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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 17, 2017 6:25:42 GMT
Discussion, reviews, news, pics, etc.
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 18, 2017 4:14:42 GMT
Natalie Portman on shooting KOC with Bale: On the set of her new film Knight of Cups, Natalie Portman says she and costar Christian Bale were often encouraged to go rogue with their dialogue and actions – which the star says was both incredibly freeing and fun, but also sometimes frightening.
“Christian would do surprising things all the time,” Portman, 34, tells PEOPLE of her first time working with Bale in Terrence Malick’s philosophical drama Knight of Cups. “It’s fun to watch – and sometimes scary, like when he’s like diving off a dock into the ocean when you don’t expect it in the middle of a scene. But he also keeps everything feeling very alive and spontaneous. It was really a fun, unusual experience.”people.com/movies/natalie-portman-on-working-with-christian-bale-for-knight-of-cups/
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 18, 2017 4:29:42 GMT
Christian Bale shares his thoughts on KOC and on Malick's process: www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/02/christian-bale-on-hollywood-hedonism-and-chris-rock-s-divisive-oscars.htmlOn relating with his character: “You know, I hated L.A. when I first came out here. It was the only place where I could get any work, but I hated it and I would leave as soon as I could,” Bale says. “Gradually I came to realize that I absolutely adore it. And obviously for me, I’ve got family now and my children were born here and I’ve got deep roots here. But aside from that, there’s a real ugliness to it and an absolute beauty to it as well, and I see this film as a real love story for L.A.” “When I first came out, parties for us were like hanging under a freeway smoking joints and smashing beer bottles,” he continues. “And then suddenly I found myself on a beach in Malibu with these houses, the likes of which I never even knew existed, and with people with faces that I didn’t really know existed. I was just amazed at the environment I was in. It didn’t last long, because the novelty wears off and you go, ‘It’s not for me.’ For Rick, it has lasted longer. But he still has that thing where he’s reaching a peak of success; he’s known every vice and every beauty that L.A. has to offer. He’s had what to anybody would be an extraordinary life, with these incredibly hedonistic and pleasurable moments.”
As abstract an experience as Knight of Cups can be, Malick’s film brings this duality into sharp focus. And as Rick’s journey takes him from one end of the city to the other—with a detour to Las Vegas, the only place fueled by even more garish stimuli—his internal searching leads to true clarity.
Bale considers the struggle his mostly silent character only verbalizes in flashes of voice-over, from remembered conversations with lovers and loved ones. “He’s rubbing shoulders with whomever he wishes to rub shoulders with,” he offers. “But he’s looking over the peak of the mountain going, ‘I’m still the same person. This hasn’t happened, the utopia I thought was going to occur—the perfect man I thought I was going to become. I’m still exactly the same.’ So I kind of see it as coming full circle back around to, who the hell was he in the first place? He feels that he’s lost something that he knew at one time, and he’s trying to rediscover it but, this time, actually comprehend and understand what the hell that is.”On Malick's process: “Despite the fact that I think Terry could absolutely annihilate filming in a traditional sense with a script and with set scenes, it just doesn’t interest him right now,” he explains. “It may come to, at some point. But he wishes to make something that is, through a very different method, aiming to be far more personally affecting than he finds other films to be right now.”
“But he likes to have absolute first-timers around, too. He likes that enthusiasm, that naiveté, that complete lack of technique. I think technique is what Terry despises most. I shouldn’t talk on his behalf. That’s the impression that I get. He wants there to be a sense of, We don’t quite know what we’re going to do, but we want to do something wonderful here today—let’s see what happens.”
“Always, the motto on the film was, ‘Let’s start before we’re ready.’ Because half the time I would turn up in my pickup, listening to music…”
The cameras would start rolling immediately as Bale threw himself into each day in neighborhoods across the city that any Angeleno will recognize—the Hollywood hills, the beaches of Santa Monica and the west side, the sidewalks of Los Feliz, the concrete sprawl of downtown L.A.
Other actors would come in for a day or two and make a beeline for Bale, seeking advice on how to make sense of Malick’s unusual methods. “I’d go, ‘It’s OK, it doesn’t matter! Make as many mistakes as you like—Terry’s going to love it the more accidents that happen. Don’t worry about it!’”
Oftentimes Malick would send his cast into the world without a crew, armed with GoPros to film themselves. “He’d just say, ‘You’re going to go driving with another actor—if you guys feel like it, talk about this. If not, film whatever.’ So I would just film the sky, film the streets, film the other person. Maybe have a conversation, maybe not. Maybe go into the ocean… We had people trying to climb in the car as we were driving along. I’d just improvise and go with it.” Somewhere out there, some intrepid and lucky fan might happen upon some Malickian treasure. “I lost a GoPro in the ocean,” Bale sheepishly admits, laughing at himself. “I forgot to put the wrist strap on! And I went around for hours looking for it. I doubt it would have survived, but I just imagine someone coming up with hours of Malick footage on this GoPro.”
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 1, 2017 22:05:02 GMT
Screenshot: Doesn't the rock just below the girl look like Bale's Batman silhouette?
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 1, 2017 22:13:33 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 8, 2017 4:35:01 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 15, 2017 15:13:44 GMT
Some interesting paragraphs from a detailed analysis of the film at Christianity Today: www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/march-web-only/knight-of-cups-and-spirituality-of-sleaze.html?start=1One character in the film defines “damnation” as “the pieces of your life never coming together, just splashed out there.” And that is a feeling one might get watching Knight, a film as arduous and uncomfortable to sit through as any I’ve seen in recent years (certainly any starring A-list talent like Christian Bale, Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett). And yet something about it rings hauntingly true to 21st-century man’s navigation of a mediated menagerie, full of garish images, escapist fantasies, pornographic pleasures, and trifling transcendences.
--- Comparison with other films: Life was Malick (played by Sean Penn) reflecting on his childhood; Wonder was Malick (Ben Affleck) reflecting on his transition back to America after living in France; and Knight is Malick (Christian Bale) reflecting on his complicated relationship with Hollywood. In the latter, Malick’s father (played by Brian Dennehy) and brother (Wes Bentley) loom large, as they did in Life. And in all three of these films, the “Malick” figures (Penn, Affleck, Bale) hardly say a word but do a lot of wandering through plains and deserts, looking and searching as in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life”).
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Malick’s portrayal of women in Knight is controversial for good reason. His notorious tendencies to relegate women in his films to whispering waifs, cartwheeling pixies, and ethereal angel-muses are taken to the extreme in Knight. ... The effect of the repetitive, intentionally indistinguishable sequence of Rick’s liaisons with women (certain shots, on beaches or in convertibles, are repeated with multiple women) is numbing, grotesque, squirm-inducing... By the fifth or sixth of them, they start to blur together. The audience becomes increasingly uncomfortable. Beauty shouldn’t be this sleazy, this empty, to the point that we want to slink in our seats, look away, or walk out.
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[Rick]’s in a dream world, half asleep, making no progress on his spiritual quest because the beauty that should be pointing him higher is instead luring him deeper into idolatry. He’s missing the truth because, as C. S. Lewis might say, he’s far too easily pleased. As one muse in the film tells Rick: “You don’t want love, you want a love experience.” ... For Rick (and presumably for Malick, who hates and avoids the Hollywood lifestyle), the black hole inertia of L.A.’s dreamscape makes an already difficult spiritual pilgrimage all the harder.--- An easter egg?:The film opens with audio excerpts from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the story of a man named Christian who, like Rick, is on a spiritual search amidst ample temptations (was Christian Bale cast for his first name?).
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When we only have utilitarian eyes to see things that bring us pleasure (“using” rather than “receiving” the world, as C. S. Lewis might say), we are doomed to spiritual blindness. This is the problem of the Hollywood culture Malick critiques: its conceptions of beauty are too short-sighted; its manner of seeing too preoccupied with pleasure and celebrity to notice the glory.
This is certainly evident in Malick’s larger body of work. In his notorious habit of hiring A-list actors for his films but then leaving them largely dialogue-less (or absent altogether) in the final cut, Malick is confronting the priorities of Hollywood’s cult of celebrity, which since the studio era has ordered the audience’s gaze mostly around “star power.”
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Movies rarely require us to ponder or process much after we leave the theater. But in our impatient culture of instant-everything, Malick says slow down. When the world beckons us to opine, Malick says observe. Take time to wrestle, to ruminate.
... This is what Malick teaches us: we need the long view. The bigger picture. In how we see the world and how we understand our own journeys, we need patience and perspective. We can’t make sense of any of it piecemeal-
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 31, 2017 3:04:53 GMT
From A.O. Scott's NYTimes' review: www.nytimes.com/2016/03/04/movies/christian-bale-knight-of-cups-review.htmlA literary reference? The last word uttered in Terrence Malick’s “Knight of Cups” — whispered in voice-over, like most of the other speech in the movie — is “begin.” Curiously enough, that is also the penultimate word of “Portnoy’s Complaint.”
This juxtaposition is less far-fetched than you might suppose. The concluding sentence of Philip Roth’s novel is a punch line, turning the tale that has come before into an extended Jewish joke. Mr. Malick’s film is not especially comical, and he is surely one of the least Jewish directors in the annals of American cinema, but his ending has a similarly startling effect. We’ve been watching a man’s life — his sex life, in particular — unspool before our eyes, only to learn that we haven’t even gotten started. Or that he hasn’t.
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Mr. Lubezki can infuse Sunset Boulevard, Venice Beach and other often-filmed spots with a beauty that feels erotic and metaphysical at the same time.
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Like Paolo Sorrentino’s “Youth,” “Knight of Cups” settles into a lukewarm bath of male self-pity, a condition perhaps more deserving of satire than sanctification.---
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 31, 2017 4:11:26 GMT
Terrence Malick’s ‘Knight of Cups’ Is an Insider’s Tale By CHRIS LEE MARCH 3, 2016 www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/movies/terrence-malicks-knight-of-cups-is-an-insiders-tale.html?_r=0An analysis of all the industry cameos in the film. An excerpt: The movie provides a privileged glimpse inside Hollywood’s corridors of power, featuring cameos by real-life super agents, TV showrunners and industry players in addition to a small constellation of A-list stars. And in the process, “Knight of Cups” obliterates the notion of Mr. Malick, 72, as an outsider. Given its roll-call of boldfaced names and sly winks at showbiz deal-making, “Cups” could have been made only by a consummate insider.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 31, 2017 21:57:45 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 31, 2017 21:59:16 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Jan 6, 2021 7:37:19 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Jan 6, 2021 7:56:47 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 12, 2021 15:57:36 GMT
Shea Whigham on working with Terry and Bale for the first time on this film: www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/shea-whigham-quarry-electric-christian-bale-scenes-1292829"I collect Knight of Cups stories any chance I get. Would you mind sharing your experience with Terry Malick and Bale on that set in 2012? How much time do you have? (Laughs) So, I was doing Boardwalk Empire, and Tim Van Patten and Terence Winter were great about letting me jump off and do The Wolf of Wall Street, Savages with Oliver Stone…. Then, Knight of Cups came up. I had worked with Werner Herzog before that [on Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans], and I just couldn’t believe I’d be working with Werner and now Terry. So Terence Winter and Tim Van Patten said, “We’re going to give you a day to fly, two days to work and then you gotta get back on a plane.” Then I heard from the Knight of Cups producers that there was no script. Terry Malick eventually said, “You’re from Wyoming, you grew up with Christian in school, he went off to become a writer and you work with your hands.” So I put my character in a place in Wyoming, I have three kids and I’m a certain kind of carpenter. I was nervous because I hadn’t worked with Christian yet at this time; I hadn’t done American Hustle with him yet. So I got there on the day, and we were waiting for magic hour to happen for my scene. We were in Venice, California, and we were going to be on a street corner. I didn’t even come out of my trailer because I was so nervous. I stayed in my trailer and peeked out as they were eating lunch. I was just too nervous to go out there and see Terry Malick and Christian. Finally, they said, “Terry wants to see you,” and I said, “Oh shit, okay.” So, I went out, and Terry was like, “Hey, how are you, Shea?” He was so sweet and amazing. Then, he goes, “So, listen, how do you like Chicago?” and I said, “Yeah, I’ve been there, Terry. I like Chicago.” Then, Terry goes, “Maybe instead of Wyoming, you’re from Chicago,” and I’m thinking, “Uh-oh.” So I went back into my trailer to do all this work on Chicago, and I called Mike Shannon to talk to him about it, because that’s where he’s from. So we went out to shoot it, and I was working with Terry’s three grandkids. They were playing my kids, and his daughter-in-law was playing my wife. So I’ve got all this pressure on me. We got to the street corner, and Chivo [Emmanuel Lubezki] was shooting it; he’s the DP. We got to the street corner, and Terry was like, “Actually, I think you’re from Wyoming.” Then, I went, “Oh my God!” And Christian was just cool as a cucumber, man. So I didn’t have time to even think about it. When you see the scene, his grandkid is running in the street, and I’m grabbing him.... We’re on a steadicam, and it was one of the most magical experiences that I’ve ever had on film. I wish we could take another 20 minutes, because there were all kinds of unbelievable things and circumstances happening."
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Post by RhodoraO on Nov 27, 2023 4:59:59 GMT
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