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

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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:






--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 12, 2012, 11:19:18 pm ---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.
--- End quote ---




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





--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on September 12, 2012, 11:19:18 pm ---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?"
--- End quote ---




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

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