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CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tom-hanks-halle-berry-join-cloud-atlas-cast-at-toronto-film-festival/2012/09/09/736611b6-fa8f-11e1-a65a-d6e62f9f2a5a_story.html
Tom Hanks, Halle Berry
join ‘Cloud Atlas’ cast
at Toronto film festival
By Associated Press, AP
TORONTO — Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and their cast mates have put in some serious overtime on their genre-bending film “Cloud Atlas.”
Members of the large ensemble of actors take on multiple roles in the epic tale that premiered Saturday night at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Hanks, Berry and their co-stars play as many as half a dozen different characters in “Cloud Atlas,” whose action stretches across centuries from the mid-1800s to the distant future.
Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer thanked their financial backers for getting behind the daring film. But it was the cast that brought the adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel to life, they said.
“The real courage that this film demanded was from the actors,” Lana Wachowski told the audience before the premiere. “There are very few movies that ask as much as we asked of the actors.”
The filmmakers were joined by Hanks, Berry and about a dozen of their co-stars, including Jim Broadbent, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw and Doona Bae. The last of the cast to be introduced, Hanks came onstage and went down the line of his colleagues like an athlete taking the field, slapping palms with each of the actors and filmmakers.
The action flits from a Pacific sea voyage in 1849 to a revolution in the making in the 22nd century and beyond to a post-apocalyptic land beset by savages.
Hanks’ characters range from a greedy 19th century doctor combing a beach for human teeth discarded by cannibals to a contemporary British thug-turned-author to a simple tribesman learning the dark truth of human history centuries from now.
Berry’s roles include a journalist uncovering a nuclear power conspiracy to an elderly composer’s adulterous wife to a woman leading the remnants of earth-bound humanity to a new home.
The film is a jumble of genres, with fast-paced action akin to the Wachowski siblings’ ”The Matrix” movies and Tykwer’s “Run Lola Run,” blending tones and styles from period drama and crime thriller to slapstick comedy and visual-effects spectacle.
Released by Warner Bros., “Cloud Atlas” opens in U.S. theaters on Oct. 26.
___
Online:
http://tiff.net/thefestival
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Meryl:
Thanks for all the reviews, John. I can't believe that both the book and the film were off my radar completely til you started this thread, but now I want to read the book and see the film. Along with Ang's "Life of Pi," it looks like the fall movie season has some real winners to look forward to. 8)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Meryl on September 09, 2012, 04:08:59 pm ---Thanks for all the reviews, John. I can't believe that both the book and the film were off my radar completely til you started this thread, but now I want to read the book and see the film. Along with Ang's "Life of Pi," it looks like the fall movie season has some real winners to look forward to. 8)
--- End quote ---
Thanks, Meryl!
It's going to be a great Fall!
;) ;D
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/09/the-wachowskis-cloud-atlas-wows-toronto-international-film-festival.html
The Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas Wows
Toronto International Film Festival
The ambitious, genre-hopping sci-fi epic from the Wachowskis
premiered to an ecstatic 10-minute standing ovation at the
Toronto International Film Festival. Chris Lee on one of
the year’s biggest films.
By Chris Lee
Sep 9, 2012 8:55 AM EDT
Tom Hanks and Halle Berry star in “Cloud Atlas.”
On Saturday night the Toronto International Film Festival hosted the world premiere of Cloud Atlas, the genre-spanning sci-fi epic cum period-drama comedy-thriller reputed to be the most expensive independent film ever made.
But the screening also provided a kind of dual unveiling, ushering in the arrival of what is sure to become one of the year’s most important movies—an inescapable, immovable presence this awards season. And it gave a rare public forum to one of Hollywood’s most Wizard of Oz–like figures, codirector Lana Wachowski, who became a subject of fascination and conjecture after undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 2008 and giving up her birth name, Larry.
A writing-directing collaboration between German auteur Tom Tykwer (Perfume and Run Lola Run ) and the Wachowski siblings (responsible for the blockbuster Matrix trilogy), Cloud Atlas managed to live up to a great deal of its prescreening hype—no small feat considering how much chatter its trailer has been generating online for months—and within an hour of its debut, the movie was a trending on Twitter.
The film is a visual feast, a work of colossal ambition and massive scope that explodes boundaries even if it can, at times, try audience members’ patience with sensory overload. Chalk that up, in part, to Cloud Atlas ’s whiplash crosscuttings between six intermingled plotlines and the deployment of nearly a dozen lead actors (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Keith David, Hugo Weaving, and South Korean newcomer Doona Bae among them) playing a bunch of different roles in a variety of outlandish prosthetic get-ups. Black people go white; Caucasians go Korean; Hanks wears a series of incredibly bad wigs. Adapted from David Mitchell’s bestselling 2004 novel, it all combines for a viscerally overwhelming experience, a grand meditation on human interconnectivity, that—love it or hate it—is quite unlike anything else in cinema.
Which made introductory remarks for the feature tricky. “We’ve never really introduced our films before, so we weren’t sure quite how to do it,” hulking, baldheaded codirector and co-writer Andy Wachowski said before the screening. “I said to go with ‘BEHOLD!’ But maybe my sister Lana has something better to say.”
On stage at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre, Lana Wachowski looked like a petite punk-rock version of Raggedy Ann, hair done in pink dreadlocks and attired in a slate gray sleeveless dress.
For the notoriously reclusive directors—who inserted a “no press” clause in their Warner Bros. contract before the release of the first Matrix—it was a rare moment in the spotlight. And it was the first time Lana had appeared before assembled media since choosing to live as a woman.
“We tried to get this film produced for years and years,” Lana said. “It’s like a dream to be standing here ... It’s quite an experimental film in many ways. That’s why it was so hard to get funded.”
At issue, many people—including the author of the book, who is considered something like the modern James Joyce—thought Cloud Atlas to be unfilmable. It unfolds across a gigantic swath of time and space with chapters alternating the stories of a 19th-century American lawyer on a boat in the South Pacific, a Korean clone in the dystopian future, a bisexual classical-music composer in ‘30s Scotland, a tabloid journalist investigating a nuclear-power-plant scandal, and survivors living in a decimated version of Hawaii after a global apocalypse called “the Fall” has wiped out most life on the planet. Various leitmotifs, including a shooting-star shaped birthmark, crop up in all the stories, and the characters’ respective works—writing, music, movies, political philosophies—turn up across the centuries and around the globe in the least expected places.
The Wachowskis and Tykwer set to writing the screenplay in 2009 and spent years trying and failing to set up funding; after all, nothing like Cloud Atlas had ever been filmed, and Hollywood’s default setting is risk phobia. Outside investors were initially spooked by the movie’s “challenging” nature, and the studios were skittish about Cloud Atlas ’s potential to become a costly flop à la Darren Aronofsky’s time- and genre-spanning The Fountain. But after landing a commitment from Hanks, the filmmakers secured a $100 million budget—a record for an independent production—even taking the unusual step of investing their own money.
To see the film is to understand Cloud Atlas as a true passion project realized. A revelatory recent profile of the Wachowskis in The New Yorker details how the siblings’ creative spark is deeply rooted in Lana’s preteen gender confusion. Ergo, their new film fairly shouts from the rooftops any number of inclusive, pro-social, deeply humanistic takeaways: how intolerance robs us of our humanity, how unjust social infrastructures exist to be shattered, how the human soul spans time’s continuum, how we are all connected as one.
But far from being some bloodless, deadly serious exercise in sanctimony, the movie is constantly shifting between tones—dramatic, funny, and thrilling—and tackling any number of topical concerns, great and small, sublime and ridiculous. Cloud Atlas features hilarious scenes of senior-citizen anarchy, a thrilling hovercraft shootout, and gratuitous joint smoking while also shedding light on America’s slavery-abolition movement, the function of an amanuensis in classical music, machinations of corporate greed, and what tribal warfare may look like in the distant future.
And reaction to the film from an industry-heavy packed house was both ecstatic and curious. After Cloud Atlas ’s final image had receded from the screen and the house lights were brought up, the audience at the Princess of Wales took to its feet for a 10-minute standing ovation. A heavy massing of the Creative Artists Agency’s most heavyweight agents could be seen beaming at the Wachowskis and Tykwer, and the movies stars—Hanks, Berry, et al.—turned in their seats to applaud the filmmakers.
But when the clapping stopped, almost everyone in the auditorium remained standing, transfixed by Lana in particular. They stood there, waiting for something to happen, instead of streaming for the exits as typically happens at the conclusion of even the most star-studded and glitzy premieres. The crowd waited for its cue from Lana, who began to receive well wishes from her cast. There was costar Jim Sturgess coming up to hug her, and there was Susan Sarandon giving the director a kiss on the cheek. For a few strange and unforgettable moments, Hollywood North stood awed by what it had just seen and unsure of what to do next.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/cloud-atlas-movie-review-wachowski-brothers-tom-hanks-368919
Cloud Atlas
Toronto Review
Tom Hanks and Halle Berry star in the much-anticipated
adaptation of David Mitchell's novel from the Wachowskis
and Tom Twyker.
The Bottom Line:
The sky’s not the limit in this well made but
dramatically diffuse arthouse blockbuster.
by Jordan Mintzer
9:01 PM PDT 9/8/2012
TORONTO -- Not quite soaring into the heavens, but not exactly crash-landing either, Cloud Atlas is an impressively mounted, emotionally stilted adaptation of British author David Mitchell’s bestselling novel. Written and directed by the Wachowski Siblings and Tom Tykwer, this hugely ambitious, genre-jumping, century-hopping epic is parts Babel and Tree of Life, parts Blade Runner, Amistad and Amadeus, with added doses of gore, CGI, New Age kitsch, and more prosthetics than a veterans hospital in wartime. One of the priciest independent films ever made (on a purported budget of $100 million), Atlas will rely on its chameleon cast to scale a 3-hour running time and reach the box office heights needed for this massive international co-production.
Mitchel’s 500-plus page book garnered several literary prizes and a huge following after it was first published in 2004, but many would have said that the novel’s unique structure–where multiple stories in different time periods are told chronologically from past to future and then back again—was impossible to adapt to the big screen.
The Wachowskis (with Lana receiving her first screen credit here) and Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The International ) figured out they could streamline the narrative by cross-cutting between the different epochs and casting the same actors in a multitude of roles. Although this helps to make the whole pill easier to swallow, it also makes it harder to invest in each narrative, while seeing the actors transformed from old to young, black to white, and occasionally gender-bended from male to female, tends to dilute the overall dramatic tension.
A brief prologue features an old man, Zachry (Tom Hanks), telling a story around a campfire, and from hereon in the film reveals how each plotline is in fact a tale told—or read or seen in a movie—by the next one (this is also a process used in the book).
They are, in ascending order: an 1849 Pacific sea voyage where a crooked doctor (Hanks), a novice sailor (Jim Sturgess) and an escaped slave (David Gyasi) cross paths; a saga of dualing composers (Jim Broadbent, Ben Wishaw) set in 1936 Cambridge; a San Francisco-set 70s thriller about a rogue journalist (Halle Berry) taking on a nuclear power chief (Hugh Grant); a 2012-set comedy about a down-on-his-luck London book editor (Broadbent); a sci-fi love story about an indentured wage slave (Doona Bae) and the rebel (Sturgess) who rescues her, set in “Neo Seoul” in 2144; and a 24th century-set tale of tribal warfare, where Zachry teams up with a visiting explorer (Berre) in search of a groundbreaking, planet-shaking discovery.
Despite their myriad differences, the half-dozen plot strands are coherently tied together via sharp editing by Alexander Berner (Resident Evil ), who focuses on each separate story early on, and then mixes them up in several crescendo-building montages where movement and imagery are matched together across time. As if such links weren’t explicit enough, the characters all share a common birthmark, and have a tendency to repeat the same feel-good proverbs (ex. “By each crime, and every kindness, we build our future”) at various intervals.
Yet while the directorial trio does their best to ensure that things flow together smoothly enough and that their underlying message—basically, no matter what the epoch, we are all of the same soul and must fight for freedom—is heard extremely loud and incredibly clear, there are so many characters and plots tossed about that no one storyline feels altogether satisfying. As history repeats itself and the same master vs. slave scenario keeps reappearing, everything gets homogenized into a blandish whole, the impact of each story softened by the constant need to connect the dots.
Of all the pieces of the puzzle, the ones that feel the most effective are the 70s investigative drama, which has shades of Alan Pakula and Fincher’s Zodiac, and the futuristic thriller, where the Wachowskis show they can still come up with some nifty set-pieces, even if the production design (by Uli Hanisch and Hugh Bateup) and costumes (by Kym Barrett and Pierre-Yves Gayraud) feel closer to the artsy stylings of Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 than to the leather Lollapalooza that is The Matrix trilogy.
Perhaps such choices go hand in hand with a movie that yearns to be both arthouse and blockbuster, yet can’t seem to make up its mind. Thus, the decision to utilize the same actors helps to visually link up the plots, but is so conspicuous that it distracts from the drama. It’s hard to take Berry seriously when she’s been anatomically morphed into a Victorian housewife (she’s much better as the crusading reporter), or to swallow Hanks as a futuristic Polynesian tribesmen with a face tattoo and a funny way of talking (he says things like “Tell me the true true.”)
Broadbent’s experience in spectacles like Moulin Rouge! and Topsy-Turvy makes him better equipped for such shape-shifting, and his present day scenario is both the silliest and in some ways, the most touching. But it’s Hugo Weaving who seems to have more fun than anyone, especially when he plays a nasty retirement home supervisor reminiscent of Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and does so by getting into full-out drag. It’s an effect that’s amusingly disarming—not to mention evocative of Lana Wachowski’s recent backstory—in a film that aims for the clouds but is often weighed down by its own lofty intentions.
Production companies: Cloud Atlas X-Filme, Creative Pool, Anarchos, in association with A Company and Ard Degeto
Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Wishaw, Keith David, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon
Directors: Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski
Screenwriters: Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell
Producers: Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, Grant Hill, Stefan Arndt
Executive producers: Philip Lee, Uwe Schott, Wilson Qiu
Directors of photography: John Toll, Frank Griebe
Production designers: Uli Hanisch, Hugh Bateup
Costume designers: Kym Barrett, Pierre-Yves Gayraud
Music: Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer
Editor: Alexander Berner
Visual effects supervisor: Dan Glass
Sales: Warner Bros. Pictures (U.S.), Focus Features International (Outside U.S.)
R rating, 171 minutes
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