Terrence Malick's new film The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, is in the works, so now is a good time to recommend (highly) Malick's The New World (2005), an evolving masterpiece of cinema. There are multiple versions, the longer the better. See it on as big a screen as possible!
There's no way I can beat this enthusiastic take by Mick LaSalle:
Terrence Malick's one-of-a-kind film, about the life of Pocahontas and the dawn of American history, contains some of the best filmmaking imaginable - some of it beyond imagining. I have seen it at least five times and have no idea how Malick knew, when he put it all together, that the movie would even make sense. It's difficult to write a great short poem. It's difficult to write a great long novel. But to write a great long poem that's the size of a great long novel - one that makes sense, doesn't flag and is exponentially better than the short poem or the long novel ever would have been - that's almost impossible. Malick did it. With images. -- "Top films of the decade," Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, January 1, 2010
Shot on location in the environs of Tidewater Virginia and England, cast includes Q'orianka Kilcher, August Schellenberg, Wes Studi (one of my favorites), Raoul Trujillo, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, Colin Farrell and David Thewlis. Much attention to detail; superb use of the prelude to Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold from Der Ring des Nibelungen -- a jewel also employed nicely by Werner Herzog. Come to think of it, the other really great film covering the early contact period (so far as I know) is Herzog's Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) / Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1977).
Today's Rune: Wholeness.
2 comments:
Beautiful scenery and acting for sure. Did you see apocolyptica? I thought it was actually a very interesting take on the New world before the coming of Europeans.
Erik, I love 'indian' movies and will want to check these out!
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