The New World

Started by edison, December 09, 2004, 12:09:28 AM

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hedwig

Quote from: SoNowThen on December 18, 2005, 02:26:01 PM
As to trivializing the suffering of native americans, it's not that I trivialize it... I don't care about it in the least. Not even enough to trivialize it. Many many many peoples have had to suffer attempts at genocide, colonies have come and gone, horros have been perpetrated all across the board.

wow, so you don't care about the suffering of Native Americans because they're not the only group who's suffered. great.

Quote from: SoNowThen on December 18, 2005, 02:26:01 PM
What does such a general retelling of this fact of life serve to the artist?

hey here's a thought -- maybe the ones who tell stories about human suffering aren't doing it to "serve to the artist."

Quote from: SoNowThen on December 18, 2005, 02:26:01 PM
This native american thing and the holocaust thing are just beloved little stories for people to hide behind.

what the fuck is this? are you really this stupid? that shit right there will prevent me from ever taking anything you say seriously again. now it's crystal clear where you're coming from.

Gold Trumpet

I'm glad Hedwig edited the posts appropriately. I find it alarming such cold tendencies can exists for those historical subjects, but I want to know why SoNowThen, when pressed for opposing arguments, feels that way. Certainly it is understandable film has no chance to compete with the information of a book, but it is also glaringly obvious the best historical films are not merely historical documents. They are interpretive works that present the situation with a new realism that define and underline so much more than a 'lesson'. Being personally linked to a Native American society and background, I can attest to the feeling of many Native Americans that there never has been a completely realized film that understands the Native American. Myths, folklore and other tales just get sprinkled with realism here and there. SoNowThen, you champion filmmakers who share opposite convictions. They address the past with vigor and passion and try to speak for people unspoken for. They also understand certain films muff the truth for exploitation. When addressing history in film, try to understand each film is an individual case and broad opinions can't be spoken for.

*Inserts foot in mouth*

SoNowThen

I dunno about speaking for people unspoken for. The filmmaker should speak for himself. And I don't understand the need for anyone, Native American or otherwise, to want so badly a movie that "understands them" as a culture. Everyone seems to get pissed off when I make a generalization, so why ask for a film that tries to generalize a race or culture during a specific time. If anything, a movie that singles out a specific "race" role as the point, contributes to the problem rather than helping it (which, yet again, I must state that I don't think film can "help" or "hinder" racism).

A myth or folklore could be very interesting, since it is less reliant on reality -- more on the open space and wonder of a good story told. In cases such as this, in Canada we got a lot of Native myths sold to us when we were growing up in school. Personally, it's not something I have any interest in. For some reason, Greek myths are more exciting to me, Oriental myths less so. That doesn't mean I have a little table in my room, whereby I rate Greeks higher than Chinese, it's just the way my interests lie at the moment.

And anyone using a Speilberg movie to show me how great a historical flick can be -- ugh. That's everything I rail against. I DO think he's a fuck for making Schindler's List and assuming he's doing us all a favor.

And Hedwig, do you really think an artist does something without wanting to serve himself? True, he may do it for "the audience" as well, but c'mon, artists aren't charity workers. I certainly hope it's "crystal clear" where I'm coming from...  :roll:
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

Ultrahip


MacGuffin

Interview: Christian Bale
The actor talks New World.

It's been a very big year for Christian Bale. He received wide praise his late 2004 performance in The Machinist, although the film was unfairly shunted opposite bigger, inferior performances come Oscar time. Soon after, Bale followed with a summer blockbuster that no one could ignore. As Batman, Bale brought to life the most multi-dimensional, fascinating portrayal of the dark knight yet seen on screen. Batman Begins was loved by critics and geeks alike. Although nothing concrete has been announced, Bale will likely return for a sequel and is welcome by fans to play the caped crusader until the end of time.

Never one to simply rest on his laurels and avoid an upcoming challenge, Bale chose a pretty interesting follow-up with one of Hollywood's most notorious and mysterious directors, the seldom heard from and seldom seen Terrence Malick. New World is Malick's first film since 1998's The Thin Red Line and only his 5th film since his directorial debut in 1969.

Starring Colin Farrell as John Smith, Bale as John Rolfe and a newcomer named Q' Orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas, New World is the epic story of the 17th century English settlement in North America and their brutal clash with the Native Americans. John Smith falls for Pocahontas, but their love can never be. Eventually, Pocahontas meets Rolfe, an English gentleman who becomes infatuated with the young and storied native. Pocahontas soon falls for the socialite's charm and becomes the toast of England.

Bale was on hand at the press day this past weekend to talk to press. Along with New World, FilmForce tried to eek out a few details on the actor's upcoming re-teaming with Christopher Nolan, The Prestige.

Malick is known for his long, storied productions. He's also often been known for cutting his actors out of the film almost entirely. Adrien Brody voiced similar issues with the final cut of Thin Red Line and, during the course of the New World press day, co-star Wes Studi had similar issues. Bale comments: "A lot of them were cut. But, when Terry first asked me to do the movie, at the time I was setting up a movie with Werner Herzog that we were doing and I just called him to check about the progress and the dates and everything. And then, they're very good friends. Werner was at the premiere the other night, and I'd heard about the Adrien Brody story. I'd also spoken with Gary Oldman about it, because he had had early involvement with Thin Red Line and stuff and had a lot of good stories about that. And then, Werner's first comment to me was, 'Oh wonderful, Terry's a wonderful man. You'll have a fascinating time working with him. Just don't expect to be in the movie.' (Laughs) So nothing could surprise me after that. And then I was actually communicating with Terry a great deal throughout his editing process. And it was very interesting. He explained, he had a requirement to bring the movie in at two and a half hours. I know that he's working on a three hour version which hopefully will be released on DVD. And, you know, consequently, a number of scenes had to go and you really have to get down to the essence of the story. And so, much of the dialogue was actually removed. He felt, and it was things that we would experiment with while we were filming as well… There were often times, we would try to do scenes that may have had a great deal of dialogue, maybe two pages, and we would see, 'Can this work without ever saying a word? Can we make it work and make it understood without saying anything.' And it seemed as though that ended up being more the way to go."

"Of course, you know, from a selfish point of view, I'd like every single scene that we shot to have ended up in the movie. But I'm not a moron. I understand it. That's not always what's important to the movie. You often have to cut very nice scenes for the better of the movie. So nah, there's absolutely no bitterness whatsoever. The only thing that I would have liked is just to have been involved more actually there, actually in the filming. You know, because I ended up only being there for I think four or five weeks or something. And I just like his style of working so much. He's such a calming director. He's so curious and he's appreciative of absolutely everything and there's never a sense that you're kind of being tested. Sometimes, with a movie, where there's such a hard, fast idea from the director about exactly what the scene should be, then it's very much like you are being tested, you know? You better achieve that line there, you better get that one in there and this one has to have this inflection and you've gotta switch here. And it stops being natural. With Terry, he was all about you do what you feel is correct to the degree that he would say end and the rare thing with him was that he actually would mean, if you don't want to say anything in this scene, then don't say anything."

Malick's methods on set have been said to be unique by some and require a bit of adjustment by others. "He has this nice way of kind of creeping up on you with filming. He doesn't announce, 'Hey everybody, tighten up. This is it. Film costs money. You better get this scene right, right now.' So you're feeling a little bit of, 'Oh, all right.' And you're running it through your head beforehand, 'Okay, I've gotta get that line in that way, then I have to make this one sound this way.' With Terry it was never like that. Half the time he would start filming and you didn't even know that he had begun filming. You'd just be sitting there doing whatever and then you just kind of realize it. Nobody was talking for some reason and then you just kind of go, 'Oh right, oh we're filming.' So, you know, and you start talking and it really seems like you're talking and I think that was something wonderful that he did, especially with it being a period movie, because so often with period movies you get this… Uptight, you know, human interaction that just, it's so difficult for me to believe that they actually behave that way outside of books. He just really masters that, you know? It was really great. I wish more movies could be done that way."

Coming off Batman Begins, New World was already well into production when Bale arrived on set. "I'd been a little bit nervous before arriving, because I'd spoken to a friend of mine who was working on the movie and he said to me, 'Oh, we do a lot of improvisation,' which to me, I thought, 'Holy crap. 1607, how do you improvise in the correct language?' And I thought, I imagined all the other actors had been studying for months and had learned how to speak like that without even thinking, so I was thinking, 'Oh man, I'm out of my league here, I'm out out of my depth.' But then got there, experienced that first improvised thing, and he didn't care that I came up with a whole bunch of anachronistic sayings. (Laughs) There were some of them which were great, so he just used those bits. I also accidentally credited John Rolfe with the discovery of gravity. (Laughs) Which, that was pointed out, that Newton had not actually written that yet. So, I hope that the Rolfe family were happy that I gave him that distinction." (Laughs)
 
Either you like Malick or you don't. There isn't a whole lot of in-between. One undeniable aspect of his work is the visual beauty of the things he films. He often takes breaks in the scheduled production for that perfect sunset or unexpected visitor. "He always kept himself busy. He never stopped. There were never times when we were sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting. As I'm sure you know, whenever it was exteriors, there was no artificial lighting. Even when we did go interior, he would just go one lighting set up in the morning and that's it. It wouldn't change, the lights would say the same. So consequently, you just filmed and filmed and filmed and filmed and filmed, you know? And so you would go way off of what the scenes were, you'd come up with different things and then he would edit it and you had a look back on the scene and you'd go, 'Wow, look at that. He took that bit by bit and wow, he's woven it together wonderful.'"

"There were absolutely times where we'd be in the middle of doing a scene and it was, 'Oh God, look at the sun, look at the way that, look at the trees, the way they're moving right now. Quick!' And people would run over there, get that, you know, or hey, 'Q'Orianka, chase that grasshopper.' (Laughs) 'Go on. There you go.' Or somebody would walk past with a caterpillar on their hand and it would be, 'Heeeey! Come on, get the caterpillar now!' But it was great, so you never knew what was gonna happen and Terry was just endlessly enthusiastic and had a great humor, you know, about him, and I found it just incredibly easy working with him and would really be honored to do that again."

Bale always heavily researches the role he takes on, but admits he may have overdone it prepping for New World. "I did. I did a whole lot. As usual, I tend to find that by the time I finish the movie I think, 'Ah yeah, once again Christian, you did all that research and it wasn't needed.' But I just can't help it. It's nice to know. I just enjoy finding out as much as I can. I was in London at the time. I went along to the British Public Library and found these great little, you know, documents that they had and old books with John Rolfe's writings actually in them. Assessments of his character and everything that was happening at the time. And I like having that, I like having that background…."

Next for Bale is another film with Batman Begins director Christopher Nolan. The Prestige co-stars Hugh Jackman, David Bowie and fellow Batman co-star Michael Caine. They're magicians, you know? And so we're working out all sorts of shenanigans that we can get up to for that. It's a very interesting cast, and obviously working with Chris Nolan again is nice. Many of the crew that I've worked with before and some of the actors as well. Yeah, I think it's going to be a really interesting piece."

The actor admits even he doesn't know whether a Batman sequel will follow Prestige. "I don't know, yeah."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

cron

context, context, context.

samsong

i get to confirm that this is, in fact, the greatest film ever made (outside of bresson's films) in a few days.

Pozer


modage

worked
Q'Orianka Kilcher / Pocahantas
Christian Bale / John Rolfe

didnt
Colin Farrell / John Smith
length
multiple (redundant) narration

winner
ben chaplin (along with Noah Taylor and Jonathan Pryce) as an extra
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

hedwig

thanks mod, your review was really insightful and thought-provoking.

samsong

this is the greatest film ever made.

not quite but WHAT A FUCKING FILM. easily, easily the best film of the year and in recent memory... whatever. months and months hyping myself up for this and it still blew me away. at this point i have nothing but hyperboles and some more digesting to do.

:shock: + :inlove: + :notworthy: = me during the entire film

mod i'd love to know what you didn't like about colin farrell. 

MacGuffin

Malick's messy, beautiful frontiers
At once exasperating and awe-inspiring, the sporadic auteur's films are like nobody else's. And that alone is worth celebrating.
By Peter Rainer, Special to The Times

LIKE some fleeting cosmological phenomenon, the appearance of a new Terrence Malick movie always seems to augur a shift in the Hollywood heavens — or at least that portion of heaven inhabited by cloud-borne cinéastes. Now that Stanley Kubrick has passed on, Malick is the undisputed recluse/auteur of the film business, the director the most movie people would most like to work with if only they could find him.

"The New World," his new film about John Smith and Pocahontas and the Jamestown colony, is only his fourth in 32 years. That's the kind of statistic of which mystiques are made, and Malick's has held up surprisingly well. The question is: Why?
 
I think the answer has more to do with the idea of Terrence Malick than with the overall quality of his films. At 62, he is one of the most gifted directors of his generation, though even his most ardent enthusiasts concede he has yet to make his "Citizen Kane." But Malick remains the sole poster boy from that '70s era when it was still possible for idiosyncratic artists in Hollywood to make in their own way the projects that they truly cared about.

The directors he started out with, like Coppola and De Palma and Scorsese and Spielberg, long ago entered the mainstream, but here is Malick in "The New World" making very much the same kind of lacework movie he might have made in 1973, the year of his "Badlands" debut. He's been called the J.D. Salinger of movies, but Rip Van Winkle is closer to the mark.

The '70s, of course, was also the era when Hollywood directors were at their most self-infatuated. But not all the peacocks were poseurs. The good and great movies from that era — ranging from "Mean Streets" and "The Godfather" films to "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and "Carrie" — represented a triumph of artistic, not narcissistic, sensibility. They were made by directors with a new way of seeing, which was, in essence, a new way of imagining.

This is what many of us miss most from American movies now — a visual daring that is at one with a daring conception. This lack is felt even in the so-called independent realm, which has been singularly unadventurous cinematographically and dramatically. Even a film as distinctly and personally shaped as "The Squid and the Whale" is nothing much to look at.

If there is a modern-day equivalent to the superstar auteurs of Malick's generation it would be Quentin Tarantino, and this is largely because, unlike most of the interchangeable functionaries and music video mavens making studio movies right now, his films are flagrantly his own. His relish for the sheer effrontery of moviemaking links him to the '70s even though beneath all the swagger in his films is simply more swagger. The vogue in this country for the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai is part of the same signature-style syndrome. Emotionally his movies are a dreamier and more ambiguously melancholy version of '50s Hollywood kitsch à la Douglas Sirk, but all that pretty patterning sure gives your eyes a show.

Malick may seem an odd duck in this current movie climate, but then again, he has never quite fit in anywhere. Unlike his contemporaries, he has never really drawn on popular sources of entertainment, even though movies like "Badlands" and "The Thin Red Line," at least thematically, have a long Hollywood lineage. Scorsese and Coppola may have been inspired by Visconti and Fellini, but their most obvious antecedents early on were American crime melodramas; De Palma raided Hitchcock; Bogdanovich raided Hawks and Ford.

Malick, by contrast, although he was part of the first wave of film school graduates in the early '70s, didn't seem to be reacting to or against anything in either the Old or the New Hollywood. He was a high culture guy in a mass culture medium — a Rhodes scholar who once translated Heidegger — and he didn't seek to overwhelm us with pyrotechnics. He was offering us a look into his own private dreamscape.

The signposts in this dreamscape have remained remarkably consistent from movie to movie, whether he is filming the Dakota Badlands or "Days of Heaven's" Texas Panhandle, or Guadalcanal or Jamestown. His great theme is the despoiling of Eden. "How did this horror enter the world?" asks a soldier in "The Thin Red Line" as guts spray the supernal vistas.

For Malick, nature's beauty, which he captures using only natural light, is defined by the depravity that will always seek to undo it. His films, which have been graced by the longtime collaboration of his production designer Jack Fisk and the cinematography of such masters as Nestor Almendros, Haskell Wexler and John Toll, are filled with breathtaking close-ups of animals and birds and insects — creatures who are elementally connected to the terrors in the wild.

He tends to film his people in the same way, as exalted specimens in the cosmic laboratory. This is why there are few memorable performances in his movies; he is more interested in actors for their sculptural and spiritual qualities than in what they can bring to bear psychologically. Sometimes he comes up very short: Richard Gere in "Days of Heaven" and Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas in "The New World" are prettified blanks, while Colin Farrell's Capt. John Smith isn't even pretty.

Nature is a riddle for Malick, a rune that, if only it could be decoded, would yield up the secret of why we are placed on this Earth. (An early, aborted project of his was an epic about the creation of the planet, no less.) Because he is always divining the ineffable, his movies can sometimes seem absurdly high-flown and, from a real-world standpoint, insubstantial. He makes movies about sociopathic serial murderers, the agrarian poor, a major war theater in the Pacific and America's founding colony, and yet there is hardly any direct political engagement to these films at all.

Not that some people haven't tried to find it anyway. "Badlands," for example, was misinterpreted by a number of critics as an elitist snob's attack on the soullessness of a mass culture that would turn wayward youths into killers and even media heroes. But Malick, who grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, wasn't mounting a cultural attack on rural hickdom. The Badlands in that great, spooky movie, which I think is easily his best, are entirely metaphorical; the wide-open spaces are maddening because they isolate and distill our own worst impulses. Nature is forever putting our souls in jeopardy.




When the world was innocent

IN "Days of Heaven," Malick is similarly unconcerned with the sociopolitical class consciousness ostensibly at its core. The film, which despite its extraordinary picturesqueness seems more than ever to me an hors d'oeuvres tray posing as a full meal, exists primarily to showcase the climactic biblical-style conflagration of the landowner's wheat fields — the light that nature, in all its awakened cruelty, sends off. In "The Thin Red Line," which came 20 years after "Days of Heaven," the strategies of war and the bearing of the soldiers pale beside the Rousseau-like idylls of Jim Caviezel (warming up to play Jesus?) cavorting with the uncorrupted Melanesians. For Malick, being AWOL is a state of grace.

The Native Americans in "The New World" are equally uncorrupted. Pocahontas certainly is — she's practically a woodland nymph. Despite his super-sophistication, Malick has a deeply childlike conception of innocence. This must be why his films, which are sensual in an almost pantheistic way, are nevertheless without a carnal dimension. There is no sex in his movies, not even in "Badlands" or "Days of Heaven." Sex occupies a baser realm than the rarefied one he inhabits. The real action for Malick is all in the head, in his characters' inner musings that crowd the soundtrack. A major problem with "The New World" is that, despite its visual ravishments and convincing note of woe, its people don't seem to have much going on between the ears.

Malick's films may not always live up to his mystique, but it would be a major blow if he were to take another decade-long siesta. The freedom he incarnates as an artist is not something deserving only of nostalgia for a bygone era. What about our own era? Something is lost in a culture when artists are not allowed to make fools of themselves, because foolishness is often the flip side of greatness. Despite all the floss in his films, Malick has had his share of that too. He has dedicated his life to his own exalted idea of beauty, where even the tiniest dabs of creation have oracular power, and he has given us images, like the torched house in "Badlands" or the long shot of the train in black silhouette against a powder blue sky in "Days of Heaven," that will resonate for as long as there are movies.

The best passages in Malick's films are all about paradise lost. His career, with its inexplicable absences, represents another kind of loss. But he is still among us, and his way of seeing is worth championing in these machine-tooled times.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Rainer is the film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and DVD critic for Bloomberg News.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

grand theft sparrow

Congratulations to everyone who saw this already... you've seen a version of The New World no one will ever see again.

This will teach me to wait.



Malick Explains New World Recall

By WENN|Wednesday, January 11, 2006

HOLLYWOOD - Director Terrence Malick withdrew latest film The New World from cinema screens just days after its release because he was convinced it needed more editing.

The bizarre recall came just nine days after the historical drama made its debut in movie houses, but Malick is confident his cuts will be beneficial.

The Colin Farrell film, which focuses on the clash between native Americans and English settlers in the seventeenth century, has been cut by the Texan director by 17 minutes.

The revised version will be released on Jan. 20.

modage

Quote from: modage on December 30, 2005, 11:11:26 PM
didnt [work]
length
looks like Malick and I see eye to eye.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

The Perineum Falcon

He's just doing that so he can release the "Semi-Unrated" Version later on. :roll:
We often went to the cinema, the screen would light up and we would tremble, but also, increasingly often, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The images had dated, they jittered, and Marilyn Monroe had gotten terribly old. We were sad, this wasn't the film we had dreamed of, this wasn't the total film that we all carried around inside us, this film that we would have wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we would have wanted to live.