For whatever reason in the fall of 2005, I had missed out on the initial local press screening of Terrence Malick's latest epic, The New World, and the reactions that followed were decidedly ... less than appreciative. Shortly thereafter, word had come our way that an alternate cut would be opening instead, and so it was this second screening that I did attend.

For the first half of the film, I was fairly fascinated by the tale of John Smith (Colin Farrell) and his conquest of both what is now America and what was then Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher). However, somewhere around when Smith disappeared and John Rolfe (Christian Bale) all but replaced him, I found my interest waning at a considerable rate.

It's difficult to deny that there were those who still thought the film to be one for the ages, even in its 135-minute incarnation. Those who lucked into the earlier screenings or lived in New York or Los Angeles could briefly get a glimpse of the original 150-minute cut, before certain scenes had been abridged, excised, or even replaced. Now, come October 14th, fans will get the chance to devour a DVD release of 172 minutes in length.

Earlier that same year, I'd found myself fairly unimpressed with the theatrical cut of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, only to eat my words once the engrossing three-hour-plus director's cut hit DVD after a similar NY/LA bow. Maybe almost three years after the fact, I can bring myself to give Malick's masterpiece another go. Will you?

Japanese watching movies to smells controlled by computer
A theater audience in Japan will be sniffing their noses -- literally -- at a new Hollywood adventure film when it opens here later this month.

A new service from major telecommunications company NTT Communications Corp. will synchronize 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 theaters, which create different fragrances by controlling the mix of oils stored in the machines, company spokeswoman Akiko Suzaki said Wednesday.

Theaters 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 yen (US$620) 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. (AP)

April 12, 2006
~source:MSN-Japan

Wide variety of film choices at Berlin Festival


Berlin - After rather a weak line-up of celebrities last year, the Berlin Film Festival is gearing up to roll out the red carpet this week for some of the world's top stars and to showcase 19 premieres in its main programme.

Now in its 56th year, the festival opens on Thursday with German-born director Marc Evans' Snow Cake, a drama starring Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman and depicting the friendship between an autistic woman and a man traumatised after a fatal car accident.

Both London-born Rickman and America's Weaver are among the star-studded guests who are expected for this year's Berlin festival, which is one of the world's top three movie fests.

Other stars and directors expected to make their way to Berlin also include Isabelle Huppert, Gael Garcia Bernal, Isabella Rossellini, George Clooney, Heath Ledger, Meryl Streep and John Hurt.

Coming as Berlin's cold grey winter months grind on, the festival's annual glamour offensive helps to give the German capital a touch of glitz amid the gloom of February.

Renowned British actress Charlotte Rampling is to head the international jury, which draws together eight key figures from the movie business in the US, Europe and Asia.

Recognising the booming worldwide interest in Bollywood movies, the Berlinale has included in the jury leading Indian producer and director Yash Chopra.

Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick insists that festivalgoers will find something they are interested in among the 360 movies to be shown in the 10-day fest's main sections.

"Whoever wants sex, will get sex, whoever wants politics will get politics and whoever wants football should also expect it to be in the programme," said Kosslick.

That said, however, many of the 26 films selected for the festival's main competition are dominated by movies which are as Kosslick said "very political and close to reality".

But then, the Berlin film festival has never shied away from controversial issues, with directors of the films included in this year's programme taking a tough look at issues such as rape, war, political repression and sexuality.

While Danish-born Pernille Fischer Christensen's En Soap tells the story of the tragi-comic relationship between the owner of a beauty clinic and a transsexual, the festival is to also premiere a movie on the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The Road To Guantanamo by directors Michael Winterbottom and Matt Whitecross, traces three Muslims from Great Britain who were held without being charged at Guantanamo Bay prison camp for two years.

The line-up of films to be shown in Berlin also includes movies by legendary American directors Terrence Malick and Robert Altman, whose new film A Prairie Home Companion is likely to offer some light relief in the festival line-up.

The New World, the long-awaited new film by Malick, the director of Badlands, Days Of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, and starring Colin Farrell, is to be shown out of competition.

Coming against the backdrop of global tensions surrounding Iran's nuclear programme, among the films selected for this year's festival are a raft of movies from Iran, including for the first time in about 30 years, two in the fest's main competition.

The two films - Zemestan (It's Winter) by Rafi Pitts and Offside by Jafar Panahi - also tend to reflect the major theme of this year's festival and explore everyday life in Iran.

Among the 56 countries that have entered movies in the Berlinale are a big contingent of contributions from the Middle East and Asia. Altogether this year's programme includes about six films from either the Arab world or Israel.

The festival's main competition also includes for the first time in about 50 years a film from Thailand. As well Chen Kaige's martial arts adventure The Promise, which is said to be the most expensive Chinese movie ever made is to be shown out of competition.

As has been in the case in previous years, the festival section celebrating new young directors (Forum) includes a large number of movies from Asia with the section's director, Christoph Terhechte praising the originality of Asian cinema.

Apart from movies from Korea, Japan and India, Forum includes two new films from Malaysia - The Last Communist by Amir Muhammad and Monday Morning Glory by Woo Ming Jin.

Since taking over director of the festival five years ago, Kosslick has also sought to promote European filmmakers, in particular from Germany.

And following what many critics believe to have been one of the best years for German cinema, a record of over 60 films from Germany have been entered across the festival's key competitions.

Of the 19 films competing for the Golden Bear this year, four are from German directors. - Sapa-dpa

Published on the web by Tonight on February 7, 2006.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Tonight 2006. All rights reserved.
source:www.tonight.co.za

Colin a "Lovely Man"
By JANE STEVENSON, TORONTO SUN

LOS ANGELES -- It's not the best news when you're leading actor goes into rehab just as interviews to promote your film are about to begin.

But so it went last December as Hollywood bad boy Colin Farrell checked himself into rehab for addiction to painkillers just as promotion for The New World was starting up.

Sarah Green, the film's producer, admitted she was disappointed that he wasn't be on hand to promote the movie.

'THINGS JUST HAPPEN'

"Of course," she told reporters. "I miss him. He's really a lovely man and so talented. I'm sorry he's not here. (But) these things just happen when they happen."

Farrell's The New World co-star Q'Orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahontas to his John Smith, says she was also distressed to learn about Farrell's rehab stay, but wished him the best.

"I was sad but you know it's the first step in the right direction," says Kilcher.

"And my entire family's heart's with him. And we love him to death and wish him well."
~source:OttawaSun

January 13, 2006
Critic's Notebook
Films in Need of a Little Nip and Tuck
By CARYN JAMES
"THE New World," Terrence Malick's poetic film about John Smith, Pocahontas and the Jamestown settlement, played for a week last month in New York and Los Angeles, but that version is already obsolete. "The New World" that will open around the country next Friday runs two-and-a-quarter hours, 15 minutes shorter than its earlier incarnation (whose brief run qualified it for Academy Awards) and a lot shorter than the three-hour cut Mr. Malick is preparing for the DVD release. The original is now something like "The New World 1.0," and you might wonder if these multiplying versions are part of some Microsoft-inspired marketing ploy, the film equivalent of the endless tinkering that makes you keep updating Windows.

Mr. Malick, who doesn't give interviews, wasn't about to explain himself, but the film's producer, Sarah Green, did it for him in a telephone interview. Like anybody else, she said, "Terry gets impatient sitting in theaters," and while preparing the DVD of "The New World" he saw that the film he had raced to deliver to New Line for the qualifying Oscar run "would play better if it were tightened up a little." He initiated the change, and people at New Line - with a sleeker, shorter movie to sell - must have felt as if they'd won the lottery.

The common-sensical view that an audience might actually have a better experience if the film were tauter is rare among directors, especially this season when some of the most prominent movies are needlessly long. These films achieve their bloated status for different reasons: the old "New World" and "Brokeback Mountain" (running 2 hours and 14 minutes) take too much time getting started. If the audience knows that the English settlers will land and the cowboys will turn out to be gay, the movies shouldn't waste 15 minutes getting there.

Both Peter Jackson's popcorn movie "King Kong," a gargantuan 3 hours 7 minutes, and Steven Spielberg's ultraserious "Munich," 2 hours and 44 minutes, seem slacker than they should, probably because their powerful directors can do whatever they want. Who's going to tell them no? What all these films have in common, though, is that their length adds minutes likely to make viewers fidget instead of drawing them in.

As Mr. Malick realized, the issue is not length itself, but what works on screen. The original "New World" created the satisfying sense of having been through an epic experience, following Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher) from her innocent youth, through her romance with Smith (Colin Farrell), her marriage to another settler, John Rolfe (Christian Bale) and her trip to London, where she is presented to the king. But that version also included more of what Ms. Green calls "leisure shots" and others might call travelogues: pretty pictures of birds flying, water flowing, trees growing, many appearing at the start, when Pocahontas inhabits a world before the English.

Those preliminary scenes, which slowed things down, have been trimmed, and the voice-overs - interior monologues in which Pocahontas and Smith meditate on their lives - are less likely to accompany picturesque views of nature. Instead, Ms. Green said, the voice-over "pulls you into the next scene." The editing was the kind of snipping that, like a good face-lift, should be inconspicuous if it works. Besides, Mr. Malick can put it all back (and more) in the DVD. "He always had it in mind that he would make a longer version that would allow people to take bathroom breaks," Ms. Green said.

Films aren't all about plot, of course, and artistically a work may need time to establish its characters and its pace. But viewers now walk into theaters already so crammed with information about the film that those establishing scenes almost take care of themselves. A 2-hour-and-14-minute movie isn't unusual today - the bloat has been happening for years - but "Brokeback Mountain" spends so much time offering scenic views of the range and all those sheep that you begin to wonder if Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger's characters are ever going to sidle up to each other. The film takes off only after their romance begins, nearly a half-hour in.

There is an anomaly behind these elephantine movies: as viewers' attention spans seem to grow shorter, accustomed to fragmented computer screens and television sound bites, films get longer, hoping to compete by creating an event. The hugely hyped "King Kong" gained even more publicity when word arrived that it had ballooned to more than three hours. The problem with "Kong" isn't the setup, though. The first section, in which the starving actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is hired by the film producer Carl Denham (Jack Black) and they make their way to Skull Island, is entertaining enough to sustain its 45 minutes.

The slackness arrives with the special effects, those magical tricks that Mr. Jackson seems so reluctant to trim. There aren't entire sequences that need to be cut from "Kong." (Well, maybe the too-cute episode in which Kong ice skates in Central Park en route to the Empire State Building.) But each set piece - the rampaging dinosaurs, the spiders, those toothy-wormy things that look like refugees from the "Alien" movies - includes a few scenes too many. And there are too many lingering shots of Kong's face and expressive eyes. These are signs of a director so enamored with his own clever accomplishments that he sacrifices the pacing of the film. Snipping a few seconds here and there would have made it a little shorter and much sleeker.

The far more trenchant "Munich" has a terrific beginning, too. Mr. Spielberg swiftly and horrifyingly depicts the murders of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, then introduces the Israelis assigned to retaliate. But after Avner (Eric Bana) and his team begin to hunt down the 11 men on their list, the film settles into a repetitious pattern. There are slight variations in the action; bombs are planted in different places. Every now and then that action stops so the characters can question the morality or effectiveness of what they're doing. About two hours in, viewers might begin to worry that the film will drag them through all 11 names. In fact, the team doesn't assassinate all its targets, but as the body count rises over a half-dozen - and some of the Israelis are killed in return - the murders blur together in a way that lessens their impact.

Mr. Spielberg made "Munich" quickly, and at times it shows. You can almost see where the screenplay, by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, was stitched together, the philosophical and the action halves never making a cohesive whole. Its best parts - the moral questioning of political assassination, Avner's emotional anguish - are so good that you wish Mr. Spielberg had made a more cogent, compressed film, one that matched his ambition. In such cases, a Malick-like return to the editing room can seem like inspiration rather than a director's indulgence.
~source:NY Times

The End of the Innocence

'The New World' is an old-fashioned masterpiece


by Matthew Wilder


Terrence Malick's The New World put me in a physical state I've never before experienced in a movie: hunched forward in my seat, breathing much too fast, bracing myself in anticipation of heartbreak--then dissolving in tears of joy at passages that feel like more than the human heart can hold. Malick's script follows the outward-flying, all-embracing shape of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, sometimes very literally; Malick is the first artist in movies who has managed to translate Whitman's ecstasy--the bliss of connectedness to all creatures and things--into sound, music, and images. He returns movies to the poetic essence of silent cinema--and essence is, in fact, the theme of this work. In 19th-century fashion, Malick is an essentialist, a believer that Nature and Woman and Country have cores that can be identified and photographed. But that essence can't be too easily quantified, because a thing's essence is, for Malick, its soul. The transmission of spirit through cinema: Haven't thought about that much lately, have you? Malick seeks to return movies to their essence by traveling backward in time to a period before their invention.

The New World takes place at the beginning of the 17th century for a tale so oft-told we almost can't hear it any longer: White Europeans encounter Native Americans; mutual attraction, incomprehension, and violence ensue. But the time to which the movie transports us is not that period; rather, it's in the 1800s where Malick's mind dwells--a time when the movement of the New World from a green idyll into a gray factory sent certain sensitive souls both inward and outward, finding the spirit they lacked in society in leaves of grass. "Is there a war in nature?" was the question that reverberated through Malick's last movie, The Thin Red Line, in which the calamities of war were seen from the vantage point of the tall, unbloodied trees that stood above dying young men in the battlefield. Here, Malick asks if there is the possibility for peace in nature, for the redemption of our mortal follies in the blissful endlessness of nature's cycles; answering in the affirmative, he manifests that possibility in set pieces of near-blinding exhilaration.

The movie is structured around three ecstatic montages: the arrival of the tall ships in the New World, the consummation of the love between John Smith (Colin Farrell) and the girl usually known as Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), and a third that I can't divulge to those who haven't seen the film. Each section uses a passage from Wagner's "Das Rheingold" that focuses on a single rising and falling arpeggio that musically mimes Malick's trademark image, the rippling of wind through tall fields of grass; and in each, the natural world cascades over us, imminent and omnipresent, its embrace at once sexual, intoxicating, menacing, and ennobling. It is a sign of The New World's towering ambition that, in these three sequences, those cascading images of nature are meant to encompass the blending of many kinds of oppositions: the "technological" and the "primitive," male and female, innocence and experience.

Are Malick's images of a fecund virgin-child-mother and her tribe "naive"? The PC police will find their arrest warrants rescinded by the totalizing power of Malick's vision. In the penultimate sequence, the heroine is brought to the British court and has the red carpet rolled out for her: His Majesty the King delights her with all the creatures of his menagerie and with the animal skins and plumage worn by his baroquely attired courtiers. It is as if the genes of the dowdy British and the florid American aborigines met once again in the future--peaceably recombining to re-create the image of the garden in heaven.

No contemporary filmmaker, not even Robert Bresson (who died nursing a dream of a film based on the book of Genesis), has removed everyday psychology from movie acting as Malick has here. By creating often wordless scenes in which his actors are focused on arduous physical tasks, Malick moves us back to a place discovered by the pilgrims of Christian portraiture: the revelation of the soul as the unselfconscious subject. In the magical alchemy between editing, music, and the guileless faces of his performers, Malick finds an inner light.

Yesterday I ran into film critic F.X. Feeney on the street, and he couldn't contain his enthusiasm for The New World: "It's as good as Dreyer's Joan of Arc or Sansho the Bailiff! It's as good as anything!" Is that right? It'll take a few years to find out. But it certainly feels right. There is something thrilling about watching the 62-year-old Malick trying to equal and exceed not his peers in the movie-brat generation, but Romantic opera, Whitman, and the Bible. Like Whitman, Malick views his work as a nature-based Book of Life, a complete almanac in which wisdom is available for every living soul at every stage of life, the entirety of experience contained within a platter of film.

That will likely provoke ridicule--and not just because this consummately anti-ironic artifact features bad boy Colin Farrell and a teenage native girl in a potentially giggle-making embrace. It's because, for all the euphoria contained within it, The New World ends on a note of supreme terror--a note sounded after you leave the theater. For the title refers also to the world that exists outside the multiplex--the world of movie posters and soft-drink bargains and bus kiosks and ring tones and civilian casualties-- our substitute for soulful leaves of grass. Once you have viewed that new world through Malick's eyes, you can never see it innocently again.

· · Vol 27 · Issue 1310 · PUBLISHED 1/11/2006
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/27/1310/article14023.asp
HOME: www.citypages.com

The New New World

The Pocahontas story is one of America’s favorite creation myths. The story of the virtuous young Indian maiden who saves an English adventurer and thus paves the way for white settlement and migration was told and retold in novels, poems, and paintings all through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (for an incisive critical study, see Robert S. Tilton’s Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative), and it’s still very much with us today, thanks to children’s books and Walt Disney.

One reason the legend has proved so durable and a focus for national discussions on race, miscegenation, and colonialism is that there are few verifiable facts to discredit any interpretation. Despite more than three centuries of historical inquiry, we probably know less about the North American Indian culture of the period then we know about the pre-Columbian Incas; in truth, historians are divided as to whether Powhatan’s daughter actually saved John Smith from ritual execution or Smith misunderstood what was happening and was in fact being made part of some adoption ceremony. If the former, we have no idea what Pocahontas’s motives were, whether she acted out of personal feelings for the English captain or merely compassion. We don’t even know how old she was, though most historians believe she was between 12 and 14.

Terrence Malick’s The New World is the latest in a long line of works that use the Pocahontas-John Smith story as a starting point for a metaphor of the birth of the New World. In early Pocahontas narratives, devised when white Americans were sure of themselves and of their glorious future, this first meeting of white and native cultures was considered a good thing. (Many leading Virginia families openly boasted of their blood ties to Pocahontas, virtually the only native American to be so honored.) Now, of course, we’re not so sure, and Malick’s film reflects our national ambivalence as we approach 2006.

It would be nice if it reflected a little more, but Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography, while presenting us with some striking images of the forest primeval, is often depressingly dishwaterish. This isn’t his fault. Malick is as quirky a director as America has produced over the last four decades, and he has given us such fascinating but only half-realized works as Badlands (1973), Days Of Heaven (1978), and The Thin Red Line (1998). This time he chose to film entirely without electric lights, which may make the world look more like it did to people in the early seventeenth century but makes it less like anything to us in the present, as we can see so little of it. Malick still directs like a film-school student more than 35 years after his first feature, and he has made other strange decisions too. Having hired James Horner, probably the most popular film-score composer now working, he inserts excerpts from Wagner’s Das Rheingold onto the soundtrack. Why, exactly? Wouldn’t Dvorak’s New World Symphony have been more appropriate?

The New World has terrific actors, and they are all well cast, though some of them, such as the great Christopher Plummer as the British Captain Newport, aren’t given enough to do. At the center of the first half of the film, fortunately, is Colin Farrell. Farrell’s characters have always had a quality of wildness and unpredictability just below the surface; he’s at his best when the script doesn’t weigh him down with all sorts of baggage about the past, as it did in Alexander. His John Smith seems to blossom in the New World, particularly when he encounters Pocahontas, played by Q’Orianka Kilcher, who was 14 when the picture was shot, two years ago. There is an intriguing eroticism to their relationship that never quite moves into the realm of the carnal; the suggestion is that Farrell’s Smith is as overwhelmed by the Eden-like atmosphere of early Virginia as he is by Kilcher’s Pocahontas. Or, interpreted another way, she is for him the manifestation of the virgin continent. Their early scenes where both work past the problem of language are the best in the movie.

One of the challenges for Malick, who also wrote the script, is to make the next hour or so dramatically interesting after the grand romantic beginning, and he never quite does it. Pocahontas, of course, did not wind up with the peripatetic Smith but with the much more husbandly John Rolfe (played by Christian Bale, who makes the most of an underwritten role). The film picks up briefly when the couple returns to England, and we see England, briefly, through the eyes of Pocahontas, in scenes that beautifully contrast with the beginning. But the real problem at the core of The New World is scarcely addressed, namely how we are to accept the contradiction that is Pocahontas. More a heroine for feminism than for Indian ideals, the poor girl died of tuberculosis in England in 1617 after choosing European civilization and rejecting the people she was born into—especially rejecting, it seems, their culture of male supremacy. How amazed she would be to see what an icon we have made of her.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.

‘New World’ is gorgeous but distant
Film is trademark Malick with its emphasis on beauty and lack of plot

By John Hartl
Film critic
MSNBC
Updated: 2:30 p.m. ET Dec. 22, 2005


Writer-director Terrence Malick takes his time, but whenever he releases a movie, cultish devotion follows. So far, the Malick collection has consisted of just three films: the ironic crime drama, “Badlands” (1973); the rapturous romantic triangle, “Days of Heaven” (1978); and the spiritual World War II nature epic, “The Thin Red Line” (1998).

His fourth feature, “The New World,” is likely to engender more respect than love. It’s typical of his work in many ways — sometimes it even lapses into self-parody — but it’s curiously distant and arty, without the unifying personality that made his previous work so distinctive.

Malick always uses narrators to accompany and interpret the lush visuals of his films: Sissy Spacek’s twangy serial-killer accomplice in “Badlands,” Linda Manz’s self-contradictory survivor in “Days of Heaven,” Jim Caviezel’s dying soldier (and the voices of other battle-weary men) in “The Thin Red Line.”

“The New World” is also narrated by several actors, none of whom is given much of an opportunity to establish a strong point of view. Colin Farrell’s 17th Century explorer, Capt. John Smith, is a blank slate much of the time. So is teenage newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher’s Pocahontas, who saves Smith from execution and falls for him when he goes native.

Only Christian Bale’s John Rolfe, the sweet-natured Englishman who eventually marries her, begins to suggest a three-dimensional character. The most affecting scenes involve the triangle that develops once Smith exits from the scene and Rolf proposes to Pocahontas, who accepts him and follows him to England when she’s told that Smith is dead.

As in “Days of Heaven,” the heroine finds herself longing for her difficult first love but gradually accepting the steadier, more reliable nature of his successor. Malick’s script accepts the Pocahontas legend while deliberately underplaying some of its more dramatic episodes. Her rescue of Smith is almost a throwaway, as is the death of one major character.

Malick has never been a plot person. He’s less interested in establishing narrative turning points than he is in capturing a moment: a savage knife thrust in battle that takes away the life of a beloved character; the Native Americans’ sighting of three settlers’ ships that will forever change their lives; the tentative first contact between the settlers and the natives. Especially effective are the street scenes in London, which doesn’t seem notably less grungy than Virginia.


Emmanuel Lubezki’s gorgeous cinematography is highly reminiscent of the work of cameramen on Malick’s previous films, as is the poetic use of sound effects and existing music. James Horner is officially credited with the score, but Malick leans heavily on Mozart and especially Wagner to create a mood.

Several famous actors turn up in roles that turn out to be astonishingly brief: David Thewlis, Wes Studi, Ben Chaplin and Christopher Plummer as Capt. Christopher Newport, who dubs the Indians “The Naturals” before disappearing. Their big scenes may have been left on the cutting-room floor, though the movie already seems overlong at two and a half hours.

As with all of Malick’s films, “The New World” will never be mistaken for the work of anyone else. He remains as distinctive as Fellini and Kubrick. For devotees, that may be enough.


© 2005 MSNBC Interactive

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10533855/

Berlin Film Festival announces competition films
Tue Dec 20, 2005 9:44 AM ET

BERLIN (Reuters) - The Berlin Film Festival announced on Tuesday the first seven films in the running for its Golden and Silver Bears awards in February along with two U.S. films that will be screened out of competition.

"Syriana", a political thriller starring George Clooney, and "The New World" with Colin Farrell about a 17th century English explorer, are the two U.S. films featured in the 26-film main program for the 56th annual Berlinale that runs February 9-19.

Both "Syriana" and "The New World" were already released in the U.S. but have been included in the festival that hopes to attract the celebrity actors of those and other films.

Six of the nine films selected so far will have their world premieres in Berlin. The rest of the program will be announced by mid-January, according to festival director Dieter Kosslick.

"We are extremely pleased to be able to present new films by famous directors as well as productions by young filmmakers," he said in a statement.

The Berlinale is the first of Europe's three major festivals in the new year and considered after Cannes and alongside Venice to be one of the world's most prestigious film showcases.

Making the Berlin festival unique are the 400,000 tickets sold to about 1,000 screenings of films in the competition and various sidebar events to ordinary cinema-goers, many of whom spend hours in long queues for tickets.

Two German directors will be competing for honors with world premieres. Oskar Roehler will present his adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's successful novel "The Elementary Particles" about two brothers set out to uncover the meaning of life.

Another German film, "Requiem" by Hans-Christian Schmid, is about exorcism in the West Germany in the 1970s.

Australia is represented with Neil Armfield's "Candy" about a young couple who become involved in drugs while a British-Canadian co-production "Snow Cake" is about a difficult love story that stars Sigourney Weaver.

Two films from Asia are in the program: a psychological thriller "Invisible Waves" by Thai director Ratanaruang Pen-ek portrays a contract killer; Chen Kaige's "Wu ji" ("The Promise") is a love story of a princess between three men and at $35 million is called the most expensive Chinese film ever made.

Last year "U-Carmen eKhayelitsha", a film that transports Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen" to a South African township, became the first African film to win Berlin's coveted Golden Bear for best film.

German actress Julia Jentsch won the Silver Bear for best actress for her portrayal of Sophie Scholl, a real-life heroine of the German resistance during World War Two who was executed by the Nazis.

Source:Reuters.com

Since his debut with Badlands in 1973, Terrence Malick has directed just two films: Days of Heaven in 1978 and The Thin Red Line twenty years later. That makes his fourth movie, the rapturously romantic and haunting New World, a genuine event. As Pocahontas, newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher, 15, is the canvas on which Malick paints his portrait of the old world colliding with the new. Kilcher, of Peruvian ancestry (and a cousin of Jewel), has a unique beauty the camera loves, capable of quicksilver changes from winsome to precociously wise and grave. She powers this mythic love story between the noble daughter of Powhatan (August Schellenberg) and Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell), a soldier of fortune who arrived in Virginia in 1607, with 102 other Englishmen, ready to settle the colony of Jamestown. Malick uses the myth to draw battle lines between nature and invading civilization. A wondrous early image of an Indian watching the three English ships sail into the harbor stands in stark contrast to the carnage of the Indian attack when the settlers refuse to leave. Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki -- a grandmaster at blending color and natural light -- craft a tone poem that may throw some audiences through its use of interior monologues. And Farrell's laddie-boy vigor sometimes feels at odds with the delicacy of the material. Christian Bale is far more persuasively in thrall as tobacco farmer John Rolfe, the widower who marries Pocahontas and sweeps her off to London when Smith deserts her. The final words of Pocahontas in England, a new mother constricted by her modern dress and surroundings, resonate powerfully. "Let's go home," she tells John. In rendering the sound and spirit of that home in exquisite detail, Malick brings his film very close to a state of grace.
PETER TRAVERS

(Posted: Dec, 15 2005)

~source:RollingStone

17th Palm Springs Festival Brings "The New World" and Foreign Oscar Submissions to the Desert


by Brian Brooks (December 14, 2005)
Plans for the 17th Palm Springs International Film Festival have been announced with 232 films from 70 countries, including four world, 31 North American and 51 U.S. premieres slated. Once again the festival will spotlight entries for the best foreign language Oscar consideration, with 51 of this year's 56 films screening during the festival. PSIFF will also host a small parade of celebs who will receive kudos at the event, in addition to its two juried competitions. New Line's "The New World" by Terrence Malick will open the festival, one of seven galas planned for the fest.

Malick's "The New World," starring Colin Farrell, Q'Orianka Kilcher, Christian Bale and Christopher Plummer is described as an epic adventure inspired by the legend of John Smith and Pocohontas "set amid the encounter of European and Native American cultures during the founding of the Jamestown settlement in 1607." The film portrays the classic story with "sweeping explorations of love, loss and discovery," according to the festival.

Additional gala screenings include the North American premieres of French director Valerie Lemercier's "Palais Royal!" starring Lemercier and Catherine Deneuve as well as Brazilian director Breno Silveira's "Two Sons of Francisco." "Palais" parodies the setbacks of the late Diana, Princess of Wales when a speech therapist marries the heir of an imaginary kingdom who becomes queen after the old king dies and is placed into a role she is unready to perform. "Two Sons," meanwhile is the story of Zeze Di Camargo and Luciano, two sons of a sharecropper who became a famous country music duo. The festival's "gay-la" will be Craig Chester's Tribeca '05 feature "Adam & Steve." The romantic-comedy revolves around 30-something gay man Adam, who encounters one of his most unsuccessful one-night stands without either of them realizing they've met before. The film stars Chester, Malcolm Gets and Parker Posey.

PSIFF world premieres include American directors Pippa Scott and Oree Rees' "King Leopold's Ghost" and Indian Rajeev Manoj Virani's "My Bollywood Bride." "Leopold" takes a look at colonial exploitation through Belgium's King Leopold II's plundering of the Congo in the 1800s, setting up a system of tyranny, which has shaped the country even to this day. Don Cheadle narrates the film. "Bollywood Bride," starring Jason Lewis and Kashmira Shah centers on a vacationing Bollywood star in California who embarks on a romance with a novelist, but then returns to India without saying "good bye" because she's torn by her feelings for him and her Indian roots.

"A History of Violence" director David Cronenberg will be in Palm Springs to receive the festival's "Visionary Award," one of a slew of celebs traveling to the desert resort to pick up accolades. "Brokeback Mountain" star Jake Gyllenhaal will be honored with the "Desert Palm Achievement Award, Actor," and Charlize Theron will take the same prize for "actress," while "Hustle & Flow" star Terrence Howard will receive the "Rising Star Award." Also in town will be Michael London (Producer of the Year Award) and Shirley MacLaine, this year's recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Thomas Newman will pick up the fest's "Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing."

PSIFF will take place January 5 - 16 in Palm Springs. The festival will announce its closing film at a later date. Then Mayor Sonny Bono founded the festival in 1990.

Farrell pulls out of premiere


14/12/2005 - 11:09:39

Irish heart-throb Colin Farrell has pulled out of the world premiere of his film 'The new world' after being admitted to a treatment centre for his drug addiction.

The 'Alexander' star, 29, has checked into an unnamed health centre for exhaustion and dependency on prescription drugs.

Farrell was scheduled to take a break from filming Miami Vice this week to promote The New World and attend the premiere in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Production company New Line have confirmed Farrell will miss the promotional activities and screening.

The epic romance about English settler Captain John Smith and native American Indian Pocahontas opens on limited release in the US on Christmas Day and opens nationwide next month.

Two Cultures Clash, And Two Lovers Leap
'The New World' 12/25

Newsweek


Dec. 19, 2005 issue - Our mental picture of the English settlers' landing in America tends to look as stiff as a grammar-school pageant: Englishmen right, with muskets; Indians left, bearing corn. Terrence Malick's "The New World" wipes clean our palette. The visionary director of "Badlands" and "The Thin Red Line" dispenses with pomp and rhetoric, and plunks us in a grassy field that would become Jamestown, Va., where, in 1607, weary, armor-clad white men make first contact with "the naturals." Barely clothed, faces painted, the natives circle the newcomers, poking, sniffing, licking, curious to see what these hairy fellows are made of. It's an astonishing scene, at once monumental, lyrical and almost comically intimate. You can feel the grass underfoot, the humidity in the air. This is, for the Europeans, the dawn of a new world; it's also nothing more or less than a bunch of wary, frightened men in a field, who may or may not have a future. And for Chief Powhatan's tribe, it's the beginning of the end of their old world, whose rules and customs the interlopers have no interest in understanding.

Malick's magnificent, frustrating epic mixes fact and legend to conjure up a reverie about Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), her love for Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) and her crossing from one culture to another. It's a voyage that leads her to Christianity, stiff leather shoes and marriage to tobacco grower John Rolfe (Christian Bale), who takes his young Powhatan princess bride to London to meet the king and queen. Just as Malick and his great cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, enable us to see the New World's landscape through Smith's awed eyes, we discover England through hers. It's as if we're seeing Western civilization for the first time, its formal gardens lunar in their beauty.

The casting of the unknown 14-year-old Kilcher proves a masterstroke. Her Pocahontas is playful, proud, soulful. Kilcher's face (she's of native Peruvian descent) has a chiseled, changeable beauty you want to study from every angle. Historians doubt that the real Pocahontas and Smith were ever lovers, but Malick spins a compelling romance, sweet, passionate—and deceptive. Farrell is a tender seducer, but her love for him puts her at odds with her own people, whom she's forced to betray. "Don't trust me," Smith warns, even as he pleads for her devotion. "You don't know who I am." The tragic collision of two competing cultures lurks inside his ambivalence.

Conventional storytelling doesn't interest Malick. Nature is as much a character as the humans. Scenes that would traditionally be played for high drama—Smith, in chains for subordination, saved from hanging by the ship's captain (Christopher Plummer)—are tossed off in a quick aside. More poet than dramatist, Malick prefers interior monologues to dialogue, eavesdropping on the inner thoughts of his three main characters, as he did in "The Thin Red Line." With mixed results. These whispered ruminations are beautifully written, but whose voice are we hearing? Malick's early-17th-century characters all suspiciously share the introverted, 21st-century sensitivity of their creator.

Malick works instinctively, discovering his movies as he films them on location, then rediscovering and reshaping them in the editing room. The reward is moments of transcendent beauty. What gets sacrificed is structure. The meditative, meandering middle of "The New World" is like a symphony with three adagio movements in a row. You hunger for a scherzo. The paradoxical Malick is a shoot-from-the-hip perfectionist who may be temperamentally incapable of making perfect movies. He can't see the forest because he's head over heels in love with the beauty of the trees.


© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10414365/site/newsweek/

Pocahontas on Acid: New Malick Movie

I did get to see an advance screening yesterday afternoon of Terrence Malick’s new movie, "The New World." This is a much-anticipated New Line Cinema release for Christmas, with high hopes for awards, etc.

Malick directed one of my all time favorite movies, "Days of Heaven," as well as the much respected “Badlands” and "The Thin Red Line." He’s a noted recluse and eccentric, not bad things at all.

"The New World" is set in 1608-1616 mostly on the Virginia shore near Jamestown. It tells the story, sort of, of a romantic triangle involving Pocahontas, Capt. John Smith and English aristocrat John Rolfe.

In many ways the story is similar to that of "Days of Heaven," which revolved around a triangle — Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and Sam Shephard. "New World" has the same dreamy texture, with breathtaking, award-winning cinematography and music that sounds like Wagner’s "Gotterdammerung."

However: in most ways “The New World” is surreal, slow, confusing, choppy and just plain weird. I mean this in the best way — it’s really interesting filmmaking. But it’s also psychedelic and kooky.

For one thing, Smith and Rolfe are played by Colin Farrell — doing his first real work as an actor and movie star that counts — and an always reliable Christian Bale. With makeup, they each look like they’re in their late 30s.

Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), however, is a child. She was 14 when they shot the movie, and, attractive as she is, she still a child.

Malick used 16-year-old Linda Manz in “Days of Heaven” as a wise narrator, but she wasn’t the object of anyone’s affection. It worked beautifully.

Here, I had a lot of trouble believing the love stories — and not just because of Kilcher’s age. Her narration was mumbled a lot, and I can’t recall anyone explaining how she learns English so fast. As for Farrell, he has a lot of inner monologues — there is very little dialogue in the movie at all.

Then there is the matter of nothing happening for a long time. It’s only at the 90 minute mark that there’s a real bloody skirmish between the Indians and the Brits.

It doesn’t last long, however. About 35 minutes or so later, the movie finally picks up unexpected speed when Rolfe takes Pocahontas to England. Malick’s eye is so keen that putting Pocahontas in this setting suddenly enlivens the entire film.

It may be too late, though. At that point, we’ve spent too much time in the Virginia woods.

You will find much brilliance in "The New World." Sometimes I felt like Malick made the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History come alive. The scenes on the ships are enough to keep you captivated.

But I worry that "The New World" won’t find a mass audience. I wish it didn’t have to. Malick is a superior filmmaker. This film may turn out to have critical legs, but it’s almost too much to digest in the face of "King Kong," "Munich," "Memoirs of a Geisha," "Match Point," "Mrs. Henderson Presents," "Capote," "Walk the Line," "Transamerica" and other more, shall we say, coherent productions.



~ from FoxNews.com

By Anne Thompson
Thu Dec 1,10:53 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Besides their weighty historic subject matter, Universal Pictures' "Munich" and New Line Cinema's "The New World" have something else in common: Their respective directors, Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick, aren't talking to the press....

With a platform release, "Munich" (Spielberg) and "The New World" don't have to open like big-event movies in thousands of theaters. They have the luxury of building buzz through reviews and 10-best lists. "They're in for the long run as opposed to a quick hit," one rival studio marketing executive says. "They'll be fueled by the Golden Globes and year-end attention. This is very much an Academy play to capture voters (and) build momentum to get through Academy season. Their success doesn't need to be monumental. But with the long run, you have to have fantastic playability and word-of-mouth, like 'Chicago' or 'Shakespeare in Love.' You have to catch a wave."

New Line Cinema also is facing a marketing challenge with its December 25 opener, "The New World" (which goes wide January 13). In that case, Texas-based writer-director Malick -- whose most recent film, the World War II drama "The Thin Red Line," earned five Oscar nominations -- is known to be reclusive, hates to have his picture taken and refuses to talk to the press on the grounds that "he's not any different from anyone else who worked on the film," New Line Cinema marketing president Russell Schwartz says.

Luckily, this great-looking epic is about a well-known piece of Americana, the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and the relationship between American Indian princess Pocahontas (played by newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher) and British explorer John Smith ( Colin Farrell). With no filmmaker available for interviews, New Line will rely on producer Sarah Green ("State and Main," "Frida") as well as the film's two stars, Farrell and Christian Bale, who plays a tobacco magnate who marries Pocahontas.

The studio also will focus on turning Kilcher, 15, into a star, much the way Newmarket Films did with "Whale Rider's" teen lead, Keisha Castle-Hughes, who landed an Oscar nomination. "Q'orianka is our hook," Schwartz says, to selling the film's central love story to women. New Line is banking on the film earning strong critical response, not only because of Malick's singular cinematic vision but also because "it's so unlike anything else," he says.

That's for sure. Whatever anyone thinks about this movie, it is unexpected, even avant garde. "Terry doesn't spoon-feed anyone. He doesn't say, 'Here's what to think,"' producer Green says. "He lets you make those choices."

"The New World" began to take shape four years ago when Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker recommended Green to Malick, who called her out of the blue. The two got to know each other, and she responded enthusiastically to the idea of his going forward with his script for "The New World," which had been sitting on the shelf for about 25 years. "There are so many parallels going on today," Green says, "with cultures seeing foreignness in each other instead of sameness. It's also the journey of a young woman learning about love."

But even with Farrell attached, it was tough to raise money for the historic epic. Former 20th Century Fox chairman Bill Mechanic, who backed the $52 million "Red Line," tried to bankroll "The New World" at his new production company Pandemonium, but "everyone was looking for an automatic blockbuster," he says. Finally, New Line chief Robert Shaye picked up global distribution rights for the independently financed $40 million picture, which is executive produced by New Line executives Mark Ordesky and Rolf Mittweg.

According to Green, Malick shot about a million feet of film (for the most part, without artificial light and using hand-held cameras) on location in Virginia and London over 17 weeks (the norm would be 300,000 feet over 10 weeks), allowing for many impulsive changes of scenery and dialogue. Like "Munich," there was no press on set.

Malick then retired with four editors into the cutting room for a year, whittling the movie down to 2 hours and 40 minutes, deleting reams of dialogue -- the movie is often silent -- and adding interior voice-overs for the three leads that were not in the original script. (Malick also used voice-overs in "The Thin Red Line.") Everything in the movie is real, including the three ships, except for one computer-generated bird -- an extinct Carolina parakeet.

Green insists that they were close to making the original November release date but were happy to be given more time by New Line to polish the final cut, partly because Farrell was still filming "Miami Vice" and was unavailable to do press. Now the stars will all participate in press junkets; the film will have an American Film Institute benefit premiere December 15 in Los Angeles as well as special showings at Washington's Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of the American Indian in New York. And then the critics are expected to weigh in. Even with strong critical backing and five Oscar noms, "The Thin Red Line" did not make its money back theatrically. For "The New World," silence may not be golden.

Full Story:http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051202/people_nm/directors_dc_1" target="_blank" class="ng_url">Reuters

New Oscar date gives Academy Screenings different feel


Filmfest offers slate of 21 films


By Stewart Oksenhorn
December 1, 2005


For 13 years, Aspen Filmfest's Academy Screenings program has been the beneficiary of perfect timing, between holidays and the Academy Award presentations, and an equally ideal location.

With the Oscar ceremony entrenched in late March or early April, distributors got in the habit of releasing their prestige films at the tail end of the year, in New York and Los Angeles, to make them award-eligible. A few weeks later, hopefully with good reviews in their sails, the films were put in wide release, and Academy Award campaigns cranked up.

Thus, when Aspen Filmfest presented its Academy Screenings for the hordes of holiday tourists - presumably a good many Academy voters among them - there was a sense of bragging rights. Few of the films had been seen outside New York and Los Angeles. So Academy Screenings attendees had the pleasure of seeing a couple dozen films, almost all brand new, almost all of them hand-picked for their Oscar-worthiness, in a two-week flurry, at the height of the season.

Then last year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threw a wrench into the gears. Deciding there was too much of a lag between the end of the year and the awards show, allowing other awards to steal some thunder from Oscar and leading to endless, bloated Oscar campaigns, the Academy moved its timetable up a month. Distributors in turn altered their release schedules, putting a good number of their awards hopefuls into theaters in September and October.

Aspen Filmfest has thus had to rethink its approach to the Academy Screenings, which enters its 15th edition later this month.

"This year, we're feeling it," Aspen Filmfest Executive Director Laura Thielen said of the adjustment in distribution schedules. "A lot of films that would be released in December are now being released in August or September or October."

Thielen mentioned "Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck," both likely Oscar contenders released in early fall, and the well-reviewed "A History of Violence," as obvious examples.

This year's slate of 21 films, announced Wednesday, gives the Academy Screenings a somewhat different feel. There are four foreign films, all of them the official submissions from their respective countries for the Best Foreign Language Film award. There are a pair of documentaries. And most notably, there are a handful of films that have already made the rounds at the multiplex.

Thielen also noted that a surprising number of the films are by first-time directors.

"Usually at this time of year," she said, "you're seeing director/star combinations: Anthony Minghella and Jude Law [from 'Cold Mountain'], or Rob Marshall and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger [from 'Chicago']. We're not seeing that this year, and I think it's because there's an interest in new blood."

Thielen added that the combination of fresh talent, lesser-known films, foreign fare and documentaries gives the program the feel of a festival and not just a series of highly plugged films.

Which is not to say that this year's series, set for Dec. 19-Jan. 1, lacks big names. On screen, moviegoers will see Johnny Depp, Anthony Hopkins, Colin Farrell, Laura Linney, Heath Ledger and Judi Dench. The films come from such directors as Terrence Malick, Rob Marshall, Lasse Hallström, James Ivory and Neil Jordan. That might be impressive, until compared to last year's star power, fueled by Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Alexander Payne, Al Pacino, Hilary Swank, Liam Neeson, Pedro Almodóvar, Bill Murray, Wes Anderson and Kate Winslet.

Among the films Aspen audiences will get to see ahead of most of the world are "The New World," "The Matador," "Hoodwinked," "Fateless" and "Tsotsi."

"The New World," Malick's telling of the colonial American story of Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas, shows in Aspen on Dec. 26, before its wider release in mid-January. "The Matador," starring Pierce Brosnan as an assassin suffering a midlife crisis, shows here Dec. 21 and gets a limited release Dec. 23. "Hoodwinked," an animated reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood, is set for Dec. 23 in Aspen and a general release Christmas Day. "Fateless," a Hungarian drama of Jews in Hungary during World War II, and "Tsotsi," a South African crime drama that earned the top Audience Award at festivals in Toronto and Edinburgh, both show in the Academy Screenings months before their February release dates.

Films showing in the series that are set for release in late December include "The Libertine," starring Johnny Depp as a debauched 17th-century earl and poet; "The White Countess," a drama set in 1930s Shanghai directed by James Ivory and starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Lynn Redgrave and Vanessa Redgrave; and "Transamerica," starring Aspen product Felicity Huffman as a preoperative transsexual on a road trip with the son she recently discovered.

Also scheduled are "The World's Fastest Indian," starring Anthony Hopkins as motorcyclist Burt Munro in his attempt to break a land-speed record; "Mrs. Henderson Presents," directed by Stephen Frears, and starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins; and "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," the directorial debut of Tommy Lee Jones.

Documentaries in the series, both released earlier in the year, are "Murderball," about wheelchair rugby athletes; and "Rize," photographer David LaChapelle's film about Los Angeles street dancers. Additional foreign titles are the French film "Joyeux Noël" and the Palestinian drama "Paradise Now."

Films released earlier in the year and being shown at the Academy Screenings are the divorce drama "The Squid and the Whale"; the Southern family drama "Junebug"; and "Crash," Paul Haggis' exploration of racism in contemporary Los Angeles. Director Neil Jordan's "Breakfast on Pluto," about an Irish transvestite cabaret singer; "Casanova," starring Heath Ledger as the legendary Italian romantic; and director Rob Marshall's "Memoirs of a Geisha," adapted from the Arthur Golden novel, are all scheduled for early December release.

Tickets for Academy Screenings go on sale Dec. 12 at the Wheeler Opera House box office. Full details of the Academy Screenings program are available at www.aspenfilm.org.

Stewart Oksenhorn's e-mail address is stewart@aspentimes.com

source:Aspentimes.com

The New World A-
The good news about Terrence Malick’s “The New World” is that we didn’t have to wait for his new movie for two decades, as we had to between “Days of Heaven” in 1978 and “The Thin Red Line” in 1998.

As visionary, poetic, and sumptuously made as his previous films, “The New World” nonetheless may be Malick’s most narrative film, one with a clear beginning, middle, and end; a discernible plot that unfolds chronologically; fully fleshed characters with arcs; and an extremely touching and powerful ending.

As with all of Malick’s work, the film is about much more than what its deceptively simple story suggests. “The New World” may not be as ambitious as “The Thin Red Line,” Malick’s personal take on WWII, but overall, it’s a more satisfying movie. The narrative structure, with its shifting perspectives and multiple voice-over narrations, two of Malick’s most distinctive devices, is both more coherent and effective.

Thematically, “The New World” bears all of Malick’s recurring motifs that were evident in his first two films, “Badlands” and “Days of Haven.” Situating the story in an era that’s seldom been portrayed on screen, the early part of the seventeenth century, Malick has made a personal film that integrates all the elements of what could be described as his worldview, his philosophical-artistic vision.

Through the bloody encounter and culture collision of European and Native Americans during the founding of the Jamestown settlement in 1607, Malick examines primitive versus modern society, the wilderness vs. civilization, the purity of nature versus the humanity’s inevitable flaws. As any Malick film, “The New World” can be interpreted in different, even contradictory ways, which attests to the richness of its ideas and visual imagery. I see “The New World” as an elegy for America of yesteryear, and a critical view of the America that was yet to be created. On one level, it’s a story of our history as Americans, our flaws and virtues, and our growing awareness of other cultures and the limitations of our own.

Structurally, “The New World” centers on a romantic couple and its conflict with its social surroundings. As such, the tale establishes a direct link to Malick’s “Badlands,” in which a young couple (played by Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen), goes on a senseless murder spree in Dakota and Montana, and “Days of Heaven,” in which the romantic duo of migrant laborers (Richard Gere and Brooke Adams) pretended to be siblings (See reviews of these films).

It’s noteworthy, that all four of Malick’s films are period pieces: “Badlands” was set in the late 1950s, “Days of Heaven” in the pre-industrial revolution America of the early 1900s, “Thin Red Line” during WWII, and “The New World” goes back even further, to one crucial decade, 1607-1616, in the formation of the New America. Yet each film reflects the era and zeitgeist in which is was made. Hence, the 1973’s “Badland” is as much about youth’s anger and disillusionment with America society in the post-Vietnam and Watergate era as it is a commentary about its fact-inspired criminals.

Malick suggests that, historically, America didn’t begin with Columbus, or the Pilgrims and the Mayflower. Nor did it begin with the settlers of what became known as Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement, which predated the Plymouth Rock landing by 30 years. There were thousands of years of habitation and culture in Virginia by indigenous peoples who found their world turned upside down by the arrival of newcomers from distant shores.

Inspired by the historical characters of John Smith and Pocahontas, Malick has transformed the classic story into a sweeping exploration of love, loss, and discovery. Against the historically rich backdrop of a pristine Eden inhabited by a native civilization, Malick has set a dramatized tale of two strong-willed characters, a passionate and noble young native woman and an ambitious English solider of fortune, who find themselves torn between the requirements of civic duty and the dictates of their hearts.

In the early seventeenth century, North America is a land of seemingly endless primeval wilderness, populated by an intricate network of tribes. Although these tribe-nations live in graceful harmony with their environment, their relations with each other are strife with tension, even before the intrusion from the outside, which upsets the “balance” even more.

On a spring day in April 1607, three ships containing 103 men sail from the kingdom of England, 3,000 miles to the east across a vast ocean. On behalf of their sponsor, the royally charted Virginia Company, they are seeking to establish a cultural, religious, and economic foothold on the coast of what they regard as the New World.

Shackled below the decks of the lead ship, named Susan Constant, is the rebellious John Smith (Colin Farrell), 27, sentenced to be hanged for insubordination. A vet of countless European wars, Smith is a soldier of fortune, though fortune has turned its back on him. Too talented and popular to be hanged, Smith is freed by Captain Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer), who knows that surviving in this wilderness will require the work of every man, particularly one of Smith’s abilities.

Most of the 103 in the group are aristocrats ill prepared for life in the New World, and the settlement struggles to survive. Smith is entrusted to lead a food fathering expedition up the Chickahominy River, on which members of the Powhatan tribe, the ruling tribe of the region accosts him.

All but Smith are killed, and he is taken to the Native American village, where he encounters Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher), the daughter of the Native chieftain Powhatan (August Schellenberg). The long chapter that follows is one of the most poetic and beautiful courtships seen in American films. Set outdoors, in the fields and by the river, this segment captures the physical landscape in a unique way, using natural lighting to maximum advantage.

Since they don’t even speak the same language, most of the communication is conducted through gestures, looks, and eventual erotic but delicate touches. (The film refrains from showing the sexual passion between Smith and Pocahontas, perhaps due to her very young age). Pocahontas teaches Smith the culture and customs of her people, and he, in turn, instructs her basic words in English, wind, earth, lips, hair, which she demonstrates gracefully and elegantly.

Months later, with enough food to help the settlement survive the winter, Smith returns to the Jamestown colonies. The following spring, Powhatan discovers that the settlement intends to stay prepares for battle. Pocahontas alerts Smith of the impending battle. When the tribe is thwarted, Powhatan realizes that it was his daughter who betrayed them and as punishment she’s banished forever from her tribe and family.

Forced to live with a neighboring tribe, Pocahontas eventually is traded to the English as an insurance policy against further attacks by her father’s tribe. She lives among the settlers, slowly adapting to their way of life. Soon, she is dressed like a young English lady, and the scene, in which she is forced to wear high heels, after years of running in the fields barefoot, has both humor and pathos.

During this period, Smith is called back to England to lead other expeditions, and a devastated Pocahontas is told that he died during the trip. Malick is excellent at capturing her deep sense of loss. The color palette changes from green and yellow to gray and brown, and Pocahontas is seen crying and mourning, lying on the dirty and muddy ground, in shots that stand in diametric opposition to the previous images, in which she was literally at one with Nature.

After three reels, in which the pacing is deliberate and the tone contemplative, the next segment picks dramatic momentum but loses in emotional and poetic impact. Among and new colonists who arrive in Jamestown with supplies is a widowed English aristocrat John Rolfe (Christian Bale), who becomes one of the first to farm the tobacco that soon became Jamestown’s “crash crop.” Drawn together by a shared sense of personal loss, Pocahontas comes to know Rolfe, eventually marrying him and bearing him a son.

The last reel again suggests culture collision and disorientation, albeit of different kind. Rolfe brings Pocahontas to England, where she is presented to the King and Queen as the Princess of Virginia; for a brief moment, she becomes the toast of London. Malick resorts to faster tempo and camera movements that go from high angle to low angle, framing Pocahontas against ominous churches or huge buildings that convey her sense of isolation and outsider’s status.

The last meeting between Smith and Pocahontas, orchestrated by Rolfe, is nothing short of brilliant. Arriving on a horse in the estate where they live, a soulful and remorseful Smith does most of the talking, while she remains silent. Malick follows Pocahontas in a series of shots that depict her standing atop a tree, the physical (and symbolic) site of their love affair, before going back to Rolfe and for the first time referring to him as ‘my husband” and meaning it. With newly regained peace of mind and social consciousness, Pocahontas seems to have resolved the eternal conflict between love and marriage.

It’s no coincidence that the film’s last image is a low-angle shot of a huge tree, the only surviving witnesses to a great love story and a unique chapter in the historical evolution of America as a new state.

In a brief montage, we learn that Pocahontas was struck down with disease and died on her voyage back to America at age 21. Rolfe, fearing his son would not be able to survive the arduous voyage back to America, left him in England and never saw him again. Rolfe died in the wars that Powhatan’s brother Opechancanough, unleashed against the English. Smith never married, and never left England, though he had plans to return to New England.

Since not much is known about the actual events, the script is based on the writings of the few people who were there, though their accounts are often contradictory. Some of the narration is taken from John Smith’s own writing, based on Edward Wright Hale’s edited volume, “Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony: The First Decade, 1607-1616,” published in 1998. Other details draw on David A. Price’s “Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation,” published in 2003. According to Price, it would be another year before the colonists would learn the extent of their naivetĂ© regarding Opechancanough, who would kill at least one fourth of the settlers.

Malick has taken the myth of John Smith and Pocahontas to serve his vision of cultures connecting and colliding, and the powerful consequences of misunderstanding. Those who search deep may find biblical allegory in “The New World,” and may fault its characters as shadowy symbols of larger cultural forces, though the film is not as burdened by those elements as “Days of Heaven.” Though not as haunting and provocative as “Badland” (arguably Malick’s best film), “The New World” is a visually stunning and lyrical evocation of a time gone by, a film replete with images that will linger in memory for a long time.

Malick's idiosyncratic approach to narrative filmmaking has been embraced by critics and cinephiles, but has not succeeded in eliciting commercially viable audience support. By standards of mainstream Hollywood, “The New World” has too many monologues, too many pauses, and too many repetitions of images of ocean, birds, and fields. Yet every single scene is meticulously staged, photographed, and framed. Literally hand-made, the film doesn’t have a single image that’s computer-generated.

Malick’s kind of beauty has been criticized as artsy, self-indulgent, and even greedy, but I don’t see his imagery as stately or decorous. An inventive filmmaker with a painterly-poetic sensibility like Malick, who imbues every single frame with immaculate attention to detail, should be applauded and encouraged to continue making personal films.

source:Emanuellevy.com

~thanks to niloclove

Actors also want to avoid getting stung by Oscar hopes when their movies flop. Colin Farrell had that experience with last year's epic historical bomb "Alexander," a presumed Oscar contender until people actually got a look at it.

This time, Farrell stars in another historical epic, "The New World," playing colonial leader John Smith, and says he is giving no thought to the Oscars.

"Not at all, man. Honest to God," Farrell said. "I came into `Alexander,' and that was on everyone's radar. So any potential for me to have a radar has since been plucked out."

Full story:Yahoo News


Discuss these comments HERE

Colin Farrell called Pawn Shop, told them it was his favorite place in Miami and asked if he could rent the entire place out so he can screen a new flick there for three friends. Of course, Pawn Shop was happy to oblige and even waived the $4,500 rental fee. Farrell and friends are renting a 35mm movie theater projector and watching this unreleased movie in the comforts of the club's airplane. The screening is to take place soon, very soon.

source: Miami.com

Discuss the article:HERE

The Myth of the Native Babe: Hollywood's Pocahontas

By STEVE CHAGOLLAN
Published: November 27, 2005
LOS ANGELES

NATIVE AMERICANS have taken a beating in American cinema dating back to silent pictures, generally depicted as marauding terrorists at worst or noble savages at best. Against this backdrop of violence, warriors like Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse have played recurring roles, but pacifists like Pocahontas have proven more elusive.


But no evidence exists to suggest that he and the historical Pocahontas, shown at above in a 1616 engraving, were romantically involved.
Despite her status as a key figure in our nation's birth, the Powhatan princess - a mere 10 to 12 years old when she first befriended the English explorer Capt. John Smith and the Jamestown settlers in 1607 - has been mostly relegated to obscure B movies that relied more on legend than fact. The 1953 United Artists clunker "Captain John Smith and Pocahontas" veered so far off the tracks of history that it married the lead characters, serving up lines like "It may well be that on the shoulders of that Indian girl will rest the whole future of Virginia."

Four decades later, the animated Disney box office hit "Pocahontas" depicted its heroine as an exquisitely beautiful, fully formed woman with flowing black hair, almond-shaped eyes and just the hint of a nose, and Smith as a dashing adventurer with square jaw, Herculean build and a blond surfer mane. It was "Romeo and Juliet" without the tragic ending.

But come Christmas Day, New Line Cinema and the writer-director Terrence Malick will offer in "The New World" what promises to be a far more complex take on the Jamestown saga and its clash of cultures between English colonists and the Powhatan tribes. The project, as is usual with Mr. Malick's work, has been shrouded in secrecy, though publicity materials have stressed the verisimilitude of a film shot close to where the actual events took place along Virginia's Chickahominy and James Rivers, before wrapping in London.

Although the period, settings and costumes have been recreated with the utmost authenticity in mind, it could be said that the filmmakers are again avoiding the dry brush of historical accuracy in painting the relationship between Pocahontas, portrayed here by Q'orianka Kilcher (who was 14 at the time of filming) and Smith, played by Colin Farrell.

"First and foremost we've created a love story," the film's producer, Sarah Green, said. "We're definitely not doing a historical piece. We try to set it properly; we try to give that background and that feeling, but we focus on the love story."

Hollywood loves a romance, and its problem with Pocahontas, historically speaking, is that she and Smith were very likely never more than cordial allies. Five leading scholars in the field of Native American studies interviewed for this article all unequivocally stated that no evidence points to an intimate link between the two, even based on Smith's own fancifully embellished accounts. (If there was, Smith was either being uncharacteristically modest, or his initial writings sent to England ahead of him were edited for propriety's sake.)

"Pocahontas was not romantically involved with John Smith," said John Mohawk, the director of indigenous studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "John Smith was one of those guys who used to go around writing stories that made himself look glamorous. That was a tradition in those days. He spun this fancy tale about how this beautiful maiden saved his life, but it was all bunkum."

In real life, Pocahontas converted to Christianity, married the original tobacco magnate John Rolfe, gave birth to their son and removed to London, where she was paraded at court as Lady Rebecca - living proof to potential investors that the Virginia Company was not only a sound enterprise but a royal partnership, given Pocahontas's high-born status as the daughter of the Powhatans' supreme chief. Barely in her 20's, she died in England, leaving behind the widowed Rolfe, played in the new film by Christian Bale.

Pocahontas has since had a mixed legacy, having been portrayed as everything from the mother of a nation to betrayer of her people. It is a fate shared by other legendary Indian women, such as Doña Marina, who acted as guide, translator and lover to Cortés during his conquest of Mexico in the 1500's, and Sacagawea, who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the Pacific coast in 1805.

"You have to view them in the context of the time," said Jon Parmenter, assistant professor of history at Cornell University, who contends that today many Native Americans are too quick to denigrate these women as collaborators.

"To the extent that they understood their roles, Doña Marina, Sacagawea and Pocahontas believed they were working very much to mediate and mitigate the impact of colonialism, but they were in tough spots," he said.

The persistent notion of a love affair between Pocahontas and Smith owes much to Smith's own pose as a man of irresistible appeal. "Smith wrote often later in life about beautiful young girls in all parts of the world throwing themselves at him, always putting his interests ahead of their own," said Camilla Townsend, a professor of history at Colgate University and author of "Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma."

"I refer to it as the 'pornographic narrative,' and I don't mean that in a purely sexual sense," Professor Townsend said. "The colonists in general wanted to believe that the Indians wanted us here, that they admired our way of life, that they needed us."

Whatever their relationship, it's accepted fact that Pocahontas and Smith took pains to learn each other's language. For Smith it was the logical first step in co-existence at a time when the colonists could not fend for themselves and needed help from the natives.

"Smith was a results-oriented person," said Professor Parmenter. "Means and methods didn't really trouble him too much." The Englishman was renowned, the professor said, "for essentially gathering up a posse and marching into smaller Indian towns and demanding food at gunpoint."


During one of these missions, Smith was captured and seemingly served up for execution. At the moment of truth, according to his memoirs (written, curiously enough, in the third person), Pocahontas intervened and took his "head in her armes and laid her owne upon his to save him from death." A major reason skeptics question Smith's account is that he failed to mention the episode in his initial recording of the expedition. The more fanciful version of his rescue was not published until 1624, seven years after Pocahontas's death.


ACCORDING to Crandall Shifflett, a University of Virginia history professor and director of the Virginia Center for Digital History, "Smith thought he was going to be killed and that Pocahontas had saved him, but what actually happened was that Powhatan was trying to bring him into his tributary system" as a chief, or "werowance."

Rayna Green, a curator at the Smithsonian Institute, said the elaborate hazing ritual was purely pragmatic. "Pocahontas, as the child of her father, would have had more of an authoritative role in converting someone from his original existence as an Englishman," said Ms. Green. "That conversion would have been necessary for him to become a legitimate functionary in the community. In other words, he can't go around whacking his brother and sisters."

Pocahontas was eventually abducted by the English when renewed hostilities broke out, during which time she met Rolfe, married him and converted. If these actions seem unlikely for a prisoner, they were still sanctioned by her father, who resigned himself to the realization that the English weren't going away.

Her eventual trip to England with Rolfe and their newborn son proved a fund-raising boon to the colony, with Pocahontas serving as a kind of poster girl for the Virginia Company. To subsequent generations of Americans, she was viewed as "the good Indian," an ambassador for peace and harmony between the two worlds, though the relative calm at Jamestown ended not long after her death.

"Mythologies aren't created for the purpose of telling history, they're created for the purpose of trying to devise some form of identity for people," said Professor Mohawk. And popular films, he pointed out, have an inherent problem with the past: "Americans like their movies with a beginning, a middle and end. By the time Pocahontas died, we were a long ways from the end."

~source: The New York Times

You can discuss this story:HERE

From Colin Farrell to Pocahontas-loving John Smith
By Glenn Whipp, Staff Writer

Colin Farrell hasn't seen "The New World" yet. He thinks he knows what director Terrence Malick was going for in telling the 17th-century story of the settling of Jamestown and the love between explorer John Smith and Powhatan princess Pocahontas. But then, in the past, others thought they had a bead on Malick, too, only to later learn that they had been all but excised


from the film. (Think Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody from "The Thin Red Line.")
"You never know with Terry," Farrell, who plays Smith, says by phone from the Dominican Republic, where he's shooting Michael Mann's film version of "Miami Vice."

"As I read it and I felt it, it's about the evolution of the world, the mixing of cultures, the survival of one at the expense of another. It's about the birth of the complex spirit of America."

Malick ("Badlands," "Days of Heaven") wrote a draft of the "New World" screenplay in the late 1970s, but the legendarily reclusive filmmaker isn't what you'd call prolific, so it lay dormant until 2002. In its depiction of the New World settlers intruding on nratives living in harmony with the land, the movie,

which also stars Christian Bale ("Batman Begins"), would seem to continue exploring themes running through Malick's slim body of work.

As for the film's romance between Smith and Pocahontas (played by 15-year-old newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher ), Farrell says that it, too, is an extension of Malick's ideology.

"It wouldn't be your average modernistic approach to a love story," Farrell says. "It's not man meets girl and they have a (bleeping) glass of wine. You don't even know if anything is consummated. But theirs is a love of each other's spirit and an understanding and a desire to learn about each other's culture. As bad as things become, they find solace in each other's company."

source: DailyNews.com

Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation to Host East Coast Premiere of Terrence Malick's 'The New World'

New Line Cinema's Film, Inspired by Story of the Nation's Founding, Debuts on the Eve of America's 400th Anniversary Events


WILLIAMSBURG, Va., Nov. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Colonial Williamsburg and the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation today announced that "The New World," director Terrence Malick's interpretation of the Jamestown story, will make its East Coast debut at Colonial Williamsburg's historic Kimball Theatre, on December 21, 2005. Two red-carpet, invitation-only screenings of "The New World" will occur on the eve of America's 400th Anniversary, an 18-month series of events commemorating the 1607 founding of Jamestown. Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas.

"This film will help raise awareness of Jamestown and its pivotal role in the nation's development as we prepare to launch America's 400th Anniversary," said Colin Campbell, chairman and president of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. "As a major sponsor of the commemoration, Colonial Williamsburg is proud to work with New Line to premiere this film within a few miles of the Jamestown sites."

"We believe this film will have international impact for Virginia. It will spur visitation to the sites where the story took place and was actually filmed," said Sen. Tommy Norment, co-chairman of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.

This sweeping adventure stars Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith, Christopher Plummer as Captain Christopher Newport, Christian Bale as John Rolfe, August Schellenberg as Chief Powhatan, and introduces Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas. Renowned writer and director Malick and his production staff filmed scenes at Historic Jamestowne and nearby locations; they also incorporated into the sets many of the concepts revealed by recent archeology and research. Jamestown Settlement's re-created 1607 ships -- Discovery, Godspeed and Susan Constant -- were used in the filming. "The New World" opens in limited release December 25, 2005 and nationwide January 13, 2006.

Jamestown 2007, a sub-agency of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, is coordinating efforts to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, Va., the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Jamestown is also the site of the nation's first representative government, free enterprise and multi-cultural society. State, national, and international commemorative events to salute these legacies begin in May 2006 and continue into 2008. Major corporate sponsors of America's 400th Anniversary include Norfolk Southern Corporation and Colonial Williamsburg. More information about the commemoration is available at http://www.Americas400thAnniversary.org.

'World' turns to Christmas
'New' bows out of November

By GABRIEL SNYDER

New Line has pushed back historical epic "The New World" from its planned Nov. 9 release date to a Christmas limited bow and a Jan. 13 wide release.
DistribDistrib prexyprexy David Tuckerman said change was made because the film "won't be done in time" for a Nov. 9 launch.

Pic, starring Colin FarrellColin Farrell and helmed by Terrence MalickTerrence Malick, is getting a big kudos push from New Line, and the Gotham and L.A. holiday bow will qualify it for Acad consideration.

In the Nov. 9 frame, "New World" would have faced off against Paramount's "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," Sony's "Zathura" and Fox SearchlightFox Searchlight's "Bee Season," as well as Warner Bros.' wide expansion of "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang."

The Jan. 13 date is not much less crowded. Currently slated to bow that weekend are Revolution and Sony's "Freedomland," Disney's "Glory Road," an untitled romantic comedy from 20th Century Fox and Paramount animated pic "Barnyard."

~ from Variety.com

The Dec. 25 release date is on Boxofficemojo's "New Dates and changes" page.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/schedule/?view=changes&p=.htm

And at this link it is shown as going wide January 13, 2006.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/schedule/?vie...wweeks=4&p=.htm

More from Boxofficemojo:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=1878&p=.htm

Date Shifts
New Line Cinema shipped The New World from a wide Nov.
11 releas