Knight of Cups

Knight of Cups was a very different subject than I was expecting from director Terrence Malick. Few directors delve into the raw emotional content that carries us through our daily narrative. Most of his films approach the viewer from the very abstract to the rather mundane. I was quite impressed with most of his previous work, but I failed to grasp what was going on here.

Christian Bale confirmed in an interview with The Guardian, a few things that people should know before watching this film. Mostly that the director did very little in terms of actual direction and scripting. Every scene in this film was either unscripted or improvised. Actors were playing off each other and had very little to go off of scene by scene.

Bale plays a successful Hollywood Screenwriter, who is haunted by his traumatic past and fails at most of his relationships. Not out of poor decisions but because he seems lost more than anything. The events that lay before him are strange and somewhat unconnected, but the recurring theme of his affairs, love interests, and strange breathy narration (which is fairly typical for Malick's films), make this film somewhat of a repeating loop of the same events over and over again. You're left a bit confused at the end wondering, what was this film about. There are some beautiful shots in it, yet still a difficult movie to follow.

A rather contemporary, if unguided effort on the director's part, and falls somewhat flat next to his more spectacular body of work.

5/10

Some random thoughts while watching this pretentious stinker: Film students correctly screen and study the works of Fellini and Antonioni and so did Malick, but ripping them off is inadvisable.

I saw "Badlands" at its NYFF world preem in 1973 and was a big fan of TM through his next one "Days of Heaven", but....he ended up a hack as witness here.

Compare careers to Conrad Rooks -as fiercely independent minded if not more so with 2 interesting features to his credit "Chappaqua", plus Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha". No idiot Malick Kool Aid drinking producers to back further follies for him, however.

Key ripoff: the great Scandi filmmaker Peter Watkins who invented the "You are There" first-person camera filmmaking technique for fictional, historical subject matter - wildly overdone by Malick with wide angle distortion added.

Ultimate indie pioneer John Cassavetes used improvisation for rehearsals and prep to invent a unique filming style; Malick uses improvisation as a lazy self-indulgence.

Film Festival-itis: making movies to be "consumed" on the antiquated, dating back to the '30s and '40s of Venice and Cannnes, international film festival as exhibition venue circuit, pandering to the gatekeepers of same: selection committees and junket-style critics, as witness the empty "eroticism" (not) thrown in as chief fetish of a "festival junkie".

Brain-dead stars: many a big name attracted to this no-script, no- nothing project in order to boast "I worked with Terrence Malick" and then spout gibberish in the inevitable BTS bonus interviews on DVD.

Film School Error 101: The Shot: when I first became a film buff over 5 decades ago I was fascinated with the "striking shot", a Bertolucci or for that matter Antonioni composition or moving camera that stuck out - the opposite of crafting a real, functioning feature film where both camera-work and editing (and SPFX especially) are ideally invisible once a filmmaker has matured. It's not the shot (battle) that counts, it's the film (war).

Antonioni, not Clapton or Kilroy, is God syndrome: not just the ending but the endless expanses of emptiness, as mentioned by loyal production designer Jack Fisk, not symbolic but merely undigested Antonioni imitation, see: "La Notte".

Elephantiasis: in the '60s I watched hundreds if not thousands of experimental film short subjects, screened at Midnight every Saturday and Sunday night at the local art theaters back in Cleveland, drawn from Ann Arbor and other regional festivals. Very educational and formative for a young film buff, with Stan Brakhage, George Kuchar and Ed Emshwiller raised to a pedestal for me. I'm sure Malick did too, but his big-budget feature-length imitations of same are embarrassing and a slap in the face of the many progenitors of the "underground movement" ranging from Maya Deren to even the '60s future pornographers -the Findlays. But he gets away with it, as current viewers and critics have no grounding in film history.

The Fellini scenes: TM couldn't resist "throwing a party" just like Fellini, but the maestro's parties have life and invention, while here we see clichéd Hollywood types milling about, over-wrangled by some anonymous assistant director, completely artificial in their groupings and movements.

Lastly, Bale as empty as the project. He gives new meaning to the derisive term "walk-through". And this is after, like the other hapless cast members, being given free rein by an absentee "director".

I'd seen some negative reviews of this film before I watched it but it's always hard to know whether they're written by people who just didn't get the film or whether they were written by people who are open to something very different who just didn't think the director succeeded in producing something of value.

Terrence Malick is indeed trying to take his audience in a different direction. He has turned away from the idea of telling a story to focus on the intangible emotional states of his characters, but I don't think many viewers will be able to relate very well to a character who is searching for meaning within an extremely privileged Hollywood social sphere, nor do I think we have much of an opportunity to connect to the film emotionally when it's edited like a music video. The film shifts wildly from one subject to another, the camera continuously in motion, as we tune in and out of incomplete conversations. Laid on top of the soundtrack throughout is slow, ponderous narration from multiple characters, often on subjects that have no immediate relationship to what is on screen at the time.

It is hard to sit through to the end. I did, though I caught myself daydreaming about other things on several occasions. It's hard to pay attention to something that seems to be making so little effort to hold it, but I was hoping it would go somewhere interesting. Surely the directer of a masterpiece like The Thin Red Line would pull something out of his sleeve to weave the chaos together, but then it ended.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you which group of reviewers I'm in. I might be the kind who just didn't get it or who aren't open to what Malick was trying to do, but I was thoroughly bored by it. I appreciate that he is trying something different, and this film is that, but I don't feel like I got anything out of it.

One group who might appreciate this film though is modern architects who put a lot of glass in their buildings. There is a lot of that.

Let's get one thing straight; Terrence Malick's films aren't exactly everyone's cup of tea. They're arguably the most unconventionally crafted movies from a well renowned director out there. Audiences normally criticize him for being highly pretentious and having no meaning in his work. But for some, his films represent everything we love about the artistic medium of motion pictures. With his latest offering, "Knight of Cups", Christian Bale stars as a screenwriter eager to explore his seedy persona in the dreamlike whereabouts of LA.

The film swoons along with a plethora of illusory montages, with Bale being Malick's primary focus as he trudges through the streets of downtown L.A., bizarre nightclubs swarming with vibrant dancers, house parties exclusively for the rich and meditative walks through the desolate wastelands of the Las Vegas desert. For the majority of the film he cuts a forlorn figure, basically looking to find some sort of significance of his life and finding the answer to faith. And in typical Malick fashion, none of what we see on screen is straightforward and we're left to determine our own meaning on the gorgeously composed images. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki once again has a vice like grip on how to bring an ethereal visual lyricism to surroundings.

Malick is one the very few directors who really embraces the beauty of artistic filmmaking. They may not follow a clear cut narrative, but there's no doubting that there's an alluring poetic rhythm that's present in his films. The key is for the viewer to figure out what Malick is attempting to portray. And even if you can't, just go along for the experience. Simply put, if you enjoy his films, you'll most likely find some sort of reward with this.

more clueless, going-nowhere pretentious. Trying so hard to find some unnecessary answers with a film to play out meaninglessly by a guy who miraculously relocated or misplaced himself in lot of big-deal events or scenes, either looking up to the sky or jumped off from a pier into the sea for no obvious purpose but spur-of-the-moment childish behaviors, or entangled himself with some females in close contact, flesh against flesh, intimate but without profound romantic feelings at all, or woken by a sudden earthquake, moronically and aimlessly roamed around inside his room with bare feet littered with shattered glass, then when the aftershock tremors hit again, escaped downstairs, still without shoes, looked up to the sky, saw chopper passing, sirens....on and on, situated himself in desert, movie shooting locations, swimming pool, bed for no purpose. The old voice narration....then with some white hair guys mingled among younger ones....on and on, without any meaningful purpose. lot of wide angled nice scenes, sunsets.

The whole movie failed to provide the viewers with any obvious intention but hollow camera works. Trying so hard to look deep but ended up with a big NADA! A pathetic copycat tried so hard to look like the heir of Fellini and his 8 1/2 film but failed miserably except in colors and wide-angle lens. A total clueless waste of resources and viewers' time and eyesight.