2015 Muriel Awards: 10th Anniversary Award

And now, the first of this year’s Anniversary Awards. It’s always interesting to see what this group will go for in these categories. I’m particularly curious to see what we vote for with next year’s 10th anniversary award, when we finally catch up with the first year we handed out Muriels. Has our favorite film of 2006 stood the test of time, or has it been surpassed by something else in the ensuing decade? Tune in next year to find out!

Meanwhile…

Third place:

Caché [117 points / 17 votes]

Second place:

A History of Violence [135 points / 21 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

The New World [180 points / 24 votes]

“The New World, or, The Only Movie Ever Made.

“This movie. THIS MOVIE. This movie is a sensory invasion. (Don’t Google ‘sensate film,’ though. Thanks.) Have you listened to this film? Malick does as much with sound as with sight, weaving Das Rheingold, insects, wind whipping through leaves, water, thunder, rain. Voiceover overwhelms dialogue, the inner world always rising to the top, just as the camera wanders away from action toward thought, emotion, fear, wonder, pain. I can’t talk about this movie, so I’m going to have to FEEL at you. This. Movie.

“My second viewing of The New World was a late Tuesday night screening in a nearly empty theater with my 9-month-old baby girl asleep in my arms. Malickian majesty unfurled while I held my own personal new world. I was in love with everything. And everything was love. Tears poured.

“I was a latecomer to Malick. He wasn’t part of my cinematic awareness before The Thin Red Line, in 1998, after his twenty-year hiatus. And man, oh, man, I hated The Thin Red Line. I can’t quite capture the nature of my disdain. It was pretentious, I thought, smugly, dismissively. Self-indulgent. How dare you try to reach for something I don’t understand, Mr. Malick? I wasn’t ready. I still read and consumed media for plot and cleverness alone. Poetry shmoetry.

“Five years later I was badgered into rewatching The Thin Red Line, and emerged an unapologetic Malick groupie. I don’t know what changed in me. Receptiveness, certainly. Decreased rigidity. Then I fell for Badlands. I went steady with Days of Heaven. But I was still unprepared for The New World. Q'orianka Kilcher is astonishing. Colin Farrell’s impetuous, passionate Smith dazzles me as much as Christian Bale’s Rolfe makes me long for lasting love. But Kilcher moves from soul-consuming passion to steady, strengthening love never suggesting one is preferable to the other, or even distinguishable. She is irrepressible, inexorable.

“‘Did you find your Indies, John?’ This movie.” ~ Marya Murphy

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