The New World

[mutinyco]

Interesting. Pete fucked a dead man.

I knew he was freaky, but that's pretty out there. Did you rake your dick on his crooked British teeth, too?

[hedwig]

that was the most pathetic comeback i've ever seen, mutinyco. please stop trying. and speaking of fucking dead men, i think that's an apt metaphor for this thread. it's been killed and hijacked so many times, this is just becoming cyber-necrophelia here. how many times, i say, HOW many times can you fuck a dead thread?!

mutinyco, SHUT UP.

people who saw The New World and actually want to discuss it, and do away with these idiotic insults -- people who are interested in discussing the CONTENT of the film: SPEAK UP.

[mutinyco]

Hedwig, put down the glass pipe for a moment. Read back a page.

modage, man, if you fail to see something that a lot of people see on this here board, and fail to convince anyone that your point of view is valid, then just walk away, man.  It's not worth raising the stakes and getting irrelevant with a generic attack on people liking slow movies.  I was thinking of jumping in to defend it but man, lets just drop the madness while it's still somewhat relevant to the movie.  We've all been jumped on this here board because of our taste.  I had my Lost in Translation thing and MutinyCo's wrong about pretty much every movie.  It's cool man, why don't we all wait until a latter time when pride is not such a big factor anymore to debate this out?  You insist that you're right, and that should be good enough.  I know I'm right about the Lost in Translation thing and I've got Chris Doyle on your side.  And you, I'm sure you'll find someone for your cause.  Maybe Chris Nolan will hate it.  Lets just cool our heads collectively.  If we keep on going, first of all, the argument will only grow more absurd as we pull out our third fourth seventh most valid points, and also the cheap shots will run more amoke.  There is just no need to get there, for now.  You're a good guy and you don't deserve it.

Furthermore, I'd suggest the bulk of this thread has been written by people who loved the movie. And because Mod didn't he was getting a bit of flack for it.

But be caureful. He'll fight you!

[polkablues]

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm totally going to now.  A) Because I loved Thin Red Line, and B) Because I want to know which side of this West-Side-Story-style dance fight we've started up I should be on.

Mostly 'cause I loved Thin Red Line.

Here's my question: in the pantheon of Malick's work, where does everybody think New World falls?  Rehash of previously trod themes?  Bold new vision?  Midget snuff porn?  Somewhere in between?

Discuss.

[killafilm]

It was like Barry Lyndon or something.

This really struck me for some reason.  Maybe because Mod doesn't love Barry Lyndon either.  And I know you enjoy some 'slow' movies.  Which doesn't seem like the right way to put it.  Ghostboy or whoever mentioned how The New World has a 2001 cut every five minutes I think really summed up why those who love the movie, really love the movie.  For myself at least it really was an experience.  I was more than able to get sucked into it all and just let it hang over me. 

I kinda find it odd that someone who totally enjoys The New World would not enjoy Last Year At Marienbad.  I think both movies owe a lot to their cinematraphy and editing for setting the mood.  Somehow similar... stretching though.  And as far as giving the movie slaw since it's from Malick, what if it was a first time directors movie? It would be George Washington all over again, with people calling it the great Malick movie Malick never made.   

[©brad]

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm totally going to now.  A) Because I loved Thin Red Line, and B) Because I want to know which side of this West-Side-Story-style dance fight we've started up I should be on.

hahah, me too.

[Gamblour.]

polka, I'd say it's the first time a film has ever transcended time and space and actually gone back to 1607. The more I think about it, the more I want to see it again. In the scope of his oeuvre, though i've only seen part of Days of Heaven, can I say that it's a less narrative, more minimalist type of Thin Red Line, and in that way it's progressive for him because he doesn't rely on voice overs so much as visuals? It's less verbal poetry, more visual poetry. Which might go back to Days. Hm i need to rewatch every Malick movie.

And killa, I'm only sort of lovin TNW. Last Year at Marienbad....man, I think Hiroshima mon amour is such a better film, Last Year I will have to give a second chance. Malick has hints of hope and utter elation in his music and editing, while Last Year is nothing but pity and sorrow.

Can we get back to the music? This film had the best score I think I've ever heard. Of course there's no oscar love. But I've never sat during a film and been so aware of the music in the best of ways. Not at all like I'm aware of Resnais' music. His scores are so bad, especially Night and Fog and Last Year.

[Sunrise]

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm totally going to now.  A) Because I loved Thin Red Line, and B) Because I want to know which side of this West-Side-Story-style dance fight we've started up I should be on.

Mostly 'cause I loved Thin Red Line.

Here's my question: in the pantheon of Malick's work, where does everybody think New World falls?  Rehash of previously trod themes?  Bold new vision?  Midget snuff porn?  Somewhere in between?

Discuss.

Polka, I came to The New World as a Malick admirer and enthusiast of The Thin Red Line. It will be interesting to see how you respond to the new film. It's obvious by now that I am an ardent supporter of The New World. I can't get it out of my head. But it has been tough for me to articulate exactly why.

Spoilers

Gamblour and others have commented on the nearly silent nature of the movie. Malick sprinkles voiceover at odd and inspired moments throughout, but it is drastically different from The Thin Red Line's nearly constant voiceover (where Line's voiceovers move from one character to another, New World stays with Kilcher, Farrell and Bale). The New World's diminished use of dialog (and voiceover) certainly makes it his most ambitious work in that Malick substantially relies on visuals to tell his story. While all of his films contain incredible beauty, it is The New World's reliance on its images that places it at or near the top for me.

In addition to this visual reliance, I agree with Gamblour that the film's music is inspired. The crescendo of Wagner at the beginning, especially at the end, and I believe at least one other time toward the middle of the movie, gave me chills. Overall, the music (score and soundtrack) enhance the visuals expertly. One other comment is the sound design. Several moments stand out for me, including the opening credits, when Smith is captured by the Naturals (you know what it's like in that helmet), any scene with one of the large ships (you can feel the wood creaking, expanding, and bending), and the attempted siege of the fort (especially enjoyed those moments of total silence during the battles).

End Spoilers

I realize this is more of a list of reasons why I love the film and not an articulated analysis. A true analytical approach to film of this kind may require many viewings. My thoughts, I suppose, are related more to the experience and enjoyment I received from it. To your original question, although I don't know if this is a ranking of Malick's films, The New World now stands alongside The Thin Red Line as my favorite. It hasn't quite eclipsed it yet...but I've seen Line many more times.

[Pubrick]

Pete can take it.

it's pathetic that you would dish it.

B) Because I want to know which side of this West-Side-Story-style dance fight we've started up I should be on.

i wouldn't call one person a side.

[mutinyco]

Yeehaw!!!!!

[modage]

Title: The New World
Released: 9th May 2006
SRP: $27.95

Further Details:
Warner Home Video has officially announced The New World which stars Colin Farrell, Christian Bale and Christopher Plummer. This Terrence Malick directed film will be available to own from the 9th May, and should set you back around $27.95 in total. The film itself will be presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, along with both English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround and 2.0 Surround tracks. As far as we know, the only extra features will be a sixty minute making of documentary, and the theatrical trailer. 
http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releases/the-new-world.html

[Pozer]

I can't wait 'til you get it on DVD and say:

so i rewatched (The New World) tonite.  i liked it. 

[matt35mm]

As far as we know, the only extra features will be a sixty minute making of documentary, and the theatrical trailer. 

Wow, I've never seen a 60-minute making-of that features not a frame of the writer-director.  Looking forward to it.

[grand theft sparrow]

Paradise Now
The heart of The New World: Feverish fans turn a box office bust into a cult film

by J. Hoberman
March 7th, 2006 11:51 AM

The Oscars went almost as expected, but the best-loved movie of 2005—the year's other tale of love and loss on the American frontier—received only a single nomination, for cinematography. (It lost.)

As of last week, The New World's domestic grosses were $12.2 million—far less than Brokeback Mountain ($75 million), Crash ($53 million), or even New Line's matching art-house release A History of Violence ($31 million). According to online services that track such things, The New World's reviews were mildly favorable to mixed. But, as anticipated by the Voice Critics' Poll's ballot-crunching Passiondex Terrence Malick's impressionistic retelling of the Pocahontas story was the movie that inspired the most fervent devotion.

Not everyone adores The New World, but those cineastes who like it, really, really like it. The movie has not only admirers but partisans—it can only be truly loved by attacking those too blind to see the truth. Fielding her readers' online Oscar queries, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis found only one possible explanation for The New World's failure to attract more than cursory Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences attention: "With the exception of my few dear friends in that august body, [the Academy members] are idiots."

The blogosphere resounds with similar insults and shriller declarations. Having seen The New World three times, N.P. Thompson of moviesintofilm.com proclaimed a virtual fatwa, declaring that those " 'critics' who are either impervious to or openly contemptuous of the movie [are] worse than mere idiots—they are monsters who are indifferent to art, to poetry, to life, to the air we breathe." Love The New World or die! Nick Pinkerton of stopsmilingonline.com attacked the snide, snarky, simpleminded infidels who swarmed out of their hidey-holes to sneer at Malick's masterpiece. Unlike Thompson, Pinkerton named names (full disclosure, mine included).

New York Press critic Matt Zoller Seitz, the most benignly inclusive of the movie's online advocates, simply declared The New World his "new religion" and used his blog to spread the joyful news. Where other movies have fans, Malick's produces disciples. Even holy relics: "On my desk beside my keyboard," wrote Seitz, "lies one of my most prized possessions: a ticket stub from the January 21, 9:30 p.m. showing of The New World at BAM-Rose Cinemas in downtown Brooklyn."

Welcome to the realm of My Own Private eBay. Yet, if nothing else, the response to The New World reflects the collective utopian yearning still bound up in the movies—and the religious fervor this particular film has generated is fascinating, not least to an agnostic like myself.

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Should The New World garner a real cult, it would hardly be the first commercial failure to do so. The Rocky Horror Picture Show had an actual opening back in 1975 before it was revived as the ultimate midnight phenomenon. Every decade since has produced at least one example: Blade Runner, Showgirls, and Donnie Darko were all flops that found their audiences at late-night weekend screenings.

As the distribution company that scored an early bonanza with Pink Flamingos (and a subsequent one, a million times greater, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy), New Line may yet promote The New World at midnight. Still, movie cults are only facilitated by exhibitors; they are created by audiences. And critics are largely irrelevant. The blogospheric pressure behind The New World is a matter of film nerds signaling their peers—a kind of sectarian chatter.

What is it with the motion picture medium? The inimitable Pauline Kael, who took her movies as personally as anyone you'll find beyond the first row at MOMA, not only panned Antonioni's 
Blow-Up but mocked its fans: "They get upset if you don't like it—as if you were rejecting not just the movie but them." You are what you love, and there's no accounting for taste—or rather, as we are reminded nightly, the unconscious is profoundly tasteless. As connoisseurs of the irrational, the surrealists were impressed by the passionate arguments movies regularly inspired, concluding that it was all a matter of sublimated sexual preferences. The New World certainly invites such fantasy. One critic I know compared it favorably to Jack Smith's underground celebration of the polymorphously perverse, Flaming Creatures.

Known to all, yet surprisingly under-leveraged in American culture, the Pocahontas myth is a dream of love in the woods: A white soldier of fortune is reborn in the arms of a dusky Indian princess. Racial reconciliation is crucial, although the fact that Smith was nearly 30 and his D.I.P. would have been the age at which Dolores Haze first met Humbert Humbert infuses their imaginary encounter with another taboo, too tasteless to mention. This love is not just love but impossible, forbidden love—as the Disney imagineers realized when they conceived their Pocahontas as a buckskin Betty Boop.

Indeed, given that the Pocahontas myth is a fig leaf to conceal the actual relations between English settlers and "natural" inhabitants, it may even be evil: Argall, William T. Vollmann's massively researched historical anti-novel, is named for the baddie who kidnaps Pocahontas and sells her to Jamestown. Small wonder New Worldites regard those besmirching the innocence of their New World Adam and his innocent Eve as snakes or worse.

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As pointed out by Umberto Eco in his canonical essay on Casablanca, cults favor "imperfect" movies, as well as movies that are, in some sense, All Movies. Trimmed by 20 minutes after its release, The New World has already been violated. And it is not surprising that its acolytes would stress the primacy of the visual and the importance of the shared experience.

There is the sense that The New World won't work on DVD, even though Malick is preparing a new, three-hour collectors' version; its presence is dependent on the big screen. "A few years from now, when those of us who love [The New World] are re-watching it and wrestling with it, we will literally not be able to imagine that," as Pinkerton wrote, "it once was writ large simultaneously in Cary, North Carolina, and Middletown, Ohio, and Durango, Colorado." The New World did receive a fairly wide release, opening on over 800 screens. (Still, the movie has performed most strongly in New York City, as well as the Bay Area and Pacific Northwest—the market one distributor characterized as "New Age Country.") The pastoral Virginia that The New World represents does not belong to Smith and Pocahontas alone. Malick's movie is its own Golden Age.

For some, paradise might have been lost when New Line withdrew the original cut; for others, The New World is less a vision of paradise lost than of paradise itself: "I bore witness to American commercial cinema's ability to astound, move and inspire masses of people," Seitz testified. More than a reconstruction of 17th-century America, The New World creates an idealized America: "At 9:30 p.m. on January 21, 2006, I sat in the upper reaches of the BAM theater, on the aisle near the back. The audience was a demographic mosaic: white folks in the row behind me, an African-American couple ahead of me, an Orthodox Jewish couple to my left, and just beyond them, a young Asian man."

Why not Walt Whitman and the crew of the Pequod? Who will deny that America has seldom needed a redemptive myth as badly as it does now? On the evening of February 23, 2006, I attended the movie's last screening at BAM, along with a rapt audience of 19. Many had obviously seen The New World before. Now it was about to vanish from their world. Sitting closest to the screen, a few remained in their seats for the entire bird-call-scored credits, waiting until the last avian note faded to silence in the empty room.

[killafilm]

'Smello-vision' becomes a reality in Japan

April 12 2006 at 02:00PM
By Yuri Kageyama

Tokyo - A theatre audience in Japan will be sniffing their noses - literally - at a new Hollywood adventure film when it opens later this month.

A new service from major telecommunications company NTT Communications will synchronise seven different smells to parts of The New World, starring Colin Farrell as American colonial leader John Smith, who is said to have been saved from execution by North American Indian princess Pocahontas.

A floral scent accompanies a love scene while a mix of peppermint and rosemary is emitted during a tear-jerking scene.

The smells waft from special machines under the seats in the back rows of two movie theatres, which create different fragrances by controlling the mix of oils stored in the machines, company spokesperson Akiko Suzaki said on Wednesday.

Theatres will be able to download different scent sequences for upcoming films from the Internet, she said.

The company began a similar service for homes last year in Japan, in which people download different programs to emit smells from a ¥73 500 (about R3 800) home version of the machine.

The smells aren't for watching movies but designed to accompany a horoscope reading or work as aromatherapy.

Owners must keep refilling the machine with fragrant liquids. NTT Communications would not disclose how many machines it has sold. - Sapa-AP