Terrance Malick, USA
Director Terrance Malick takes us down the path of stream of consciousness moving far away from conventional story telling. He had three powerful stars: Christian Bale, Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett all flowing in and out of the screen in a rhythmic way as the imaginary floats by in an architectural form. It is a film with heavy poetic uses but if one cannot read into the Taro deck then one is lost. At one point Christian Bale tries to explain that this is clearly about the city of L.A. and the characters were there on a different level of an emotional and spiritual level. L.A. is a gold fish bowl of experience and is looking for something in the soul. He said that Terrance Malick is a unique story teller. He is on his own journey. The characters were given cameras to use and then their work would be edited in or not. At the Cinderella press conference, Cate Blanchett even refers to the fact that she wasn’t even sure she was in the movie since it was so abstractly made and the end result was even unclear to the actors themselves. All I could get out of the film was that it is about a guy wandering around L.A. having encounters with beautiful women and his family. It was supposed to make some sort of sense out of life but I will never know, since I couldn’t wait to leave the cinema since I felt seasick myself. It was 118 minutes long which felt like a short film that went on too long and it lacked the weight of his last film The Tree of Life. (Shelly Schoeneshoefer)