Stewball wrote:and I was huge on The Tree of Life.
There's a handful users on here (including me) who hated both ToL and TTW, but did give high ratings to his prior films. What I don't understand is how people can love ToL, but hate TTW. It seems that people like to think of ToL as some kind of philosophical masterpiece, but to me it has the exact same problems as TTW: A narrative that is much too loose, pointless characters (Penn's character, Bardem's character, etc.. both actors said in interviews that they didn't know what they were doing or how they were contributing to the narrative).. Basically just people walking around and looking at each other.. Plenty of nice shots yes, but it all doesn't add up to much, so for me they are just pretentious. I think there is more to movies than watching people walk around in buildings (ToL) and dancing around in supermarkets and laundromats (TTW)
Malick seems to be on a roll now, multiple movies in 1 year, and shooting back-to-back (Uwe Boll style).. If his next 3 movies are received as poorly as TTW then I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people revising their opinion on ToL.
Before he would take a long time (years) to develop a script.. Nowadays he's just doing it on the go, writing down new ideas each morning before the shoot.. At the rate he's going now, it doesn't seem like he's very critical anymore about his work (his 'fans' will love it anyway, and his crew will do most of the job anyway and give him the fancy images+sound that he needs for presenting his flawed ideas), so I'm not really surprised by the way his last movies have been turning out
