I saw Knowing on Sunday afternoon. It's the kind of movie where you find yourself wondering how you got to be watching a movie like this in the first place. The ending, without giving anything away, is crazy and surreal and not needed, but right. Also, the movie kind of blows, also it's kind of awesome. Confused? There's no knowing how you'll feel about it until you go see it. It's definitely not time wasted.Nicholas Cage is getting eerily competent at playing characters who are trying to act normal but aren't coming off as normal. To illustrate my point, let me give you some trivia from The Shining: Jack Nicholson wasn't the top choice for the role of Jack Torrence. Many people involved with the film wanted Jon Voight to play Torrence. The issue with Nicholson was that he seemed so crazy all the time anyway, that most movie-goers wouldn't understand or comprehend his characters' gradual slipping into insanity. A valid point if you ask me, although I love The Shining, and Nicholson is great in it. (Moral: Stanley Kubrick knows what he's doing, don't fuck with his vision.)
See, that picture above is just plain-old-normal-everyday Jack Nicholson. And so it is these days with Nicholas Cage. He starts out being a normal single father and is supposed to end up crazed and frantic...except he seems about to snap the entire way through the movie so there's no transition. Cage discovers this secret code in a page full of "random" numbers, and he does it so quickly that it's like he's been waiting for this opportunity for his whole life. (Plus he does it while drunk, so that scene belies the theme of the film and supports the argument posed by one supporting character against numerology: You see what you want to see.)
Aside from that, when Cage gets to the parts where he is supposed to be teetering on the edge of reason, he is great. It goes without saying that Nicholson's best scene in The Shining is a tie between his reveal to Wendy that he is crazy (all work and no play makes jack a dull boy) and his axing of the bathroom door. Likewise with Cage, his best scenes are towards the end when his natural weirdness parallels his characters', and he becomes a method actor. (PS: this picture below is something Cage does a lot of in Knowing.)
It's hard to critique a movie [that is about how everything is tied in to everything else showing a thread of congruity throughout our seemingly random lives] without ruining some of the surprises, so I won't. I'll tell you that the film is scary, tense, action-packed, weird, scary again, sad and of course, eclectic. But I want to reiterate that it's not a bad movie, and I enjoyed it basically, and it's not a waste of your time. The plane crash alone brings this movie from a C+ to a B-. The subway car crash is even more amazing. It's not bloody, but my GF had to turn her head all the same. You just have to see it to believe it.
The end is...odd. Like I said before, you'll sit in the theater and wonder how in the hell the movie you started with ended up with you watching this. That's the only way to describe it. My final thought on this movie is that it's better than 80% of the other movies out right now. You won't feel gypped at the very least. Here's the trailer.
2 comments:
Time for the GF to write in her comments about this movie.
Yes, it was nothing like what I expected it to be. I expected it to totally suck and it did not. This movie brought out so many emotions in me. I was scared, horrified, nervous, happy, sad, depressed, and in the end felt totally emotionally raped because of the roller coaster my feelings had just been on.
I liked it overall. I thought Nick Cage was perfect (I love him anyways since he drives my favorite car ever in Gone in 60 Seconds). I liked the little boy too. I thought the plot was decent. It was actually somewhat believable (if you believe that someone can know the future or have premonitions or prophecies or something like that). There was a lot going on and when it was all over it made me think. The special effects were great. But almost too great. My super all-movie-knowing BF told me that the plane crash was filmed by the director on a hand-held camera (well the explosions were filmed that way and the people but the actual crash was CGI). It was so real. I actually felt like I was standing in the middle of a plane crash and I could totally connect with what the main character (Cage) was thinking. It was so surreal yet there you are and there he is standing in the middle of it. Pretty amazing.
And then you would think I felt the same way about the subway scene but NO! The subway scene was too real for me and I can't really put my finger on why. Maybe it was that part of it is from the point of view of looking out the window in the subway car. Maybe it was because I had already been emotionally raped a lot during the movie so my feelings were all kinds of fucked up. But in the end I absolutely could not watch the subway scene. I buried my head in B's arm because I felt like if I kept watching I would scream or cry or some combination of both.
But I guess that is the sign of a good movie, right?
I agree that I could do without the ending. Not necessary at all. Which is funny because I usually hate movies that leave loose ends or don't have a solid ending. But I think the first part of the ending was solid enough and I just didn't need the very end. But I think it was there to cheer the audience up after the emotional rape.
Also, I had no problem with Cage figuring out the numbers right away when he was drunk. He is an astrophysicist at MIT. He has spent his whole career looking at complex number sequences and what not. I thought him figuring it out right away was perfect because part of the movie has to do with him being so obsessed with his work for one reason or another.
SO in the end, I really like this movie. But I don't think I will ever watch it again. Just too much for my little emotional body to handle.
Such an interesting dual write up - makes me want to just have you tell me all about the movie over drinks and not actually see it. That's b/c I never see movies in theater though :)
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