We can’t stop writing (and reading) about The New World: today’s required article is Reverse Shot’s own staff writer extraordinaire Nick Pinkerton’s awesome new piece on Malick’s masterpiece in the new issue of Stop Smiling, which both rightfully ascends the film to a heavenly plane and drags its short-sighted critics down to the sweaty bog of idiocy from whence they came. Watch out Zacharek, Hoberman, and Stephen (lol) Hunter: prepare to be dropkicked.

You left Rosenbaum off your list of dissenters. A critic much harder to write off than any of the three you mentioned.

Fuck, I give up.

Nick, if you ever do something in your life which prevents you from writing about movies -- even for a short period of time -- I am going to hunt you down and kick the shit out of you.

Bravo.

You fail to mention Rosenbaum on your list of haters. I don't necessarily agree with him, but I've yet to read an adequate response to his objections to the film - a false handling of history in the name of transcendentalism.

How do we know Malick's handling of history is false? I think the "story" of Pocahontas falls well within territory where his guess as an artsit is as good as Rosenbaums, or mine, or yours. And would a "true" historical look at the same story be necessarily more worthwhile than a project that actively sifts through the very mechanics of storytelling and legend-making that have left us with an incomplete record?

I don't respond to fat critics.

Yawn...oh right...moral responsibility. Yeah, I suppose we're all for that at Reverse Shot, provided we are indeed talking about a "historical film" which "The New World" isn't really. Would we write off Tom Pynchon's vast insights into WWII and the 1700s in "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Mason & Dixon" just because they're historically inaccurate? Just because there aren't any sex rockets or talking dogs in "The New World" doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize it for what it is: a piece about certain ideas with a certain agenda set in a particular period that isn't making any claims towards verisimilitude.