"the new world" (terrence malick film)

this subject is ripe for so many divergent (and potentially interesting) treatments.

will this be a displaced meditation on the meaning of america and "civilization"?

This sounds good though.

I hope George Clooney doesn't pop up in the last scene of this one.

Vollmann's Career = Revenge of the Nerd, April 6, 2002
Reviewer: A reader (Austin, TX)

William Vollmann is like the nerdiest person you knew in college or high school. He grew up to become a novelist who gained notoriety by writing in great detail about his experiences with prostitutes and having the audacity to claim that it took some sort of moral heroism for him to smoke crack with them in roach-infested transient hotels. Of course, it wouldn't do to be slumming all the time -- otherwise he'd just be another John Rechy or Bruce Benderson. So he adds Ivy League intellectual patina to these books by positioning them as meditations on the history of North America, or as reflections on how "all loving relationships are really forms of prostitution." He writes long, long books hoping that you'll be very, very impressed with him.

Folks, read this book or any other book by William Vollmann and keep in mind that this is an author with a profoundly stunted emotional growth. There's nothing cute about celebrating prostitution as the "most honest form of love" -- it's sickening writing, the babbling of a man still stuck in the fantasies of adolescence who will never understand that real love transcends economic exchange into a pure giving of oneself to another. He pats himself on the back for his "ferocity," when in fact he's never really outgrown being a journal-scribbling teenager who thinks every word he scribbles needs to be published and admired. His writing amounts to one big infantile gesture of lashing out at his Mommy and Daddy -- he admits as much in his interviews -- but at the same time hoping all these books he writes will make his parents love him. It's sad.

The fact that Vollmann has a big crowd of admirers says a lot about the sheep-like mentality and the moral vacancy of too many people who like cutting-edge literature. Read the bombastic praise Vollmann receives that is printed on the dustjackets of his books, and reviewers envious of his lifestyle just look like fools with the pumped-up praise that lavish on Vollmann. Go to a Vollmann reading and look around -- the people there are the sort who are hip, cynical, wear funky glasses and hate their parents, and whose main worry is keeping up with the latest slick novels and edgy CD's to hit the shelves. They have no ability to think for themselves and they are bored with life -- so they are profoundly impressed by this guy who writes about his experience with prostitutes. If you recognize yourself in this description, you need to get a life.

There's a certain sort of bourgeois person who believes their life can be redeemed by writing a novel in which they'll "show 'em all" -- the 'em being Mommy and Daddy, the cool kids who rejected them in high school, the jocks who called them nerds, etc. Vollmann is the "patron saint" of this sort of misfit. I read an interview in which Vollmann stated confidently that he is as important as Shakespeare or Faulkner. He doesn't seem to understand that the self-absorbed navel-gazing of a well-read prostitute's john doesn't quite cut it as great literature, no matter how many big words and descriptive phrases he tries to pack into his sentences. Vollmann's delusions are as bloated as his books, and his vision lacks even a hint of the universality or breadth or understanding that literary importance requires. Nobody but a few misfit loners and antiquarians will be reading Vollmann fifty years from now. Vollmann is a Montherlant in the making -- that is, an irrelevant curiosity that even most highly educated people will not have heard of.

Please think for yourself and don't buy this book just because you think it's kind of neat and edgy that this guy writes about his experiences with prostitutes. Don't engage in the sad spectacle of living vicariously through William Vollmann's sad, warped world. You'll just put yourself one step closer to moral oblivion. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title

(also I really want Sterling Clover to read that.)

internal affairs you lunatics!!!

(whatever happened to jim mcbride?)

This was the first film in years I've been unable to finish watching. And I made it to the end of It's All about Love.

!!!

One of the few ambitious 21st-century Hollywood films can't get the usual 900 words out of nabisco?

(the astonishing thing is you finished Brick)

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=68114

Extended Cut due in October, for those not bothered with the link.

Running time is now 172 Minutes.

freakin love this film

you jest.

I'm actually reasonably pleased at an extended cut; I liked this film, but after Thin Red Line I was definitely a bit disappointed at its brevity - not because I prefer long films to short films generally (far from it) but because I felt the narrative was missing something.

finally saw the extended cut on blu-ray and i think this film finally got to me. i loved the shorter versions but this one is far, far superior for me.

even noticed some lovely small details that had escaped me. at the end, as mother and son are playing hide and seek, and as Bale's voiceover informs us that she died we see the child looking for her and not find her, as the camera whips back and forth searching for her as well. it's so brief it's easy to miss. it's full of moments like that. what an extraordinary movie.

finally saw the extended cut on blu-ray and i think this film finally got to me

did you notice cars in the far distance during the scene with the indian in the palace gardens?

sort of unsure about this film but the english sojourn is great and as noted the coda is sublime

i've seen the standard DVD version of this maybe 3 times. felt it was almost a great film. saw the extended Blu-Ray version and kind of fell in love with it. as stunning as it looked, i'm chalking it up to the different cut.

trailer
― :| (....), Thursday, December 23, 2004 5:28 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark
Suggest Ban Permalink
it's funny how some of those shots seem virtually identical to shots in "the thin red line"
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Thursday, December 23, 2004 5:40 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark

haha in retrospect this is a key moment.

Have we had this interview linked somewhere? Pretty harsh by James Horner.

So he went out shooting the movie, went over time, and got beautiful images and everybody (said) “Oh god, this is so beautiful.” There were a couple of things that were pasted together by a couple of the experienced editors of the love scenes: “Oh, this gonna be great, absolutely great”. OK.

He had eight editors working for him—two prestigious, the rest out of the woodwork, and some assistants. There was so much film he was working on night on night, (that) there was a crew… When I first saw it, it was a mishmash of unrelated scenes, complete mishmash. I said, “Well Terry, you need to…” He asked me what I thought. “You need to cohere this. I mean this scene should be there” ... all kinds of editing things were wrong. It was the first assembly.

It was April and he was supposed to have a cut ready by May to look at, and that we missed. He missed his deadline and it was in the middle of June when we saw it. The studio saw it, and it was the same thing I saw two days after he finished shooting. It has gone through two and a half month’s work and it was in just the same state. This was when I first saw it and red lights started to go up everywhere because I’m getting close to my recording dates and this is unscoreable like this.

I played him scenes, I played him everything on the piano and I had the feeling he did not really know what movie music was. He didn’t have any experience with real film music being presented to him. Even in ‘Thin Red Line’ it was all cut up. Here I was writing music for him, which he would say was “beautiful and great” and sounded “great” on the piano. Whatever. But I knew - and I warned everybody - this man does not have a clue what to do with movie music or how it works, not a clue. He is gonna to hear his first cue and not know what to do with it and I warned everybody.

I begged him to watch several movies that have music in them (used) very effectively. Be it ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ I mean I showed him all kinds of films or asked him to see all kinds of films that had scores in them. He said he would, but he never did.

Slowly the editorial team started to disintegrate. The good editors left and they brought in more asisstants and it was cut by a bunch of incompetents. There was no real editor. He continued on in that way asking for opinions and we were approaching recording and there were no scenes to record, there were no scenes to time. I had my music editors assemble sequences as I thought they should be or as they normally (would) be, and we scored some of that and it was lovely, just what everybody had hoped would be intended by the film.

Terry saw it and immediately took it back to his editing room and cut it apart and we were still recording and I realized that it was just a waste of everybody’s money to keep recording, though we were commited because we had hired the orchestra. So Terry was making this movie that was incomprehensible.

Everybody told him it was unwatchable. Everybody! Everybody! And he had Final Cut, and when a director has final cut, everbody can scream and shout, but unless you’re willing to really go head-to-head in combat, you basically have to throw up your hands and say, “I have no control over this man.” The editor who had worked on “The Thin Red Line” begged Terry to fix the fim. It was a love story, and Terry doesn’t feel those feelings. All I can say is that Terry is on the surface a stone and he does not know how to tell love stories to save his life. When we scored the movie he completely disassembled everything. The score made no sense anymore and he started to stick in Wagner over scenes, and a Mozart piano concerto over an Indian attack. Everybody thought he was insane. By this time I was no longer on, I basically said, ‘futz you. So I just did say a four letter word. I’m out of here. I’ve done my score.’

I never felt so letdown by a filmmaker in my life….It was the most disappointing experience I’ve ever had with a man because not only did he throw out my score, he loved my score, he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. He didn’t have a clue how to use music. So what he started to do was, as I said, to take classical pieces, but not even pieces that would be transparent and lovely, he was taking Wagner like a thick blanket and putting it in his movie. I swear to god, on the dubbing stage everybody thought he was joking and he would bring up these musical solutions and take out the score and put in Wagner, or take out the score and put in Mozart.

It’s not like he fired me and I’m bitter. What happened was I’m bitter because he did not make the movie he promised everybody he would make. Everybody felt betrayed, from the film company down to the editors. Everybody felt betrayed, and this was the man who took the story that could have been one of the great love stories and was one of the great love stories in history, and turned it into crap, and it’s because he doesn’t believe in those things. He doesn’t understand them. And most importantly, he has not an emotion in his body. He’s emotionless.

link?

kinda feel like the wagner use in this movie is the best part!

this man does not have a clue what to do with movie music or how it works, not a clue

god what a fucking cunt

sorry, here's where I got that excerpt from: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/terrence_malick_almost_directed_che_-_eight_things_we_learned_about_the_new/

It links to the full original (which I haven't read), but it's on some forum you have to log into.

freakin love this film

Horner seems like the typical overblown ego who thinks he knows more than everyone on set/in post and can't believe no one else sees this. Whatta prick. I think TNW is lovely and moving.

this man does not have a clue what to do with movie music or how it works, not a clue

Well, Horner certainly knows how film music works:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-one-category.tcl?topic=TitanicShack&category=My%20Heart%20Will%20Go%20On

I scored Bicentennial Man. I scored Deep Impact. I wrote 'My Heart (Will) Go On' for Celine. I conducted Jumanji. I know music.

TNW is cold and monstrous and the opposite of moving 4 me. lets be honest, horner's a much more formidable creative mind than malick... maybe if terry listened to him he would've made a decent movie for once

...joeks?

full interview btw:

DANIEL SCHWEIGER: The New World is done by Terrence Malick, a very esoteric director. Especially in terms of his music, and he has never used what anyone could consider a traditional score until The New World, what was it like working with the director who had such unique approaches to film music?

JAMES HORNER: I would sum up Terry as a brilliant photographer - and that’s where it stops. The images in The New World are stunning, in Thin Red Line are stunning. In Thin Red Line he was surrounded by a couple of.... three, four people: a wonderful editor and a wonderful sound effects person who guided him through the dubbing and a couple of other people. And on The New World they were not employed. And Terry shot The New World.

The whole idea of The New World was going to be a love story between John Smith and Pocahontas, and there is no reason in the world why it could not have been as great love story as Titanic was. That was the premise he got hired on, and that is the premise he promised everybody he was going to deliever.

So he went out shooting the movie, went over time, and got beautiful images and everybody [said] "Oh god, this is so beautiful." There were a couple of things that were pasted together by a couple of the experienced editors of the love scenes: "Oh, this gonna be great, absolutely great". OK.

He had eight editors working for him - two prestigious, the rest out of the wood work, and some assistants. There was so much film he was working on night on night [that] there was a crew, on day there was a crew. When I first saw it, it was a mishmash of unrelated scenes, complete mishmash. I said, "Well Terry, you need to..." He asked me what I thought. "You need to cohere this. I mean this scene should be there" ... all kinds of editing things were wrong. It was the first assembly.

He is a very, very nice man. It was April and he was supposed to have a cut ready by May to look at, and that we missed. He missed his deadline and it was in the middle of June when we saw it. The studio saw it, and it was the same thing I saw two days after he finished shooting. It has gone through two and a half month work and it was just the same state. This was when I first saw it and red lights started to go up everywhere because I’m getting close to my recording dates and this is unscoreable like this.

He also knew what the music was. I played him scenes, I played him everything on the piano and I had the feeling he did not really know what movie music was. He didn’t have any experience with real film music being presented to him. Even in Thin Red Line it was all cut up. Here I was writing music for him, which he would say was "beautiful and great" and sounded "great" on the piano. Whatever. But I knew - and I warned everybody - this man does not have a clue what to do with movie music or how it works, not a clue. He is gonna to hear his first cue and not know what to do with it and I warned everybody.

I begged him to watch several movies that have music in them [used] very effectively. Be it One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I mean I showed him all kinds of films or asked him to see all kinds of films that had scores in them. He said he would, but he never did.

Slowly the editorial team started to disintegrate. The good editors left and they brought in more asisstants and it was cut by a bunch of incompetents. There was no real editor. He continued on in that way asking for opinions and we were approaching recording and there were no scenes to record, there were no scenes to time. He had no structure, literally, no structure. Scene A that was should go to scene B to C to D a natural progression. He had it attached to scene Z and that was attached to scene X and that was attached to scene D. I mean, there was no way to score it. So what I did with the film company’s permission is that I made sequences for myself. I had my music editors assemble sequences as I thought they should be or as they normally [would] be, and we scored some of that and it was lovely, just what everybody had hoped would be intended by the film.

Terry saw it and immediately took it back to his editing room and cut it apart and we were still recording and I realized that it was just a waste of everybody’s money to keep recording, though we were commited because we had hired the orchestra. So Terry was making this movie that was incomprehensible.

Everybody told him it was unwatchable. Everybody! Everybody! And he had Final Cut, and when a director has final cut, everbody can scream and shout, but unless you’re willing to really go head-to-head in combat, you basically have to throb your hands and say, "I have no control over this man." And if we get the reputation of taking a director’s cut film from a director and recutting it ourselves and releasing it, no one want to make movies with us. So the studio company let him go along.

He never did preview it but he played it for the studio and there were thirty-five people [that] would come to the screenings and slowly over the course of three hours, because it’s a three hour movie, they would walk out.

The editor who had worked on The Thin Red Line begged Terry to fix the fim. It was a love story, and Terry doesn’t feel those feelings. All I can say is that Terry is on the surface a stone and he does not know how to tell love stories to save his life. When we scored the movie he completely disassembled everything. The score made no sense anymore and he started to stick in Wagner over scenes, and a Mozart piano concerto over an Indian attack. Everybody thought he was insane. By this time I was no longer on, I basically said, "futz you. So I just did say a four letter word. I’m out of here. I’ve done my score."

I thought, 'what I have done was exactly what [I was hired for], exactly what the studio wanted, exactly what the film was supposed to be and the one who broke the bond was Terry. From the day he started editing to the final day when they kicked him off the dubbing stage, he was just spending hour-after-hour doing nothing. It was like shuffling the tiles in a Rubik’s Cube. There was never a solution. All he was doing was shuffling scene D over to scene X, or Y would go up to A. How's that? Let’s try putting up A after D and putting D behind J. There wasn’t any gift of telling the movie. Terry doesn’t so this. And that was something we all learned about the great Terry. I never felt so letdown by a filmmaker in my life.

DANIEL SCHWEIGER: Well, I think, it’s a listening experience. There certainly is no letdown.

JAMES HORNER: Well, the cd is as I intended. I said to myself "This is not worth it. I want to resign." I’ll get my money anyway, so to speak, but I don’t care about the money. I want to do what is needed in the film and make a wonderful film.

I kept telling Terry, "Terry, this does not have any emotion in it. Don’t you understand?" He looked at it and he would say, "I don’t know if emotion is important here."

The whole movie goes by without you knowing that this girl is even called "Pocahontas." I don’t even know if people noticed that. No one ever uses the word Pocahontas in the movie. I said, "Terry, people, this is the name of the girl." She got this name of her backer when she was hounded into the English fort. Nobody knew what her real Indian name was and this was the name of this women up to the end of this movie. You never knew she was Pocahontas. There was never really a love story, it was only alluded to. It was a complete mishmash and that's what was released. What is amazing is that fifty-million dollars later, what was released in the cinema was the exact version of the movie I saw when it was first assembled. The only thing different was they had spent forty-million dollars in-between editing, just moving the Rubik’s Cube. Out came the other end the same movie and all the important people have resigned and said "Terry, you’re out of your mind." That’s the story of The New World.

It was the most disappointing experience I’ve ever had with a man because not only did he throw out my score, he loved my score, he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. He didn’t have a clue how to use music. So what he started to do was, as I said, to take classical pieces, but not even pieces that would be transparent and lovely, he was taking Wagner like a thick blanket and putting it in his movie. I swear to god, on the dubbing stage everybody thought he was joking and he would bring up these musical solutions and take out the score and put in Wagner, or take out the score and put in Mozart.

The CD is what I wrote for the movie and it makes a lovely CD, but it’s the weirdest experience. He loved all the music, but he had not a clue. It’s not like he fired me and I’m bitter. What happened was I’m bitter because he did not make the movie he promised everybody he would make. Everybody felt betrayed, from the film company down to the editors. Everybody felt betrayed, and this was the man who took the story that could have been one of the great love stories and was one of the great love stories in history, and turned it into crap, and it’s because he doesn’t believe in those things. He doesn’t understand them. And most importantly, he has not an emotion in his body. He’s emotionless. He looks at a scene and it breaks everbody’s heart and there are fifteen people in the room crying. When we scored a scene, the orchestra came in because it looks so beautiful, its photography is so stunning and it was a scene we put together for scoring. It wasn’t Terry’s cut. It was more or less James Horner and his music editors’ cut so that we could have a structure to score to, otherwise it was just going to [play over] black film. There was no film to record to. It was a fifteen-minute sequence and literally there were like eighty people. We played it two or three times. He was in the room, all crying all thinking how moving it was, how brilliant it was, not the music, but the scene, and they thought the picture was so beautiful and the story and everybody was so excited and I thought surely that this would show Terry that he was on the wrong track. The primary editor, Richard Chew was there and it was so clear what people longed for in the movie and what the music brought out. But that’s not the movie Terry had in mind. He saw the reaction and he took that whole scene and, of course, but it back on the Rubik’s Cube stage and the whole thing was deconstructed and unwatchable again.

my favorite part:

I kept telling Terry, "Terry, this does not have any emotion in it. Don’t you understand?" He looked at it and he would say, "I don’t know if emotion is important here."

that is some sort of A+ rant, i have to say.

huh I searched in order to bump but it seems you started talking about this while I was watching it! Anyway I just finished the long (170 minute) version and I thought the first ninety minutes were beautiful and the last thirty minutes were escalatingly beautiful until I shed a manly tear or two at the end, a little sagging in the middle but I'll blame my tiredness. My question is, what do the shorter versions do? I'd guess they cut out the slow bits and go more narrative, which I wouldn't be so into, but I would maybe be interested in a version that's has an even higher meandering to storytelling ratio, as unlikely as that is.

Princess Tam Tam, you have lost yer gutdamned mind.

Horner is a grade A hack. But I;ve got to admit, I never noticed they never call her by her name in the movie. She's like Malick's Ewoks!

The montage when jack whatever and pocahontas are first getting to know each other is so so so incredibly beautiful. This is gonna sound ridiculous, but it's like first getting to know you're dog - no communication, but you've got vibes and you're feeling each other and totally connecting.

those last 2 minutes as well are pretty heart rendering. the rest of the movie didn't do much for me, as i assume the rest of the world.

i'd see this again

heheh feels like horner has been saving that one up for _years_

there is no reason in the world why it could not have been as great love story as Titanic was.

Dude is all up in Jim Cameron's junk. I believe he pissed off Michael Bay a few years ago, too.

"There's no reason Tree of Life couldn't have been as great a dinosaur movie as Jurassic Park was."

christopher plummer: “He’s fascinated by nature, and just cuts to birds,” he told New York Magazine earlier this year. “Colin Farrell kept saying, ‘My character, he’s a fuckin’ osprey. That’s how he sees me.’ You’d be playing a passionate scene, and he’d say in that strange southern voice of his, mixed with Harvard and Oxford, ‘Ah, jes’ stop a minute, Chris. I think there’s an osprey flying over there. Do you mind if I just take a few shots?’ I wrote him an infuriated letter because I saw the film and I was hardly in it—he cut my part to shit. And it recalled the story of Adrien Brody, the lead in The Thin Red Line. He went to the premiere, and he wasn’t in it! I wrote to Terry and said, ‘You need a writer, baby, you need somebody to follow the ­story.’ I was awful to him, but I did say I admired him. He’s an individual—also mad as a hatter.”

that rant upthread makes me want to see the new world more than ever

For anyone not bored with this sort of thing, I wrote blurbs for my picks.

whoops -- wrong thread!

I kept telling Terry, "Terry, this does not have any emotion in it. Don’t you understand?" He looked at it and he would say, "I don’t know if emotion is important here."

but maybe it isn't! yeah now i really want to see this as well, is it on the instant netflix yet?

i mean some of the things they (horner + plummer) say are not entirely wrong but i dunno the hubris of these dudes. frankly horner sounds like a clueless idiot. plummer just sounds pissed he wasn't in the film more. but the parts he is in--he's indelible! he makes a strong impression in a few brief strokes. so dude should be happy. but instead he's just there with a stopwatch counting how much screen time he has. pffft.

and yes 'pochahontas' is never mentioned by name which seems like a pretty deliberate decision on malick's part. it's not like anybody doesn't know who she is.

...joeks?

― Gukbe, Wednesday, July 6, 2011 7:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i dont really know. horner's achievements:

• my heart will go on
• that crazy steel drum score from COMMANDO
• the spooky Cocoon music that was used so effectively in the Super 8 trailer

• ttrl
• badlands
• days of heaven

If Plummer was in every scene he'd be complaining the movie wasn't about him. Actors are stupid.

The Horner "Aliens" score is pretty good. But isn't that guy dogged with plagiarism claims?

Hah, just read that Horner's unflattering nickname is "Anvil Clanker."

haha, if you look up Anvil on wikipedia there's a section about horner's overuse of it. i didnt realize that clanging anvil sound in movie scores was a literal anvil all this time

neither of these guys sound like they have much of a clue about Malick's style or aims. i mean if you're expecting it to be a Titanic, yeah, he probably is doing it all wrong.

and lol at "you need a writer, baby"

Michael Bay: "Dude, Terry, if you want your movie to make fuckin' money, take out some of those fuckin' trees and put in some giant 3-D fuckin' robots!"

Po "did you find your indies, john?"
JS "i may have sailed past them"

colin farrell was surprisingly very good in this btw!

Having checked the formidable Criterion edition out of the library, I have a choice b/w three versions.