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CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
Jeff Wrangler:
I think David Haglund needs a bran muffin.
Or maybe a bowl of bran flakes.
8)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.examiner.com/article/review-cloud-atlas?CID=examiner_alerts_article
Review
Cloud Atlas
By Brian Zitzelman
October 23, 2012
Cloud Atlas is big, bold, kind of a mess and equally full of stunning beauty. An adaptation of the acclaimed David Mitchell novel, Cloud Atlas comes courtesy of a creative collaboration between Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix ) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run ). The three worked together on the book’s sprawling, six-point narrative, deciding to join the various plots and centuries apart timelines into one nearly three-hour long montage.
To say it won’t be for everyone is an understatement. The same goes for the opposite. Few movies achieve so much and occasionally fall so flat. This drastic batting average prominently stems from the film’s earnestness.
Cloud Atlas is about, above all things, man’s inhumanity to there fellow man, primarily those that are different. That difference can be based on gender, race, sexual orientation or even molecular creation; there are clones afterall. In order of historical occurrence, the movie tells the story of a young man (Jim Sturgess) abroad confronting slavery, a man (Ben Whishaw) seeking to be a composer in 1930s England, a female reporter (Halle Berry) looking to uncover the truth behind a suspicious nuclear power planet during the 1970s, an elderly man (Jim Broadbent) in modern times on the run from Irish mobsters, a female clone (Doona Bae) learning to rebel against the system in a futuristic “Neo Seoul” and finally a tale that occurs “After the Fall” where a tribesman (Tom Hanks) frets over the safety of his family on a remote island.
That’s a lot of plates to spin. The Wachowskis and Tykwer mostly keep them from falling. All six threads are compelling, though some distinctly more than others. Those that play up the simplicity of the given parable resonate stronger. Even if the Cloud ’s themes are clunkily stated verbatim time and again, the actual execution of the better ones are worthy of a few tears.
The 1930s plot with Whishaw is a favorite. Aided by the film’s finest performance, Whishaw’s story lacks the wow-inducing scenery crafted elsewhere, but focuses far more on the character. Whishaw’s Robert Frobisher is a delicate soul, easily lost in his own whimsy and ego; a young man positive that he knows more than those far older than him. Without the sharp twists and adrenaline of the other five chunks of Cloud Atlas, this element gets to be the rock of the picture. It has a calming elegance that manages to shed a soft light on the more tender ideas elsewhere.
One can only imagine the hellish nightmare it must have been editing Cloud Atlas. That only the 70s mystery angle feels like the tedious one is astonishing, and even that tale starts strongly.
Perhaps the most discussed thing about the movie, at least for those that haven’t seen it, is the choice to feature an array of actors playing various parts in each time period. Thus, we witness Tom Hanks as a bullish English bloke and a conniving and a big-toothed treasure hunter, amongst other things. Some of these work, with Broadbent’s ability to swing from mugging to subtle as the finest example. For Hanks, Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant, it distracts instead of invites, with overbearing or embarrassing accents badly sticking out.
The issues of fate and reincarnation aren’t deftly stated by the Wachowski and Tywker, and for many audiences it will be new-age mumbo jumbo. That gut feeling is a fair one, for the movie intrigues on a lyrical, very base level. When Cloud Atlas connects, whether it’s via the pulsating futuristic action or goofy comedy of today, the nagging weaknesses slip out of mind. A film doesn’t have to be great to be a must-see, and this is a perfect example.
Cloud Atlas opens wide in Seattle this Friday, October 26.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Cloud-Atlas-review-Baring-your-soul-3981566.php
Cloud Atlas
Baring your soul
Mick LaSalle
Friday Oct 26, 2012 1:30 AM PT
There is something new going on in 21st century movies, a strain of films attempting to convey the entire experience of life in a single movie. Alejandro Inárritu has tried this, with lesser ("Babel") and greater ("Biutiful") success, and so has Terrence Malick ("The Tree of Life"). "Cloud Atlas," more successful than most, is the biggest effort yet in this new vein - enormous in length and scope, a film whose purpose doesn't even begin to come into focus until two hours in.
Directed by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings (Lana and Andy), and based on the novel by David Mitchell, "Cloud Atlas" is unlike any other movie, so a little description is in order. It takes place in six different periods of history - the mid-19th century, the 1930s, 1973, 2012, 2144 and the distant future. There are six different stories, with different characters, and from the very beginning, the stories are intercut. One scene follows the next in no particular order, and sometimes a scene will last no longer than a minute before a shift in time and location.
There is no apparent logic to these shifts, except, perhaps, an unconscious or cinematic one. A movement or a gesture in one era will connect with a similar movement in another. At times, you might hear someone talking in voice-over, while a scene from another era is shown onscreen. Likewise, there is little or no link between the stories, except, as one comes to realize, a moral one. "Cloud Atlas" attempts to depict endless cycles of recurrence, the moral patterns of human existence.
If that sounds ambitious and challenging, it is. The filmmakers are betting on audiences being both willing to pay close attention, as underlying connections emerge, and willing to go along for a ride, without a clue as to the destination. The filmmakers are gambling, in fact, on the intelligence and patience of the sci-fi action audience. Let's wish them luck.
Familiar cast
They hedge their bets by casting familiar faces - Tom Hanks, Jim Broadbent, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant - and having them turn up in a variety of roles over the course of time. Implicit in the casting is the notion that these are the same souls in different incarnations, but that's the weakest idea in the movie, and it doesn't hold up. There is no real point of contact between the characters each actor plays.
A movie with this kind of jagged, one-thing-after-another structure, can only hold an audience's interest if each individual story is so compelling that each shift, from one to the next, becomes welcome. This is almost, but not completely, the case with "Cloud Atlas."
The 19th century section, directed by the Wachowskis, about a young man (Jim Sturgess) who helps a stowaway slave, is of moderate interest, though it grows over time. The 20th century stories, directed by Tykwer, are better: Ben Whishaw as a young composer of genius working for a cantankerous has-been composer (Jim Broadbent) in the 1930s; Halle Berry, as a crusading reporter risking her life to uncover a scandal, in the 1970s; and Broadbent as a man trying to escape imprisonment in a nursing home, in the current time.
Future times
The Wachowskis directed the two future segments, with mixed results. The story of a young replicant (Doona Bae) in Seoul, Korea, who ends up leading a revolution in 2144, is tense and moving, one of the film's highlights. But the section set in the distant future, in which Halle Berry and Tom Hanks wear animal skins and talk in a ridiculous future language, is almost unwatchable. It's this story, always a drag to come back to, that keeps "Cloud Atlas" on this side of greatness.
Still, despite some weaknesses, a sense gradually emerges in this film- not just an idea, but a strong feeling mixed with an idea - about the dance of good and evil over time. It's a grown-up person's vision: When you're young, it's possible to believe that evil can be vanquished. As you get older, you realize that evil never stops changing shapes and faces. In "Cloud Atlas," the monster can be beaten, but always comes back, but always can be beaten. There can never be a happy ending, but there can be a mature consolation that, in itself, has grandeur and is the opposite of despair.
I hope "Cloud Atlas" finds its audience.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle's movie critic. E-mail: [email protected]
Sci-fi action. Starring Halle Berry, Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant. Directed by Tom Tykwer and Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski. (R. 172 minutes.)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://blog.zap2it.com/pop2it/2012/10/cloud-atlas-director-lana-wachowski-opens-up-about-transgender-experiences.html
Cloud Atlas director
Lana Wachowski
opens up about
transgender experiences
By Terri Schwartz
October 26, 2012 10:37 AM ET
Lana Wachowski, one half of the Wachowski sibling directing team that is responsible for "The Matrix" trilogy, has been increasingly open about her history as a transgender woman during the promotional tour for "Cloud Atlas," her new movie with her brother, Andy, and director Tom Tykwer. During a speech given as the Human Rights Campaign fundraising dinner in San Francisco on Oct. 20, Wachowski opened up about some of low points in her life before she came out as transgender.
During the speech, the 47-year-old recounts an experience when a Catholic school nun beat her for not getting in line with the boys, and also talks about how she almost committed suicide as a young adult. The Chicago native says she would have jumped from a subway platform had another man in the station not stared her down.
"I don't know why he wouldn't look away," Wachowski says. "All I know is that because he didn't, I am still here."
Wachowski, who was notorious for her private persona and hatred of press tours, was at the HRC event to accept the Visibility Award because of her decision to step out while promoting "Cloud Atlas" and be open about her transgender experiences. Other celebrities who have received the award are Portia de Rossi, director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.
"Lana's willingness to tell her story will impact and change countless lives across the world," HRC president Chad Griffin said to introduce Wachowski. "She is a giant in her industry, and for someone with such success and such profile to be willing to tell their personal story to the world sends a tremendous message to LGBT people across the globe that they too can aspire to be a giant in their industry."
"Cloud Atlas" is due in theaters today (Oct. 26).
Follow @Terri_Schwartz
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/movies/cloud-atlas-from-lana-and-andy-wachowski-and-tom-tykwer.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all
Movie Review
Souls Tangled Up in Time:
Cloud Atlas
From Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: October 25, 2012
Halle Berry and Tom Hanks in “Cloud Atlas.”
In 1849 a businessman on a Melville-esque sea voyage in the South Pacific battles a mysterious illness and shelters a runaway slave. In 1936 Robert Frobisher, a penniless young composer, flees Cambridge for Edinburgh to join the household of a vain and temperamental maestro. Four decades later an alternative-press journalist risks her life investigating safety problems at a nuclear power plant.
In our own day a feckless book publisher finds himself trapped in a nursing home. Sometime in the corporate, totalitarian future a member of the genetically engineered serving class, a fast-food worker named Sonmi-451, is drawn into rebellion, while in a still more distant, postapocalyptic, neo-tribal future (where Sonmi is worshiped as a deity), a Hawaiian goatherd. ...
That last one is a little more complicated, involving a devil, marauders on horseback and the possibility of interplanetary travel. It is also where the spoilers dwell. In any case, these half-dozen stories are the components of “Cloud Atlas,” David Mitchell's wondrous 2004 novel, now lavishly adapted for the screen by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer.
“Cloud Atlas” is a movie about migratory souls and wayward civilizations, loaded with soaring themes and flights of feeling, as vaporous and comprehensive as its title. Big ideas, or at least earnest intellectual conceits, crowd the screen along with suave digital effects and gaudy costumes. Free will battles determinism. Solidarity faces off against domination. Belief in a benevolent cosmic order contends with fidelity to the cruel Darwinian maxim that “the weak are meat the strong do eat.”
Describing this movie, despite its lofty ambitions, can feel like an exercise in number crunching, and watching it is a bit like doing a series of math problems in your head. How do three directors parcel six plots into 172 minutes? (And how much might that cost?) Which actor — most of them inhabit several roles, in some cases changing gender or skin color as well as costume, accent and hairstyle — tackles the widest range of characters? What is the correlation between a musical phrase and a comet-shaped birthmark? How many times does Hugo Weaving sneer?
Maybe the achievement of “Cloud Atlas” should be quantified rather than judged in more conventional, qualitative ways. This is by no means the best movie of the year, but it may be the most movie you can get for the price of a single ticket. It blends farce, suspense, science fiction, melodrama and quite a bit more, not into an approximation of Mr. Mitchell’s graceful and virtuosic pastiche, but rather into an unruly grab bag of styles, effects and emotions held together, just barely, by a combination of outlandish daring and humble sincerity. Together the filmmakers try so hard to give you everything — the secrets of the universe and the human heart; action, laughs and romance; tragedy and mystery — that you may wind up feeling both grateful and disappointed.
Though the six sections flow together more or less seamlessly, it is also possible to divide the movie into Wachowski and Tykwer halves. Mr. Tykwer’s contributions are those that take place closer to the present — they concern the composer, the journalist and the publisher — whereas the Wachowskis leap back to the past and forward into the future. They are less concerned with efficient storytelling than with the maximization of spectacular and intellectual impact, with blowing your mind and explaining the cosmos. The Wachowski chapters are bigger, grander and noisier, while Mr. Tykwer’s are tighter, funnier and more emotionally resonant. The tale of Frobisher is perhaps the only piece that could stand alone, a perfect novella of artistic rivalry, sexual misbehavior and poetic despair.
Considering it in isolation is difficult, however, and contrary to the film’s design. A major difference between the movie and its source is structural. Mr. Mitchell nests his plots inside one another, splitting each one to make room for the others and making his book into something like a set of Russian dolls or a turducken. Mr. Tykwer and the Wachowskis — abetted by the heroic editing of Alexander Berner — have abandoned this symmetrical literary design, opting for the more cinematically manageable technique of crosscutting. The narrative strands are woven together, elegantly plaited and quilted at some points, tangled and snarled in others. Connective tissue is supplied by music (composed by Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek and Mr. Tykwer), by voice-overs and visual echoes, and also by the reappearance of the same actors in elaborate but nonetheless transparent disguises. Mr. Weaving, for example, memorably pops up as a devil, a Victorian capitalist, a sadistic female nurse, a corporate-totalitarian bureaucrat and a hit man.
Zachry the goatherd is played by Tom Hanks, sporting facial tattoos and speaking in a futuristic pidgin. (In Zachry’s language, “aye” means “yes,” “cog” means “know” and “true-true” means “very true indeed.”) Mr. Hanks also plays, among other roles, a scientist who aids the journalist’s investigation, a London gangster and a 19th-century quack attending to Adam Ewing, the ailing South Seas traveler. (That poor fellow is played by Jim Sturgess.) The muckraking journalist, Luisa Rey, is Halle Berry. She also appears as Meronym, who visits Zachry’s island as part of a delegation of technologically advanced researchers. And she is almost unrecognizable as Jocasta Ayrs, married to the temperamental maestro, played by Jim Broadbent. He is, elsewhere, a ship’s captain and the luckless publisher Timothy Cavendish.
You see what I mean about quantity. Simply enumerating the rest of the cast members and saying what they do would turn this review into a Domesday Book of postmodern film acting. And identifying the flavors of ham they import to the proceedings would require an advanced degree in charcuterie. There is, in any case, a lot of acting here. It is delivered by the bushel, by the truckload, by the schooner, and the quality varies.
Mr. Broadbent is, as ever, delightful, and Ben Whishaw is perfect as the witty and passionate Frobisher. Hugh Grant indulges in some sly, vulgar villainy, with impressive prosthetic teeth, and Susan Sarandon floats through a few scenes trailing mists of love and weary wisdom. As Sonmi, the South Korean actress Doona Bae is a haunting, somber presence.
Sonmi awakens from a life of grim deprivation — a condition of slavery that is horrible to contemplate and horrifyingly easy to imagine — into an awareness of the possibility of freedom. The tale of how she recovers her humanity (and the cost she pays for it) becomes scripture in Zachry’s time, and her fate is also the allegorical key to the rest of “Cloud Atlas.” In every chapter powerful forces work to constrain, exploit and otherwise suppress the individual and collective desire for liberation. Alliances form between victims and sympathetic members of the race or caste in power, and even when their efforts are doomed, they manage to keep some hope alive for the future.
Mr. Tykwer and the Wachowskis emphasize the spiritual rather than the political dimensions of Mr. Mitchell’s novel and at the same time make his meanings less elusive and more accessible. Perhaps too much so. “Cloud Atlas” aspires to be a perception-altering head trip in the tradition of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Matrix.” But instead of leaving you trembling in contemplation of metaphysical mysteries, it succumbs to the term-paperish explication that weighed down “V for Vendetta” and the second and third “Matrix” movies. Its reach is admirable, but its grasp is, if anything, too secure.
For a movie devoted to the celebration of freedom, “Cloud Atlas” works awfully hard to control and contain its meanings, to tell you exactly what it is about rather than allowing you to dream and wonder within its impressively imagined world.
The movie insists — repeatedly and didactically — that a thread of creative, sustaining possibility winds its way through all human history, glimmering even in its darkest hours. A beautiful notion, and possibly true. But unfortunately not quite true-true.
“Cloud Atlas” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has nudity, violence and sexuality, past, present and future.
Cloud Atlas
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written and directed by Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell; directors of photography, John Toll and Frank Griebe; edited by Alexander Berner; music by Mr. Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil; production design by Uli Hanisch and Hugh Bateup; costumes by Kym Barrett and Pierre-Yves Gayraud; produced by Grant Hill, Stefan Arndt, Ms. Wachowski, Mr. Tykwer and Mr. Wachowski; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 52 minutes.
WITH:
Tom Hanks (Dr. Henry Goose/Hotel Manager/Isaac Sachs/Dermot Hoggins/Cavendish Look-Alike Actor/Zachry),
Halle Berry (Native Woman/Jocasta Ayrs/Luisa Rey/Indian Party Guest/Ovid/Meronym),
Jim Broadbent (Captain Molyneux/Vyvyan Ayrs/Timothy Cavendish/Korean Musician/Prescient 2),
Hugo Weaving (Haskell Moore/Tadeusz Kesselring/Bill Smoke/Nurse Noakes/Boardman Mephi/Old Georgie),
Jim Sturgess (Adam Ewing/Poor Hotel Guest/Megan’s Dad/Highlander/Hae-Joo Chang/Adam/Zachry Brother-in-Law),
Doona Bae (Tilda/Megan’s Mom/Mexican Woman/Sonmi-451/Sonmi-451/Sonmi Prostitute),
Ben Whishaw (Cabin Boy/Robert Frobisher/Store Clerk/Georgette/Tribesman),
Keith David (Kupaka/Joe Napier/An-Kor Apis/Prescient),
James D’Arcy (Young Rufus Sixsmith/Old Rufus Sixsmith/Nurse James/Archivist),
Xun Zhou (Talbot/Hotel Manager/Yoona-939/Rose),
David Gyasi (Autua/Lester Rey/Duophysite),
Susan Sarandon (Madame Horrox/Older Ursula/Yusouf Suleiman/Abbess)
and
Hugh Grant (the Rev. Giles Horrox/Hotel Heavy/Lloyd Hooks/Denholme Cavendish/Seer Rhee/Kona Chief).
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