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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 17, 2017 6:10:09 GMT
Discussion, reviews, legacy, news, pics, artwork, etc.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 10, 2017 21:18:19 GMT
From a pre-release piece on Terrance Malick: Set in the Jamestown settlement in 1607, "The New World" is being sold as a love story, with Pocahontas caught between Smith, the dashing renegade whose life she famously saved as her father was about to kill him, and John Rolfe (Christian Bale), the more cautious settler she later married. (Most historians doubt that there was a romance between the very young Pocahontas and Smith, and some even question whether she saved his life, but the filmmakers are comfortable with their fiction.)
Although Mr. Farrell and Mr. Bale are the big-name stars, the story belongs to Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher). Russell Schwartz, president for marketing at New Line, said, "Terrence said to me very early on, 'This is our original mother,' " meaning that her journey is that of America itself, as she goes from her role as native American to a woman who embraces European civilization when she is baptized and moves to London.
For a movie opening soon, though, there is still a ridiculous amount of secrecy surrounding "The New World." Mr. Fisk guessed that Pocahontas would do the narration and Ms. Green, the producer, would say only that there'd be one. Mr. Schwartz described the voice-overs as internal monologues and said that in the early version shown to New Line, "we start with Colin's voice-over because we enter the world from John Smith's point of view, then it's picked up by Pocahontas." That brings "The New World" closer to the meditative narratives of "The Thin Red Line" than the commentaries of the first Malick films.
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The film's budget of around $30 million isn't much by Hollywood standards ("The Thin Red Line" cost $50 million) and New Line expects the film to do well internationally. Whatever "The New World" turns out to be, it isn't likely that Mr. Malick will be considered a big risk for his next film. Maybe he's getting more practical.
Or not. Mr. Fisk said: "There are a couple of other projects he's been working on since the 70's. He hasn't yet made the projects most important to him." What are they? "I can't tell you," he laughed.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 10, 2017 21:27:02 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 10, 2017 21:36:45 GMT
From Manohla Dargis review at The New York Times: For the filmmaker, who is more poet than historian, Pocahontas is clearly a metaphor (virgin land, as it were), but to see her as exclusively metaphor would only repeat history's error. What interests Mr. Malick is how and why enlightened free men, when presented with new realms of possibility, decided to remake this world in their own image: free men like Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell), who marvels at the beauty of a place where "the blessings of the earth are bestowed on all" while Indians lie bound in his boat, and who claims to love, only to destroy.
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In a gutsy move, the filmmaker represents this romance between Pocahontas and Smith as real, but only to flip it on its head... If the affair seems strangely ethereal, as if it were taking place in another dimension, in a lovelier, more enchanted realm, it is because Mr. Malick is fashioning a countermythology in "The New World," one to replace, or at least challenge, a mythology already in place. In Mr. Malick's interpretation, Pocahontas is no longer the simple girl of Smith's fanciful imaginings or the acquiescent native who bows to take the English yoke, thereby making way for all the colonies to come and all the catastrophes perpetuated against native peoples. Pocahontas is still irrefutably "other"; for a filmmaker living 400 years later in another world and different skin, there is no alternative.
... Malick's Pocahontas, while impossibly young (the mature-looking Ms. Kilcher was 14 when the film was shot), is also the agent of her own destiny, never more so than after she and Smith are separated. The two are parted just as Mr. Farrell's moony reveries threaten to drown Pocahontas's voice. Once he is out of the picture, though, she secures her voice and then a husband (an excellent Christian Bale), and ushers the story toward its shattering close.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 10, 2017 21:39:26 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 10, 2017 21:46:51 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 10, 2017 21:50:30 GMT
From another New York Times article this one detailing the differences between the more streamlined theatrical version with the earlier longer version: Mr. Malick has not shot any new material for his latest and fourth feature, but those returning to the film may notice changes in the voiceover narration and a somewhat tightened tempo. The most noticeable alterations are in the first section after Capt. John Smith (Mr. Farrell) and the rest of the Jamestown founders have dropped anchor off what is now Virginia. The most conspicuous addition is a bit of exposition that finds the leader of the voyage (played by Christopher Plummer) summarizing who and why the travelers are there, which may prove helpful to anyone walking in cold or to those who slept through high school history. It's a whiff of convention in a film that otherwise still overwhelmingly hews its own aesthetic course.
Lovers of the film can rest easy; both theatrical versions are satisfying and devastating in equal measure. (It's promised that the DVD will contain both the 135-minute version and a three-hour edit, bringing the number of director's cuts to three.) Although I miss the drifty interludes in the longer edition that sweep us along in the dream, it's also a relief that Colin Farrell no longer registers quite as much like a new age Hamlet -- to be with Pocahontas or not to be. This Smith is slyer, cagier (watch his eyes) and much less of a moral question mark. And if the romantic haze that settles over Smith and Pocahontas sometimes made it seem as if it were the filmmaker who was swept up in fantasy, rather than his characters, that is no longer the case.
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 7, 2021 4:59:45 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 8, 2021 4:49:38 GMT
Bale speaks briefly at 1:06, then 1:08
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 8, 2021 4:58:58 GMT
This analysis by Chloe Zao is so beautiful and insightful.
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