March 08, 2006
What others are saying...
The Critics
"So Crash won the Oscar for Best Picture. The same night that Hollywood gave one of the only Oscars to go to a Black man to a group of rappers rapping about pimps and Memoirs of a Geisha, like Zhang Ziyi herself, were celebrated as aesthetically pleasing but containing no substance." - Reappropriate
The film world this year has been bursting at the seams with controversy. Brokeback Mountain was the obvious lightning rod this year but other films such as Munich and even March of the Penguins got people worked up. In these films the controversy was a result of the ideas presented by the films and had little to do with the filmmaking itself.
Andrew: But then again, if a film as ugly as The New World can be filmed so well, maybe the ideas is where the focus ought to lie.
Ben: In the case of Crash, that's not the situation. It's pretty safe to say that most people think racism is a bad thing. It's the manner in which Haggis presented his thesis that's causing so much outrage. Here are articles we've collected on the film that we've found to be illuminating:
Crash - Mudd Up!
Crash and Burn - Reappropriate
'Brokeback' dreams crash and burn as the academy's voters play it safe - Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times
Meanwhile, the War of the 'The New World' wages on:
And the Ship Sails On - Jeff Reichert of Reverse Shot
'The New World': A Cult Film Is Born - J. Hoberman of the Village Voice
Andrew: Notice how both Reichert and Hoberman agree that The New World is a very American phenomenon. In my opinion, Hoberman's got the right read here - his last two paragraphs really clinch it. Reichert's acting like he's never seen nature photography before.
Ben: I'm going to have to side with Reichert here. With the few films that he's made in the past thirty or so years, Terrence Malick has actually stretched the boundaries of the art form. The New World was no exception, it's a stunning work. While I do admit a certain degree of discomfort with the Pocahontas myth, I feel that it allowed for audiences to gain a foothold via a story that we're all familier with. Paralleled with the "discovery" of the new world and subsequent culture clash, both stories are idyllic on the surface yet turn out to be of paradises lost in which there never was any chance of a paradise actually existing. Hoberman says that America has "seldom needed a redemptive myth as badly as it does now," this film and all the real world actions that this country has taken shows that, at this point, it's beyond redemption.
And lastly, a short word from a favorite comedienne:
Thank You Ang Lee - Margaret Cho
