Well three packs of Dramamine and two overboard backgammon sets later, we’re back from a month of tall ship sailing along the coast of Brazil. There were a lot of things we missed. It’s practically impossible to make ice cubes on a sail boat, and the South Americans still haven’t mastered the art of brunch. But we missed watching movies most of all. So we decided to jump right back into it with a two-hour-plus Terrence Malick film, The New World (see our reviews after the jump).

Olive: The New World features a tremendous amount of people staring at each other silently, which reminded me of my extended family in Switzerland; slightly disconcerting, but certainly polite. Wonderful! There was also a good deal of people not doing much of anything, muddy Englishmen looking crazed with hunger, noble natives looking proud and savage, and everyone brushing their hands along the tops of fields, a trick that directors seem to love (see Gladiator, 300). In the end, if the movie was “about” something, it was something of a fairy tale, about a beautiful, curious princess.

Cliff: I am not an emotional man. While I have been known to occasionally anthropomorphize the S&P 500 as an irredeemable woman, I am generally not given to bouts of sentimentality or corniness. But I admit that The New World made me shed a tear. The film has so much fantasy in it that it requires that you suspend your disbelief, which may take a few scenes, but once I did I was completely drawn in. If movies are like vacations, The New World is like waking up lost in the middle of Southern France with no money; disturbing, but actually very nice once you get over the initial shock. I had heard only bad reviews of The New World before Olive and I saw it, which only goes to prove that 99% of people are wrong 99% of the time.