Tree of Life is worth watching for the primordial “birth of the cosmos” segment alone. It’s like 15 minutes of exploding stars and lava and it’s incredible.
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I’ve never heard of Days of Heaven, but the above posts make it sound more like an overly long cinematographic tech demo than a proper movie. And honestly, I’m not sure I really cared about cinematography even when I had a working eye.
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I like Days of Heaven, and I’m surprised that someone would dislike it that much. But there is no accounting of taste, and I suppose its main problem, which it shares with all Malick’s films after Badlands, is that it tries too hard to be beautiful, which you either buy or not. If you can’t get on the wavelength of the dreamlike mood, or if you find the narrator annoying, you probably won’t enjoy it.
It sits in an uneasy place between more crowd-pleasing 1970s epics like Deer Hunter and art movies like Tarkovsky’s The Mirror. Too slow and vague for the wider audience, and too kitschy and romantic for the arthouse crowd.
The main plot isn’t complicated, but there is a lot of background detail like the depiction of period farming, seasonal labor and the struggle to escape poverty. It is romanticised and probably not very historically correct, but I still find it fascinating.
If you only watch one Terrence Malick movie, though, it definitely should be Badlands.
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“Icare” (2022) is very good for Ancient Greece nerds. It’s about Icarus and the Minotaur.
I’ve written a review on a furry news website:
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I don’t know much about Greek myths but I’ll add this to my list.
It seems like France is responsible for a lot of recently well-received Western animation. Looking at my Letterboxd page I’ve got The Prince’s Voyage, Long Way North, A Cat in Paris, Ernest and Celestine, and The Illusionist all pretty highly rated.
I guess there’s probably a longer tradition I don’t know much about, probably tied to Tintin and Asterix moving off the comics page and becoming big animation properties in the 1980s? I don’t know, just guessing.
By the way, did I mention that ‘Icare’ is a kid-friendly movie?
It seems like France (and other non-US countries) are able to make broadly appealing stuff instead of going too edgy or too juvenile, which seems to be a problem of the U.S. animation market.
Several of the films I listed above are marketed to children in the U.S., but I don’t get the sense that was how they were intended originally (Ernest and Celestine aside).
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And Icare, as far as I understand, is mainly a Luxembourg movie; it says here “Luxembourg (54.87%), Belgique (35.12%), France (10.01%)”, and, judging by the end titles, Luxembourgish version was made first (but wasn’t widely distributed) – and then redubbed in French.
Luxembourg, although a small country, has a well-respected film tradition.
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Production / country breakdowns as percentages are usually about where the financing comes from. Especially with European films. This can overlap with the qualities of which country put in X amount of work, but that’s probably the minority case.
I just say all this as someone who used to work in secondary royalties distribution in Australia. From Australia, European films have traditionally been the hardest to pay out, due to the number of entities involved in financing them and the consequent number of contracts involved. Try sending an email to a strange producer in another country telling them you have money for them. Unsurprisingly, upon first contact, it can often be perceived as a scam and rejected.
-Wade
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Well, The Iris Studio is located in Luxembourg, Carlo Vogele (director, co-writer and the main force behind the movie) is a Luxembourger, and it was Luxembourg’s “Best Foreign Film” submission for Oscars 2023.
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That sounds pretty Luxembourgian!
-Wade
In all fairness, Belgium and Luxembourg both have French among their major, if not official languages and are among the European countries not that well known west of the pond. Conflating their pop culture and media with France’s strikes me as being akin to how many Canadian productions get lumped in with the US or how the US Film industry gets reduced to just Hollywood(and I would imagine accurately crediting places for American-made things would be just as complicated as the European case if broken down by state).
Yeah, I shouldn’t have conflated French-language with France. I was aware that some of the specific films I listed weren’t exclusively productions in France, but I should have looked up the details.
I feel silly about Tintin, since I’ve probably heard it was Belgian before. However, since we’re talking animation, I was thinking of the 90s cartoon which was a co-production between studios in France and Canada and which helped revived it when I was growing up.
(I also don’t have any French background despite my pseudonym, which means “to throw out” in Middle French. The idea was to name my account “throwaway” in a pretentious way, even though I stuck with it.)
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There is no Greek mythology movie that put its stamp on me as much as Clash of the Titans from 1981. I was 10 years old and saw it FIVE TIMES in the theater. It absolutely rocked my world. The stop-motion special effects blew my mind, and I was just old enough to get all bashful about Harry Hamlin in a little skirt. I’m sure it’s an absolutely dreadful movie ('ve never seen it since because I don’t want to ruin it for myself), but at the time it was the bomb for a 10-year-old.
Been watching more TV than movies recently. Loving Succession (how could you not?) and just finished The Righteous Gemstones, which is basically the same story as Succession except funnier and with more heart.
Also on a true crime miniseries binge: watched Unbelievable (a heartbreaking story of law enforcement failure/triumph), Under the Bridge (insanely good teenage actors making me remember how out of control teenagerdom is), and The Night of, which has John Turturro in it, which is always good for me.
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It might set off the camp detector, but this is classic Harryhausen! Jason and the Argonauts, 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Clash of the Titans ignited my imagination as a kid, and I can still feel the spark!
I couldn’t really get into The Righteous Gemstones, but I thought Succession was incredible. One of my new all-time favorites. I’ve watched the whole thing twice already, and I’ve been thinking about watching it again…
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Oh, it’s amazing even today.
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A classic indeed! We saw both the original Clash of the Titans (1981) - IMDb and its remake Clash of the Titans (2010) - IMDb and although the remake has modern special effects, we think the original scored much better on the story and suspense. I also saw the original in the theatre when it came out, and rewatching it was a cool experience.
Fun fact: The river crossing scene Clash of the Titans (1981) CharonTheFerryman.mov (youtube.com) was a direct inspiration for the river crossing scene in my One King to Loot them All - Details (ifdb.org) game 
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Yeah, I’m another Clashophile. Didn’t see it in the cinema but it was heavy on my early 80s VHS rotation. I love and have the score. The film ranks heavily in things that I probably keep emulating in whatever I make.
PS I also saw the remake - and remake sequel - and both are broadly forgettable. Except the scene where they notice the owl from the original film in a bin of odds and ends, and the hero says ‘What’s this?’. And whoever’s assisting him says something like, ‘Never mind that,’ and they just walk away from it. It’s a pretty good joke and way to acknowlegde the owl, and also say, ‘This film won’t have the owl.’
-Wade
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I love it, but I can’t imagine sitting through all that painful cringe more than once. It affects me physically-- I start twisting and contorting, literally cringing, as I’m watching. I cover my eyes sometimes. I can watch a killer in a slasher flick rip someone to bloody bits, no problem, but the family dysfunction makes me feel sick. There’s stuff in it that reminds me of my own family in a really uncomfortable way, although not to that degree, thankfully. Which is all to say that it’s an incredibly well-made, well-written, and well-acted show.
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It didn’t fully click for me until “Prague,” so I initially wanted to rewatch the first season to pay more attention to the opening episodes. But it’s so good that I kept going. It really is Shakespearean. The acting, the writing, the structure! Most shows have a few high points but eventually fumble the ball. Not Succession. It’s basically perfect from start to finish.
Honestly, it has kind of ruined TV in general for me. Apart from Scavengers Reign, nothing else I’ve seen lately has come close to stirring me in the same way.
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I think we all have our own lines, and our own version of excruciating, and excruciating that we like and excruciating that we hate.
I saw thriller/horror film Speak No Evil the other night, which both my friend and I thought was exceptional. And we both agreed it was almost ceaselessly excruciating in its social situations. This is the new thriller about a couple who meet a lively and ‘interesting’ couple on holiday in Italy, agree to visit them at their home in Devon in a moment of haste, and from there they’re stuck with them, and the situation ratchets up really cleverly and awfully.
There’s a scene involving a kid trying to do a dance routine to the Rednex version of Cottoneye Joe, in which James McAvoy as the bullying father is escalating the abuse on this kid and making him do it again and again. This scene had my friend covering his face while I was laughing (and mentally, covering my face). Possibly my favourite scene in a film this year.
I’ve seen director James Watkins’ earlier, brutal thriller Eden Lake (2008) about a couple who go for a vacation in the English countryside and run afoul of some of the worst English louts ever put on film. And both that film and this one share the director’s interest in manners, social mores, and to what extent we’re prepared to tell others or their kids how to behave.
I guess my own version of excruciating-I-hate is where’s there’s a cast of only two or three, and one or two of them are completely intolerable / unreasonable, so there’s no escape. This includes films like Made (2001).
-Wade
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