Knight of Cups (2015)

If you narrate...your movie...using whispers...in short...sentences...it will make it seem...meaningful...

..only it wasn't. From start to finish this film is nothing more than stylised cliché. If you've seen the first 5 minutes then there is absolutely no need to watch the rest, because nothing else happens.

In short the film is as follows: Playful nymphets frolicking around in luxurious spaces, Christian Bale looking like he's had too much lithium, various narrators whispering something about life and some melodramatic improv. acting all filmed with a shaky camera. That's it. No meaning, no message and certainly no depth.

From the style of the film it's safe to say that the director is aiming at depicting a characters search for meaning in a superficial world of carnal desire and material illusion. Unfortunately though, far from creating some kind of Zen reflection, the film itself remains as superficial as the characters it portrays. The direction is a bag of tricks with the same series of shots repeated over and over and the narration is all pseudo-poetic garbage delivered in whispers so it seems deep.

This is all actually very surprising, because this same director also made 'The Tree of Life' which was similar in style to this film but actually had a purpose and urgency to it. In comparison this really does seem suspiciously like a very lazy imitation of his earlier work.

Spiritually this film is about as important as a Levi jeans advert and artistically it's as beautiful as a plastic palm tree. There's literally no reason to watch this film, it's simply the product of Malick's ego masturbation brought to orgasm with the help of some Hollywood A-Listers in the hope everyone would come off looking like celebrity Buddhists. Instead they just look like fakers.

Take my advice, don't waste your time and money on this pretentious nonsense, go and watch The Tree of Life instead.

Fmovies: 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

Let me start by saying that I regard Terrence Malick as the sole currently working director who can be spoken of with the same reverence as that for the great early masters of cinema – Welles, Chaplin, Hitchcock, Renoir (make your own list). Since 'The Tree of Life' - even since 'The New World', I have thought of him as the saviour of modern cinema from the slurry of bland naturalism.

But the enormous stylistic advances in cinematic expression that have characterised his recent works have come at a price, and the price is clarity of vision. We do not necessarily need to *know* what his images represent, but we need to *feel* it. Occasionally in 'The Tree of Life', frequently in 'To the WONDER' and most of the time in 'Knight of Cups' most people would, I suspect, be at a loss to rationally explain the relevance of much of Malick's visual expression. (They don't always 'feel' right, either.)

So (after three viewings) I offer my 'guide' to this enigmatic film. The 'story' (no story) of 'Knight of Cups' is that of a 'celebrity' Rick (Christian Bale) on the loose in Hollywood, who has lost his moral compass and lives a life of total debauchery drifting from one soulless sexual encounter to another in between failed relationships.

This is represented in a kaleidoscopic torrent of imagery reminiscent of the works of Bruce Connor in the 1960s. Bale does the best he can with the central role of Rick, a 'celebrity' in Hollywood, but, like Sean Penn in 'The Tree of Life', he has really drawn the short straw, as he, like Ben Affleck, Penn and Richard Gere before him tries to wordlessly express his response to ambiguous emotional and moral situations.

Malick, to his credit, tells us what the film is about in an opening voice-over, which recounts a story ('Hymn of the Pearl') from Acts of Thomas in the Apocrypha. A king sends his son to search for a pearl in a foreign land. The pearl is to be found in the sea, protected by a hissing serpent, but the prince is seduced by the inhabitants of the foreign country and given a sleeping draft. After he awakes, he has forgotten not only what he came for, but even that he is a prince.

Much of the first half of the film memorably (but not graphically) depicts the life of total decadence that Rick finds in Tinseltown. But this is interspersed with encounters – real or imagined, present or past – with people from his former life – wife, brother, father.

The term 'emotional roller coaster' is often inappropriately used, but here it is very precisely apt, as one has the sense of Rick being propelled down paths he'd rather not take by external forces over which he has lost control. But, for me, at least, this section is too long and suffers from overkill, in the 'when you've seen one, you've seen 'em all' sense.

The rest of the film follows Rick in his attempts to make sense of his life and find 'the pearl', and, to be fair, the film does give the sense of an inexorable move in this direction which aids dramatic tension and gives clarity in some measure. As in 'To the WONDER', with the story of the crisis of faith of the priest, here also there are tangential sections in which compassion is seen as the alter ego of passion, and the place of young children adds positive emotion to an otherwise extremely bleak, if dazzlingly beautiful work.

Yes, Malick's unique visual lyrici

Knight of Cups fmovies. This...is not a movie. It's a narrated commercial for nothing, or maybe for the cameras they used for filming? The shots are cool, I'll give it that, one point for the cinematography. Nothing happens in this commercial, there's no story arc, no plot, no character development. You will not experience any emotions during this film, unless you are moved by perfume ads in magazines. You will not have any thoughts about this thing either, besides 'why did I finish that?' , if you can survive to the end. Its a tough watch. Lots of pretty girls in it, so if that means anything to you, then I might recommend this.

I don't think they will release this movie in theaters, it won't be worth that type of distribution, because the movie looks expensive and the cast is top notch. I am not a film critic by any means, but I know this is bad. Not funny bad, just painstakingly boring and pointless bad.

Avoid

As we grow more and more tired of dull as dishwater, predictable, structure obsessed nonsense, we come to love films that want to use the medium to take us on a trip. I see nothing wrong with enjoying beautiful imagery, stunning music and a bit of emotional self analysis for a couple of hours. Or would you rather the story by numbers of say, Joy? I may not have loved this as much as Thin Red Line, or Tree of Life, But am I happy to spend two hours with Mr. M? Indeed I am. Anyone who has led anything verging on an interesting life will have plenty to ponder as this washes over them. This was like meditating. It's freeing to let a sense of the story wash over you without having some contrived plot shoved down your throat. I let the cinema invigorated and cleansed.

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.