the burning reel

Film 1 (of 365) To the Wonder Screenshot from   Terrence Malick's   To the Wonder Terrence Malick's  To the Wonder  pushes the filmmaker's visual style further to abstract than it has ever been. For those of you unfamiliar with Malick's work he continues to push story and plot to the side in favor of powerfully emotional moving imagery. However, this is also a problem. The law of diminishing returns is alive and working in To the Wonder .  So much visual information is being poured over the viewer for such a long time (110 minutes) that I often found myself daydreaming. To be fair, Malick's Tree of Life  is much the same. For some reason I was touched and moved by that film so much more than I was by this one. In Tree of Life  we are in a childhood memory and experiencing an almost spiritual exploration of the character. This means the cinematography was visually supporting the narrative. Granted, it was booed at Cannes. So speaking for...

A screenshot of Olga Kurylenko from Terrence Malick's To the Wonder . I have long desired to watch one movie a day for a year and then write about it online (arguably I should be doing this anyway). First of all I'm doing it for primarily selfish reasons. I want to start expanding the library of cinema in my head and make myself a better storyteller. There are several movie "lists" out there that I can choose from: Roger Ebert's Great Movies  and the Criterion Collection  to name a couple. I could simply pick a list and start viewing from the first to the last. That sounds like a logistical nightmare. Instead I'll sample what I can of those lists  from what I have - namely Hulu and Netflix. This is all well and good, but I want your  input! What should I start with? It's my goal to have a weekly list released on Sunday to give you an idea of what I'll be watching for the next week. I'll spice it up each week with films ranging from co...