CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26

[oilgun]

Strangely, when I first saw the trailer I said to myself, I said, self, stay away from that one.  The trailer just turned me off the film for some reason.  Tom Hanks may be a factor, I'm not a fan.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/TIFF-2012-Radical-Magnificent-Cloud-Atlas-32900.html




MOVIE NEWS
TIFF 2012:
The Radical, Magnificent
Cloud Atlas
By Katey Rich
published: 2012-09-11 12:59:31




Technically, we've already reviewed Cloud Atlas  here in Toronto, thanks to Sean O'Connell's excellent writeup about the response to the film's premiere on Saturday. But after finally seeing it for myself this morning, I'm having a hard time getting anything done until I get Cloud Atlas -- my most anticipated film of the festival by far-- out of my brain. So here we go.

This big, ambitious, gorgeous, glorious film demands that its audience walk in as open-hearted as it is; it's going to take you to some hippy-dippy, love-is-all-around-you places, and skeptics who choose to reject that will be in for a long two and a half hours. But directors Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer also make the choice to run along with it an easy one, filling the screen with gorgeous locations and effects, casting a huge slate of fantastic actors in some almost absurdly challenging parts, and even expanding and reshaping David Mitchell's original novel into a tale that's about, well, nearly everything. Some of it is the dreamy philosophy you might be expecting-- love is the most important thing, we are all connected-- but much of it is surprisingly incisive and even radical. By abandoning the nested structure of Mitchell's novel, in which each story was told in two individual sections, and layering them on top of each other instead, the Wachowskis and Tykwer have created a moving synchronicity between all of them, powerfully making the case for common pursuits and motivations and desires among humans over time.

They also accomplish this, as you might have heard, by casting all the actors in multiple roles, some of them playing a lot of big parts-- Tom Hanks and Halle Berry loom largest-- and others, like Ben Whishaw and Doona Bae, playing one major role and popping up in the margins of other stories. It makes for a fun kind of Where's Waldo? game, as you scrutinize each new character's face to figure out which actor has returned, but it resonates with the many themes of how humanity both improves and repeats its own mistakes across the centuries. It's moving to see Tom Hanks start history as the devious Dr. Goose in the 19th century then become the striving survivor Zachry in the distant future, or Halle Berry struggle with discrimination against Jews as a composer's wife in the 1930s and women as Luisa Rey in the 1970s, then in the furthest future become the enlightened leader Meronym who helps rescue humanity. But then there's Hugo Weaving, who plays a racist in one era, a hitman in another, and eventually the embodiment of the devil himself-- sometimes that struggle to get better just doesn't pan out.

In Mitchell's novel each story was distinguished from the next not just by a different setting and characters, but a different literary genre and style of writing. There's no real cinematic cognate for that, and the Wachowskis and Tykwer use it as a reason to link the stories even closer, one commenting on the other as sound and music cues overlap eras, characters learning from each other in no more than a well-placed edit (the editing, by Alexander Berner and Claus Wehlisch, is by far the film's most incredible accomplishment). The layering of the stories may feel chaotic, or even on-the-nose in the way they relate, but the multitude of thematic connections and resonances are a thrill to sort through, and deeply emotional by the end. Why does this all feel grand and meaningful instead of like a cloying long distance commercial? I honestly don't know-- and I can't promise it won't feel that way for you. But Cloud Atlas  is made with such skill and honest intentions that it demands to be taken seriously, and if you can take that small step up alongside the directors, the rewards are so, so worth it.

I know I've barely scratched the surface of what there is to say about Cloud Atlas,  about the ideas and emotions it inspired in me, about the best scenes, or even about how Korean actress Doona Bae runs rings around every Hollywood actor in the movie with her performance as the defiant clone Sonmi-451. It's also very moving to think of this movie about transformation and revealing true selves in the context of Lana Wachowski's transition into becoming a woman while making the film. With Cloud Atlas  coming to theaters in October, I'll have plenty of time to write about all that. For now, here in Toronto, Cloud Atlas  and its ambition and its enormous heart are still jangling through my veins, almost too close to quite understand just yet. I can't wait for you all to see it so we can talk about it some more.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117948250/




Cloud Atlas
(Germany)

by By Peter Debruge
[email protected]
Posted: Sat., Sep. 8, 2012, 9:01pm PT





An intense three-hour mental workout rewarded with a big emotional payoff, "Cloud Atlas" suggests that all human experience is connected in the pursuit of freedom, art and love. As inventive narratives go, there's outside the box, and then there's pioneering another dimension entirely, and this massive, independently financed collaboration among Tom Tykwer and Wachowski siblings Lana and Andy courageously attempts the latter, interlacing six seemingly unrelated stories in such a way that parallels erupt like cherry bombs in the imagination. The R-rated epic should find a substantial audience when Warner Bros. releases it Oct. 26, assuming critics don't kill it in the cradle.


Based on David Mitchell's novel -- more like six novels really, with each one executed in a different genre, then split and wrapped around the next in a nested, "The Saragossa Manuscript"-style construction -- this daunting adaptation rejects the book's innovative, but overly literary format in favor or a more cinematic approach, opting to tell all half-dozen tales at once. Like juggling Ginsu blades, the tricky feat is part stunt, part skill, but undeniably entertaining to witness as half a millennium of world history unfolds, much of it set in centuries still to come.
 
Whereas the directors' earlier films hook viewers from the opening scene, this one functions more like a symphony, laying out snatches of all six separate strands and gradually building toward grand movements in which these elements merge in different combinations. Playing to their respective strengths, the Wachowskis tackle the earliest and two future-set segments, while Tykwer manages the three more contempo episodes, including a comedic one featuring Jim Broadbent as Timothy Cavendish, a borderline-senile book editor set in present-day London.
 
Broadbent, like the rest of the multiculti cast, reappears in the other sections as well, fully reinventing himself as a briny sea captain and a world-famous composer, plus a couple other bit roles so cleverly disguised by makeup, auds might not recognize him on first viewing. Each of the stories involves some measure of romance, beginning in 1849, with American lawyer Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) separated from his beloved (Doona Bae) by seafaring adventures among the Pacific Islands, and extending to the year 2346, where a lowly goat-herder (Tom Hanks) falls for an emissary (Halle Berry) from the opposite end of the technological spectrum in post-apocalyptic Hawaii.
 
Berry also stars in her own thread, playing Luisa Rey, a San Francisco reporter circa 1973 investigating the imminent threat of a nuclear reactor meltdown, receiving key assistance from scientist Rufus Sixsmith (James D'Arcy), who might just be the same man seen in the Cambridge-set 1936 chapter, a touching same-sex love story involving an aspiring musician (Ben Whishaw) attempting to write what will become the film's theme, "The Cloud Atlas Sextet," a beautiful piece actually composed by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil.
 
The riskiest and most essential of the threads -- the one on which the entire tapestry depends -- takes place in NeoSeoul, 2144, a socially stratified "Blade Runner"-like city in which genetically cloned fabricants serve their consumerist masters. (By 2346, the middle class has been so ruthlessly eliminated that the world may as well be divided into cave-dwellers and astronauts.) Because the six segments naturally assume different styles, the division of labor among directors and their respective units complements rather than compromises the project's overall success, with the makeup and visual effects departments each carrying off seemingly impossible feats of transformation.
 
In Mitchell's novel, readers must draw their own connections between the tales, with only the recurring motif of a comet-shaped birthmark to suggest the continuity of a single soul across time. The film makes the congruities clearer, as Adam Ewing's Pacific journal is read by Frobischer, whose epistolary correspondence with Sixsmith resurfaces in the Luisa Rey mystery, eventually published by Cavendish, whose own story is adapted to film and viewed as a futuristic recording much later by Sonmi-451 (Bae) in NeoSeoul. The final connection is best left for auds to discover, but suffice to say that common themes echo throughout the film, where the gesture of liberating a slave in 1849 reverberates through time, culminating in a paradigm-changing insurrection whose denouement occurs two centuries later.
 
Certain links are impossible to miss by virtue of the way the three writer-directors assemble the film, and yet, given the sheer scope of the source material, so much has been omitted that one's attention must be engaged at all times as the mosaic triggers an infinite range of potentially profound personal responses.
 
No less exciting is the way "Cloud Atlas" challenges its actors to portray characters outside their race or gender. For instance Hugo Weaving plays villains in nearly every age, ranging from a heartless Korean consumerist to a Nurse Ratched-like ward master. Indeed, the filmmakers put the lie to the notion that casting -- an inherently discriminatory art -- cannot be adapted to a more enlightened standard of performance over mere appearance, reminding us why the craft is rightfully called "acting."



A Warner Bros. release and presentation of a Cloud Atlas/X-Filme Creative Pool/Anarchos production in association with A Company and Ard Degeto. Produced by Grant Hill, Stefan Arndt, Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski. Executive producers, Philip Lee. Co-producers, Roberto Malerba, Marcus Loges, Peter Lam, Alexander Van Dulmen, Tony Teo. Directed, written by Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski.

Zachry, et al - Tom Hanks
Luisa Rey, et al - Halle Berry
Timothy Cavendish, et al - Jim Broadbent
Nurse Noakes, et al - Hugo Weaving
Adam Ewing, et al - Jim Sturgess
Sonmi-451, et al - Doona Bae
Robert Frobischer, et al - Ben Whishaw
Kupaka, et al - Keith David
Rufus Sixsmith, et al - James D'Arcy
Madame Horrox, et al - Susan Sarandon
Kona Chief, et al - Hugh Grant
With: Xun Zhou, David Gyasi, Robert Fyfe, Martin Wuttke, Robin Morrissey, Brody Lee, Ian Van Temperley, Amanda Walker, Ralph Riach, Andrew Havill, Tanja de Wendt, Raeven Lee Hanan.

Camera (color, widescreen), John Toll, Frank Griebe; editor, Alexander Berner; music, Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil; production designer, Uli Hanisch; supervising art directors, Stephan O. Gessler, Kai Koch, Charlie Revai; set decorators, Rebecca Alleway, Peter Walpole; costume designers, Kym Barrett, Pierre-Yves Gayraud; sound (Dolby Digitial/SDDS/DTS), Ivan Sharrock; sound designer, Marcus Stemler; supervising sound editor, Frank Kruse; re-recording mixers, Lars Ginzel, Matthias Lempert; senior visual effects supervisor, Dan Glass; visual effects supervisor, Stephan Ceretti; visual effects, Method Studios, Industrial Light & Magic; Rise FX, Scanline VFX, Black Mountain, One of Us, Trixter, Lola VFX, Bluebolt, Gradient Effects; associate producers, Gigi Oeri, Lora Kennedy, Peter Grossman; assistant director, Sebastian Fahr-Brix; casting, Lora Kennedy, Lucinda Syson, Simone Bar. Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Gala Presentations), Sept. 7, 2012. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 172 MIN.

(English dialogue)

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/09/_i_know_ive_seen.html


Toronto #3:
Cloud Atlas
By Roger Ebert
on September 9, 2012 10:53 AM




I know I've seen something atonishing, and I know I'm not ready to review it. "Cloud Atlas," by the Wachowski Siblings and Tom Tykwer, is a film of limitless imagination, breathtaking visuals and fearless scope. I have no idea what it's about. It interweaves six principal stories spanning centuries--three for sure, maybe four. It uses the same actors in most of those stories. Assigning multiple roles to actors is described as an inspiration by the filmmakers to help us follow threads through the different stories. But the makeup is so painstaking and effective that much of the time we may not realize we're seeing the same actors. Nor did I sense the threads.

The actors Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant and Jim Sturgess together portray 14 different characters, and not even sex is a clue because some of their roles cross gender categories. The end credits, which go by a little too fast, will surprise a lot of audience members. Say what? Hugo Weaving plays Nurse Noakes? "Cloud Atlas" has locks on Oscar nominations for best makeup and costume design.
 
The stories, much adapted and retold from a David Mitchell novel, include characters, times and locations as diverse as a 19th century sailing ship, a futuristic Korea, Aboriginals, young gay intellectuals at Cambridge, a nuclear scientist, a slave, a classical composer and others. There is a good deal of narration, most of it about the nature of human life (and some of it about lives of fabricants). There are chase and action scenes as good or better than the best work by the Wachowskis (the "Matrix" films) and their friend and collaborator Tykwer ("Run, Lola Run"). Moment by moment, scene by scene, story by story, I was enthralled.

What did it sum up to? What is the through line? I can't say. Not today, anyway. Not yet. Maybe there isn't one. What will its first audiences get out of it? My mind travels back to the first public screening of "2001: A Space Odyssey," the film the Wachowskis says made them filmmakers, and inspired this one. As Rock Hudson walked out in the middle of the second half, I heard him quite audibly ask, "What the hell was that about?"

"Cloud Atlas" opens nationally October 26.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Assigning multiple roles to actors is described as an inspiration by the filmmakers to help us follow threads through the different stories. But the makeup is so painstaking and effective that much of the time we may not realize we're seeing the same actors. Nor did I sense the threads.

The actors Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant and Jim Sturgess together portray 14 different characters, and not even sex is a clue because some of their roles cross gender categories.

Roger has missed quite a few characters--I have counted thirty-six so far!

What did it sum up to? What is the through line? I can't say. Not today, anyway. Not yet. Maybe there isn't one. What will its first audiences get out of it? My mind travels back to the first public screening of "2001: A Space Odyssey," the film the Wachowskis says made them filmmakers, and inspired this one. As Rock Hudson walked out in the middle of the second half, I heard him quite audibly ask, "What the hell was that about?"

Poor Roy--he may have been 'musical', but he certainly was no 'intellectual'!  

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Whups! Somebody really, really  didn't like Cloud Atlas--Yike!  





http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2012/09/cloud_atlas_review_the_wachows.php



Film
Cloud Atlas  Review
The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer Bring Their
Adaptation of David Mitchell's Novel to Toronto

By Karina Longworth
Sunday, Sep. 9 2012 at 7:35 PM





One man's ambitious, iconoclastic, like-nothing-ever-before-seen passion project is another man's Battlefield Earth,  and so it goes that for some of us who saw the film's world premiere in Toronto last night, Cloud Atlas  -- written and directed by Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski from David Mitchell's novel -- is a truly stunning misuse of talent and resources, and for others, it's the film of the festival, if not the year.

The central gimmick is that each actor (from superstars Tom Hanks and Halle Berry to a crew of international players, many of them previously unknown to me) appears as multiple characters within six stories set around the world (Hawaii, San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, London, "Neo Seoul") and across ages past, present and future. Each story is interwoven, one fragment at a time, via painfully drawn-out L-cuts which connect characters across centuries via internal monologue (some are also connected by a common birthmark in the shape of a comet). Adversity is faced and the lesson is repeatedly learned that people born of different races, bloodlines and sexual orientations are all equally human. Unless they're snooty book critics, corporate hit men, hard-ass retirement home nurses, or anyone else who disrupts a hero character's journey.

The players transition between characters with the aid of exaggerated accents and elaborate facial prosthetics that more often than not look like they were picked up at a Halloween pop-up and applied by the actors themselves. I'm not kidding -- the constant reveals of the same players in new roles in different eras is a "joke" that's way overplayed, but I really think that what plays as a lack of quality control is actual intentional, for two reasons. First of all, from a commercial standpoint (and while independently financed, Cloud Atlas  needs to attract a massive audience in order to justify its enormous expense), truly transformative facial effects wouldn't make sense, because what's the point of having Tom Hanks in your movie if no one can tell he's Tom Hanks?

But more importantly, the, shall we say, "handmade" quality of the make-up fits in with what seems to be the film's guiding ethos. I haven't read Mitchell's book, but in many ways the film adaptation would seem to reflect the point of view of co-director Lana Wachowski -- who was born Larry and has transitioned from male to female since the release of the last Wachowski film, Speed Racer.  Formally, it's an experiment in the self-designed mutability of the body (up to and including male actors playing women and at least one star apparently cast as a character of a different race); thematically, it builds to a series of variations on the idea that we are all the same on the inside regardless of our born and/or lived exterior, and should all be entitled to the freedom to look and behave in the manner most true to our inner selves.

This altruistic message is great in theory, but it's confused by the film's abysmally inconsistent, tone-deaf execution, and contradicted by the film's videogame casualness when it comes to violence. A manifesto in the form of an enormously budgeted quasi-sci-fi epic, Cloud Atlas  is evidently personal, defiantly sincere, totally lacking in self-awareness, and borderline offensive in its gleeful endorsement of revenge violence against anyone who gets in the way of a good person's self-actualization. The rest of the time, it's just insipid, TV-esque in its limited visual imagination, and dramatically incoherent.




(But--what did you REALLY think??    )

Oh well, we shall see!    

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/09/12/cloud-atlas-an-enthralling-sci-fi-ride/

Toronto Film Festival:
Cloud Atlas
is an enthralling sci-fi ride & the
Wachowskis' best movie since
The Matrix

by Owen Gleiberman
Sep 12 2012 11:49 AM ET



The movie’s Big Idea — and its inspired fusion of
form and content — is to wake us up to how all
of us are linked through time, through history,
self-destiny, and the grand karma of being human.


I arrived in Toronto on Monday, five days into the festival, and with this festival that’s so late it can feel like showing up for Thanksgiving dinner around the time dessert is being served. Most of the major, high-profile movies had already been consumed and buzzed about (not to say that some smaller, unheralded gems weren’t waiting to be discovered), and this meant that I’d probably read or heard a thing or two about them, which isn’t the way I like to roll here, but whatever. I bring all this up only because I’d taken in bits and pieces of the divided reactions to Cloud Atlas,  the new film by Andy and Lana Wachowski (they co-directed it with Tom Tykwer, the one-hit art-house wonder who made Run Lola Run ). And I can honestly say that virtually everything I heard about the movie made me think that I wouldn’t like it at all. A time-tripping multiple-storyline phantasmagorical science-fiction hodgepodge. (It sounded like homework.) Actors like Tom Hanks and Halle Berry playing half a dozen characters apiece. (It sounded like a labored stunt.) Tell-tale comparisons to Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain.  (Sorry, but that’s not the comparison you want to hear.) Nearly three hours long. All derived from a novel that even the filmmakers considered nearly unadaptable. It sounded like a pile-up of pretension, a hyper-mystical jumble — and, frankly, coming from the Wachowskis, it sounded like the worst “cosmic” aspects of the two Matrix  sequels compounded and inflated.
 
So the first thing I want to say about Cloud Atlas  is that it’s a nimbly entertaining and light-on-its-feet movie. Adapting the 2004 novel by British author David Mitchell, the Wachowskis tell half a dozen stories at once, but that doesn’t mean the film is a mish-mash. It’s more like a gonzo mini-series made with a sophisticated channel-zapper consciousness — an invitation to go wherever the Wachowskis want to take you, with the trust that they know just what they’re doing. Each of the stories writes its own rules and unfolds in its own madly detailed and organic world. And as the movie goes on, the worlds fuse across time. Cloud Atlas  isn’t a chaos; it’s more like the history of movies crammed into a single, emotionally transporting parable of freedom and authoritarian control.
 
Different elements draw us into the different tales. A post-apocalyptic episode, in which Hanks, as a primitive forest dweller dotted with Maori-style tattoos, reluctantly agrees to be the guide for a searcher (Berry) who looks like she stepped out of Star Trek,  draws you in through its odd, slangy language — you learn to decipher it, as you do when you read the novel of A Clockwork Orange  — while a fascist-future parable, set in a darkened Blade Runner version of Seoul, is a mesmerizingly ominous vision of a synthetic digitized existence. The way that the tales link up across the centuries isn’t labored or obvious — it’s more like a stone skipping across the water, from one videogame level to the next. Thus, the heroine of the Seoul segment is a fast-food wage slave, played by the outwardly stoic, inwardly perky Doona Bae, who’s living the life of an automaton until she’s spurred to rebel and escape by watching a fragment from an old Hollywood movie, which features Hanks in the heroic role of a beleaguered book publisher, who is played for real in another segment by Jim Broadbent as a desperate British twit who gets locked up in an old age home. He wants to rebel and escape too, and that’s the reigning arc of the film: Everyone is fighting the power, but in each case, it’s something you can’t see. The movie’s Big Idea — and its inspired fusion of form and content — is to wake us up to how all of us are linked through time, through history, self-destiny, and the grand karma of being human.
 
The multiple-role casting, and the bravura makeup that makes it possible (it includes not just flipped genders but switched racial roles), is so clever and imaginative that it’s more than a gimmick — it’s closer to a burlesque of identity. Casting Hugh Grant as an early-’70s U.S. energy-company stooge in a wide tie is fun…but Grant, in the post-apocalyptic story, as a bloodthirsty “native” in savage skeletal war paint? Now that’s casting against type. That ’70s segment is the place where Tykwer (who directed it) and the Wachowskis come closest to putting forth a timely and specific — and far from conventionally liberal — environmental conspiracy theory: namely, that the possibilities for nuclear power, and therefore for an energy-independent America, were killed off not by the anti-nuke movement but by the oil companies. This segment, too, teams Berry (as an investigative reporter) and Hanks (as a nerdish nuclear scientist) in a romantic connection that reverberates throughout the movie.

Cloud Atlas  is an original vision, but in a funny way it’s also a wildly overstuffed smorgasbord that seems to be wearing the entire history of Hollywood genre movies on its sleeve. You’ll catch echoes of a hundred previous pieces of pop culture, from Total Recall  to Roots  to Soylent Green.  I wouldn’t say that Cloud Atlas  is profound — it’s more like a pulpy middlebrow head trip — but the hook of this movie is that Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer so clearly meant everything that they put in it. I predict that for a very big audience, it will prove to be one of the must-see movies of the year.
 
* * * *

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/hugo-weaving-cloud-atlas-interview.html



Hugo Weaving on
Cloud Atlas,
Lana Wachowski, and
Playing a Hefty Woman Nurse

By Mina Hochberg
Today at 4:20 PM

In the Wachowski Siblings’ film Cloud Atlas,  Hugo Weaving plays multiple characters — a devil, an assassin, a nineteenth-century businessman. But the role that really won over audiences at the Toronto Film Festival was Nurse Noakes, a brutish orderly who menaces the residents of an elderly home. The cross-dressing role gives Weaving a rare opportunity to flaunt his comedy chops, and it’s also his first time donning a fat suit for film. We spoke with Weaving about performing an S&M version of Nurse Ratched, working with Lana Wachowski, and why Cloud Atlas  may “be too much” for some people.
 

Nurse Noakes was a big hit with the audience. Were you padded underneath?
Oh yeah! I had a massive fat suit. And then the whole deal — stockings and high heels, skirt. Then of course all the prosthetics — neck and cheeks and face and chin, and originally nose, but we got rid of that. Lips, I had lips. So it was actually quite extreme. That was the most difficult character to deal with physically. I felt I never quite got to the place I wanted to get to, embodying her physically. I'd like to have had more time with that. Four hours to get into the prosthetics, so you don't have a lot of time to play around in it. That was something that was difficult for all of us. But the character — I'd always loved her. I loved reading about her in the book, and the script, too.
 

Were you channeling anyone while playing her?
No, not really. But I had seen Cuckoo's Nest  before, because I thought she was like a sort of S&M version of Nurse Ratched. But she's also physically quite like a monster.
 

Have you ever had to wear a fat suit for a role before?
On the stage before, but not on film.
 

It seems like a fun movie for actors, sort of like being in a theater ensemble.
Very much so. I love that sense of play because as a viewer of the film you're constantly reminded that these are actors playing roles, because you're constantly seeing them as someone else. It's unusual to see that on film. It's not part of our film language. We try [instead] to create this sort of natural reality, so people can go into this dream world. I think often in film we limit our imaginations a little — well, quite a lot, actually ... things get quite formulaic.
 

The multiple genres in Cloud Atlas  make it a hard movie to describe.
It does, and it also makes it a hard movie to accept and to watch, because it's out of their experience and therefore it’s wrong. So I suspect that will be the main problem for some people: Because it's unusual, it's like, "Ehhh that didn't work for me because I've never seen it before and I wanted it to be like this. Why couldn't they do that?" But what I think is great about it is that it’s actually quite revolutionary in its structure. It's quite playful yet it’s a very serious film. It manages to incorporate all these elements amazingly well, but I think for some people it will be too much.
 

When the Wachowskis came to you with the role, did you say yes right away?
We'd all read it, actually, when we did V for Vendetta.  So I sort of knew the book very well. And I've read all of David Mitchell's stuff and really love his work. Then I heard they were working on the script, so when Andy rang and said, "There's a script coming for you and these are the roles we want you to play," I knew what those roles were. I knew the story and the book. So it was an easy script to read, and a wonderful adaptation of a complex, wonderful novel. I said yes quite quickly.
 

I just finished The New Yorker  article about the Wachowskis and it mentioned how much happier Lana is since she became a woman. Have you noticed that while working with her?
Yeah, I think so. I wouldn't have said when I first met Larry that he wasn't content and that he wasn't talking about the same things that she's talking about now. But I do know from having talked to her towards the last years of The Matrix,  the whole issue started to come up. And then we had a whole conversation about it. I do know it’s been a massive transition for her. Undoubtedly she's happier now than she was, but you wouldn't necessarily have known that from the outside.
 

The Hobbit  opens in a few months. Did you have to think twice about playing Elrond again?
No, it seemed to me that's just what you should do, really. It's the same people in that world, it's the same world, the same director. It wouldn't have seemed right not to do it. Actually I remember in New Zealand, saying to Peter, “Oh well, I guess we'll see you on The Hobbit. " And he said, "No, no, I'm not doing The Hobbit.  We're not doing The Hobbit. " I said, "Of course you will." And you know he didn't want to do it initially — Guillermo Del Toro was directing it. He ended up doing it. It seemed like the right thing to go back and revisit.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/halle-berry-xun-zhou-racially-transform-cloud-atlas-192252393.html




Halle Berry, Xun Zhou
racially transform in
Cloud Atlas

By Meriah Doty Movie Talk
Wed, Sep 12, 2012 3:22 PM EDT


Halle Berry transforms into a white woman in 'Cloud Atlas.'


Xun Zhou also transforms into another race in 'Cloud Atlas.'

By now, most everyone knows "Cloud Atlas" is a mind-bending, epic tale spanning centuries -- within which individual characters are reborn. Many of the leading actors in the film portray several different people in different eras, with different hair color, and sometimes appearing as a different race, even gender.

Halle Berry, who is biracial, and Chinese actress Xun Zhou do some race-bending in the film. Both of them portray white women at two different points in the epically long 2-hour, 44-minute cinematic journey, made by the creators of "The Matrix" and "Run Lola run" (the Wachowski Siblings, and Tom Tykwer, respectively). Incidentally, South Korean actress Doona Bae -- who is getting a lot of buzz for her performance in "Atlas" -- also transforms into a white woman at a certain point.

Berry plays a litany of characters in the film, but the white woman she portrays is Jocasta Ayrs, a not-so-true, rather kinky wife of a composer (Jim Broadbent).

And Zhou's white character is the wife of Tom Hanks in the far future when the world has gone to hell. (re SPOILER, if you wish: http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/halle-berry-xun-zhou-racially-transform-cloud-atlas-192252393.html

Along with crossing racial lines with the help of heavy makeup -- and in some instances prosthetics and eye contacts -- Hugo Weaving and James D'Arcy bend their genders by playing women. Weaving is especially memorable as the evil Nurse Noakes.

And Berry takes it even a step further: She plays an old Korean male doctor at one point in the film.

To make all the race-bending more fun, Jim Sturgess also transforms into an Asian character.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/08/21/cloud-atlas-author-mitchell-mobbed-in-shanghai/


Cloud Atlas
Author David Mitchell
Mobbed in Shanghai

By Colum Murphy
August 21, 2012, 4:13 PM HKT




It’s not often that any fiction writer, much less a foreign one, ends up being chased down a Shanghai street by a gaggle of fans. Yet that’s just what happened British author David Mitchell on a recent afternoon in the city as local admirers battled to have him autograph copies of his novel “Cloud Atlas.”

One particularly determined man even blocked Mr. Mitchell’s path and, slapping a life-size portrait of the writer on the hood of a parked car, shouted in English: “Sign! Sign!”

A startled Mr. Mitchell sheepishly obliged, leaning over the car to scrawl his name in black marker across his own forehead.

“This has never happened before,” Mr. Mitchell said, picking up the pace again in attempt to keep ahead of the crowd. “I have no idea why the book is so popular. If you find out can you let me know?” he added before disappearing down Nanjing Road.

“Cloud Atlas,” first published in English eight years ago and recently translated into Chinese, is an intricate weaving of several separate stories that take place across time and place. The novel has just been made into a Hollywood movie starring Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon and Halle Berry that’s due for release in the United States in late October.

When the movie’s close to six-minute trailer appeared on Apple Inc.’s website in July, reaction was overwhelming, spurring widespread chatter on Twitter and catapulting sales for the book to No. 7 on Amazon.com Inc.’s list of best sellers, up from No. 2,509 a week earlier.

Now, in China, too, social media is fanning the flames of the “Cloud Atlas” craze, helping Mr. Mitchell’s feed on Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging website rack up 35,000 followers in its first week.

Why is the book so popular in China?

According to one fan, 32-year old designer Li Wei Gang, the appeal of “Cloud Atlas” lies in its melding of contemporary British literature with themes that resonate in China.

“The younger generation in China wants to understand better what young British people are seeking, what they care about, what they read,” says Li. “Then there is a kind of spirit of transmigration in the book, which is an Asian thing that is also in accordance with what Chinese believe.”

Hong Kong writer Xu Xi suggests the popularity of the book could simply come down to the economics of publishing.

“These days, what gets chosen for translation is so heavily dictated by the marketplace as opposed to by literary translators or scholars,” she said.

“This is especially true for fiction because a lot of the romance and crime fiction gets translated, whereas a winner of a good literary prize might not if the book is not commercially successful in its original language.”

A lot of contemporary books are “popular” in China simply because the market doesn’t have access to the real range of what constitutes contemporary literature in English, Ms. Xu says.

But the structure of China’s publishing industry likely isn’t the only explanation, she adds.

“It’s a very ‘constructed’ book which spans a ponderously long period of time, through a series of happy—or not so happy—coincidences or reversals of fortunes, ending on an apocalyptic note. This is how life might feel for a Chinese living in China today who reflects on her country’s recent and older history,” she says, noting the seemingly constant stream of stories about polluted rivers, tainted food, corruption and other problems flowing out of the country.

“Apocalypse is a satisfying revenge for life in ‘these here times’ of the muddled Middle Kingdom,” she says.

The ability of Chinese people to see their own concerns and frustrations reflected in Western culture has proven lucrative in the past. James Cameron’s “Avatar,” for example, became the highest grossing movie in Chinese history with more than $200 million in box office receipts in 2010, fed in part by moviegoers who saw in its story of aliens holding out against a greedy human corporation an allegory for the struggle of regular Chinese people to defend their homes against rapacious real estate developers.

Of course, part of the Chinese enthusiasm for Mr. Mitchell’s book might also be explained by the appearance of sultry-voiced movie star Zhou Xun in the film version – her first role in a major movie outside Asia.

– Colum Murphy, with contributions from Yoli Zhang.