Not Coming to a Theater Near You
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
Yes, folks, a new Terrence Malick masterpiece. I was as nervous as the next man: even a quarter of the way through the film, I was worried that Malick was taking his faux-naïveté and ethnographic essentialism too far. But fortunately, I was proved wrong, and Malick delivers the masterful extrapolation on cross-cultural encounter that I’ve been hoping for ever since those Pacific Islanders ingenuously sang Christian hymns in the first scenes of The Thin Red Line.
Here again, Malick proves himself to be the least ironic filmmaker in the world, approaching the themes of love, colonialism, and foreignness with the attention and generosity that others would scrap for cynicism and misanthropy. Melancholy without bitterness, hopeful without ignorance, The New World holds out the possibility that John Smith may find his Indies after all, if not on any map.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: New Line Cinema 35mm Print
30 Dec 2005 3:22 PM | Submit Comment
