Word: caste
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brings the warring family together. As Ahmad, Brandon Hammond is superb: his serious eyes are alert, his bearing natural. He points the film up the road it should have taken. Didn't, though. The dialogue plays like song cues without the songs, and the rest of a talented cast is wasted. Soul Food aims to be a banquet of feelings, but mostly it serves up tripe...
...certainly wouldn't have guessed that Malick would be the one directing seemingly every other male movie star in Hollywood in a big-scale World War II combat epic. The picture is The Thin Red Line, based on the James Jones novel about the battle of Guadalcanal. The cast includes George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, Gary Oldman, Sean Penn, Bill Pullman and John Travolta. And they are only, with the exception of Penn, members of the supporting cast...
...film's core players are a group of mostly unknowns who portray the grunts and noncoms of the novel's C for Charlie company. If the young actors and Malick do their jobs well, The Thin Red Line could do for this cast what The Godfather did once upon a time for the careers of Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan. Altogether the film has more than 60 speaking parts, hundreds of extras and a shooting script of 180-plus pages--which would indicate a running time of more than three hours. And that's not including the scenes...
Five years later, Malick followed his lavishly praised debut with the studio-financed Days of Heaven, an opaque allegory about migrant farm workers in Texas on the eve of World War I. It is so lyrically beautiful and narratively elliptical that its cast, which included Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, was upstaged by a field of wheat--which might sound like a knock on the film but is really a tribute to the quiet, meditative power of its best moments, of its preoccupation with the verities of the natural world. As one might assume from that description, Days of Heaven...
...sleep thinking about it, wake up thinking about it," he says as he writes lyrics and discusses the play with friend and cast member, James Shelton '98. Shelton listens quietly to his friend talk, a little reticent and visibly reluctant about the prospect of putting on Ashong's play in so short of a time...