Heaven (19)16
Posted on | November 10, 2008 at 3:12 pm | 4 Comments
I guess it’s Movie Mention Monday, since I missed Movie Review Sunday! Okay, I’ve missed a lot of days since I “came back”, but that’s because of both my laziness and my (still unresolved) Internet problems. I’m on vacation today, so I’d thought I’d sneak in a little ol’ blog entry while I actually have a connection.
My girlfriend got it in her head that she wanted to see the 1978 movie Days of Heaven because of a recommendation she saw somewhere, and so checked it out of the library. I was like “Wha? Isn’t that one of those big-budget three hour-long flops from some formerly A-List director that took years to make and nearly bankrupted a studio?” Turns out I was thinking of Heaven’s Gate from 1980 (and not 1978’s Gates of Heaven either). But if Days of Heaven didn’t also fit that description, it probably should have.
Days of Heaven was directed by reclusive, non-prolific directer Terrence Malick, who has only directed like four movies in 35 years, including the Oscar-nominated best picture The Thin Red Line, which I haven’t seen, but which my friend Pilto describes as “three hours of watching grass grow”. Lucikly, DoH is less than two hours long, although there isn’t much of a story there. And since there isn’t a whole lot of dialog, what story exists has to be gleaned from the actions on the screen. It takes place in 1916 and stars a young Richard Gere as a Chicago steelworker with big, distracting eyebrows who murders his supervisor for some undetailed reason (I’m guessing because the supe insulted his eyebrows). He flees to the wheatfields of Texas along with Brooke Adams, who is pretending to be his sister but is really his lover or his MySpace Friend or accountant or something. I was never totally clear on their relationship. Also tagging along is a young freaky girl played by Linda Manz, who narrates the movie with a really annoying accent/tone of voice, and who also may or may not be related to one or both of them. I was very confused on that point. They all end up working on the farm of a wealthy man played by Sam Shepard, who is apparently dying of some kind of unspecified terminal disease, even though he looks like one of the healthiest, more robust people in the movie. The farmer falls in love with Brooke Adams and gets her to marry him, under the condition that her “brother” and “sister” be allowed to stick around and make trouble. And trouble does ensue. There’s a plague of locusts, a fire, some circus dudes flying biplanes, and a murder or two, but that makes it all sound more exciting than it is.
In the Criterion Collection DVD extras, Gere and Shepard wax nostalgically about the making of the picture, and one of them (I forget which) says that the movie is to be taken as more of a “poem” than an actual film. They claim that there was much more filmed and it had lot more dialog and story, but that was all excised by the director in the editing room (which took two years) in favor of this visual poem. I’ve never been much for watching poems on a 1080p Plasma HDTV, although I suppose that if you do have to watch a poem, that’s one of the better ways to do it. I do have to say that the cinematography is spectacular and the movie does look gorgeous, especially all those scenes of the farmer’s big house sitting all alone on top of the hill with the fields all around. It doesn’t make me want to go live in the Texas panhandle in 1916, but it looks like an okay place to visit.
So, neither N or I was totally thrilled with this, though I’m glad I can knock another “classic” movie off my list. And despite our reaction, she now she really wants to watch Malick’s first big movie Badlands from 1974, since it appears to be not such a snoozefest and neither of us has seen it. So stayed tuned for a Movie Mention of that one eventually.
Latre.
Jogged Fri 11/7 (@ 40°F with a cold, strong wind)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “What Am I Supposed to Do?” (A Flock of Seagulls)
- “I Can’t Imagine the World Without Me” (Echobelly)
- “198090″ (Thunderbirds Are Now!)
- “Use It” (The New Pornographers)
- “Down Among The Dead Men” (Pledge Drive)
- “Here It Is Tomorrow” (Game Theory)
- “Hi-Ya!” (Headlights)
- “Payment For The Babies” (Robert Pollard)
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “what if i’m a bad friend?”.
Comments
4 Responses to “Heaven (19)16”
November 10th, 2008 @ 4:34 pm
Badlands is such a good movie. I suspect you will like it better. Sissy Spacek is perfect, and the young Martin Sheen is a socially maladaptive dreamboat.
November 10th, 2008 @ 6:31 pm
Ditto Paula. “Badlands” is the only Malick movie I’ve ever seen, but I thought it was excellent and it certainly held my interest.
November 11th, 2008 @ 9:05 am
I unrepentantly love all of Malick’s films, and Days of Heaven is probably my favorite. All Malick’s films are basically about… hm, how to put it… about humanity as a part of nature, and only a small part. I certainly understand how other intelligent human beings could find them boring; I just happen to find them incredibly moving. This also may be the only “starring Richard Gere” movie that I have ever enjoyed.
I’m thinking from your reaction to this film that you might not want to see another slow-paced, opaque Miles favorite, Morvern Callar. But I could be wrong. I’d like to be wrong!
Also, Heaven’s Gate is not nearly as bad as its bomb rep, not even close.
November 13th, 2008 @ 12:44 am
I love Days of Heaven, but if someone claimed it was pretentious twaddle I couldn’t really argue with them. The same is not true of Badlands, which is unequivocally brilliant.