Terrence Malick's SONG TO SONG Panned as "Humiliating Wreck of a Movie" in Early Reviews
For a director whose films have often been referred to as "inaccessible," Terrence Malick doesn't seem to have strayed too far from that perception with his latest movie, judging by the early reviews.
Song to Song, which had its world premiere as the opening-night film at the South by Southwest festival last week, is set amid the Austin, Texas, music scene and stars Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling, Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman. The film follows two intersecting love triangles between a music executive (Fassbender), his business partner (Gosling), a budding musician (Mara) and an ex-teacher (Portman). The movie is short on traditional dialogue and heavy on voiceovers and improvisation, which
the cast said at the Friday night premiere created a unique challenge (the reclusive Malick was not in attendance).
Said Fassbender: "It's a lot of improvisation. You read the sides, they're very dense. For me, it's hard to learn lines quickly, so it’s about getting a feel or flavor of what is happening in the scene and then improvising it." Added Mara: "It was kind of hard to know how to prepare because everything was so vague."
Critics also are having a hard time wrapping their heads around the latest from Malick, who made his name with
Badlands but then famously dropped out of view for 20 years after 1978's
Days of Heaven, returning with the critically acclaimed
The Thin Red Line. In a late-career rush, Malick has directed
The Tree of Life, To the Wonder and
Knight of Cups — all to mixed, at best, receptions.
Giving the movie a C-plus grade, IndieWire's Eric Kohn argues that the movie is redundant and overlong at 130 minutes.
ComingSoon.net's Joshua Starns
writes that Malick is "stuck in a rut."
The Playlist's Rodrigo Perez
gives the film a C grade, noting that as a filmmaker, Malick "has abandoned narrative cinema, for a fragmented, quasi-experimental form, that while once unique, has curdled into cliche, and even self-parody."
Marten Carlson,
reviewing the movie for Consequence of Sound, described the movie as an "overbearing take on the music business" with "no emotional or philosophical through-line to carry the audience." Calling the movie "just a parade of music and film celebrities," Carlson adds that it "lacks the soul of Malick’s best work."
Robbie Collin of the U.K. paper
The Telegraph notes that the love scenes don't quite work.
"Sex and Malick have never been an easy fit, but
Song to Song plumbs new boreholes of cringe in that department, and its various bedroom encounters, shot in the usual extreme wide-angle by the director’s regular cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, are gauzy and bloodless," Collin writes. "The film is to sex as a lepidopterist is to a butterfly cabinet — it gets right in there with the magnifying glass, but perish the thought that anything might flap."
Variety's Peter Debruge
notes that Malick took a 20-year break between 1978's
Days of Heaven and 1998's
The Thin Red Line.
"It pains me to say it, but Malick might want to consider another lengthy hiatus," Debruge writes. "Rushed into production mere months after his nearly-self-parodic, Hollywood-set
Knight of Cups, Song to Song finds the maestro in broken-record mode, rehashing more or less the same themes against the backdrop of the Austin music scene — merely the latest borderline-awful Malick movie that risks to undermine the genius and mystery of his best work."
Entertainment Weekly's Joe McGovern gives the movie an even worse D grade.
"In terms of content and meaningfulness, Terrence Malick’s
Song to Song is the cinematic equivalent of a Trump press conference," he
writes. "Incoherent, disconnected, self-interrupting, obsessed with pointless minutiae and crammed full of odd, limp stabs at profundity from a closed-off man in his 70s who apparently has no ability to edit or accept constructive criticism. Malick, too, still inspires a passionate minority of hardcore devotees who will defend everything he does, no matter how inept or ludicrous, out of some bizarre sense of base loyalty towards the man who made
Days of Heaven 39 years ago. Even for those groupies, this new humiliating wreck of a movie — the reclusive director's worst ever — presents a test of will."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...umiliating-wreck-a-movie-early-reviews-985468
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