Three Reasons

Badlands is a Terrence Malick masterpiece, and it also happens to be his first film. True crime and teen romance (two of my favorite genres) are combined to sublime effect, creating a crazy mix of dreaminess and danger.

Watching Badlands is an immersive experience, where you co-exist with the characters, in their time and place. The look and feel are so unique that we had to call attention to Malick’s incredible way of looking at the world as our first reason. The other two reasons had to feature the two amazing stars of the film—young lovers played by a very young Martin Sheen (looking like an insane combination of his sons Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez) and Sissy Spacek (a few years before her breakthrough performance in Carrie).

It is so exquisitely beautiful that every single shot could be the poster for the film. You’ll see.

Comments [1]

Badlands is a great film Bonnie. It’s a topic I have always been interested in. It’s loosely based on the true crime story of Charles Starkweather (age 19) and Caril Ann Fugate (just 14), two teenagers who murdered 11 people on a 2-month killing spree in 1957 in Nebraska and Wyoming. It was one, if not THE first, killing sprees this nation had ever witnessed. People in those states were freaking out back then. A friend of mine who lived in adjoining state Iowa at the time (he was a boy) was afraid to go outside or to school. People stayed inside. Unlike today—this was a new thing for that time. Starweather was executed and Caril Ann went to prison and was a model prisoner. She was paroled in 1979, and is alive to this day, though she has had a series of strokes. A number of books and movies have emerged from this horror story—including “Natural Born Killers” with Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, and even Rodney Dangerfield as the abusive father. Christian Patterson and MACK books did a great job on the book “Red Headed Peckerwood”—a slur that Starkweather’s own father called him. http://www.mackbooks.co.uk/books/15-Redheaded-Peckerwood.html

John Foster
04.09.15
02:26

Bonnie Siegler is an award-winning graphic designer. She is the founder of Eight and a Half, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York, and before that, was the co-founder of Number Seventeen. She got her degree at Carnegie Mellon University, has taught in the graduate design programs at Yale University, RISD, and the School of Visual Arts and was the 2014 Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at the University of Hartford.

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