Haha, the Internet's music tastemakers HATE your favorite director, Sup Forums. How does that make you feel?
>Song to Song was supposed to be Terrence Malick’s paean to indie rock. The New Hollywood legend spent years documenting SXSW and other Austin music festivals for the movie, making headlines as early as 2011 for a scene in which Christian Bale supposedly pounded bongos with Fleet Foxes. Its three main characters work in the music industry, recording artists join A-list actors in its cast, plenty of its action takes place at live performances, its soundtrack features Julianna Barwick and Sharon Van Etten, and a seven-inch record adorns its poster.
>But despite all that, Song to Song is not really about indie rock—and not just because neither the bongo scene nor Malick’s footage of Arcade Fire and Iron & Wine made the cut. Although there are plenty of musicians on hand to lend credibility, this story has so little to do with the arts of songwriting and performing, its subjects might as well be investment bankers. Beyond the rock‘n’roll window dressing, Song to Song turns out to be just another minor variation on Malick’s favorite theme—the power of love and spirituality to transcend the life-poisoning curses of ambition and greed—and not a very effective one, at that.
>The film begins with a confession: “I was desperate to feel something real. Nothing felt real,” Rooney Mara’s Faye recalls, in one of Malick’s trademark whispery voiceovers. Over a montage that includes shots of men slamming their bodies together in a festival’s muddy circle pit, she confides that she’d been seeking out violent sex. “I wanted to live,” she insists. “Sing my song.”
>Faye is, in fact, a young singer and songwriter, although the shape of her aspirations isn’t entirely clear until midway through the film. She hopes that an entry-level job with a fabulously wealthy music-industry macher named Cook (Michael Fassbender) will be her ticket to success. We watch them go to bed together. “I thought he could help me, if I paid my dues...” she intones.
>Then love intervenes. Faye falls for another musician, BV (Ryan Gosling), and Cook sets about making him a star—a process that takes place almost exclusively offscreen. But she and Cook secretly continue their affair, even as the bonds of ambition and desire bring all three closer together. The triumvirate travels to Mexico, where Faye has an epiphany that her romance with BV is the real thing. No one captures the magic of a world viewed through the lens of infatuation with more golden-lit poignance than Malick’s longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. But the glow fades once Faye and BV settle down together.
>Built on a festering lie (and questionable business deals), none of these relationships can last. As all three characters move on to new lovers and continue chasing fame, money, or debauched oblivion, Malick’s favorite question pops up: can an existence defined by striving and struggle, rather than true love and harmony with the universe, ever bring fulfillment? His cinematic manifesto, 2011’s The Tree of Life, presented the tense, combative “way of nature” and the open, peaceful “way of grace” as two diametrically opposite approaches to life. If you’ve seen that film, Song to Song’s groan-out-loud idyllic ending couldn’t possibly surprise you.
Daniel Wilson
>Considering that Malick went to such extremes to fully situate his latest parable within the Austin music scene, it’s strange that he couldn’t be bothered to write Faye and BV’s development as musicians—rather than as pretty, young vehicles for an allegory about the dangers of ambition—into the script. We barely see them perform. If you timed it, you might find that the camera lingers longer on appreciative shots of Mara’s exposed midriff than on scenes of any character entertaining an audience.
>The large cast of real musicians is frustratingly underutilized, too. Lykke Li and a local Austin singer, Dana Falconberry, both have small roles that could just as easily have been filled by non-musicians. Malick’s festival footage is dominated by mosh-pit and backstage shots. Every once in awhile, a recognizable face (Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Lydon, Iggy Pop, Big Freedia) appears to dispense a morsel of ostensibly unscripted wisdom, in a tented outdoor green room or at a party. Of these cameos, only Patti Smith gets substantial screen time. Amid a sea of dire Malickian clichés (“I love the pain. It feels like life”), her reflections on her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith’s death comprise some of the film’s only dialogue that feels genuine and specific. At one point, she says simply, “I thought I would be with him for the rest of my life, but he died,” and it’s enough to make you long for a whole documentary of artists’ reflections on loss.
Ryder Anderson
>Malick fans who also cherish live music will surely go into Song to Song longing to see him channel the almost religious quality of those performances—to watch Lubezki’s ecstatic camera elevate the imperfect music-festival experience so that those sweltering afternoons look as holy on the screen as they do in decade-old memories. Terrence Malick’s great obsession is earthly transcendence. That he would make a movie about music but neglect to capture the way it helps us detach from our everyday preoccupations, and make contact with some force greater than ourselves, just seems like a missed opportunity.
>It’s not entirely fair to take a director to task for failing to make the film you wish he’d made. Malick’s limited knowledge of the recording industry is also hard to overlook. Cook is either a major-label honcho who does all of his own production or an indie boss with access to a private jet. Parties for what is, presumably, the SXSW crowd too closely resemble the poolside celebrity bacchanals of Malick’s previous movie, Knight of Cups. One features a naked woman covered in sushi, a spectacle Lubezki is happy to zoom in on, but not one you’re likely to witness at any Jansport-sponsored industry mixer. It couldn’t be clearer—or more ridiculous—that the director sees Austin and Hollywood as functionally interchangeable.
>What is most insufferable about Song to Song’s depiction of music and the people who make it, though, is that it’s philosophically shoddy to the point of hypocrisy. Malick frames Smith, Iggy, and the other successful artists he spotlights as sages. He soundtracks his obligatory shots of nature’s majesty with gorgeous songs that run the gamut from classical to classic rock. At the same time, he implies that Faye and BV can only lead fulfilling lives once they shift their focus from their careers to each other.
Justin Thomas
>But what makes them so different from the artists Malick worships, besides their youth and lack of experience? In their own, sui generis ways, Patti Smith and Iggy Pop were both hungry, young strivers once. To imply otherwise is to twist reality into a simplistic, self-serving fairy tale—which is to say, the only kind of story Malick still seems capable of telling. The result is an irreconcilable film that celebrates a life spent making (and, yes, promoting) music and dismisses it as a distraction in the same breath.
>Song to Song offered Malick the chance to complicate the nature-vs.-grace binary he set up in The Tree of Life and has since rehashed in To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, a collection of vignettes about a grieving screenwriter that has just as little to say about the value of creative work. What if there is some element of grace in following inspiration? What if making music—or any kind of art—can be both an act of love and act of ambition? Or, hey, what if there is more than just one way to live a good life?
>Instead of expanding upon Malick’s philosophy, Song to Song simply restates it for a fourth time. Frankly, it’s painful to watch a once-brilliant filmmaker spin his wheels like this, planting facile morality plays within casually lurid soap operas as though convinced that his audience still hasn’t absorbed the not-particularly-complex take on metaphysics he’s spent years peddling. Maybe it is Malick’s own creative gridlock that has made him so disinclined to publicly ponder what it means to make art.
Damn, Malick and footfags BTFO with wit and class! How will Sup Forums ever recover?
Grayson Anderson
>a movie about Roo Roo looking for violent sex
Sounds like the movie of the fucking year to be honest
Jordan Anderson
She has a threesome with Hershlag and Fassbender
Ian Brown
...
Charles Gutierrez
Stereocuck weighed in, too--and, surprise surprise, they also hated it.
>It was silly of me to think that a Terrence Malick movie set against the backdrop of the Austin music scene would come anywhere close to capturing the reality of that scene, or even the music industry in general. But the idea seemed almost promising, or an least like an exciting prospect: Get a bunch of big-name musicians to appear — Lykke Li, Patti Smith, and Iggy Pop have the most memorable roles, but it’s filled with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos from Big Freedia, Tegan And Sara, Diplo, and Florence Welch, and smaller parts for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Lydon, and Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo — and shoot amidst the festival chaos that happens during South By Southwest, Austin City Limits, and Fun Fun Fun Fest. But Song To Song is in step with Malick’s more recent work — Knight Of Cups in particular with its Hollywood focus — in that it wastes a potentially interesting setting by indulging in vacuous interpersonal melodrama where the stakes feel just as low as our investment in the characters, and the location is little more than a vessel.
Samuel Smith
>The story is simple enough, though Malick’s preference for a nonlinear narrative makes it needlessly complicated to follow along. Young songwriter Faye (Rooney Mara) is our entry point into Malick’s Austin. She starts sleeping with music business executive Cook (Michael Fassbender) in hopes of getting ahead in the industry — “I thought you had to know the right people, get close to them,” Mara says in a heavy-handed voiceover at the start of the film. It doesn’t work out, of course, and while still seeing Cook, Faye gets involved and falls in love with struggling musician BV (Ryan Gosling). Cook and BV also have a contentious creative relationship, and thus begins our triangle. Eventually, BV finds out about Faye cheating on him with Cook and leaves her, and all three of them embark on new relationships at different points in the film: Cook with Natalie Portman’s character Rhonda, a waitress who meets a tragic fate thanks to his emotional unavailability; BV with Cate Blanchett’s Amanda; and Mara tries out a new path with a character portrayed by Bérénice Marlohe. But none of these pairings feel particularly fated or worth the overwrought attention they’re given, and the takeaway from the film is an empty sort of “live life from song to song because you never know when it’s going to be your last” type of message.
Samuel Torres
>Pretty underwhelming, huh? Malick is talented, of course, so there are a lot of beautifully shot scenes and individual moments that almost reach poignancy during the film’s two-hour runtime. And the central cast comprises top-notch actors who do their best to sell their roles, but nothing coheres in any meaningful or significant way. As with most of Malick’s films this decade, it asks half-questions with no answers. And while conclusions or grand themes aren’t necessary to make a great movie, his listlessness here feels so uninspired. There doesn’t seem to be much of a point to it beyond watching pretty (exclusively white) people do banal things, with a lot of pristine Austin architecture in the background.
>Though both Mara and Gosling’s characters are “struggling” musicians, at no point in the film does it feel like they’re putting in any of the hard work that goes along with being successful. Music is used as an accessory, and not even a compelling one at that. There’s very little commentary on the interplay between business and the arts — the relationship between Gosling and Fassbender’s characters grows increasingly contentious throughout the film as BV comes to the realization that Cook screwed him out of money in his contract, but the most it amounts to is a couple of bottles smashed on the floor of a bar in a display of machismo.
Cooper Phillips
>There’s no indication that any of these people are talented, though the scenes of Mara yucking it up on stage with a backing band played by the Black Lips while Val Kilmer chainsaws an amp or the number of times Gosling serenades with a guitar seem to suggest we’re supposed to think that they have that special spark. During one of the central couple’s first meetings together, they bond over music that Faye is listening to on an iPod Classic while standing poolside at a ritzy party. Sharing an earbud pair can be an intimate bonding moment between lovers, but there’s nothing in the film to suggest any sort of that fire between them. It’s not even really apparent that Mara’s character wants to be a musician until Cook offers to sign her to a record contract at one point, creating the jealously that eventually eats away at her relationship with BV.
>The closest that the film gets to capturing the intense passion and dedication that comes with making music are the few times it allows the actual musicians to speak from the heart. Patti Smith plays herself in a couple of scenes as a mentor to Mara’s character, and in one she talks about the death of her husband and her doubts about ever being an artist with longevity. “I never thought I would live long,” she says. “You know, I’d be an artist and die young of tuberculosis or something, like Charlotte Brontë.” Lykke Li appears in the film as one of Gosling’s lovers who is also a musician, and her character — who is analogous to but not completely herself — has some interesting things to say about the economy of fame, but it’s undercut by a flat performance of her and Gosling covering Bob Marley And The Wailers’ “It Hurts to Be Alone.” Even Iggy Pop’s brief, frenetic appearance backstage at a festival has a certain electricity to it that lacks in most of the scenes between the actors who are playing musicians.
Ryder Rodriguez
>If only those lived-in experiences had translated over to the plodding love affairs that occupy the rest of the film, maybe Malick could have drawn some parallels between the struggles of love and the struggles of creating art. And while there’s a fun jolt of recognition, as a music writer and fan, in watching Mara looking downtrodden and tired, leaning against a fence with FADER Fort wristbands up and down her arm, it ultimately means nothing and doesn’t feel true to the reality of creating music today. Maybe that wasn’t Malick’s intention with the film at all, but then why choose such an oddly specific backdrop and weirdly insular world to tell what appears to be yet another story of boring, hot people feeling dissatisfied? That can be done anywhere, and it has been done much more compellingly than this.
As far up their asses as they are, at least p4k has better writers than Stereogum.
Wyatt Roberts
When will Malick fags realize this guy is a pretentious poser and his movies are laughably bad?
Kayden Phillips
they love him dearly
Carson Morris
When will you go back to ?
Isaac Kelly
why are you faggot Sup Forumstants so obsessed with pitchfork? it's shit, has been for 15 years. stop giving it traffic and attention and it will go away
Samuel Phillips
this is exactly the movie I wanted
Colton Jones
>P4K >Internet's music tastemakers
oh shit is it 2005 again?
Hunter Lopez
>some guy telling Malick wath he should do with his movie Autism
Joshua Lopez
>"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."
John Russell
The Dissolve was decent, at least. RIP
Aiden Powell
I honestly think Terry has forgotten how to make an honest film. He was out of the game too long.
Levi Hill
Sure, decent. But the quality was declining in the end, and the comments section was literally( literally) a major SJW safe space, full of trannies and assorted freaks
Carson Howard
I loved Knight of Cups, critics hated it and the opinions on letterboxd are crazy mixed.
Fuck their opinions. I'm the master of my kino.
Cooper Brown
>Fuck their opinions. I'm the master of my kino. This. It's a sad state of affairs that most of Sup Forums gets their opinions from the critics--and Sup Forums itself.
Josiah Watson
>reading the comments
Parker Ward
They were there, you checked them
Caleb Anderson
Meant to the frog
Jayden Ortiz
Actually I didn't; I had a shitty old laptop running Windows XP then and they would never load.
Lincoln Lopez
>P4K Stopped reading there
Jackson Bell
>p4k
Hunter Hall
we are not alone
Aiden Bailey
kek
Easton Collins
>different reviewers have different opinions
hot damn. if anyone takes pitchfork scores seriously you deserve all the butthurt you are inflicting on yourself. they're only good for identifying up and comers who have already broken and writing interesting if slightly florid reviews. also i'll never forgive them for trashing jet's get born, which was a solid pub rock album and can still get a reaction out of any non-pretentious wanker when be my girl is cranked at a party
Leo Adams
I'm pretentious wanker and I think it's pretty good. Fuck you, man
Jaxon Wood
>A masterpiece, life-changing and other superlatives I stand by
>If you know the feeling of needing to cry but not being able to, you will probably enjoy submerging yourself in this film which is just saturated with that feeling.
>The 40-minute mark in a movie usually comes with the descending thoughts as a viewer: “Am I enjoying this? Is this good?” I would encourage you to resist the urge to address these and just let the viewing experience wash over you.
Mason Stewart
>When the 15 year younger gen x faggot who gave an album which you wrote in a suicidal haze a 2 which effectively stalled your career at the time ends up a balding nu male cuck and you're having a fantastic time getting jacked, winning oscars™ pumping half a dozen kids into an unbreakable Millennialfu and everything is alright.
Nathan Davis
meh, it was just the AV Club's golden era film writers past their prime
Colton Cox
>Pitchfork
John Moore
How likely is it that based Armond and Brody will love it?
James Morgan
Armond loved Knight of Cups. Very likely.
Cameron Russell
Brody already loves it. He writes about Malick beautifully.
Jordan Ward
Any nudity?
Dylan Gonzalez
God bless
Samuel Taylor
>who cares what critics think? >unless it's a critic who agrees with me
Liam Ramirez
>Without sacrificing any of the breathless ecstasy of his urgent, fluid, seemingly borderless images (shot by Emmanuel Lubezki), Malick girds them with a framework of bruising entanglements and bitter realizations, family history and stifled dreams. His sense of wonder at the joy of music and the power of love is also a mournful vision of paradise lost.
— Richard Brody
Christopher Morgan
threesome with roon-roon, hershlag, and fassbender
Cameron Bailey
>music writers doing a film review i'll pass, and it seems like they are more upset that it isn't more about musicians and the music industry, coupled with not understanding what a Malick film is like (or maybe a bias against his style)
Song to Song got a huge number of walkouts at its SXSW screening, so I'm guessing a lot of people didn't know what they were getting into and expected a conventional film despite Malick's relatively high profile
Evan Brooks
Malick is delivering foot nudity in his recent flicks
pls be true
Ian Young
>huge number of walkouts Always a sign of kino
Jose Williams
Really depends on the reason, like is it gore or just sheer boredom? I doubt it's gore. If it's full penetration on screen with the aforementioned threesome then I might be enticed
Lincoln Stewart
OFFICIAL TERRENCE MALICK POWER RANKINGS/TIER LIST
GOD TIER 1. The New World 2. The Thin Red Line 3. The Tree of Life
KINO TIER 4. Days of Heaven 5. To the Wonder
OK TIER 6. Voyage of Time 7. Badlands
SHIT TIER 9001. Knight of Cups
personally, not looking forward to Song To Song but Radegund seems like it could be grand kino
Easton Myers
REEEEE WHEN IS VOYAGE OF TIME GETTING A VOD RELEASE REEEEEEE
Jack James
With Malick, it's because people get offended with his unique style. Fucking plebs
>Malick >having a shit or ok tier Dumb tier poster
Nolan Brooks
Should've seen it in IMAX
Lucas Barnes
>tfw rural and suburban retard No IMAX for miles and miles, user.
Sebastian Reed
Knight of Cups is awful
Ethan Hughes
no u
Ryan Mitchell
No, not in any way. Actually, anyone who really appreciates Malick, would never think that. You're a phony.
Isaiah Reyes
>P4K >relevant >2017
lol
Jordan Campbell
It's a glorified life insurance commercial.
Sebastian Thomas
indie rock is shit why should anyone care what malick wants to do with it, he's more important than the entire faggot genre himself
Jayden Clark
Indie rock and Terence Malick movies are the 2 worst things ever
Julian Hernandez
>Malick’s favorite theme—the power of love and spirituality to transcend the life-poisoning curses of ambition and greed—and not a very effective one, at that. t. never watched a malick film just read summary about it on wikipedia
Mason Cook
>Sup Forumsfags are butthurt the kinomeister didn't make a 2 hr long music video
In other news, water wet
Brayden Roberts
Aggie!
Thomas Davis
Sup Forums > Sup Forums desu
Charles Morgan
>Sup Forums > Sup Forums desu And yet kino > music
Funny how the world works
Joseph Evans
sanctimonious and juvenile. written by an homely woman or low testosterone numale.
Levi Bailey
Daily reminder the Pitchfork tried to start a film criticism spin off site and it was a colossal failure because of every piece was exactly like this one. Hipster douche with no knowledge of film trying to mask their ignorance with a pretentious tone.
Charles Clark
based, and the biblical reference is astute.
Jace Sullivan
>Badlands >Ok tier
Opinion discarded
Caleb Sanders
>Paradise Lost >biblical reference
Carter Roberts
>Sup Forums plebs understanding a sophisticated medium such as film
Andrew Gonzalez
Not gonna lie, former Malick fan here. This is fucking hilarious watching Terry crash and burn. But in all seriousness we can't let this guy make any more films.
Grayson Walker
The term "Paradise Lost" is in of itself a biblical reference to the book of genesis, the fall from the garden, being that it's Milton's literal retelling
Keep reaching tho
John Cruz
>How does that make you feel?
Everyone is entitled to opinions, including tourist plebs that only watch capeshit that think they are properly equipped to analyze art.
Sebastian Hall
You must be one of the anons shilling capeshit threads without end.
God forbid there be artists out there actively aiming for originality.
Tyler Cooper
i bet you're a dadrocker
Ethan Perez
what does he mean by this?
Tyler Perez
in the time it took to come out, Thee Oh Sees (who star in it) broke up, reformed, and released like 10 albums in that period.
Cameron Cox
The only way p4k would have liked this is if Malick had used Beyonce, Arena Granda, weekend, Drake etc instead of the musicians that ended up making it into the movie.
Liam Sanchez
Not those guys but """indie rock""" is the "dadrock" of gen x/millenials. Garden State will always be essential cringe-core. The Shins will always suck. Arcade Fire will only ever have one good album. Madvillainy will always be the best album of 2004.
Joshua Robinson
More like Chance the Rapper, Jamila Woods, Saba, Noname, Kweku Collins, Towkio, Joey Purp, and Taylor Bennett
Cooper Perry
He's like anti=pretentious. Not hard to get at all.
Zachary Foster
>The Shins will always suck no >Arcade Fire will only ever have one good album Neon Bible is good, too
>"indie rock" is the "dadrock" of gen x/millenials. nah, just millenials. gen x would've already been in their 30s at the height of early/mid '00s """""indie"""""" rock, and are associated with 80s/early 90s college rock/alternative, forever linked with actually great bands like Sonic Youth, Pavement, R.E.M., Guided by Voices, etc.
Nicholas Morris
tl;dr muh indie bands got cut in the editing room!!! wahhh!!
retard
i hope green day is the only band in the movie
Blake Turner
NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF!!! NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF!!!
Dominic Green
>musicfags, who are supposed to be into more sensitive and abstract approach to artistic creation, mood, tempo, etc, completely missing the point of his experimental work with evocative editing and complete use of the audiovisual medium in ways no others are doing, instead complaining it's not a conventional theater-influenced three-act plot-and-characters-focused story about musicians like hundreds of cinematically unimaginative movies have already done before Terry is pure K I N O in the non-ironic non-meme meaning of the term, he will always alienate the plebs because he's not giving them the comfort of conventions, despite using A-List actors
>>“This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.” – Dziga Vertov, 1929
Landon Hill
Do you think Terry voted for Trump or Hillary?
Christopher Morris
Yeah, but it's the Gen X faggots who grew up on Sonic Youth, Pavement, R.E.M., Guided by Voices, Pixies, Elliott Smith, Jason Molina, etc. who made p4k-era "indie" rock popular in the first place. And now the millenials that grew up with early-mid 2000's "indie" rock and mall punk commercial emo are solely into SJW-tier pablum like the Knowles sisters and meme-rap
Logan Peterson
The Avon is pleb-tier. Cable Car is the REAL arthouse cinema in Providence.
John Butler
Probably Jill Stein or pic related
Lincoln Cox
bump
Levi Peterson
NEW THREAD >>
Adrian Martinez
Did any of Malicks films in the past 10 years or so, including Tree Of Life break even at the Box Office?
Where does he get the money to keep shooting these?
Daniel Moore
He shot Tree of Life and Voyage of Time simultaneously and then To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song simultaneously right after all in the span of 2-3 years. Tree of Life made ~20 mill profit, so that probably helped with the next three and Radegund.
