age of 21. It wouldn't take an Albert Einstein to figure out we're in on the childhood of Honest Abe Lincoln himself, but I suspect if I hadn't known before going in that this is whom/what the picture was dealing with, I'd like to think I'd have potentially been watching the story of a young boy, any young boy and his deep, undying love for his mother.

I will say, though, that the images and events rendered by Edwards and his cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd, all underscored by a gorgeous soundtrack composed by Hunan Townshend, are ultimately so potent that I did indeed file away my knowledge that we were following the young boy who eventually became one of the great presidents of the United States of America. What's kind of cool about this is that we're left with an evocative portrait of pioneer life that gives us a sense of both the hardships and joys of working the land and being inextricably linked to it.

The narrative of Abe's younger years is presented in a series of impressions of days and nights that proceed over the course of time and we're moved forward by some of the most spectacular jump cuts rendered in any film in recent memory. Though some cuts are clearly of the breathtaking variety, many seem so perfectly fluid and in fact seem as gentle as required, when required. We get impressions of children at play and at work, but we're almost always within Abe's sphere and/or POV. Ultimately, the film focuses upon a simple trinity of characters overwhelming all others populating the frame. The most important relationships involve Abe and his stern father (Jason Clarke) and his truly angelic mother (Diane Kruger).

When Abe raises the ire of his father and gets a stern lecture and/or a painful whipping, it's of course his mother who applies the gentle words to calm Abe and to help him understand and love his father in spite of the punishment. One of the most moving sequences is when Abe's mother tenderly describes the look on her husband's face when he first laid eyes on the boy after birth. She assures him that his father had nothing but adoration in his eyes and that she knew that he would always go to the wall for Abe and protect him with his very life.

We do indeed experience moments of tenderness between Abe and his Dad. We also come to understand that it's Abe's mother who recognizes the boy's special gifts and tries to convince her husband that Abe's not cut out for the rough, brutal hardships of working the land. Dad seems at first to dismiss this out of spite or even jealousy, but as the film progresses, we see that Abe's Dad wants to build fortitude and perseverance in his son.

When Abe's mother is taken ill and dies, Abe's Dad marries anew and Abe's stepmother (Brit Marling) proves to be as angelic, if not even more spiritually connected to the boy. The trinity of Father, Son and Stepmother is also as strong and important as the first one.

In both cases, it is the MOTHER (by blood and by marriage) who is able to outwardly perceive Abe's intelligence and sensitivity, whilst Dad is the hide toughener. One sequence even has a dreamy, ghostly moment when both mothers connect fleetingly and we are infused with an almost spiritual warmth, a glow that carries us and Abe through whatever hardships he continues to face.

And as haunting and sad as many of the impressions Edwards imparts are, we're always tied to the glory and spirit of the natural world and the special love that only a mother and son can have. The film paints a portrait of the formative years of a great man, but what we're often aware of is the potential of greatness in any man who honours God, nature and of course, his mother.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

The Better Angels is in platform theatrical release via levelFILM and can be seen in Toronto at the Carlton Cinema. Why this isn't also unspooling at TIFF Bell Lightbox and/or a decent Cineplex screen is beyond me. It's worth seeing as soon as possible, but I suspect its astounding picture and sound will shine ever-beautifully once the film is released on Blu-Ray.

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TO THE WONDER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Terrence Malick provides proofpositive that he will have a fine adjunct career as a writer ofHallmark Greeting Cards.

This is a revised version of my review. As I fell asleep for the last five minutes, I felt it incumbent upon me to see the film again, so I did and watched the movie from beginning to end. This allowed me the opportunity to glean a lot more from Mr. Malick's feature length greeting card. I hope you appreciate this effort.

"Love made us one. I in YOU. You in ME."
The Wonder. The Wonder.
The Horror. The Horror.

Terrence Malick or Jed Clampett? You Decide.

To The Wonder (2012) *
dir. Terrence Malick
Starring: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In Paris, the city of love, people talk to themselves. Not out loud, mind you. After all, they aren't afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome but rather, they yammer away in their heads.

In Paris, a Man and a Woman, both pierced by Cupid's arrow, are unable to keep their eyes and hands off each other whilst Hallmark Greeting Card prose-poetry floats from their respective inner sanctums and into the ether - swirling about like the ghostly intonations of the dead.

In Paris, Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko play this loving vapid couple. They wander amongst the architectural treasures of Gay Paree, psychically transmitting their purportedly soulful words to each other and to the audience of Terrence Malick's latest pretentious snore-Fest To The Wonder.

Based upon their words alone, either Malick and/or the characters are touched - not by love, but by some form of retardation of the cerebellum.

"Newborn," Kurylenko declares. "I open my eyes. I melt." One certainly hopes, like M&Ms, that she melts in his mouth and not in his hand.

Olga continues, as if she were in a sequel to Twilight: "Into the eternal night. A spark. You got me out of the darkness. You gathered me up from earth. You've brought me back to life."

Alas. no vampires here, and writing that makes Stephanie Meyer literarily akin to no less than Leo Tolstoy himself.

Olga, aside from looking deeply into Ben's eyes, spends an inordinate amount of time jumping up and down like a pogo stick and/or twirling about. At one point, Ben tries taking snaps of her with his digital camera, but she keeps spoiling his shots by snapping at it with her purty mandibles. Presumably, this is because she's happy. Perhaps she is in love. Perhaps, she's hungry. If the latter, there is no doubt - Olga is afflicted with the aforementioned retardation of the cerebellum.

Now, I have to admit I might have missed something, but I really have no idea why Ben is in Paris. He has virtually no dialogue save for a few words of hideously pronounced French. I have no idea why Olga is in Paris either, but though she is Ukrainian, she does speak French quite beautifully and she's gorgeous. Paris has many gorgeous women, so why shouldn't she be one of them?

What I know for a fact is this: Olga and Ben are in love. Just in case, I didn't know, Malick's screenplay wisely has Olga intone in voice-over that she is, indeed, "in love".

Thank you Mr. Malick. Your screenplay is full of helpful information like that. I was grateful during one special moment early on in the movie when Ben and Olga visit some old castle or church or whatever it is - in any event, it's old - and Olga delivers extremely vital story information in the past tense, as if she's remembering it (or something) as we see the lovebirds climbing up some steps, .

"We climbed the steps," reveals Olga.

Again, thank you Mr. Malick. Good to know.

We eventually find out that Ben hails from Oklahoma - not the dullest state in the Union (that honour would go to North Dakota), but dull enough that one wonders why he wants to drag Olga and her daughter back there with him. Once they get there, they move into what appears to be a house lacking much in the way of furniture.

Olga informs us that Ben "speaks very little."

This is true. He's hardly spoken a word and just so we get it, Malick gives us many scenes where Ben speaks very little, save in voice-over when he tells us what we can see for our own eyes.

Apparently, Ben and Olga's daughter hit it off famously. We know this because Kurylenko tells us in a voice-over. We don't actually see it rendered dramatically. Why bother when you can convey this through greeting card voice-overs?

Happily ensconced in hurricane and tornado country, the lovebirds spend quality time walking through fields and looking at the flat landscape and big skies while we get to hear more greeting card philosophy.

Most disappointing here is that we never get any storms. For years, the late, great experimental filmmaker George Kuchar would travel to Oklahoma during tornado season, stay in sleazy motels, watch weather reports, take dumps, inspect and comment upon his faecal matter and put it all on film. This resulted in his ever-so brilliant Weather Diaries.

I mention this only because Malick and Kuchar are brothers in the avant-garde tradition. Kuchar, however, always had a great sense of mordant wit. Malick is humourless. Hence, no tornados. And very sadly, no faecal matter, save for the movie itself.

Whilst living in Oklahoma, Affleck appears to have a job, but damned if I can tell what it is. Olga starts to spend a lot of time doing laundry, washing dishes and going shopping for furniture. (Some might quarrel with this, but I didn't - she is, after all, a Ukrainian woman - put on this Earth by God Himself to serve her Man.) Besides, she isn't living a complete life of drudgery. She has plenty of time to wander through fields, stare at the sky, examine foliage, recite monologues in voice-over and jump around like a pogo-stick. Her daughter appears quite adept at this bouncing motion also. I smiled and chortled to myself in a good natured manner. "Like mother, like daughter," said my internal voice-over.

Alas, as luck and life would have it, Olga and Ben appear to move quickly beyond the "honeymoon" stage of their relationship. Ben starts sniffing around his old flame Rachel McAdams. This allows for more voice-overs. Olga begins sniffing around the parish priest who is having a kind of Gunnar Bjornstrand-like crisis of faith and in turn, has his sights set on Olga. (Or does he? At one point he stares at a very pretty nun while she washes dishes.)

The priest is played by Javier Bardem. His face is so grimly deadpan we expect him to blow someone's head off with an automatic assault rifle. Alas, all we get are voice-overs like this howler: "You shall love whether you like it or not." At one point, Javier visits a home. Is it Ben and Olga's home? If so, who is the woman with a baby in the backyard? Your guess is as good as mine.

In any event, Javier does not knock or go in. He looks at toys strewn about the front veranda. We perk up. Perhaps he is a child molester. Most priests are, after all.

No such luck. He walks away as he speaks to himself in voice-over. "My heart is cold," he says. "Hard." Alas, that's all that's hard.

Olga leaves Oklahoma and goes back to Paris. This allows Ben Affleck to spend a lot of time looking out his window. An Italian woman shows up out of nowhere and babbles nonsensically in Olga's direction. I have no idea who this woman is, but Olga seems to and before you can say, "voice-over," our Ukrainian princess is compelled to return to Oklahoma.

On my first helping of the film, I looked at my watch, sighed and closed my eyes. The last five minutes of the movie was a mystery to me - not because of anything Malick barfed up onto the screen, but because I fell asleep. It was one of those power naps I hate where I had a short, grotesquely vivid dream - you know the kind - where jellylike, viscous blobs fall from the ceiling on your Mother's bed and she tenderly strokes them with the knobby stumps where her arms once were.

After such an awe inspiring experience as To The Wonder, I did not want the aforementioned dream to be the last thing I remembered, so I watched it again. This time, I did not bother to suppress my guffaws and watched it to the end. I'm elated I did. I do not wish to spoil it for you by giving away the ending. Even if I did give away the ending, I'm not quite sure what I'd tell you as I have no fucking idea what the ending was. Suffice it to say that Javier has a ridiculously long voice-over monologue wherein he intones Christ's name many times, various characters stare at the sky, Olga licks a branch and eventually bounces around again like a pogo stick and someone, I'm not telling who, walks into a white light.

As the credits came up, I walked into the toilet and turned on my own white light.

"To The Wonder" is playing theatrically and on VOD day-and-date via VVS Films. If you enjoy gorgeously photographed scenery, you're probably better off going to the movie theatre to see it. On VOD, however, you will not feel compelled, as I was, to repress your endless stream of guffaws.

TO THE WONDER - TIFF 2012 - Review By Greg Klymkiw

This is a revised version of my review. As I fell asleep for the last five minutes, I felt it incumbent upon me to see the film again, so I did and watched the movie from beginning to end. This allowed me the opportunity to glean a lot more from Mr. Malick's feature length greeting card. I hope you appreciate this effort.

"Love made us one. I in YOU. You in ME."
The Wonder. The Wonder.
The Horror. The Horror.

Terrence Malick or Jed Clampett? You Decide.

To The Wonder (2012) *
dir. Terrence Malick
Starring: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In Paris, the city of love, people talk to themselves. Not out loud, mind you. After all, they aren't afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome but rather, they yammer away in their heads.

In Paris, a Man and a Woman, both pierced by Cupid's arrow, are unable to keep their eyes and hands off each other whilst Hallmark Greeting Card prose-poetry floats from their respective inner sanctums and into the ether - swirling about like the ghostly intonations of the dead.

In Paris, Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko play this loving vapid couple. They wander amongst the architectural treasures of Gay Paree, psychically transmitting their purportedly soulful words to each other and to the audience of Terrence Malick's latest pretentious snore-Fest To The Wonder.

Based upon their words alone, either Malick and/or the characters are touched - not by love, but by some form of retardation of the cerebellum.

"Newborn," Kurylenko declares. "I open my eyes. I melt." One certainly hopes, like M&Ms, that she melts in his mouth and not in his hand.

Olga continues, as if she were in a sequel to Twilight: "Into the eternal night. A spark. You got me out of the darkness. You gathered me up from earth. You've brought me back to life."

Alas. no vampires here, and writing that makes Stephanie Meyer literarily akin to no less than Leo Tolstoy himself.

Olga, aside from looking deeply into Ben's eyes, spends an inordinate amount of time jumping up and down like a pogo stick and/or twirling about. At one point, Ben tries taking snaps of her with his digital camera, but she keeps spoiling his shots by snapping at it with her purty mandibles. Presumably, this is because she's happy. Perhaps she is in love. Perhaps, she's hungry. If the latter, there is no doubt - Olga is afflicted with the aforementioned retardation of the cerebellum.

Now, I have to admit I might have missed something, but I really have no idea why Ben is in Paris. He has virtually no dialogue save for a few words of hideously pronounced French. I have no idea why Olga is in Paris either, but though she is Ukrainian, she does speak French quite beautifully and she's gorgeous. Paris has many gorgeous women, so why shouldn't she be one of them?

What I know for a fact is this: Olga and Ben are in love. Just in case, I didn't know, Malick's screenplay wisely has Olga intone in voice-over that she is, indeed, "in love".

Thank you Mr. Malick. Your screenplay is full of helpful information like that. I was grateful during one special moment early on in the movie when Ben and Olga visit some old castle or church or whatever it is - in any event, it's old - and Olga delivers extremely vital story information in the past tense, as if she's remembering it (or something) as we see the lovebirds climbing up some steps, .

"We climbed the steps," reveals Olga.

Again, thank you Mr. Malick. Good to know.

We eventually find out that Ben hails from Oklahoma - not the dullest state in the Union (that honour would go to North Dakota), but dull enough that one wonders why he wants to drag Olga and her daughter back there with him. Once they get there, they move into what appears to be a house lacking much in the way of furniture.

Olga informs us that Ben "speaks very little."

This is true. He's hardly spoken a word and just so we get it, Malick gives us many scenes where Ben speaks very little, save in voice-over when he tells us what we can see for our own eyes.

Apparently, Ben and Olga's daughter hit it off famously. We know this because Kurylenko tells us in a voice-over. We don't actually see it rendered dramatically. Why bother when you can convey this through greeting card voice-overs?

Happily ensconced in hurricane and tornado country, the lovebirds spend quality time walking through fields and looking at the flat landscape and big skies while we get to hear more greeting card philosophy.

Most disappointing here is that we never get any storms. For years, the late, great experimental filmmaker George Kuchar would travel to Oklahoma during tornado season, stay in sleazy motels, watch weather reports, take dumps, inspect and comment upon his faecal matter and put it all on film. This resulted in his ever-so brilliant Weather Diaries.

I mention this only because Malick and Kuchar are brothers in the avant-garde tradition. Kuchar, however, always had a great sense of mordant wit. Malick is humourless. Hence, no tornados. And very sadly, no faecal matter, save for the movie itself.

Whilst living in Oklahoma, Affleck appears to have a job, but damned if I can tell what it is. Olga starts to spend a lot of time doing laundry, washing dishes and going shopping for furniture. (Some might quarrel with this, but I didn't - she is, after all, a Ukrainian woman - put on this Earth by God Himself to serve her Man.) Besides, she isn't living a complete life of drudgery. She has plenty of time to wander through fields, stare at the sky, examine foliage, recite monologues in voice-over and jump around like a pogo-stick. Her daughter appears quite adept at this bouncing motion also. I smiled and chortled to myself in a good natured manner. "Like mother, like daughter," said my internal voice-over.

Alas, as luck and life would have it, Olga and Ben appear to move quickly beyond the "honeymoon" stage of their relationship. Ben starts sniffing around his old flame Rachel McAdams. This allows for more voice-overs. Olga begins sniffing around the parish priest who is having a kind of Gunnar Bjornstrand-like crisis of faith and in turn, has his sights set on Olga. (Or does he? At one point he stares at a very pretty nun while she washes dishes.)

The priest is played by Javier Bardem. His face is so grimly deadpan we expect him to blow someone's head off with an automatic assault rifle. Alas, all we get are voice-overs like this howler: "You shall love whether you like it or not." At one point, Javier visits a home. Is it Ben and Olga's home? If so, who is the woman with a baby in the backyard? Your guess is as good as mine.

In any event, Javier does not knock or go in. He looks at toys strewn about the front veranda. We perk up. Perhaps he is a child molester. Most priests are, after all.

No such luck. He walks away as he speaks to himself in voice-over. "My heart is cold," he says. "Hard." Alas, that's all that's hard.

Olga leaves Oklahoma and goes back to Paris. This allows Ben Affleck to spend a lot of time looking out his window. An Italian woman shows up out of nowhere and babbles nonsensically in Olga's direction. I have no idea who this woman is, but Olga seems to and before you can say, "voice-over," our Ukrainian princess is compelled to return to Oklahoma.

On my first helping of the film, I looked at my watch, sighed and closed my eyes. The last five minutes of the movie was a mystery to me - not because of anything Malick barfed up onto the screen, but because I fell asleep. It was one of those power naps I hate where I had a short, grotesquely vivid dream - you know the kind - where jellylike, viscous blobs fall from the ceiling on your Mother's bed and she tenderly strokes them with the knobby stumps where her arms once were.

After such an awe inspiring experience as To The Wonder, I did not want the aforementioned dream to be the last thing I remembered, so I watched it again. This time, I did not bother to suppress my guffaws and watched it to the end. I'm elated I did. I do not wish to spoil it for you by giving away the ending. Even if I did give away the ending, I'm not quite sure what I'd tell you as I have no fucking idea what the ending was. Suffice it to say that Javier has a ridiculously long voice-over monologue wherein he intones Christ's name many times, various characters stare at the sky, Olga licks a branch and eventually bounces around again like a pogo stick and someone, I'm not telling who, walks into a white light.

As the credits came up, I walked into the toilet and turned on my own white light.

"To The Wonder" via VVS Films premieres at TIFF 2012.

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THE TREE OF LIFE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Terrence Malick's new picture, "To The Wonder", will premiere at the Venice and Toronto (TIFF2012) Film Festivals, so now's as good a time as any to take a look at this idiotically overrated pile of sludge.

The Tree of Life (2011) *
dir. Terrence Malick
Starring: Brad Pitt,
Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn
Review By Greg Klymkiw

I like trees. Sometimes I talk to them. When I forget to take my meds, the trees talk back. It's okay, though. Clint Eastwood talked to trees in Paint Your Wagon while Harve Presnell called the wind "Maria". It's all good. One can be manly and still commune with nature. You need not bag game with automatic assault rifles, or use dynamite to float stunned fish into a net or careen down backroads in a half-ton with jars of open liquor sloshing down one's throat.

Those things are manly, to be sure, but so is talking to trees.

I was, it seems, a happy child. I loved dinosaurs, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and inhaling the misty aroma of DDT as it wafted gently through my suburban paradise, keeping it bereft of mosquitoes, numerous birds and other small animals. I attended church regularly – cherishing the solace, architecture and magical dapplings of light piercing the stained glass.

Dearest Dad, being an ex-cop was (understandably) of the authoritarian persuasion – strict to be sure, but a hard-working fellow who wished only to provide for his family. And Mom? She was a saint, not unlike Mother Teresa.

Winnipeg, where I grew up during the 60s and 70s always seemed a couple of decades behind the rest of the world – very post-war if you will. ’Twas, I might add, a leafy city – thus rendering the aforementioned tree worship.

It was like any small town or sleepy burg - anywhere. Hell, for all anyone knows, it might as well have been . . . Texas.

Now hold on! Hold on just a goldurn' second! I thought this was my life I was talking about, but the more I ruminate on those halcyon days of yore, it's all starting to sound suspiciously similar to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.

What gives?

Has Malick captured a universal truth or was my life that pathetic?

No!

A resounding NO!

My relatively uneventful childhood was, finally, much more interesting and poetic than Malick's lugubrious Battle of Ypres upon my gluteal muscles.

Granted, Malick is a filmmaker whose work I otherwise adore, but The Tree of Life stinks like an un-wiped asshole. Worse yet, way too many critics (and audiences of the "pseud" variety) pretended to find merit in this precious nonsense – extolling the virtues of Malick’s ambition and praising him for taking a bold risk.

For me, the only thing Malick took was a bold dump. I can only hope he found it satisfying and didn't forget to wipe.

What happens with pictures like these is that big stars like Brad Pitt take non-roles and desperately try to make something of them - finally giving up and giving in to the grand maestro who is "directing" them. After all, this is supposed to be art - not the usual crap they do that people might actually enjoy.

Basically, Pitt does little more than sleepwalk through the role of the taciturn Dad who beats one or all of his boys (however many there are - we never know for sure) and eventually weeps at the death of one of the aforementioned sons - whichever one it is. I’m not sure if Dad even knows which one of his sons died, but that's probably okay, because I certainly didn’t know, nor do I think anyone else in the audience knew either.

At the end of the day, Pitt varies his three expressions from adoring to mean to sad - that is, when he's not sleepwalking (which, I suppose counts as a fourth expression). This gives those who should know better an opportunity to heap accolades upon a performance that's really anything but.

Sean ("Fuck, look at me, I'm so intense") Penn shows up every so often in what appear to be flash forwards to a time long after Dad has died. He is, apparently, one of the sons, however many there are of the little buggers. Penn is clearly not the son who died. He might as well have kicked the bucket though, because it's clear his soul is bereft of life. He is in pain. Deep pain. Which is fine, I suppose, because so are we, the audience.

Have I mentioned the dinosaurs yet? No? Well, I'm not kidding. At one point, during the non-story of this family in post-war Texas, Malick takes a break from the regularly scheduled programming and delivers a long sequence involving the birth of the universe and, by extension, that of the planet Earth which, of course, involves dinosaurs generated by CGI and many trees - all teeming, no doubt, with life.

Jessica Chastain is the wife and mother of this family that we spend an awful lot of time with, but never really get to know because they ultimately do not exist as characters and as such, only resemble people because they are clearly not dinosaurs.

Nor are they trees.

Chastain has proven - in films in which she has something to do other than bake pies, look at a tree and do laundry - that she is an exquisite actress. Here, she at least appears to perform her chores as wife and mother very well. This is, I trust, acting.

Most of all, Chastain thankfully provides scenery equal to the tree Malick keeps forcing us to look at.

And yes, I talk to the trees and they, in turn, talk to me.

The Tree of Life is rich and bountiful.

Unless you’re talking about the movie.

This is a longer version of a piece that originally appeared in Electric Sheep Magazine. The movie is available for those who really feel they want to buy it on Blu-Ray from eOne.