Michael Leary on Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven

film-think’s Michael Leary has just posted thoughts on Terrence Malick’s work in Badlands and Days of Heaven

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If Beale Street Could Talk

Alissa Wilkinson at Vox praises the new movie from Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight: “[C]inema that dares us to sit with the story, to immerse ourselves in its beauty rather than be propelled along by its plot, is still rare from an American filmmaker. Jenkins loves his characters, and trusts us to love them enough to be patient.”

Quotable

“C.S. Lewis once observed that while many people use art, only a very few receive it. … We only receive art when we let it call our own lives into question. If the words of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, strike us as comfortable and perfectly in tune with our own confident common sense, our likes and dislikes, our budgets, and our actions toward strangers and foreigners, then receiving the words of Jesus is probably not what we’re doing. We may quote a verse, put it in a PowerPoint presentation, or even intone it loudly with an emotional, choked-up quiver, but if it doesn’t scandalize or bother us, challenging our already-made-up minds, we aren’t really receiving it.”

– David Dark, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything

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“Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is their suggestiveness.”

– Nathaniel Hawthorne

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“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

– Nelson Mandela

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“The public have always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.”

– Oscar Wilde

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For more of the quotable wisdom that captures the vision of Looking Closer, check out The Looking Closer Book of Wisdom.

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Looking for Looking Closer’s archive of film reviews?

Here it is.

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What is a “nous”? What does “theoria” mean?

These two words are at the heart of Looking Closer’s vision.

Michael Leary on Terrence Malick's Badlands and Days of Heaven

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Michael Leary on Terrence Malick's Badlands and Days of Heaven

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