Song to Song

BV (Ryan Gosling) and Faye (Rooney Mara) are musicians. Cook (Michael Fassbender) is a producer. Rhonda (Natalie Portman) is a waitress. BV has a fling with Amanda (Cate Blanchett) and Faye with Zoey. These relationships start, conflict, stop, and detour in the Austin music scene.

Terrence Malick continues to make these beautiful-looking dreamlike movies. It's beyond beauty but the story telling is muddled. His style of filmmaking is deliberately disjointed which makes all these complicated relationships hard to follow. It's also emotionally distant. Mara and Gosling have these droning voices which don't help in this case. It's a beautiful movie but the complicated relationship jumping loses me along the way. There is a bit guerrilla filmmaking as Malick steals scenes during real music festivals. This would work much better with fewer relationships.

I always go to a Terrence Malick movie hoping to find once again something akin to the transcendent vision firmly grounded in the real world that I encountered when I first saw "Days of Heaven" (1978), a movie that combined gorgeous cinematography with a compelling plot. My hopes were dashed yet again with "Song to Song." The visual beauty is here, but the movie feels bloated, self-indulgent, and disconnected. Malick's technique of splicing together seemingly random footage overlaid with barely audible interior monologue has by now become formulaic, and he seems incapable, unwilling, or afraid to deliver a sustained scene in which characters actually exchange meaningful dialogue. And speaking of characters, one after another is introduced for no apparent reason, as if quantity could make up for the fact that none of them are developed, and their utter shallowness foreshortens any depths the movie might be trying to plumb. Finally, the movie went on so long that I left feeling too exasperated and exhausted to hold on to the shreds of visual beauty that it offered.

I'm not someone who thought there was nothing of worth in To The Wonder or Knight of Cups. However, they did seem to be treading a lot of unoriginal waters. Considering the reviews for Song to Song I also expected it to be around the same quality, but to my surprise I've finally seen Malick's true talent blossom again. I think this film is unique in his filmography up until this point. It tells a coherent story of intersecting characters' lives in its usual Malick way. I definitely think this is underrated and I hope people start to be more favorable towards it.

My God I am all here for a great experimental, artistic movie, but this was just boring. Despite all the great cinematography, the message from this movie could be told in 30 minutes and was explored so much better in another 100 movies. The scene with Holly Hunter in the parking lot was the best one, but it only lasted a few seconds. Besides that, it was just an accumulation of beautiful faces flerting together (good acting nonetheless). And where was the music? The music could have saved the movie. Filming the film at a festival and putting on some old music legends doesn't do the job.

The only reason I gave this such a high rating is because of the cast. The casting is great but Gosling said their was no script, this is just a drawn out boring film and it's hard to believe the original take of this was 8 hours. Nothing to spoil because it's just drawn out every day boring couple talking. If you are dedicated to see your fave celeb in every film they did then sit through that's about it.