Director Terrence Malick suddenly prolific, with three movies in queue

By Sarah Sluis

After waiting years for writer/director Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, I was a bit underwhelmed when it came out this May. What's wrong with a little narrative? Even so, Malick remains my favorite working director. No one else captures (or even cares about!) natural imagery the way he does. His films are like watching a "Planet Earth" that's subsumed to the narrative of the humans around the creatures and vistas.

Malick is famously private and refuses to give interviews to the press. Until The Tree of Life, he also had a perfect track record (at least in my book). Given how few films he's created, I suspect he's a perfectionist. I wonder if mixed opinions about his latest work somehow freed him from a fear of failure, because he now has three projects in the works.

The first has already filmed and supposedly will be edited by 2012 (though Malick is a notoriously slow editor, often using the cutting room to transform the work).Today, the Los Angeles Times was able to scrounge up details about the plot. Ben Affleck stars as a philanderer who goes to Paris, encounters a European woman (Olga Kurylenko) and brings her home, marrying her for visa reasons. With the romance fizzling, he takes up with a hometown girl (Rachel McAdams) with whom he has a history. Javier Bardem plays a priest Affleck's character consults about his raffish ways.

Malick's other two projects will shoot back-to-back in 2012. Lawless stars Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and Haley Bennett, who may be Malick's latest ingnue (he has cast unknowns such as Sissy Spacek and Jessica Chastain in the past). Knight of Cups, the second project, will also star Bale and Blanchett, though the movies reportedly do not relate to each other. That picture would also star Isabel Lucas, another young, relatively unknown actress.

None of the pictures has a U.S. distributor, though FilmNation has been serving as a sales rep and production company. Malick has reportedly already received offers for the first movie, though he has turned them down--an enviable position to be in. Let's hope his first movie squeezes into the end-of-year 2012 releases, but knowing Malick, such an optimistic timeline will be a longshot.

Tribeca Film Festival coming to a Peoria television near you

By Sarah Sluis

Taking a cue from IFC Films, which has pursued day-and-date releases of its movies on-demand along with their theatrical release at New York's IFC Theatre and other select art houses, the Tribeca Film Festival will become a distributor of movies both year-round and during the festival. The theatrical platform will be called Tribeca Film, and the online version will be called TFFV (Tribeca Film Festival Virtual).

As someone who has not always had the benefit of living in a city as culturally rich as New York City (seriously, there is so much going on here), nor the inclination to make treks to various city centers for every cool thing going on there, I can see a strong demand for specialty movies finding a way to connect with isolated audiences over their televisions or laptop screens. Most of the people that would take advantage of these movies would have to rent or buy them on DVD anyway. Home exhibition systems that can give the movie an accurate, if not jaw-dropping, presentation, are standard nowadays. Plenty of people in Peoria would be interested!

The movies available on-demand will include niche titles like the environmental documentary Climate of Change, a biopic of someone famous

to select people, Ian Dury, in Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and what

sounds like a version of Eat, Pray, Love, or maybe The Darjeeling

Limited: Road, Movie, which follows a young man's journey through

India. All of these titles sound like good candidates for on-demand,

with their presumably smaller audiences and limited prospects of

theatrical release. Because the movies will premiere on VOD at the same time as the film festival, there will be some added free publicity. Instead of waiting months for the movie to show up on DVD, or, if they're lucky, a local specialty theatre, people will be able to see the movie at the same time as their city cousins. Given the select audience and niche content, I don't really see this as being a threat to theatre exhibitors. For them, showing these kinds of movies would be unprofitable or require an all-out marketing onslaught.

On the Internet, TFFV (Tribeca Film Festival Virtual) costs $45 and will run concurrently with the festival, showing select movies as they premiere at the New York event. There is a free version that offers the standard briefs and recaps, but the select version will have short films, Q&As, and everything to make a non-NYC-based film geek drool.

There is some precedence for this kind of move. Just this year, Sundance released feature-length films on Hulu, which currently exists as a section (sponsored by Bing) with clips from some films and free (ad-supported) feature-length versions of others (including years-old Super Size Me). On television, Sundance also offered three movies on-demand.

The way I see it, these types of alternative distribution ideas are a way to help match the increase in film production. With digital camcorders, making a movie is cheap, and there are far more films made than exhibited. Considering the kind of dreck that's out there, that's a good thing. But for every movie that deserves never to be seen, there's another that didn't reach a wide audience, was too niche, or too odd. I hope that on-demand, self-distribution, and other platforms can help these movies find an audience. And for viewers, it's a way to bring a little bit of that festival glitz to their own homes.