Talentless hacks general
WAITING ON YOU OP, JUST WAITING ON YOU
>>71170375
image unrelated?
>>71170407Nope
>>71170375
>>71170397
pleb detected
>inb4 Snydra
Fine, i'll start
>>71170375
post rare malicks
badlands = days of heaven > thin red line > TTOL > TNW > TTW
>>71170565
great taste desu
early Malick best Malick
>>71170536
Literally who
>>71170375
Pic related
>>71170375
>It's an obvious over exaggeration just because they don't really like or get their work episode.
>>71170781
He isn't a great filmmaker, though.
>>71170375
OP, since you didn't justify why Malick is a hack.
>>71170375
:( Malick is one of my favorite directors. Knight of Cups was amazing
>>71170781
>It's autists defend shallow writing because the movies are pretty episode
>>71171035
Underrated
>>71171048
I'm sorry your taste is so shit
>>71171055
Wholly disagree
>>71171201
>Malick hater likes JJ
Heh
>>71171326
Knight of Cups was terrible
Even here, Malick asks his players to do that walk away from the camera in half-light, the turn, the little dance that has become his almost over-recognisable choreography. The empty shells of these street sets are juxtaposed with wondrous, mournful long takes driving through LA at night, their own signs of life dazzling and hyperactive but, in a different way, illusory.
Lubezki, from whom an uninteresting shot is a rarity, works miracles with the buildings. There’s a certain angle he loves to use, about 45º above the horizontal, catching actors’ faces from below and the skyscrapers and the skies being scraped. It becomes a tic, all the same, and the film is hardly breaking new ground in its photo-exhibition vision of this city as an epic but hollow construct.
There are flickers of dramatic interest in Bale’s family life – he has lost one brother, perhaps to suicide, and stands by while another (Wes Bentley) feuds with their hulking shipwreck of a father. In this fairly brief role, Brian Dennehy wades in with that remarkable, Arthur Miller-ish potency of his, and the sheer breadth of his shoulders is another special effect for Lubezki to feast on.
But Malick mutes the drama, quite literally – we come into charged, ranty scenes in mid-monologue, and find the volume dipping, surges of melancholy classical music (Grieg, Wojciech Kilar, Elgar’s amazing Thomas Tallis Fantasia) welling up instead.
It might be a feast for lip-readers, this film, but it’s proof that Malick has come to distrust words, at least the ones being spoken face to face. He’s still in love, never fear, with all that disembodied, contrapuntal voiceover: “Fragments of a man,” whispers Bale, gruffly. “Where did I go wrong?”
Knight of Cups is a Tarot card – Jack of Hearts, essentially – which stands for restlessness, romantic adventuring, boredom, dreaming, and sometimes fraudulence.
>>71171377
Look, I too can copy and paste
Perhaps no film in the history of cinema follows the movement of memory as faithfully, as passionately, or as profoundly as Terrence Malick’s new film, “Knight of Cups.” It’s an instant classic in several genres—the confessional, the inside-Hollywood story, the Dantesque midlife-crisis drama, the religious quest, the romantic struggle, the sexual reverie, the family melodrama—because the protagonist’s life, like most people’s lives, involves intertwined strains of activity that don’t just overlap but are inseparable from each other. The movie runs less than two hours and its focus is intimate, but its span seems enormous—not least because Malick has made a character who’s something of an alter ego, and he endows that character with an artistic identity and imagination as vast and as vital as his own.
As such, “Knight of Cups” is one of the great recent bursts of cinematic artistry, a carnival of images and sounds that have a sensual beauty, of light and movement, of gesture and inflection, rarely matched in any movie that isn’t Malick’s own. Here, he—and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki—surpass themselves. Where “The Tree of Life” is filled with memories, is even about memory, “Knight of Cups” is close to a first-person act of remembering, and the ecstatic power of its images and sounds is a virtual manifesto, and confession, of the cinematic mind at work. It’s a mighty act of self-portraiture in dramatic action and in directorial creation. And because “Knight of Cups” is about the world of movie-making itself and is set mainly in and around Hollywood, it’s also a vision of the modern world, the world of inescapable images and of their dubious demiurges, of whom the movie’s protagonist, a screenwriter named Rick (played by Christian Bale), is one.
>>71171140
>watching for plot
u r bad
>>71171527
>Knight of Cups is laden with voice-over assuring us that Rick is racked with regret. But anyone who watched it with the sound turned down might assume that it was an unusually arty episode of Entourage. Are we supposed to take this existential fretting seriously?
>There’s certainly a lot of it about. Navel-gazing dramas keep asking us to take pity on wealthy, attractive people who are starting to feel that being wealthy and attractive isn’t quite as fulfilling as they had expected. Never mind the vintage sports cars and the designer wardrobes, they say. Never mind the luscious friends and lovers. And never mind the highly paid, creative jobs that most people would kill for. Having everything you ever dreamed of is actually a curse.
>It’s not an inherently boring theme. And any film-maker who has made it to the top of their profession, only to find that they’re still not very cheerful, must feel that they have something to say on the matter. They may also think of themselves as heirs to Federico Fellini. In the maestro’s 8 1/2 (1963), Fellini represents himself as Guido (the peerlessly handsome Marcello Mastroianni), a lauded director who is struggling to get started on a sci-fi epic. Guido’s biggest headache is how to keep his lusty mistress away from his loyal wife, but Fellini brings such mischief, melancholy and imagination to the scenario that the film is regarded as one of cinema’s supreme masterpieces. It’s no wonder that it has so many imitators, from Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories to Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, via Rob Marshall’s musical version of 8 1/2, Nine. (In which Guido is played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and his main concern is who is going to lure him into a luxury hotel suite next – Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz or Kate Hudson? The heart bleeds.) But however often directors return to the theme of being prosperous but miserable, film has to be the worst possible medium in which to explore it.
>>71171556
>watching movies for the plot
>bad
Malick fans everybody
>>71171590
>he missed the beyond-surface-level symbolism
Knight of Cups is about a man seeking the solar strength inside himself. This is the spiritual masculinity of the Hindu kshatriyas, the Hesiodic heroes, and even Arthur and his knights.
This is what Rick is talking about when he says he can still remember the "man he wanted to become."
Submergence (water, beach, pool shots) vs. ascendance (shots of planes, helicopters, palm trees, Rick always looking upwards), materialism vs. spiritualism, the allure of coveting vs. the apathy the comes with possessing, the Tarot suggesting predestined fate as a wandering Knight of Cups vs. Rick choosing his own highway at the end and beginning a new life,
This isn't about becoming le epin manly man XDD, but attaining a Center in oneself that transcends and conquers the feminine, lunar world of flux, image, emptily beautiful women and fleeting pleasures.
For this kind of spirituality, ever action is sacrifice, and every moment is consecrated. The man does not live for the content of experience, for "the love experience", but for the fact of experience itself.
When Rick's father says he can't even name this nebulous thing that he hungers for, it's because he thinks it will be some particular experience, some image or woman that will be just right that will eradicate his desire for wholeness forever. But this is a mistake. Plotinus said desire does not negate privation, but creates it.
This world, or even the individual's own hedonism treadmill, doesn't burn with craving because it just hasn't happened to acquire this perfect happiness yet. No, it is the principle of craving and eternal insufficiency ITSELF.
>>71171590
>>71171763
Genesis 3:14-15: "Then the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all animals, domestic and wild. You will crawl on your belly, groveling in the dust as long as you live. And I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel."
Rick compares suicidal depression to being swallowed by a snake. Most people take this line at face value, and it is a great line. But the snake is also an esoteric symbol of wisdom and knowledge of the subtle mysteries. The snake is hell, but once you come out the other end it is transformed into life and wisdom. The lunar Whore becomes the virgin, the snake trampled at its feet. The solar male has taken his rightful Seat. He's found the pearl.
The dogs trying to get the ball in the pool is symbolic of everything going on in the movie. Beings prevented by the "Waters" from getting what they want.
The woman with the red, bottomless eyes that asks "Are you afraid?" in the Vegas party scenes is every pretty girl turned into a symbol of desire and salvation by spiritually frustrated, hopeless men.
Stopping by to post this in a Malick thread again:
>Will To the Wonder--or TO THE WONDER, as the film's end credits have it--finally dispel the aura of reverence that has settled over the cinema of Terrence Malick? The late creation of an artist can act as an alembic, concentrating and thereby heightening the qualities of his former work, Robert Bresson's L'Argent (1983) being only the most imposing example. And To the Wonder, like Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986) (both of which Malick has drawn from, particularly in 2011's Tree of Life), distills all that is intolerable in its maker's films. Ironically, To the Wonder is positioned as a departure, the first in Malick's oeuvre, aside from a few uneasy sequences in The Tree of Life, to be set in the present day. That apartness--Terry Does Contemporary--serves to reveal that Malick's stylistic traits, previously identified as auteurist signatures, appear too often tics and affectations. What Malick's disciples praise as his ambition and sincerity increasingly registers as feigned naivete, an untoward belief that his fervent romanticism can renew such exhausted tropes as a van Gogh field of sunflowers, a Milton tree of life, a Gauguin South Sea paradise. The unfortunate effect of To the Wonder is to cast a retrospective pall over the director's work, to underscore the tendency in his earlier films to banal symbolism, manufactured rapture, and middlebrow aestheticism.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/An+embarrassment+of+riches%3A+James+Quandt+on+the+films+of+Terrence...-a0325892846
>>71171590
>>71171790
When Rick's dad is talking about damnation being your life "just splashing out there", I was reminded of a passage from Plotinus that describes the fully lived life as "holding tight to experience". That is, being awake to the present, and not experiencing your life as a dim procession of images.
Afterwards, we get a bunch of shots of women on billboards set to some really eerie music. This is the false glamour of materialism and Hollywood excess. These women are beautiful, but it is a dream beauty that can only exist in images. Notice the cut to the jellyfish in the aquarium: same thing here, all these prim, pretty girls are like jellyfish, luminescent in their medium, but take them out of the "water" and they deflate into nothing.
Notice how the final 'Freedom' chapter begins with a montage of mornings, likely mornings Rick had slept through or his hangover rattled brain didn't even care to notice.
But this time we finally come out of the lunar night into the day. The moon is an esoteric symbol of Becoming because for all its hypnotic beauty, its light is only ever a reflection of a greater principle, Being/the Sun.
Morning is also reflective of the solar nature because every party must end with the rising of the sun, but as the pleasure and intoxication evaporates into the aether so do the shadows of the dark night of the soul. The solar masculinity is an internalization of this principle: that there is a Ground to the phantasmagoria of desire that transcends it. It is the incorruptible purity on which the image is projected and, eventually, returns to.
>>71171590
>>71171817
Recall the girl that asks "Are you afraid?" in the Vegas party, who we only catch a very soul-piercing glimpse of and her pinhole eyes. Zizek (sorry) mentions in his Perverts Guide to Cinema that ocular imagery, particularly the eyes of females, is utilized in certain strains of psychological horror because we fear there is nothing behind those eyes but the void. For men like Rick, their own emptiness is reflected back to them in the eyes of the Other, and the effect can be one of terror, especially if those eyes are owned by what can afford them the very beauty and intimacy they crave.
They fear there is nothing behind those eyes that they can latch onto. They fear that the Other that should fulfill them. an't be grasped or possessed, and so they want to conquer her flesh, her surface, if they can't have her depths.
Notice how the dream girl has eyes on the back of her head when she's turned away from the camera. Even in turning away, even in rejection, she's looking right through men like Rick.
The Tao is described as a "living void", void because as the source of all qualities it is devoid of quality itself, living because even this nothingness is absolute fullness.
The consciousness behind eyes is this ungraspable , living force. For men who have only void in themselves, they only see emptiness and lack in others. For those who "have plenitude in their own being" as Plotinus describes the key to happiness, they are not confronted by an object to be possessed. They do not recoil in fear of the Other. They see another living being. A whole as whole as their own inner selves.
>>71171590
>>71171844
The movie ends with the exhortation to "Begin." But as anyone whose tried to claw their way out of their own pit knows, you're going to fuck up. No single commitment to change will carry you the whole way up without a couple bumps and bruises, no matter how earnest.
So there is not one monumental, cheesy, time-to-buckle-down-and-do-this decision to "Begin", but there are many little begginings, for when the gravity of your former life will inevitably pull you part of the way back before you snap out of it. There as many beginnings as there are moments.
This ties into the theological/esoteric idea of the Creation of the universe not as a single, temporal event in the past that's over and done with, but an always happening, ever-present Now, eternally sustained by the Divine. Men like Rick must not live in the world of time - in Becoming - but in the present that never exhausts itself.
This not just metaphysical abstraction but a very pragmatic and deep attitude towards cultivating a truly healthy life. When Rick inevitably fucks up, he's going to narrativize, turn into a story, "I was good for awhile, but then I fucked up." But is this impulse to describe and explain that doomed him from the start.
>>71171590
>>71171902
His mental chatter used to be "I'm sad, I'm alone, I'm this, I'm that, I'm this, I'm that." In the solar strength there is only silence. There is no "I am this", but like God when Moses asked who he was, there is only "I AM."
The only woman who realizes that Rick is only passing through life trying to find the shape to fill the void within himself (the model), probably because she understands the painful paradox of beauty, being a model herself. IIRC she says something like she's hurt too many men, thus functioning as Rick's counterpart but she has gone through what Rick is going through now. It's also implied that their relationship isn't really consummated (she asks if this is just friendship) and she knows that their relationship will be doomed because she knows that Rick is just a wanderer.
She's telling Rick that he can be anything he wants. A saint, a devil, a god. "Your perception is your reality". In some sense, she is saying all limits are self-made, which is about as pithy as the typical drivel you'd see posted on a Facebook wall.
One can always object, "the limits of my body are not self-made. I cannot escape them."
But this person would never understand that his mental resistance to these perceived limits, THAT, is self-created. The mind is as free as it believes itself to be.
Seijun Suzuki
Gaspar Noe
Jean-Pierre Melville
Aki Kaurismaki
Sidney Lumet
Ridley Scott
>>71171590
>>71171945
There's a great line in the Banderas party scene. He says, "there are no principles, only circumstances."
An echo of Deluezian pluralism, where everything is haecceity, uniquely itself, and there are no universal rules to follow. There is no judge.
To apply a strict moral code to a universe of only circumstance, where what's right differs with the situation, would require a superhuman adaptability and mental processing. Most would rather sit it out, fly over the "swamp" that is life than get tangled in its complexities.
"Nobody's home," Banderas' character says. He means there is no God. But this line refers to himself and the other partygoers just as well. N No one's Here, nobody's Home, alive to the present anymore.
What does Imogen Poots' character say when Bale asks what her dress is made of? "How should I know?"
Malick was being pretty ironic in associating Antonio's character, someone who preaches living sensually and constantly flitting from woman to woman,with the Hermit card that generally represents wisdom and a higher spiritual knowledge. It's a literal reversal, quite unlike the reversed meaning of the film poster
>>71171590
>>71171965
Knight of Cups is a card used in Latin-suited playing cards, including tarot decks. It is part of what tarot card readers call the "Minor Arcana".
If the card is upright, it represents change and new excitements, particularly of a romantic nature. It can mean invitations, opportunities, and offers. The Knight of Cups is a person who is a bringer of ideas, opportunities and offers. He is constantly bored, and in constant need of stimulation, but also artistic and refined. He represents a person who is amiable, intelligent, and full of high principles, but a dreamer who can be easily persuaded or discouraged.
Reversed, the card represents unreliability and recklessness. It indicates fraud, false promises and trickery. It represents a person who has trouble discerning when and where the truth ends and lies begin.
But there is a higher sense. That the modality of who Rick can conceive himself to be, happy or sad, represents the wealth and diversity of life and the universe. Every interior wholeness is a fractal reflection of the Neoplatonic unity. At all scales this perfection is attainable, trickles down. Every consciousness is an observer-participant in something infinitely beyond itself but also nearer to itself than its own physical heart, for as it is said, "the principle of sublimity and self-overcoming in the spirit is the spirit itself."
>>71171590
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/terrence-malicks-knight-of-cups-challenges-hollywood-to-do-better
>>71172048
kek youre not that guy who shits all over armond white and shills richard brody are you?
![tumblr_mg8oj4KvJ31qgu2gyo2_500[1].gif](https://i.imgur.com/VkMdBIG.gif "tumblr_mg8oj4KvJ31qgu2gyo2_500[1].gif")
>>71170375
I thought he was our guy
>>71172133
No
>>71172134
Don't worry, he is
>DUDE CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM LMAO
Dropped. god doesn't exist, come on guys
