Rosenbaum has been retro-posting reviews he wrote for the Monthly Film Bulletin in the 70’s on his website. Among these trips down memory lane is a dense review of Badlands that caught my eye on account of the way Rosenbaum’s descriptions become so lyrical:
The stylistic familiarities, on the other hand, appear too quickly and variously for them to fall into predictable patterns. Holly occupying a bed with an enormous dog; her disappointment with her first foray into sex, and Kit picking up a stone to commemorate the event (substituting a smaller one when he finds it too heavy); a balloon carrying souvenirs sent off for posterity; Holly’s father painting a primitive landscape on a billboard in the middle of a primitive landscape; the integration of Holly’s greenish dress with the blue hallway in her house; the lyrical interlude (worthy of Fahrenheit 451) of fire consuming the house, “distanced” by the use of silence and [Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman’s] “Musica Poetica”; the fairy-tale ambience and irony of the forest sojourn, Kit reading National Geographic while Holly muses pantheistically on the soundtrack; her attempt at small talk about a pet spider with a dying Cato [Ramon Bieri]; sepia newsreel-like glimpses of police and frightened townsfolk: all these are too striking as images and as ideas, and too neatly abstracted out of their immediate contexts, to fit into traditional genre expectations.
Every review of a Malick film needs a spot like this, where the basic material of his scripted images begins to push the critic into a paragraph that could with marginal effort be turned into a poem:
The stylistic familiarities,
on the other hand,
appear too quickly and variously
for them to fall into predictable patterns…