Directed and Written by : Terrence Malick
Starring : Christian Bale, Imogen Poots, Wes Bentley, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Teresa Palmer, Natalie Portman, Isabel Lucas
Release Date : September 10, 2015
After seeing "Knight Of Cups" at a movie theater, a common statement that I heard from audience members was "I seriously don't know what I just watched." Welcome to the world of Writer / Director Terrence Malick! Artsy. Pretentious. Experimental. Thought-provoking. This movie does not hold your hand on what it's about. In order to make complete sense of the film, you need to have some knowledge on Tarot Cards. Hence the title of the film, which can represent unreliability and recklessness. There are also other Tarot Cards that act as title cards and indicates a new chapter of the story. If you need more info, you could always just go to the wikipedia page, but that would be cheating.
The movie itself seems to just be a series of random scenes with minimal dialogue and voice over narrations, that are all stitched together to form more scenes of randomness that contain a lack of dialogue and cryptic voice over narrations. Lying in bed. Los Angeles skyline. Driving on the freeway. Standing in a deserted land, contemplating. Walking through a neighborhood. Lying in another bed. Earthquake. Universal Studios backlot. Hollywood party with tons of celebrity cameos. Driving around the city. Walking through the city. Lying in yet another bed. Naked woman. Homeless people. Standing in another deserted land, contemplating some more. Jumping in a body of water with clothes on. People frolicking. People drinking. People crawling. People acting angry. People yelling. Standing in yet another deserted land, contemplating even more.
Shot with what appears to be a handheld steady cam, there are tons of extreme close ups of people's faces, with angled shots constantly facing upwards, and often times there's a panning or zooming shot. Some sequences are edited in spurts of 2-5 second scenes of seemingly random orders. Watching the movie can get hypnotizing because it's like watching a dream, and for some people it might be enough to put them to sleep. At least it's all visually beautiful to look at, and that's thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki; the guy who won three straight years at the Academy Awards for best cinematography. If you live in the greater Los Angeles area, you'll get a kick out of seeing a lot of familiar locations.
Needless to say, "Knight Of Cups" is a hard sell for most movie goers. After all, this is a movie that hardly had a script, and the actors were told to heavily improvise their scenes. It shows.
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