I am 42. For more than half my life, Terrence Malick had only directed two movies. He returned to movies in 1998 with The Thin Red Line, and it would take another seven years for his follow up, 2005's The New World. It took only six years later to get The Tree of Life. And since 2011, what's happen in seven years? Three feature length films already on home video, a documentary, and another film that may yet be released this year. In thirty two years Malick made his first four features. In seven he made his second four. And though The Tree of Life topped a lot of year end lists and won prizes, Malick is one of those artists that people describe as pretentious even when they like his work. Add to that, the next three films - To The Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song - were not exactly wide releases that got little critical or commercial support. Yes, there are still Malick cheerleaders, but that leads to the other big sea change.
Sure, we may get a New York Times review of this release, but The Dissolve is no more. The AV Club currently has no review. Blu-ray review sites have already put up their pieces, and it's hard to imagine a lot of local newspapers running a review, outside of maybe a home video corner-type mention. There is no primary film critics any more as there is no national platform that doesn't extend to all critics. There is no Roger Ebert, and though Criterion is respected as a curator of the canon, there are no more video stores, so the only people who are going to watch this are people who want to buy it and people who go to libraries. I spent a long time writing for Collider, and they probably would have covered the film if I was still writing Blu-ray reviews, but they are on the hustle, they wrote a story about Avengers being sorted at Hogwarts because they knew it was a cute stupid story that people would share. The internet tends to share stuff like that over - say - three thousand word articles on the analysis of L'Argent, to make a not entirely inaccurate false equivalency.
On top of all that is the very act of making a longer cut is no longer special. Sure, you can blame unrated cuts of comedies for this, but this extended version wasn't Criterion and a squad of dedicated restoration experts dedicating themselves to reassembling a director's pruned vision. This was about letting Malick fuck around with all his footage to deliver a longer version. There are no still images for missing sequences, nothing seems to have been lost.
And yet, this is still special. And yet, this is one of the most important cinematic events of the year.
