http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Red_Line_(1998_film)
I've been on standby for work all last week and this weekend, meaning I need to stay close to my computer in case I get a call and have to log in to our system. Which means I've been home every night last week and all this weekend. Which means I'm watching a lot of TV and movies while Melanie runs around doing other things.
Today I watched "The Bride of Frankenstein" from 1935, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" from 1962, and "The Thin Red Line" from 1998.
I thought I'd seen "The Thin Red Line" before, but nothing was familiar about it, so I guess not. I didn't realize it was a Terrence Malick film, or maybe I'd forgotten, and I'm pretty impressed by it. It's the kind of movie that doesn't need a review so much as a dissertation. Elegant, poetic, thoughtful, intelligent, philosophical, kind of spacey in a way (in a good way) because it's more about emotion, life, and feeling than plot. Not that it's plotless, but the story isn't really the point. It's kind of an examination of life and war and nature, and is really special. I don't always go for these kinds of movies, but I love this one.
It helps that I've seen Malick's "Tree of Life," another meditation on life, so I recognize the filmmaker's vibe. "The Thin Red Line" is a little more grounded than "Tree of Life" and that's a good thing, but it's still very meditative. Roger Ebert said, "Actors like Sean Penn, John Cusack, Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin find the perfect tone for scenes of a few seconds or a minute, and then are dropped before a rhythm can be established." I disagree. I like the movie more than Ebert did (he gave it three stars). I think it's easy to expect a more conventional film with more conventional rhythms when a movie is linked to a genre, the war movie, but you can't say this film lacks or has disjointed rhythms. I think the whole thing goes along at its own pace and weaves in and out of lives almost languorously and absolutely not without rhythm, it kind of swoops in and out like a bird. Maybe it's a little disjointed in a standard narrative sense, but it does hold together within its own logic. You don't always know at first if one sequence immediately follows another or maybe precedes it, and we get flashbacks from some of the characters mixed in with the "present" action, but I like that, it creates a mood rather than a strictly linear plot. Perhaps Ebert was reacting to the difficult production the movie had; its first cut was five hours long and it took months to get it down to its current three-hour running time. But I don't think the final cut is fragmented, I think it's a whole that works very well and has a kind of grace to it. Very interesting movie, I liked it very much. It also depicts battles, war, in a way that seems more convincing than other war movies I can think of. Nothing is glorified and it doesn't have that kind of artificial or stylized Hollywood look other war movies have. Great flick.
"Liberty Valance" was OK, but I'm not a big western fan. I wanted to watch it because it's so famous and influential, and I liked it more than a lot of other westerns from the 40s and 50s (this is a bit later from 1962), but I'm not the best audience for it. I enjoyed the cast and it was fun to see Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne in a film together, I think it was the first (and only?) time that happened. And it looked great, but it was only OK.
I probably have about 30 more movies backed up in my TiVo. I'll read about an interesting movie and then punch the title into the TiVo. Whenever the movie shows up on cable, the TiVo records it. Lately I'm working my way through the list starting with the movie that's been in the que the longest and going forward. Next up is "Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia."
