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Knight of Cups (2015)
A Religious Experience
Knight of Cups is a religious experience- not in any way particular to a deity or faith, but in how it places us, as viewers, into a world infinitely larger than we are or could ever hope to understand. Malick's camera is constantly looking up: at vaulted ceilings, perfectly spaced rows of palm trees along highways, skyscrapers, and infinite expanses of golden skies. As the film's tagline suggests, we, and our audience surrogate protagonist, Rick (Christian Bale), are on "a quest." Throughout Knight of Cups, Rick's father (Brian Dennehy) tells us, in voice-over, about a prince who was sent to a foreign land in search of a fabled pearl, only to forget why he ever left his home. The pearl is emblematic of what both we and Rick are searching for; something transient, intangible, indefinite; for Rick, meaning in life, for us, meaning in art. The film concludes with a shot that speeds down an empty stretch of desert road into nothingness. Our quests seem to be incomplete; the pearl is all but unreachable. But it is the straining of our necks in search of it that gives us what we need: not the pearl, but the quest itself.
A Hologram for the King (2016)
Hilarious, Heartfelt, and Human
This film is of the sort that is very rare in modern cinema (or the cinema of any period, really): a thoughtful, compelling story for adults in which the life of the protagonist gets better, not worse. A bombastic, jarring, and hilarious opening sequence fills us in on everything that's gone wrong in Alan Clay's (Tom Hanks) life- he's lost his house, his fancy car, his wife, and he's about to go to Saudi Arabia on business. He attributes all of his other problems (lack of energy, poor job performance, sexual impotence) to a benign tumor on his back. He struggles with a lack of Wi-Fi and air conditioning, a business "contact" that always seems to be out of town, indefinite delays, and the innumerable laws and customs of a foreign land. These Kafkaesque elements and director Tom Tykwer's touches of magical realism seem at first to shape A Hologram for the King into a surreal black comedy, the sort of story where the failed businessman is battered down by the inhumanity of capitalism and decides to kill himself rather than face the pathetic reality of his life. But Clay's Middle Eastern odyssey becomes strangely uplifting as he alternately battles and bumbles his way through all his woes. Hologram is never as single-faceted as the moral fable, financial drama, or culture-clash comedy it could have been; instead, it is a subtly heartfelt and frequently hilarious film that shows us that the human experience may not be as hopeless as most other "serious" movies would have you believe.