Days of Heaven

“A beautiful meditation on the forces defining tragedy in people's lives. The actors are allowed to act within their settings, letting the story unfold naturally.”

“4K is non negotiable here as it all Terrence Malick. American excellence. Big beauty, big expanse!”

“The vibes of this delirious, slow and slightly meandering movie are unmatched. I urge you to watch it just for the visuals, the theory of mind that made it, and the slice of a very different moment in film. If I were teaching a film editing class, I would ask students to recut it into a more suspenseful, coherent narrative. Because there is one in the many long, artful compositions. But for me, I don't need to care about the plot to love the experience of watching this. Does it make sense? Not really. Does that matter? Not really. Days of Heaven brings you to an imagined frontier within the heightened past of the 1970s. The costumes, sets, actors, everything looks so carefully composed as to feel modern. The stuff of art directors from every era since. Go on, open a container of whatever stuff you enjoy, and spend some time remembering when movies had no need to tell you what to feel. They just let you experience beauty and wonder. This one begs the question, in our time of simple narratives and constant calls to action, of how this ever got made to begin with.”

“fall of 2024 i watched this re-screening in 35mm at braindead studios fairfax. it was a relatively lowkey weekday showing and the sweet curly-haired girl in a crimson i-put-the-laughter-in-manslaughter hoodie a couple rows behind me sidled over to ask how i found the movie after the credits rolled. i said it was somewhat forgettable but i loved the atmosphere it created. she asked if i had plans later- i didn’t- so we hotfooted it to pantheon coffee a ten minute walk down the ave under the october rain and discussed the movie for about an hour until the downpour mellowed into a drizzle. that post-movie debrief over hot chocolate touched on a lot more than just the movie and i confessed how miserable my corporate job left me and she naively asked something along the line of well why are you still in it and i shot her a blasé ‘i know right’ eyeroll with a shrug because it felt pathetic to say i needed the money. but i shared with this stranger far more about what i was struggling with at the time than i ever confided in close friends, it is ironic how sometimes you can be most yourself around the people who know you least. god i think i even cried a little to her. i didn’t have socials then and we didn’t exchange numbers so i will likely never see her again but unbeknownst to her, mariana’s hour-long presence kind of helped me through a rough patch. anytime i come across days of heaven i think of mariana in her insouciant curls and crimson hoodie and that rain-soaked california evening and i want to let her know that i eventually did find it in myself to walk away from the job and boy did it turn out to be a bittersweet pyrrhic victory because i’m even more miserable now. and that maybe debriefing over hot chocolate with a stranger could really help once again. anyway i went off on a tangent here. my point is, the movie was somewhat forgettable. but god i loved the atmosphere it created.”

“I say “maybe she’d meet a character” to myself when I watch my friends drive off after we say goodbye.”

“i want to live inside this film--dreamy, earnest performance from the lovely Sam Shepard”

“One of the all time great films. Just recommended it to a writer friend. You simply can’t go wrong with this one.”