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CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
Aloysius J. Gleek:
Whups! Somebody really, really didn't like Cloud Atlas--Yike! :o ::)
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?? :laugh: )
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.
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