Whatever happened to Terry Malick? (1 Viewer)

[ThomasC]

The official site is up:

http://www.thenewworldmovie.com/

 

[Elijah Sullivan]

Doubtlessly he is going to make a politically-correct film -- he's done it before. If you have seen his three other films, and I can't recommend them enough, you would be aware that he is not afraid of being politically correct, questioning American values, or contradicting the Hollywood norm.

The man has a strong reputation for being at the forefront of mature cinema; I wouldn't worry about this movie being politically incorrect. He tought philosophy at MIT when he was still in his twenties; he has a healthy appreciation for the truth.

I'll let loose my inner Malick fan at this point and register my amazement at the New World teaser footage. Yes, it also occured to me that it looks a lot like The Thin Red Line... there were a couple shots that could have belonged to either film, and that isn't a good sign. But the rest of the footage was stunning, and Malick's movies have always been improvements upon their predecessors -- Badlands being very good, Days of Heaven being purely great, and The Thin Red Line being an acknowledged masterpiece. If this movie didn't continue that trend, it would be unfortunate. But even if it were a major disappointment it might still be a great film.

But Malick films were never for everyone. Personally, I think he's the greatest living American director, hands down. Disregarding one of his movies on the basis of being controversial (especially when it hasn't even been confirmed that there was any deviation from historical fact) is rash and saddening. Give it a chance. We're talking about what could potentially be the most important movie made in the English language this decade.

Thanks.

 

[Kevin M]

What does being "politically correct" have to do with "the truth"?
PC is the mind numbing attitude of not wishing to offend anyone, even if it is done so by stating the truth, so if anything Malick is making a politically incorrect film in that it is (perhaps) taking a rather controversial look at our history but will be doing so by stating the facts.

 

[Elijah Sullivan]

Excuse me. I thought political correctness was taking all sides into consideration and making an unbiased statement. I wasn't aware that this term had come to mean being deceptive.

 

[Ernest Rister]

"if anything Malick is making a politically incorrect film in that it is (perhaps) taking a rather controversial look at our history"

OUR history? Who is OUR? My ancestors came to America in the early 20th cenutry, from Germany and Czechoslovakia. If some assholes came over on a boat in the 1600's and behaved badly with the Natives, that's not OUR history, no more than it is OUR history that "Native Americans" immigrated to these lands across a land bridge from Asia many centuries before that. If Malick wants to make a movie about a collision of cultures, more power to him. If he wants to make a movie about how the Evil West polluted the virgin soil of America and came here with a bloodthirsty desire to slaughter the innocent Natives - a'la Disney's "Pocahontas" - he can count me out.

 

[Lew Crippen]

OUR history? Who is OUR? My ancestors came to America in the early 20th cenutry, from Germany and Czechoslovakia.

With respect Ernst, it is. ‘Our’ used in context refers to the collective American experience.

This includes for the collective citizenry, what happened at Plymouth and Jamestown as well as San Antonio and San Juan Capistrano. It includes for us all, the arrival of the Puritans, but the Huguenots, the Irish, the slave trade, your ancestors and displaced persons after WWII (and Vietnam).

None of us individually have responsibility for actions against the natives back then (though we all share some responsibility today) and none of us participated in the slave trade, regardless of when our forbearers arrived. But for me, all of these things and many more are our history.

 

[Kevin M]

OUR history? Who is OUR? My ancestors came to America in the early 20th cenutry, from Germany and Czechoslovakia. If some assholes came over on a boat in the 1600's and behaved badly with the Natives, that's not OUR history

Really Ernest, that is the worst kind of hyperbole and not very well presented as it is truly obvious in it's desire to start an argument. Obviously I was referring to the history of America and, as we live here, "OUR" American history.
You may not want to count the bad things that the forefathers did as "our history" but the fact is that they did do these things and to put blinders on in an attempt to whitewash "our" history as being only honest, kind and good is fairly shortsighted......we can only learn from "our" past mistakes if we confront them head on, not by burying our heads in the sand.

I get the feeling that this is only a taste of the controversy that Malick is going to start if he is indeed telling the story from that point of view, in this era of ultra patriotism this isn't going to go over well in certain peoples minds no matter how "factual" it may be.

 

[Kevin M]

Then again Dances With Wolves won for best picture and I have the feeling/hope that this film isn't going to be nearly as myopic as that film was, I.E. Malick hopefully won't present the natives as being totally "angelic" or the colonists as being totally "Evil" as Costner did.....the trailer isn't bolstering my hopes much though.

So you see Ernest, I'm not quite as down on the forefathers as it might seem, I don't feel they were the absolute evil corrupters that most modern films present them as....but the fact is that, almost from the very start, their dealings with the indigenous population weren't very honorable for the most part, and in the end not honorable at all.

 

[teapot2001]

Then again Dances With Wolves won for best picture and I have the feeling/hope that this film isn't going to be nearly as myopic as that film was, I.E. Malick hopefully won't present the natives as being totally "angelic" or the colonists as being totally "Evil" as Costner did.....the trailer isn't bolstering my hopes much though.

I thought the portrayals in Dances with Wolves were more balanced than that. The Pawnee tribe was portrayed in a negative light and I would only call one of the white men as being evil.

~T

 

[Kevin M]

It's true that the Pawnee we portrayed as enemies but on the whole, IMO, the entire native peoples were played out with a rather child like innocence that was a bit of a cop-out to my eyes. Human beings can behave this way, yes, but in any group you will have wide diversity of attitudes & personalities, these people were anything but diverse.

I would also have to disagree with your view about the portrayal of white men, as the only positive white male character in the entire film, as I recall, would be Costner. The rest either being callus, crude, war mongering, insane, evil or just generally slimy. Caricatures rather than characters.

 

[Ernest Rister]

There are many good Union soldiers in Dances With Wolves - the general feeling I get from Dunbar and many of the other characters in DWW is that you have people trapped within these larger historical movements, and are trying as best they can to free themselves from them, or escape them. The opening sequence with Dunbar on the table tells you everything you need to know -- he seems doomed to a fate, another piece of meat on the assembly line. The powers that be are indifferent to him as they do what they do. Dunbar must take matters into his own hands to change his fate and escape this "amputation factory", because the middle-management authorities can't be trusted.

What Dunbar finds with the Sioux is the exact opposite -- trust. He earns the trust of the Sioux, just as he comes to trust them. Just as Dunbar's self-willed motivation to escape the judgements of his society is shown as metaphor in the first sequence of the movie, this is shown again in metaphor with his relation to Two Socks. As Dunbar and the Sioux come to trust each other, so do Dunbar and the wolf. He trusts the living system of the Sioux because it seems to work and serve everyone, he is lost in his own society because he doesn't see any value to it.

This sort of falls apart in the final twenty minutes of Dances with Wolves, because the filmmakers are unwary about how audiences will react to seeing the indians kill white U.S. soldiers. In order to make this go down easier, they give us reprehensible, loathsome characters like Spivey and the Sgt ("We gonna hang ya!") to remove any antipathy or doubt or sympathy for them in the mind of the audience -- these characters are all killed in order for Dunbar to escape, and so they must earn their death by being scumbags worthy of a tomahawk to the chest or strangled underwater by a pair of leg irons. We're even treated to scenes with Spivey in a field, defecating and wiping his human waste with the pages of Dunbar's journal. And then he shoots Dunbar's dog.

These moments are easily the most-criticized sequence in Dances with Wolves because the film becomes a heavy-handed cartoon. In westerns of the past, many times, the native peoples were written as one-dimensional evil stereotypes. I'm not convinced that by reversing that trend, it should be considered progress. At the end of the day, you're still writing one-dimensional characters as opposed to a more objective approach that is more complicated and more fascinating.

The last time someone tried their habd at the Pocahontas story, the studio (Walt Disney Pictures) failed the test by giving us a clear cut buffoonish villain and a side to root for and a side to root against. The "whites" are led by a greedy, power-hungry villain ("With all you've gat in ya, boys, dig up Virginia, boys!") and this cheap character strips the film of some of its potential power. The film is strongest when it presents a collision of cultures...like that breathtaking shot when Pocahontas says she sees "Clouds", and then we see her POV, and the clouds are the great sails of a ship barely visible over the tall tree line. Great stuff.

It is weakest when this is diluted - like Pocahontas and John Smith magically learning to speak each other's language, or when the scales tip as far as they do in Dances With Wolves, and characters become one-dimensional buffoons.

So I return to my previous statement. If Malick's film is an objective look at a collision of cultures, it should be a fascinating thing to behold. If it is a one-sided political screed, i.e. "How Evil Whitey Polluted the Virgin Shores of America" like Disney's Pocahontas, I have no interest in such one-dimensional simplistic revisionism.

 

[Kevin M]

I disagree since virtually every white male character he encounters after the opening sequence is either insane, indifferent, hatful, crude or slimy...the only people he has any meaningful connection with is (of course, considering the intent of the story) the sioux, and I still feel they were portrayed just a bit over the top of reality as being so in touch with nature and themselves as a community as if to appear angelic in comparison to the rest of the characters in the film who were, IMO, so reprehensible and loathsome as to guarantee the viewer would identify with the natives as being more "human" than any other character....it is manipulation in the truest sense of the cinematic word. You have no other choices to turn to in the film.

This is what I hope Malick avoids in his film.

 

[JonZ]

"I disagree since virtually every white male character he encounters after the opening sequence is either insane, indifferent, hatful, crude or slimy"

There was also the other Lieutenant who was a decent person.

I think theres alot of overreacting here. Are these characters any different than the bad or loathsome people of Oliver Stones Platoon?(I think Platoons characters were more fleshed out and /or real)The people of that time werent very kind to nonwhites so Im not sure theyre behavior in DWW was really a exaggeration or cartoonish.

As for New World, I'll wait until I see it before a make a opinion, argue or rant over it.

 

[Edwin Pereyra]

Can't wait to hear Colin Farell sing "Colors of the Wind"! Or talk to the old woman in the willow tree! Who is playing the bad, fat British Governor, and most importantly, who is playing the raccoon?

You must be obsessed with everything that is... Disney.

~Edwin

 

[Jan H]

Wow, I can't believe there are doubts about what Malick will do with this material. Frankly, his 3 other films are unequivocal masterpieces (IMO) and he should be given the benefit of the doubt. Granted, on the surface Farrell is a curious choice, but it's possible that Malick can tap into his strengths as an actor (and I believe Colin has potential) far more than Stone did in Alexander. Maybe he can do for Farrell what Kubrick did for Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon: Take a pretty boy and use him in service of the story. In any case, if Malick decides to make a film about anything it should be cause for celebration.

 

[JonZ]

Some pics here...........

http://www.cinemaemcena.com.br/multi...e.asp?cod=3300

 

[ThomasC]

*sigh*

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6853518/

As if Colin Farrell’s love scene with a male actor in "Alexander" didn’t cause him enough grief, now he’s filmed one with an underage girl. But looking to avoid the sort of furor that erupted over Nicole Kidman’s scenes with a young actor in “Birth,” the filmmakers reportedly have re-shot the scenes, toning them down.

Colin Farrell stars as American colonist John Smith in “The New World,” and 14-year-old Q’Orianka Kilcher plays Pocahontas. The flick is said to be slavish to period detail and the love scene between the two was “in good taste,” according to a defender, but when studio lawyers for the film saw an early cut, according to a report, “they nearly had a heart attack.”

“Farrell was told to get romantic and sensual but knew there was a certain amount of kissing involved,” a source told the British mag The People. “He played the scene brilliantly and he really put Q’Orianka at her ease. But when the lawyers saw the finished product with Colin and Q’Orianka rolling around on the ground kissing they just flipped out.” The lawyers were concerned about child-pornography laws, and a tamer version of the scene was reportedly re-shot.

“This is the first time I’ve heard of this,” a New Line spokesman told The Scoop. “To my knowledge, there is no scene of this nature in the picture.”

 

[Chuck Mayer]

Of course, unlike "Birth" this film is about a specific relationship that likely did occur, even with the disparate age differences in a time where such a thing was normal. I just can't wait to see the film.

Take care,
Chuck

 

[Chuck Mayer]

Back to the title of the thread, it actually appears that Tree of Life found itself a lead in Brad Pitt. Those of you familiar with the backstory of The Fountain might smile at that.

I guess if you are going to ditch Aronofsky on a tale like this, the only way to not regret it is a Malick film

Whatever gets Malick filming is fine by me. Great news if this actually rolls in the next few months.