#747 The Thin Red Line (1998)

Directed by: Terrence Malick
Starring: Sean Penn, Jim Caviezal and Nick Nolte
Genre: War
IMDB

War don’t ennoble men. It turns them into dogs… poisons the soul.

The Thin Red Line doesn’t want to inspire feelings of patriotism in you. It doesn’t want to make you proud of your American soldiers fighting overseas. It wants to drop you in the middle of the fight. It wants to show you the devastation a bullet can cause, and then tear you away before you can process it. It wants to put you in the head of a young man in a strange land as gunfires burst all around him and his buddies are cut down before his eyes. It’s an anti-war film, not in a political sense, but in a moral sense.

Terrence Malick is a unique filmmaker for his generation. He’d be a much better fit (and probably much more critically praised) making films alongside Orson Welles and Howard Hawks, filmmakers who understood the camera as an actor and told their stories with visuals as much as plot. The Thin Red Line is not your traditional war movie, and for that reason it wasn’t well received when it was released. In contrast to Saving Private Ryan (to which it will always be linked), people couldn’t get behind a war movie with more talking than shooting. Instead of contrasting the two films, I’ll contrast two scenes. The famous Normandy beach invasion in SPR is famous because it’s a technical marvel. Beautifully shot and realized, it is undoubtedly inspiring to watch. We are with the men as they travel across the Atlantic, we watch as they anticipate the worst, and watch again as they are thrown into something that’s beyond what they could have possibly imagined. We root for our soldiers against the evil Nazis and despite the carnage, we feel good. In TTRL we are again faced with young men in boats approaching a beach landing expecting the worst, expecting to die in a firefight. They arrive… to nothing. The beach is silent, not even a breeze blows through the trees. It is a terrifying scene. The captain approaches a young soldier who arrived to the island earlier. The soldier tells him, “they have fish that live in the trees”. The point, throw out all your expectations. This is a foreign land, this is a foreign enemy and we are facing something much worse than 50,000 German soldiers on a beach… we’re facing the unknown.

The Thin Red Line is my favorite war movie. Some critics will say it’s too cerebral. I’ve never been to war, but I promise you if I was, my mind would be racing a million miles a second. I picture war as a physical battle against the enemy, and a mental battle against yourself, and no other film depicts that dichotomy as well as The Thin Red Line.

#584 Boogie Nights (1997)

Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore
Genre: Drama
IMDB

Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino will forever be linked together as incredibly skilled directors who made their debut films in the 1990s. Both directors first two films are now modern classics, and many believe that P.T.’s one-two punch of Hard Eight and Boogie Nights out-duels Quentin’s first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. While I might argue that P.T. has had the better career up until this point, I believe that he has never made a film that rivals either Dogs or Pulp Fiction. Boogie Nights is undeniably stylish and perfectly acted, but it seems to get muddled in it’s middle 45 minutes and P.T. resorts to cliche plot devices to move towards the finale.

The cinematography in Boogie Nights is in a word, brilliant. Elswit’s camera wanders around the pitch perfect streets of 1970′s-80′s L.A., seemingly incidentally catching the action, never making conclusions about the characters, merely documenting their lives. P.T. Anderson may be the best of the young generation of directors, and Boogie Nights is the film that put him on the map (though not his best; Magnolia anyone?). I always find it amazing that P.T. was able to pull together such a stellar stable of actors for this film, but then I look back and realize that this film made many of the actors who star in it, and that is as high a praise as a film can hope to attend, and a testament to the skill of it’s director.