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01/15/2006:

"Yes, Virginia, This Pocahontas Is for Real"

She's running a little late (wardrobe malfunction) and she's limping a little bit from the day before yesterday when she fell down the stairs in a fit of excitement (more on that later), but she's still rocking her platforms (it helps her hurt foot, she says, to walk in heels), strolling very slowly into the National Museum of the American Indian, apologizing for her tardiness, chewing gum and smiling and shaking hands with the museum director.

And here comes her mom, bringing up the rear. With a video camera. Mom. But Mom is intent on capturing everything (for a documentary), all this newness , the movie premieres, the newspaper interviews, the museum visitors doing the whozzat double take. So, after a little sotto voce negotiating -- in German -- Q'orianka (Cor-ee-AHN-ka, which means "Golden Eagle" in Quechua) Kilcher, the 15-year-old star of Terrence Malick's "The New World," does her mother's bidding, and stands there, in the lobby where everybody can see her, holding up a copy of her very first magazine cover (the reason she went tumbling down the stairs), smiling for the camera while her younger brother and her publicist and her agent and her agent's son and a handful of passersby look on.

In "The New World," which opens Friday, Colin Farrell plays Capt. John Smith to Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas. "I don't care about the attention," says the actress, 15, of her fast-budding fame. (New Line Cinema Via Reuters)
"I feel so conceited," Q'orianka moans, gripping the latest edition of the Indian museum's magazine.

All this attention takes considerable adjustment. After all, before her head shot was passed along to Malick's casting directors, Q'orianka's previous screen experience amounted to a brief stint on "Star Search" (she sings, too) and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role in "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." But adjusting is what Q'orianka, part Quechua-Huachipaeri Indian, part Swiss-Alaskan, will have to do. In Malick's much-acclaimed "New World" -- his fourth film in 32 years -- the home-schooled ninth-grader plays a sinuous Pocahontas to then-29-year-old Colin Farrell's grizzled John Smith. She even gets to kiss Farrell -- yes, her first kiss.
washingtonpost.com

The story of the real Pocahontas is one of the many shameful travesties in the annals of the Native American genocide. How could a liaison between a teen-aged native girl and a white colonizer (she was actually passed from one to another) be understood as anything but rape? Pocahontas was the poster-girl for tobacco in England, and she died hideously there in her early 20's in its hostile climes.

Two of the most acclaimed American films of the year, New World and King Kong feature racist themes, a fact ignored by rapturous critics and practically everybody else.

I guess we're supposed to feel good about ourselves that we embrace this new multiracial star. What a sickness.