Film Freak Central,2003:weblog-99928295733106445 2016-03-11T21:19:54-05:00 TypePad Knight of Cups (2016),2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01bb08c76977970d 2016-03-11T21:19:54-05:00 2016-03-11T21:21:25-05:00 ****/**** starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Wes Bentley written and directed by Terrence Malick by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups is an obvious companion piece to Sofia Coppola's Somewhere and Fellini's 8½, and a less obvious spiritual companion to the Coens' Hail Caesar!, Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, and even Fosse's All That Jazz. Its most direct influence is John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, with Malick borrowing phrases entire from its text along with its sense of wandering, seeking, and the pilgrim meeting various incarnations of sin and redemption on the road to salvation. Malick, as has become his hallmark, places people against images of eternity. In Los Angeles, the only external nature he can find is the ocean, and so he sends his "Christian" (Bale), playing a film director named "Rick," to the shore repeatedly with a succession of women who are incarnations of Bunyan's "Evangelical" and "Faithful" and "Mercy," including his wife (Cate Blanchett), whom he rejects and, if Malick follows form, who will be the centre of another story all her own. Rick wanders through streets, studio lots, highrise suites that are Bunyan's City of Destruction and Vanity Fair and, in a sequence... Walter Chaw TIFF '12: To the Wonder,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017c31cde3f7970b 2012-09-12T00:31:40-05:00 2012-09-12T00:36:04-05:00 **/**** written and directed by Terrence Malick by Angelo Muredda For a long time, it seemed like Terrence Malick would vanish altogether before he made a serious misstep, but for better or worse, he's now delivered To the Wonder, the bum note that forces you to warily retrace a major artist's career. A muted greatest-hits compilation of Malick's oeuvre, To the Wonder borrows whole apostrophized lines to God from The Tree of Life, nicks The Thin Red Line's trick of meting out disembodied humanist voiceovers across the cast (including an underused Javier Bardem), and re-stages Pocahontas's carefree romp through the palace gardens in The New World via a young girl's joyous dance through the aisles of a supermarket. It's all here, in a manner of speaking, but as the little girl tells her mother at one point, "There's something missing." Whatever it is, it isn't feeling: The film's diffuse chronicle of Neil, an American man (Ben Affleck) who marries his volatile European girlfriend, Marina (Olga Kurylenko), and hauls her home to Oklahoma, is apparently loosely autobiographical, with rekindled old-flame Jane (Rachel McAdams) as a fictional surrogate for Malick's wife. On the surface, then, the ratio of universal prayer to personal... Angelo Muredda The Tree of Life,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c0168eb511147970c 2012-05-08T10:17:40-05:00 2012-05-08T10:17:40-05:00 ****/**** starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken written and directed by Terrence Malick by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is his attempt in a secular way (a very Romanticist way), much like Milton attempted in a religious way, to explain the ways of God to men and, more, to further define God as something created in the heart of Man. It's immensely mysterious, and immensely grand. In scope, its only parallel might be the mysterium tremens at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but even that doesn't try to get at the heart of what made the Monolith so much as why. The Tree of Life is about how fathers disappoint their sons and how sons perceive that they disappoint their fathers, and it may along the way be about why a religion revolving around a Father who never has to explain why He disappoints His children has taken the hold that it has (the film opens with a passage from The Book of Job). But that's ancillary to the topic at hand for Malick, because really what he's interested in is the way that sons will always fail to be at peace... Bill Chambers