Knight of cups trailer1/19/2024 ![]() ![]() I believe Knight of Cups is an experimentation with an ancient storytelling device called dream vision, where dreams and visions reveal important knowledge to a character. I believe the opening sequence where Rick’s father ( Brian Dennehy) read from gnostic tex t Hymn of the Pearl in voice over reveals much more about the film’s deeper meaning. Most important, it doesn’t reveal any deeper meaning to Knight of Cups. It’s a fun artifice, but it’s not exactly profound. Rick is the knight of cups (a wild vector of creativity), his ex-wife is the judgement (she reveals Rick’s behavior to him), Natalie Portman’s character is death (heartbreak and the end of his womanizing), etc. The tarot cards represent who the characters are to one another. Although each character represent a certain card, Rick also represent one and there’s no allusion to the ritual of tarot like shuffling the deck and picking cards in certain order, which is as important as the cards themselves. It would be easy to reduce Knight of Cups to a two hours-long tarot metaphor. They each represent a character, mostly women Rick sleeps with, but also his dead brother Barry ( Wes Bentley) and another womanizer who mirrors his actions ( Antonio Banderas). Knight of Cups is split in eight chapters named after tarot cards (like Rick himself, hence the film title). He lives a life of drugs, alcohol and womanizing, trying to find answers to questions I believe aren’t even clear to himself. It tells the story of Rick ( Christian Bale), a successful Hollywood screenwriter undergoing an existential crisis. Knight of Cups is not exactly a straightforward movie. So, I decided to watch his first contemporary-set movie Knight of Cups to find answers. Then, he exploded like a supernova and directed eight films over the following eight years and nobody seems to have even seen them? What happened there? Was his muse constipated or did he just lose his goddamn mind? I used to love Terrence Malick. Each were poetic, meticulously crafted ciphers that critics and cinema snobs like me anticipated, admired and debated. Legendary film director Terrence Malick released six movies over the first 36 years of his career. ![]()
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