February 7, 2006

The New World, 2/7.

Ask Manohla: So Manohla Dargis is answering New York Times readers' questions about the Oscars and writes that, while Crash is "a consummate Hollywood fantasy," "there is only one possible explanation for why Terrence Malick's glorious film, one of the most aesthetically and intellectually ambitious, emotionally devastating and politically resonant works of American art in recent memory, was overlooked by the Academy: with the exception of my few dear friends in that august body, they are idiots."

The New World

NP Thompson: "The 'critics' who are either impervious to or openly contemptuous of the movie strike me as being a good deal worse than mere idiots - they are monsters who are indifferent to art, to poetry, to life, to the air we breathe, to the trees in the forests, to the pleasure of all that, and perhaps even to sunlight. They are victims of television."

More from DK Holm, for whom The New World is "the first great film of 2006," and who also suggests that "an enterprising grad student should take on the task of tracking down and analyzing all of Malick's ghost assignments and see how they figure into the gestalt of his own directing career." By the way, Movie Poop Shoot is evolving; the word from Kevin Smith.

Meanwhile, guess who's rounding up more linkage. Why, it's Matt Zoller Seitz.

Update, 2/8: Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic: "Malick continues to float along the edge of the American film world as an unusually intelligent personage who occasionally delivers the fruit of his meditations. But his role as adjunct philosophe is better than the films he eventually gives us."



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Posted by dwhudson at February 7, 2006 3:25 PM

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Captain Smith loved Pocahontas
They had a very mad affair
When her daddy tried to kill him
She said, "Daddy-O, don't you dare!
He gives me fever with his kisses,
Fever all through the night.
Fever. I'm his missus.
Daddy won't you treat him right?"

Peggy Lee ain't got nuthin' on me!!

Manohla Dargis calls "The New World" "a work of astounding ambition and beauty" and Carina Chocano writes that it is "a work of breathtaking imagination ... and in every sense a
masterpiece."

I concur that the film is ambitious, beautiful and imaginative. A masterpiece? Not quite sure about that but it certainly demands consideration, where few films do. Q'Orianka Kilcher has certainly made her presence felt in this screen debut. The film has a rapturous self-reflectivity about it, like questions posed at the open sky, or thoughts adrift on running clear water, or spun aloft on thieving wind. Subjective musings seed the script.

Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography is stunning. And James Horner's score one of his most evocative. The opening scene where the "naturals" view the ships in the harbor is quintessentially wonderful, as in full of wonder. I held my breath in anticipation as these two cultures encountered each other for the first time. Definitely an incredible beginning to the film.

I'm not sure how accurately "The New World" tracks the story of Pocahontas, but it certainly provides an interesting perspective. She
struck me as the Ariadne of the New World. She betrays her father and her people for a man whose destiny it is to leave her behind.

Colin Farrell provides a brooding, longhaired Captain Smith. It'd be hard not to fall for a hunk like him, especially if you were an inquisitive native princess, and Christian Bale holds up his own end of the triangle.


Posted by: Michael Guillen at February 7, 2006 4:15 PM

I loved the film. I do secretly wish that they had given David Thewlis more space to inhabit that character though... as soon as you get interested in him, he's dead.

Posted by: Wiley Wiggins at February 8, 2006 11:51 AM