Author Topic: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26  (Read 155814 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« on: September 03, 2012, 11:02:04 pm »


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #1 on: September 03, 2012, 11:06:53 pm »


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnAqFyaQ5s[/youtube]
Published on Jul 27, 2012 by movieclipsTRAILERS

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #2 on: September 03, 2012, 11:28:57 pm »

T O M     H A N K S

H A L L E    B E R R Y
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #3 on: September 03, 2012, 11:33:19 pm »


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #4 on: September 03, 2012, 11:43:53 pm »

H U G O

W E A V I N G

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #5 on: September 04, 2012, 12:00:05 am »

J I M


S T U R G E S S

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #6 on: September 04, 2012, 12:18:01 am »

H A N K S

T O M

H A N K S

T O M

H A N K S
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #7 on: September 04, 2012, 12:30:10 am »



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EBZcRTEX7k[/youtube]
Published on Jul 27, 2012 by trailers

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #8 on: September 04, 2012, 12:43:35 am »




"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #9 on: September 04, 2012, 01:09:24 am »
J A M E S

D' A R C Y

J A M E S

D' A R C Y

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #10 on: September 04, 2012, 01:18:21 am »

B R O A D B E N T

J I M

B R O A D B E N T

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #11 on: September 04, 2012, 01:34:02 am »

KEITH DAVID

HUGH GRANT

DOONABAE

DAVIDGYASI

BENWHISHAW

SUSANSARANDON


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Offline Penthesilea

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #12 on: September 04, 2012, 03:33:52 am »
Anyone read the book?

Offline Meryl

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #13 on: September 04, 2012, 11:30:14 am »
This looks so cool!  Must see.  8)
Ich bin ein Brokie...

Offline Luvlylittlewing

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #14 on: September 04, 2012, 01:29:34 pm »
Good Lord, this looks crazy!  I'm all over it!

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #15 on: September 07, 2012, 01:55:14 pm »



There's More:
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9K_Fz3J2sAE[/youtube]
Published on Sep 6, 2012 by MovieclipsCOMINGSOON



"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #16 on: September 07, 2012, 02:05:00 pm »



Music:
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQNL5C8wSR8&feature=related[/youtube]
Published on Jul 26, 2012 by xDarkLegacyx2




"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #17 on: September 07, 2012, 02:08:30 pm »



More Music:
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFDeHRc3agY&feature=related[/youtube]
Published on Jul 27, 2012 by Gola Georg





"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #18 on: September 08, 2012, 09:31:13 am »



And James Schamus!



http://www.indiewire.com/article/andy_and_lana_wachowski_and_tom_tykwer_present_their_vision_for_cloud_atlas


Andy and Lana Wachowski
and Tom Tykwer Present
Their Vision for
Cloud Atlas

by Dana Harris
May 12, 2011 2:38 AM



James Schamus, Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski,
Andy Wachowski.



In addition to Tom Hanks, "Cloud Atlas" will star Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving and Ben Whishaw.

Focus CEO James Schamus made the announcement at a buyers-only presentation at Cannes' Olympia Cinema in which Schamus moderated a panel of the project's three directors -- Andy and Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer -- as they presented their vision for the project.  

"Cloud Atlas" is a massive production (more than $100 million) based on the very large novel (528 pages) by David Mitchell. And it's a plot that defies easy summary. Here's how Focus positions it:


CLOUD ATLAS is an epic story of humankind in which the actions and consequences of our lives impact one another throughout the past, present and future as one soul is shaped from a murderer into a savior and a single act of kindness ripples out for centuries to inspire a revolution.


Grant Hill and Stefan Arndt are producing; Philip Lee is executive producer.

The film will start shooting in September. Warner Bros. will release the movie in North America; Focus International is selling foreign rights.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline serious crayons

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #19 on: September 08, 2012, 11:49:21 am »
This should win the makeup Oscar, for sure!


Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #20 on: September 08, 2012, 05:19:35 pm »



This should win the makeup Oscar, for sure!




Could be!





Tom Hanks is Dr. Henry Goose
                    Isaac Sachs
                    Dermot 'Duster' Hoggins
                    "Timothy Cavendish"
                    Valleysman Zachry
                    Old Zachry (30 Years Later)
                    a Narrator
                    and ?

Adam Siviter is Hoggins Impersonator
                    and ?

                                                     Halle Berry is Jocasta Ayrs
                                                                         Luisa Rey
                                                                         Meronym
                                                                         an Island Native
                                                                         an elderly (male)
                                                                              Korean Doctor
                                                                         and ?

Hugo Weaving is Bill Smoke
                         Nurse Noakes
                         a Korean Pervert
                         Old Georgie
                         and ?

                                                     Jim Sturgess is Adam Ewing
                                                                           Hae-Joo Im
                                                                            and ?

Doona Bae is Sonmi-451,
                         a clone 'fabricant'
                    Tilde Ewing
                    'Sonmi' (a goddess??)
                    and ?

                                                     Jim Broadbent is Vyvyan Ayrs
                                                                             Timothy Cavendish
                                                                              a Sea Captain
                                                                              a blind Violinist
                                                                              a Narrator
                                                                              and ?

                                                     Robin Morrissey is Young Cavendish
                                                                              and ?

Ben Whishaw is Robert Frobisher
                       a blonde woman
                           (Hugh Grant's wife??)
                       and ?

                                                     James D'Arcy is Rufus Sixsmith (young)
                                                                            Rufus Sixsmith (old)
                                                                            "Rufus Sixsmith"
                                                                             and ?

Xun Zhou is Yoona-939
                  Rose
                  and ?

                                                    Keith David is Joe Napier
                                                                         Kupaka
                                                                         Ankor Apis
                                                                         and ?

David Gyasi is Autua
                     and ?

                                                   Hugh Grant is Alberto Grimaldi
                                                                        Timothy Cavendish's
                                                                             brother
                                                                        a Cannibal (Kona Chief)
                                                                        and ?

Susan Sarandon is Ursula
                          Madame Horrox
                           a Narrator
                           and ?



« Last Edit: October 03, 2012, 01:37:23 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline SFEnnisSF

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #21 on: September 08, 2012, 11:31:08 pm »
Good Lord, this looks crazy!  I'm all over it!

 :D

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #22 on: September 09, 2012, 09:26:16 am »



This should win the makeup Oscar, for sure!



Again--could be!




http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/our-lives-are-not-our-own-deconstructing-the-cloud-atlas-trailer-20120726?page=1#blogPostHeaderPanel


Our Lives Are Not Our Own:
Deconstructing The 'Cloud Atlas' Trailer

by Oliver Lyttelton
July 26, 2012 3:29 PM








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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #23 on: September 09, 2012, 10:42:15 am »



Anyone read the book?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)

Cloud Atlas  (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

Cloud Atlas is a 2004 novel, the third book by British author David Mitchell. It won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award, and was short-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize, Nebula Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and other awards.


       


Plot summary
 
The novel consists of six nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or observed) by the main character in the next. All stories but the last are interrupted at some moment, and after the sixth story concludes at the center of the book, the novel "goes back" in time, "closing" each story as the book progresses in terms of pages but regresses in terms of the historical period in which the action takes place. Eventually, readers end where they started, with Adam Ewing in the Pacific Ocean, circa 1850.

(....)



The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
 
Pacific Ocean, circa 1850. Adam Ewing, an American notary's account of a voyage home from the remote Chatham Islands, east of New Zealand.



 

The next character discovers this story as a diary on his patron's bookshelf.
 


Letters from Zedelghem

Zedelgem, Belgium, 1931. Robert Frobisher, a penniless young English musician, finds work as an amanuensis to a composer, Vyvyan Ayrs, living in Belgium, Letters from Zedelghem  sees Robert Frobisher compose the Cloud Atlas Sextet, which consists of six nested solos arranged in the same manner as the narratives in Cloud Atlas.  Mitchell has noted that the characters Robert Frobisher and Vyvyan Ayrs were inspired by Eric Fenby and Frederick Delius (Fenby was an amanuensis to the great English composer). The daughter of Ayrs appears in Mitchell's Black Swan Green  as an elderly woman befriended by the main character.



   



This story is saved in the form of letters to Frobisher's friend (and implied lover) Rufus Sixsmith, which the next character discovers after meeting Sixsmith.


 
Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery.
 
Buenas Yerbas, California, 1975. Luisa Rey, a journalist, investigates reports that a new nuclear power plant is unsafe, with the help of Sixsmith who as a respected nuclear physicist has become a whistleblower.





The next character is sent this story in the mail, in the form of a manuscript for a novel.
 


The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
 
United Kingdom, early 21st century. Timothy Cavendish, a vanity press publisher, flees the brothers of his gangster client. He gets confined against his will in a nursing home from which he cannot escape.





The next character watches a movie dramatisation of this story.
 


An Orison of Sonmi~451
 
Nea So Copros (Korea), dystopian near future. Sonmi~451, a genetically-engineered fabricant (clone) server at Papa Song's diner (a proxy for large fast-dining chains), is interviewed before her execution after she rebels against the totalitarian society that created and exploited her kind.









The next character watches Sonmi's story projected holographically in an "orison," a futuristic recording device.
 


Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After
 
Hawaii, post-apocalyptic distant future. Zachry, a tribesman living a primitive life after most of humanity dies during "the Fall," is visited by Meronym, a member of the last remnants of technologically-advanced civilization. This story is told when the protagonist is an old man, to seemingly random strangers around a campfire.









Structure and style
 

(....)


Apart from the central (6th) story (Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin After ), which is uninterrupted, each story breaks abruptly off halfway through, to be followed by the first half of the next story. The interrupted story then appears within the next one, with the protagonist reading or watching the first half of its text; for example, in "An Orison of Sonmi~451," Sonmi~451 describes watching a film about the life of Timothy Cavendish, but she is only able to watch 50 minutes before her story is also interrupted. Each story ends with its protagonist finding the second half of this story, which is then printed after it.



Linking themes

Mitchell has said of the book:

Literally all of the main characters, except one, are reincarnations of the same soul in different bodies throughout the novel identified by a birthmark...that's just a symbol really of the universality of human nature. The title itself "Cloud Atlas," the cloud refers to the ever changing manifestations of the Atlas, which is the fixed human nature which is always thus and ever shall be. So the book's theme is predacity, the way individuals prey on individuals, groups on groups, nations on nations, tribes on tribes. So I just take this theme and in a sense reincarnate that theme in another context...



Film adaptation
 
The novel was adapted to film by directors Tom Tykwer and Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski. With an ensemble cast to cover the film's multiple storylines, production began in September 2011 at Studio Babelsberg in Germany. The film is scheduled to be released in the United States on October 26, 2012.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #24 on: September 09, 2012, 01:09:45 pm »


1
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing
directed by Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski






                                                                                     2
                                                                                     Letters from Zedelghem
                                                                                     directed by Tom Tykwer

                                                                                   



                                                                                   3
                                                                                   Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery
                                                                                   directed by Tom Tykwer

                                                                                      
 

                                   
                                                                                  4
                                                                                  The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish                                       
                                                                                  directed by Tom Tykwer

                                                                                 



5
An Orison of Sonmi~451
directed by Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski





6
Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After
directed by Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski


 


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #25 on: September 09, 2012, 01:14:54 pm »









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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #26 on: September 09, 2012, 02:41:50 pm »





http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-wachowskis-cloud-atlas-toronto-20120909,0,3034761.story



Toronto International Film Festival
Wachowskis open up
their 'Cloud Atlas' at last

By Mark Olsen
September 9, 2012, 11:10 a.m.



Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess in "Cloud Atlas." (from the Toronto International Film Festival)


TORONTO -- “Cloud Atlas,” among the most anticipated films of the season, had its world premiere on Saturday night at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. It's directed by the trio of Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski, who wrote the adaptation of the popular 2004 David Mitchell novel.

As the festival’s Cameron Bailey noted in introducing the filmmakers, many declared the novel un-adaptable for the screen, in essence too big, too sprawling, too epic to be harnessed into a single movie. The story traverses six story lines that jump across some 500 years: a sailing ship returning from the Pacific Islands in 1849, a composer in pre-WWII Britain, San Francisco in 1975, the present day, the futuristic 2144 and some unspecified future when things have become a mixture of the primitive and the high-tech.

When the filmmakers took the stage, Andy Wachowski began by saying, “Hello, citizens” before noting, “We’ve never really introduced one of our films before so we weren’t sure quite how to do it. I said to go with – behold!”

Lana Wachowski balked at speaking next, saying, “I’m not ready,” allowing Tykwer to make a few remarks. Then Lana Wachowski stepped to the microphone and said, “The movie speaks a lot about human courage, and the producers obviously had a lot of courage, or stupidness, to get this thing produced.”

She said that the evening was “like in a dream, I can’t believe we’re actually standing here,” adding: “It’s quite an experimental film in many ways.”

In addition to its time-skipping structure, the film's main conceit is to have the same actors appear in multiple roles across the different scenarios, done up in a variety of false noses, wigs and elaborate makeup to alter and at times hide their appearance. The main cast was all there, including Keith David, James D’Arcy, Ben Whishaw, Doona Bae, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Halle Berry and Tom Hanks. When Hanks came onto the stage, he ran down the line of talent bumping fists with everyone as a ballplayer would before the big game.

The end credits of the film show each actor in all of his or her various roles. The audience rose to its feet for an ovation that lasted through the entire cast roll and well beyond.

Early response from the town hall of Twitter was wildly divided on “Cloud Atlas,” with some declaring it “an intense three-hour mental workout with big emotional payoff,” “the most ambitious film I’ve ever seen” or a “deft interweaving of six stories and sincere as all get out,” while others felt it was a “symphonic fiasco of artistry and tackiness,” “five or six movies interrupting each other” or just plain “unbearable.”


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #27 on: September 09, 2012, 02:59:14 pm »

http://www.clickonline.com/movies/review--cloud-atlas/13209/



Review
Cloud Atlas
Epic. Masterful. Brilliant.

By Peter Nelis
9 September, 2012





Having not read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas  (it's in the pile just waiting to be read, I swear), I was completely and utterly ignorant as to what to expect from Lana and Andy Wachowski's big screen adaptation, also directed alongside co-composer Tom Tywker. It wasn't until the first trailer hit our screens earlier this summer that my interest was really piqued. Was it a science fiction movie? Was it a drama? Was it an action flick? It was tough to tell, but one thing's for sure it certainly looked epic.

Fast forward to this year's TIFF and I found myself in a packed theatre bustling with excitement and expectation for the movie, which was fast becoming one of the most talked about movies on the massive TIFF timetable. Still not entirely sure what I was letting myself in for, aside from knowing that the movie had a mammoth 164 minute running time, I approached with a completely open mind.

As I have since learned from those who have read the book, Cloud Atlas  is something of a divisive beast. There are those who love the way it meanders around multiple stories, while others see lack of focus and too many liberties taken by Mitchell, when it comes to the big screen version, practically everything was a delight.

For those of you still unaware of the general idea of Cloud Atlas,  it centres around the idea that we and our loved ones are all connected, in this life, lives that have come before and lives that have yet to be lived. Certainly, it's quite heavy material to ponder, but the way it plays out is nothing short of masterful.

With stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon and Doona Bae all playing multiple roles across the various stories, it can be quite a jarring experience at first. The tales unwind, initially at least, as wholly independent narratives. The faces, the recognizable ones at least, are familiar, but each of the settings, the characters and the time periods vary wildly. From the 1800s through to the distant future, Cloud Atlas  flits between each story seemingly at random, building towards numerous peaks, dipping into pensive troughs and even going so far as to provide us with the occasional dash of humour (mostly courtesy of Broadbent's Timothy Cavendish) without ever feeling laboured.

This in itself is a feat worthy of substantial praise, as there are few movies of close to three hours in length that haven't once had me checking how long was left during more pedestrian moments. It's a testament to the strength of the source material that the directorial trio had to work with that things never for a moment start to grate, while the initially confusing cuts between the different stories and time periods seamlessly start to come together almost effortlessly, building subtle connections at first, before offering enough to connect the remaining dots in the run up to the finale.

Each story has its own distinct flavour, with different stars taking leads here, supporting roles there or cameo appearances elsewhere. There are fantastic turns from Sturgess as Adam Ewing, Hanks as Zachry Bailey, Berry as Luisa Rey and Meronym, Weaving as a distinctly Agent Smith-esque Bill Smoke and the ridiculously scary (you'll need to see it) Nurse Noakes and Bae as Sonmi-451, while Grant and Sarandon have some meaningful peripheral roles that, while not taxing their thespian abilities all that much, still add quite bit to the overall product.

With so many actors playing multiple roles, it was always going to be important that the prosthetics department was up to the task of giving each character a unique look, however things weren't the raging success that they could have been. This is particularly noticeable in the 2144 version of Seoul, where distinctly un-Asian actors are given distinctly strange looking Asian facelifts that don't particularly work. The same is evident when Berry takes the role of a white woman, and Bae a full-blooded American.

Thankfully, there's not quite enough there to cause any major problems for the audience beyond a couple of disbelieving scowls, or amused titters here and there, for Cloud Atlas  very much stands on the strength of its writing, performances and direction.

The action scenes, of which there are a few, are tastefully executed, with just the right emphasis on impactful graphic violence there to shock the audience. Those easily offended may have a bit to get up in arms about here, with the C word and the N word making a few appearances, however without giving too much away about where and when they feature, we found their inclusions played a more important role to the overall narrative than merely being there for shock value.

The comedy moments are delightfully ridiculous, with Broadbent's Cavendish centred parts taking the bulk of the responsibilities on that front, while the overall feeling crafted is one that will tug at the heart strings, get the blood pumping and excite the mind.

Clichéd and all as it may sound, Cloud Atlas  is a picture that genuinely has all the bases covered. It takes a pinch of everything, mixes it with a dash of everything else, throws in some masterful performances, great writing, beautiful scenery and still manages to feel cohesive at all times.

Many will disagree, but for my money it's little short of a masterpiece; three hours of brilliance with very few missteps. Like the movie itself, five stars just isn’t enough.


SCORE:



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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #28 on: September 09, 2012, 03:30:31 pm »

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/toronto-2012-cloud-atlas-tom-hanks-halle-berry-jim-broadbent-wachowski-tom-tykwer-368925





Toronto 2012:
'Cloud Atlas' Earns Lengthy
Standing Ovation,
But Are Oscars in the Cards?

The highly-anticipated film by the Wachowski Siblings
and Tom Tykwer, which features a massive ensemble
cast, will open nationwide on Oct. 26


by Scott Feinberg
8:28 AM PDT 9/9/2012







TORONTO -- Cloud Atlas,  a mind-blowing film adapted from David Mitchell's best-selling 2004 novel and directed by Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (the siblings responsible for The Matrix  films) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run ), had its highly-anticipated world premiere last night at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film, which will be released theatrically by Warner Bros. on Oct. 26, was greeted with a loud and lengthy standing ovation throughout the portion of its credits that recognized the filmmakers and the members of the film's large ensemble cast, who each played multiple roles in multiple eras in the time-traveling film (and virtually all of whom were in attendance). They include Oscar winners Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Jim Broadbent, plus Hugh Grant, James D'Arcy, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, Xun Zhou and Doona Bae.

Any film that attempted to tackle Mitchell's 500-plus page tome -- a meditation on karma, past lives, and freedom that jumps across the centuries (past, present, and Twilight Zone -ish future) and genres (drama, comedy, sci-fi, and everything inbetween) -- would inherently be ambitious and daring. This one is that, to the extreme. It took years to come together. It was made on a budget of over $100 million, a portion of which was furnished by Warner Bros., but most of which was raised independently (making it the most expensive indie film of all-time). And it comes only six years after a similarly-structured film with a big budget, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain  (2006), face-planted at the box-office. In Hollywood, people rarely venture into territory on which others have failed before, but -- as chronicled in a recent artlcle in The New Yorker  -- there was no stopping these filmmakers after they encountered Mitchell's book.
 
There are positive and negative effects of jumping back-and-forth between an 1849 sea voyage, 1936 Cambridge, 1970s San Francisco, 2012 London, 2144 "Neo Seoul," and the 2300s. On the former count, it was very appealing to the actors to get to play so many different parts within a single film, and to the makeup artists who transformed them for each, changing their ages, races, and even genders (which is particularly interesting because, in real-life, Lana was, until recently, Larry).
 
On the latter side of things, however, it is headache-inducing to try to keep up with everything that's going on in each storyline, and, even if one can, it is hard to get terribly invested in any one of them because it's always usually just a matter of a few minutes before it is set aside for another one. (Then again, this might be the first film perfectly tailor-made for the ADD generation -- or merely the latest for those who partake in mind-altering recreational habits.)
 
Ultimately, connections between these stories, which initially seemed random and unrelated, become apparent. Without spoiling anything for a first-time viewer, I can say that thematically, at least, they are each about controlling and being controlled, and about the desire for freedom that rests in every soul.
 
Like The Matrix,  this film's points are made with stunning visuals (though none as striking as the slow-mo bullets scenes in that film) and laugh-out-loud humor ("Official cause of accident: pussy," "You won't believe what people will pay to luck up their parents," and even a Soylent Green reference), if also a bit of politics (it goes after Big Oil, highlights the dangers of nuclear power, and subtly tweaks the media and Israel -- "the press is blaming the PLO") and heavy-handed philosophy ("All boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended... if only one can conceive of doing so," "The weak are meat and the strong do eat," "From womb to tomb we are bound by others," "A single drop in an ocean? What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?").
 
I can't say that I loved the sum of its parts, but I was still blown away by many of the parts themselves -- the performances (although it's hard to single any one or two people out when everyone had so much to do), the editing (by master juggler Alexander Berner), art direction/production design (who must have felt like they were responsible for many movies), visual effects (coordinated by a team of over 100 people), especially the makeup (anyone that can make Hanks look like himself in Castaway,  Mike Myers in Austin Powers,  Russell Crowe in Gladiator,  and Elton John, all in one film, deserves heaps of praise). I suspect that Oscar voters will feel similarly.


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #29 on: September 09, 2012, 03:48:11 pm »




http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/09/09/toronto-film-festival-cloud-atlas-premiere-with-halle-berry-tom-hanks-wows-crowd-cast-directors-get-standing-ovation/


Toronto Film Festival:
'Cloud Atlas' premiere lands
an emotional standing ovation
for cast, including
Halle Berry, Tom Hanks


Solvej Schou
Sep 9 2012 01:42 AM ET





How many new movies are truly epic these days? The kind of films that literally span the world: generations, time, distance, people?
 
Saturday night’s packed Cloud Atlas  premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival proved the nail-bitingly anticipated film — directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run ) and Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix ) and based on David Mitchell’s novel — to be just that: utterly, wonderfully epic. After the final credits rolled, following a dense, trippy, funny, fierce visual ride through 500 years, the crowd not only clapped and cheered, they stood up one by one and gave a 10-minute standing ovation to the movie’s cast and crew, facing them head on. It was the kind of moment that felt, in the scheme of a festival, epic.
 
Sci-fi and realistic, simple and sprawling, clocking in at close to three hours, the movie follows multiple story lines and characters played by a thick pack of actors, including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant, and many more. Almost every actor in the film plays three to six different characters within an almost mind-exploding weave of locales, from the Pacific Islands in 1849 to San Francisco in 1973, 2012 London, apocalyptic Korea in 2144, and a primal, futuristic society in a place called Big Isle years beyond that. Berry, who looks forever young, takes on six different roles, from a saucy, fluffy-haired journalist in the ’70s to an almost unrecognizable light-eyed British wife and an outsider with electrode-looking attachments snaking through her face, with the help of excellent makeup.
 
The premiere itself felt like one big emotional party, given the more than a dozen cast members in attendance. Lana Wachowski, previously Larry, was giddy and teary on stage, introducing the movie with her brother and Tykwer. She looked straight out of Run Lola Run,  with pink and red dread locks, wearing a black dress and tights. Berry and Sarandon both went masculine-feminine in fitted pants suits (Berry’s patterned purple, and Sarandon’s blue). Other celebrities even made sure to snag prime seats to the premiere, including Bryan Cranston, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (fresh off his Toronto Looper  premiere on Thursday), and Julie Benz.
 
“We’ve never really introduced this film before. I thought to go with ‘BEHOLD,’” joked Andy Wachowski to the crowd. Added his sister, who said it took years to get funding for what she called an “experimental” film, “The movie really speaks to human courage. … The reason we’re here is because of the courage and talent of this unbelievable cast.”
 
The crowd especially loved Hanks and Broadbent, who would squint his face into a scowl as composer Vivian Ayrs in pre World War II England, then get the most laughs as spunky, sly present day Timothy Cavendish, grinning like a loopy chipmunk, with his villainous brother played by Grant, whose prosthetic jowls resembled a fleshy blowfish. Another Grant part, as the kind of dirt, blood, and war-paint covered warrior you don’t want to meet in a dark forest, will shock some people. Silent, but deadly.
 
Hanks threw his acting weight around with the most relish fans have seen in a while. Sweaty and red-nosed as a greedy doctor in the 1800s, buff and covered with miniature face markings as hallucination-prone Zachry in the future, and best as totally ballsy, violent, head-shaved Brit writer Dermot Hoggins. The audience cracked up when normally demure Hanks appeared as Hoggins on-screen. Hello Oscar nomination?
 
When fans finally returned their love of the movie with that long standing ovation, the actors and directors became visibly overwhelmed. Sarandon grabbed Andy Wachowski in an enormous hug. James D’Arcy started to tear up, and Doona Bae — the Korean actress whose big, black eyes and striking heart-shaped face encompass one of the movie’s most memorable characters, a revolutionary-in-the-making in futuristic Korea (very Matrix -y) — glided out of the theater with a trail of admirers behind her.


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #30 on: September 09, 2012, 04:00:00 pm »


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.


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Offline Meryl

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #31 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)
Ich bin ein Brokie...

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #32 on: September 09, 2012, 04:14:11 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)




Thanks, Meryl!

It's going to be a great Fall!

 ;)  ;D

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #33 on: September 09, 2012, 06:08:45 pm »

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.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #34 on: September 10, 2012, 08:00:39 am »

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


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #35 on: September 10, 2012, 09:04:58 am »



http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/toronto-gets-a-look-at-cloud-atlas/





Toronto Gets a Look at
Cloud Atlas
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
September 8, 2012, 11:53 pm



Susan Sarandon and Tom Hanks in “Cloud Atlas.”


TORONTO — How to describe “Cloud Atlas”?  Picture “Brazil” meets “The Matrix” meets “The English Patient” meets “Forrest Gump,” with a little bit of “The Hobbit,” which we still haven’t seen, thrown in.

You will have to decide for yourself whether it works. It’s that kind of picture.

But the crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival, where “Cloud Atlas” had its world premiere on Saturday night, was filled with believers.

The standing ovation went on and on and on. Granted, the audience at the Princess of Wales theater was heavily larded with friends of the family. The three directors — Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski — were on hand, along with at least 17 cast members, including Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, the two of whom account for a dozen roles.

But enthusiasm of this sort can’t be faked. As the credits rolled, perhaps 700 people on the theater’s ground floor (we couldn’t see the balcony crowd) rose and applauded, as the minutes and myriad credits rolled by. Eventually, they formed surrounding the filmmakers. After a pause, the applause picked up again, and got loud, as Ms. Wachowski, with a shock of fire-engine red hair, hugged and kissed anyone in sight.

Is this the stuff of Oscars? Who knows?

Is it a force to be reckoned with in the coming months? Absolutely.

Based on a novel by David Mitchell, “Cloud Atlas” criss-crosses through time, multiple stories and a wild mélange of personalities in an epic exploration of human existence. As they left the theater, what movie industry veterans like to call “civilians”—i.e., people not in the industry—could be heard sorting out film references and who was actually who in the movie.

Before the movie  started, the  directors gathered onstage for what proved to be an antic performance. Mr. Tykwer, in the middle, played the straight man. Mr. Wachowski, on one side, took photos from the stage and was clearly having a good time. “Behold!” was his suggested introduction for the picture, which cost $100 million and has been in the works for years.

Ms. Wachowski speculated about whether it was brilliance or “stupidness” that moved producers to support the film.

Either way, “Cloud Atlas” it made some noise on Saturday night.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #36 on: September 10, 2012, 03:27:20 pm »

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/9533411/Toronto-Film-Festival-2012-Cloud-Atlas-review.html



Review:
Toronto Film Festival 2012:
Cloud Atlas
Tim Robey reviews Tom Hanks in
Cloud Atlas  at the Toronto Film Festival.


By Tim Robey, Film Critic
6:06PM BST 10 Sep 2012



Tom Hanks as Zachry and Halle Berry as Meronym in a scene from Cloud Atlas.
 


Cloud Atlas  is going to be far and away the most divisive film of 2012, but I don't think it's possible to fault it for shortage of chutzpah. David Mitchell's 2005 novel – pipped to the Booker prize by Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty,  though in any other year it would surely have won – is a virtuoso plate-spinning exercise, an addictive feat of nested storytelling, and a sprawling treatise about human capacities for removing and reclaiming freedom. It's amazing they've tried to adapt it at all, let alone as a single, near-three hour picture. In the hands of co-writers and directors the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer there was a danger of it mutating into a monstrous ballooning folly. So even more amazing is that it strays frequently in that direction but never quite bursts.

The movie, shown at the Toronto Film Festival, offers such a mad array of plot threads, over six timeframes from the mid-19th century to the distant, post-apocalyptic future, so much scenic diversity, and such a smorgasbord of out-there performances from a multitasking ensemble, that it's impossible not to prefer some aspects of it to others. If you don't like Tom Hanks playing a tattooed island primitive orating at a campfire, there's always Tom Hanks as a scheming ship's doctor with ratty beard and ghastly teeth, or Tom Hanks as a grasping 1930s flop-house landlord, Tom Hanks as a blond nuclear scientist wracking his conscience, or Tom Hanks as (gulp) a gold-chain-wearing East End gangster memoirist flinging his fiercest critic over a balcony.

And if you don't like Tom Hanks at all, it's not the end of the world (though that's a subject often on Mitchell's mind). He may narrowly get the most screen time, but the whole principal cast play multiple roles – some three or four, some as many as six. This isn't structurally dictated by the book, and the movie proves inconsistent, verging on enjoyably random, in how it parcels out this boisterous sketch-book of performances. There's continuity here and there: Hugo Weaving, probably still best-known as that proliferating evil suit from The Matrix,  struts his stuff with typical hammy abandon as a sixfold baddie.

The main structural change is the intercutting of the six stories, which sat apart in Mitchell's book and pivoted back on each other in the middle. The movie makes a major virtue of its slice-and-dice approach, cutting for effect, varying the pace with flair, and underlining Mitchell's points about the cyclical problems of our race: this isn't subtly done in the slightest, but subtlety is hardly ever the name of the game here. Momentum is. The weaker sections (there are two main offenders) are rarely allowed to annoy us for too long, and even the comical guessing-games of who's behind each new make-up job provide jolts of weirdness and novelty. Yes, that really is Hugh Grant as a futuristic Korean pervert, and again as a marauding demonic tribesman in face-paint, and several other lip-smacking antagonists who aren't mute. (He's clearly having a blast, and nails his accent work better than anyone.)

The episodes tend to stand or fall by how well their protagonists are cast: Ben Whishaw, sparingly used in the other periods, is snugly ideal as a waspish composer's Tom Ripley-esque amanuensis in the 1930s. Largely escaping prosthetics (or gender-swapping), Jim Broadbent is always very obviously Jim Broadbent (and spikily effective as the composer), but comes into his own as shambolic publisher Timothy Cavendish in the present-day bit. Some of Mitchell's most biting comedic writing may be a little dulled here, but the Ealing Comedy-style breakout from an old people's home is frisky, crowd-pleasing stuff. Halle Berry whites up ever so weirdly as a Jewish socialite, but not for long, and she's a minor revelation as the intrepid journalist in charge of the 1970s San Francisco section, a China Syndrome  knock-off with equally good James D'Arcy as an ageing whistleblower (and link to the previous section). Meanwhile, Korean actress Doona Bae is pretty wonderful as Sonmi-451, a fabricant (clone) waitress in the New Seoul of 2144, talked out of her pre-programmed servitude by a rebel-philosopher lover (Jim Sturgess).

Chronologically speaking, the outer time-frames are the dullest, the far-future one in particular failing because Mitchell's energetic stab at science-fantasy patois, handed to Hanks and Berry, can't survive its transplant off the page. It's a shame that this story's required to frame the movie, supplying a cod-mystical overlay that does its internal ideas a disservice. Complaints that it's all just one big congested barrel-load of kitschy genre clichés may come at the picture thick and fast – just wait – but Mitchell's whole project was pastiching literary formulae to play with the hand-me-down nature of storytelling, so the Wachowskis and Tykwer surely deserve a pass on this. There's plenty to argue with, more to scoff at, and some uninitiated viewers may well choose to check out of engagement early. But it's also a dizzily generous ride, scored with real grandeur, and even its silliest elements are guilty pleasures.


Cloud Atlas dir: Lana and Andy Wachowski, Tom Tykwer;
stars: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw



"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #37 on: September 10, 2012, 06:00:59 pm »


Click this and let it load; then just--watch. Eerie!



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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #38 on: September 10, 2012, 06:52:20 pm »
Mesmerizing!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #39 on: September 10, 2012, 07:44:08 pm »



When a European investor said she would contribute to the project, then withdrew her support in a text message, the directors were desperate. But then, in the winter of 2010, the Wachowskis sent the script to James Schamus, the head of Focus Features, NBCUniversal’s art-house-films division. Schamus called them the next day and offered to handle international sales for the movie. Reading the script, he told them, had brought back what it was like to see “2001” for the first time. Schamus teaches film theory and history at Columbia University. In his office there, the level of his excitement not quite compatible with the bow tie he was wearing, he told me, “The true genius of the screenplay is that it’s ridiculously narrative. They’ve managed to keep almost every little block of storytelling a cliffhanger. They’ve managed to make you feel the kind of propulsive movement that makes you want to keep coming back.”




http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/10/120910fa_fact_hemon?currentPage=all



Onward and Upward With the Arts
 Beyond the Matrix
The Wachowskis travel to even
more mind-bending realms.

 
by Aleksandar Hemon
September 10, 2012



The new film from the siblings Lana and Andy Wachowski, co-directed
with Tom Tykwer, is an adaptation of the novel “Cloud Atlas.” Their
model was “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a movie they first saw as children.
Photograph by Dan Winters.




O n the monitor screen, Tom Hanks’s eyes, in extreme closeup, flickered through a complicated sequence of emotions: hatred, fear, anger, doubt. “Cut!” Lana Wachowski shouted. The crew on Stage 9 at Babelsberg Studio, near Berlin, erupted in a din of professional efficacy, preparing for the next shot, while Hanks returned to his chair to sip coffee from an NPR cup. Lana and her brother, Andy, who are best known for writing and directing the “Matrix” trilogy, were shooting “Cloud Atlas,” an adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 best-selling novel of the same name.

The novel has six story lines, and the Wachowskis and their close friend the German director Tom Tykwer, with whom they’d written the script, had divided them up. They were shooting at Babelsberg, using the same actors, who shuttled between soundstages, but Tykwer had an unplanned day off. Halle Berry had broken her foot while on location in Mallorca and he needed to wait for her full recovery to shoot a chase scene. And now there was another problem: the actor Ralph Riach, who played a small but crucial role in one of the story lines that Tykwer was working on, had fallen ill and been hospitalized, and his state was progressively worsening. Tykwer had been on the phone with Riach, and the prognosis was, at best, unpredictable. Tykwer, with a bad cold and a large scarf around his neck which resembled a Renaissance millstone collar, had stopped by the Wachowskis’ set to discuss the situation.
 
The filmmakers huddled near the monitor and in low, concerned voices debated whether to wait for Riach to recover or to hastily find a replacement and reshoot the scenes he’d already appeared in. The decision: they would wait, even if it meant prolonging the shooting schedule. “The rocket ship is falling apart,” Lana said afterward, shaking her head. “We’re sitting in this capsule, can’t get out, only one engine working—and we have to make it to the end.”

In the Wachowskis’ work, the forces of evil are often overwhelmingly powerful, inflicting misery on humans, who maintain their faith until they’re saved by an unexpected miracle. The story of the making of “Cloud Atlas” fits this narrative trajectory pretty well.



I n the spring of 2005, Lana and Andy Wachowski were at Babelsberg running the second unit for the director James McTeigue’s “V for Vendetta,” which they also wrote and co-produced. Between scenes, Lana (who is transgender and, until 2002, was called Larry) noticed that Natalie Portman, the star, was engrossed in a copy of “Cloud Atlas.” Portman raved about the book, so Lana began reading it, too. She and Andy, who is two and a half years younger, have retained a childhood habit of sharing books, and soon both of them were obsessively parsing the novel and calling friends to insist that they read it.
 
Mitchell’s book is not a simple read, with its interlocking stories and a multitude of characters, distributed across centuries and continents. Each story line has a different central character: Adam Ewing, a young American who sails home after a visit to an island in the South Pacific, in the mid-nineteenth century; Robert Frobisher, a feckless but talented Englishman, who becomes the amanuensis to a genius composer in Flanders, in the nineteen-thirties; Luisa Rey, a gossip-rag journalist who rakes the muck of the energy industry in nineteen-seventies California; Timothy Cavendish, a vanity-press publisher who finds himself held captive in a nursing home in present-day England; Sonmi~451, a genetically modified clone who gains her humanity in a futuristic Korea, ravaged by consumerism; and Zachry, a Pacific Islander who struggles to survive in the even more distant future, after “the Fall,” which seems to have endangered the planet and eradicated much of humankind. These characters are connected by an intricate network of leitmotifs—a comet–shaped birthmark crops up frequently, for instance—and by their ability to somehow escape the fate that has been prepared for them. The book’s dizzying plot twists are infused with lush linguistic imagination. For the Zachry sections, Mitchell constructed post-apocalyptic mutations of the English language, which effectively force readers to translate as they go.

“As I was writing ‘Cloud Atlas,’ I thought, It’s a shame this is unfilmable,” Mitchell told me. But the Wachowskis found themselves instantly, and profoundly, attracted to the idea of adapting the book for the screen. They were drawn to the scale of its ideas, to its lack of cynicism, and to the dramatic possibilities inherent in the book’s recurring moments of hope. They also wanted to work on something with Tykwer, whose 1998 movie, “Run Lola Run,” they’d loved (“our long-lost brother,” Lana called him), and “Cloud Atlas” seemed like the right project to unite their cinematic sensibilities.

In 2006, at the Wachowskis’ prompting, Tykwer took the German translation of “Cloud Atlas” with him on a vacation to the South of France. “It was a mistake,” he told me, with a laugh. He sat on the beach reading for days, “stressed and inspired” by the book; when his wife finally persuaded him to go on a day trip, he made her pull the car over so that he could finish a chapter. The moment he was done with the novel, he called Lana in San Francisco, where it was the middle of the night, and breathlessly declared his commitment to the plan.

He and the Wachowskis, who were in the middle of other projects, had to wait a couple of years before turning to “Cloud Atlas.” But finally, in February, 2009, they met in Costa Rica, where they had rented a secluded house near the ocean. Before they began to work on a script, they acknowledged that it might prove impossible to make “Cloud Atlas” into a movie, and that they might not be able to work together. “Writing is the most intimate process in the artistic development,” Tykwer said, and there was no way to anticipate how things would go. Then they got started: boogie-boarding in the morning, working the rest of the day, then preparing dinner together. Andy’s “world-famous” chicken roasted on a beer can was often the main dish on the menu. “It was like a childhood camp,” Lana said.
 
The main challenge was the novel’s convoluted structure: the chapters are ordered chronologically until the middle of the book, at which point the sequence reverses; the book thus begins and ends in the nineteenth century. This couldn’t work in a film. “It would be impossible to introduce a new story ninety minutes in,” Lana said. The filmmakers’ initial idea was to establish a connective trajectory between Dr. Goose, a devious physician who may be poisoning Ewing, in the earliest story line, and Zachry, the tribesman on whose moral choices the future of civilization hinges, after the Fall. They had no idea what to do with all the other story lines and characters. They broke the book down into hundreds of scenes, copied them onto colored index cards, and spread the cards on the floor, with each color representing a different character or time period. The house looked like “a Zen garden of index cards,” Lana said. At the end of the day, they’d pick up the cards in an order that they hoped would work as the arc of the film. Reading from the cards, Lana would then narrate the rearranged story. The next day, they’d do it again.

It was on the day before they left Costa Rica that they had a breakthrough: they could convey the idea of eternal recurrence, which was so central to the novel, by having the same actors appear in multiple story lines—“playing souls, not characters,” in Tykwer’s words. This would allow the narrative currents of the book to merge and to be separate at the same time. On the flight home, Lana and Andy carried the stack of rubber-banded cards they would soon convert into the first draft of the screenplay, which they then sent to Tykwer. The back-and-forth between the three filmmakers continued, the viability of their collaboration still not fully confirmed.
 
By August, the trio had a completed draft to send to Mitchell. The Wachowskis had had a difficult experience adapting “V for Vendetta,” from a comic book whose author, Alan Moore, hated the very idea of Hollywood adaptation and berated the project publicly. “We decided in Costa Rica that—as hard and as long as it might take to write this script—if David didn’t like it, we were just going to kill the project,” Lana said.

Mitchell, who lives in the southwest of Ireland, agreed to meet the filmmakers in Cork. In “a seaside hotel right out of ‘Fawlty Towers,’ ” as Lana described it, they recounted for the author the painstaking process of disassembling the novel and reassembling it into the script he’d read. “It’s become a bit of a joke that they know my book much more intimately than I do,” Mitchell wrote to me. They explained their plan to unify the narratives by having actors play transmigrating souls. “This could be one of those movies that are better than the book!” Mitchell exclaimed at the end of the pitch. The pact was sealed with pints of Murphy’s stout at a local pub.



I n June, 2011, the Wachowskis and Tykwer were in Berlin, working on preproduction for “Cloud Atlas.” In the living room of Lana’s apartment on Unter den Linden, where a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” was being used as a doorstop, the three directors talked about their passion for the movie. Andy, who was forty-three, was wearing a washed-out T-shirt and a pair of Crocs with a South Korean flag on them, which went nicely with the middle-aged grunginess of his shaved scalp. Lana, who was about to turn forty-six, had a full head of pink dreadlocks. Tykwer, at forty-six, was wiry and energetic, with striking green eyes. The three resembled a former alternative-rock band—the Cinemaniacs—overdue for a reunion tour.

“ ‘Cloud Atlas’ is a twenty-first-century novel,” Lana said. “It represents a midpoint between the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.” As she spoke, she was screwing and unscrewing two halves of some imaginary thing—its future and its past—in her hands. If the movie worked, she continued, it would allow the filmmakers to “reconnect to that feeling we had when we were younger, when we saw films that were complex and mysterious and ambiguous. You didn’t know everything instantly.”

Andy agreed. “ ‘Cloud Atlas’ is our getting back to the spectacle of the sixties and seventies, the touchstone movies,” he said, rubbing his bald dome like a magic lantern.

The model for their vision, they explained, was Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which the Wachowskis had first seen when Lana, then Larry, was ten and Andy seven.

The siblings grew up in a close-knit family in Beverly, a middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Their parents—Ron, a businessman, and Lynne, a nurse—were film enthusiasts. They dragged Larry and Andy and their two sisters to any movie they found interesting, ignoring the parental-advisory labels. “We would have ‘movie orgies’—double features, triple features, drive-ins,” Andy recalled. “I was so young that I didn’t know what the word ‘orgy’ meant, but I knew that, whatever it was, I liked it.”
 
Lana initially hated “2001,” and was perplexed by the mysterious presence of the black monolith. “That’s a symbol,” Ron explained. Lana told me, “That simple sentence went into my brain and rearranged things in such an unbelievable way that I don’t think I’ve been the same since. Something clicked inside. ‘2001’ is one of the reasons I’m a filmmaker.”
 
Perhaps not coincidentally, Lana’s gender consciousness started to emerge at around the same time. In third grade, Larry transferred to a Catholic school, where boys and girls wore different uniforms and stood in separate lines before class. “I have a formative memory of walking through the girls’ line and hesitating, knowing that my clothes didn’t match,” Lana told me. “But as I continued on I felt I did not belong in the other line, so I just stopped in between them. I stood for a long moment with everyone staring at me, including the nun. She told me to get in line. I was stuck—I couldn’t move. I think some unconscious part of me figured I was exactly where I belonged: betwixt.” Larry was often bullied for his betwixtness. “As a result, I hid and found tremendous solace in books, vastly preferring imagined worlds to this world,” Lana said.
 
It was around the time that Larry and Andy saw “2001” that they first directed together: on cassette tape, they read a play inspired by the “Shadow” comic books and radio programs. Soon, they were writing and drawing their own comics. Their creative process, Lana said, “hasn’t essentially changed since.” The brothers were inseparable. “Larry would come up with a crazy idea,” Ron Wachowski recalled, “to hang ropes from a tree and make a swing or trapeze, and Andy would be the person to grab hold of the rope, climb, and crash down.” The boys spent sleepless weekends playing Dungeons & Dragons in the attic, coming downstairs only to raid the fridge. “In D. & D., you have nothing but your imagination,” Lana said. “It asks all of the players to try to imagine the same space, the same image. This is very much the process of making a film.” The Wachowski brothers and some friends even wrote a three-hundred-page game of their own, called High Adventure.  “We were often frustrated by genre differentiation, whether it was in games or in fiction,” Lana said. “In our naïve and foolish innocence, we dared to imagine a utopian world where all genres could intermix.”

In high school, Larry and Andy started a house-painting business to earn money for college. (Their only previous experience was a pantheon of superheroes that they had painted on their aunt’s garage door.) Larry took out a loan and went to Bard, but dropped out after a couple of years. “I thought the teachers had to be way smarter than me to justify the loan,” Lana told me, “but some of them hadn’t read half the books I’d read.” He moved to Portland, Oregon, to write, working on, among other things, an adaptation of William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride.” (Having finished the script, he cold-called Goldman to ask for the rights; Goldman hung up on him.) After Andy dropped out of Emerson College in his sophomore year, the brothers reunited in Chicago, where they started a construction business, learning most of the skills on the job. They once built an elevator shaft without any plans or previous experience, having projected unquestionable confidence to the people who’d hired them—not an unuseful talent in the film business.

All the while, the Wachowskis kept on writing: in the early nineties, Larry went to New York to knock on the doors of the comic-book publishers. He managed to get himself and Andy hired by Marvel Comics, to write for the series “Ectokid,” which was drawn by Steve Skroce. The brothers also worked on screenplays of their own. “Carnivore,” their first completed script—in which a soup kitchen feeds the poor by chopping up rich people and cooking them in an addictive stew—was sent out to ten addresses, selected from an agent handbook. Two agents offered to sign the brothers. In the end, they went with Lawrence Mattis, who is now their manager. These days, the mention of “Carnivore”—which never became a movie—makes the Wachowskis chuckle, but Mattis remembers “a surety to their writing that really popped.”

The blockbuster-film producer Dino De Laurentiis optioned the Wachowskis’ next screenplay, “Assassins,” while they were renovating their parents’ house. De Laurentiis entertained them with champagne and lascivious stories about beautiful actresses, and then sold the script to Warner Bros. for five times what he’d paid. According to Lana, substantial revisions by a hired writer removed “all the subtext, the visual metaphors . . . the idea that within our world there are moral pocket universes that operate differently.” When the movie was made, in 1995 (directed by Richard Donner, of “Lethal Weapon” fame, and starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, and Julianne Moore), the Wachowskis tried to get their names taken off the credits but failed. Still, the script earned them a deal with Warner Bros. They finished the work on their parents’ house, quit construction, and became full-time filmmakers.



B y 1994, the Wachowskis had completed the first script for the “Matrix” trilogy. They’d had the idea while working on a comic-book proposal. They were thinking, Lana recalled, “about ‘real worlds’ and ‘worlds within worlds’ and the problem of virtual reality in movies, and then it hit us: What if this world was the virtual world?” The trilogy is set in a dystopian future where machines exploit human energy by keeping people perpetually comatose in pods, while placating their minds with a continuous simulated reality called the Matrix. A small group of liberated humans—Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity—fight back, through confrontations with the virtual Agent Smith, and the stark darkness of the machine-controlled world is countered by the feeble light of human solidarity. “When I first read ‘The Matrix,’ ” Mattis told me, “I called them all excited because they’d written a script about Descartes.”

According to Mattis, the Wachowskis were “the hot flavor of the month” when he sent the “Matrix” screenplay out, in 1994. “But then everyone read the script and passed. Nobody got it,” he said. “To this day, I think Warner Bros. bought it half out of the relationship with them and half because they thought something was there.” The brothers had spent two years writing the script, and they insisted on directing the movie. To prove themselves, they took on a smaller project first: “Bound,” with Gina Gershon, Jennifer Tilly, and Joe Pantoliano, a lesbian thriller with a happy ending. “Bound” convinced Warner Bros. The Wachowskis shot “The Matrix” in a hundred and eighteen days. To make the movie, the brothers and their visual-effects team developed a number of new techniques, most famously “bullet time,” which allowed them to create the effect of a bullet progressing through space in slow motion, by using virtual cinematography to manipulate a series of still shots taken along the bullet’s trajectory.

“The Matrix,” which opened on March 31, 1999, took in nearly thirty million dollars in its first weekend. Eventually, it earned close to half a billion dollars worldwide, and four Academy Awards. Audiences responded to its cool, ultramodern style while rooting for its heroes, whose only reliable power was their old-fashioned humanity. “The Wachowskis have a mythic sensibility,” David Mitchell told me, “consciously clothing ancient stories in new dress, language, and form.” The movie’s philosophical underpinnings won it a cult following, as well as numerous academic studies, with such titles as “Neo-Materialism and the Death of the Subject” and “Fate, Freedom, and Foreknowledge.” The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has written about the “Matrix” trilogy, and titled his book on the responses to 9/11 “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”—a quotation from the movie, which is, in turn, an allusion to a line from Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation.”

The two former construction workers from Chicago were suddenly stars of the global movie industry. In the contract they signed with Warner Bros., however, the Wachowskis included a no-press clause. Avoiding the scrutinizing glare of the industry press, they gave no interviews and did no publicity; they stayed loyal to Chicago, close to their family. “My desire for anonymity is rooted in two things,” Andy told me in an e-mail. “An aversion to celebrity (I like walking into a comics shop and nobody knowing who I am) and the fact that there’s something nicely egalitarian about anonymity. You know, equality and shit.”



W ith the “Matrix” rage in full swing, the Wachowskis moved to Australia to work on the second and third parts of the trilogy. “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions,” released in May and November of 2003, respectively, earned more than a billion dollars worldwide, but the production process was notoriously difficult; the shooting alone took nearly three hundred days. In addition to the usual stresses of movie-making—constructing a world from scratch; managing hundreds of people; dealing with actorly egos—the crew had to cope with tragedy. Two actors died before filming all their scenes. Then a grip committed suicide. At the insistence of his boss, the grip’s girlfriend went to Bali with a friend to recuperate, only to witness her friend’s death in the 2002 terrorist attack there, in which Islamist militants’ bombs killed more than two hundred people.
 
At the same time, Larry, who had separated from his wife, was dealing with depression and struggling with his gender situation. During the production, he told Andy that the reason he went swimming in the bay every morning, rather than in the pool, was that he was half hoping to be hit by a boat or attacked by a shark. “For years, I couldn’t even say the words ‘transgendered’ or ‘transsexual,’ ” Lana told me. “When I began to admit it to myself, I knew I would eventually have to tell my parents and my brother and my sisters. This fact would inject such terror into me that I would not sleep for days. I developed a plan that I worked out with my therapist. It was going to take three years. Maybe five. A couple of weeks into the plan, my mom called.”
 
Sensing that something was wrong, Lynne Wachowski flew to Australia the following day. The morning after her arrival, Larry told her, “I’m transgender. I’m a girl.” Lynne didn’t know what he meant. “I was there when you were born,” she said. “There’s a part of me that is a girl,” Larry insisted. “I’m still working at that.” Lynne had been distraught on the plane, worried that she might lose her son. “Instead, I’ve just found out there is more of you,” she said. Ron, who soon flew in, too, offered his unconditional support, as did Larry’s sisters and Andy, who had suspected for a while.

A couple of days later, the Wachowski family went out to dinner in Sydney. Larry was now renamed Lana and was dressed as a woman. A waiter referred to Lana and Lynne as “ladies.” The next day, Lana showed up at work in her new identity, as though nothing had happened.

But the news got out, and the blogosphere was abuzz with rumors. Among other things, the Wachowskis’ reclusiveness was now interpreted in terms of Lana’s gender identity. When Lynne and Ron returned to Chicago, reporters were camping in front of their house, the brazen ones ringing the bell every once in a while.
 
Eventually, the press retreated. Lana completed her divorce and met and fell in love with the woman who became her second wife, in 2009. “I chose to change my exteriority to bring it closer into alignment with my interiority,” she told me. “My biggest fears were all about losing my family. Once they accepted me, everything else has been a piece of cake. I know that many people are dying to know if I have a surgically constructed vagina or not, but I prefer to keep this information between my wife and me.”
 


I first met the Wachowskis in December, 2009, when they were in the midst of their struggle to find financing for “Cloud Atlas.” Uncomfortable with being idle while they waited, they were also developing “Cobalt Neural 9,” a project that had grown out of their frustration with the Bush Presidency and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Curious about how the early aughts would be perceived in the future, the Wachowskis imagined a documentary film made eight decades from now, looking back at the country’s plunge into imperial self-delusion. In order to write a script for “Cobalt Neural 9,” the Wachowskis were filming interviews with people, from Arianna Huffington to Cornel West, who they thought might be able to help them elucidate their concerns. I was invited to participate and was costumed to look as if I were speaking in 2090. Dressed like a Bosnian Isaac Hayes (with sparkling lights attached to my skull, a psychedelic shirt, and a New Age pendant), I ranted about the malignant idiocy of the Bush regime. Lana sat next to the camera, asking most of the questions, while Andy was somewhere beyond the lights, his voice occasionally booming from the void.

Usually, I experience an erosion of confidence around famous people—an inescapable conviction that they know more than I do, because the world is somehow more available to them. But I got along splendidly with the Wachowskis. Seemingly untouched by Hollywood, they did not project the jadedness that is a common symptom of stardom. Lana was one of the best-read people I’d ever met; Andy had a wry sense of humor; they were both devout Bulls fans. We also shared a militant belief in the art of narration and a passionate love for Chicago.
 
Eventually, I asked them to consider letting me write about the making of “Cloud Atlas.” They talked it over and decided to do it. By then, they’d sent the script to every major studio, after Warner Bros. had declined to exercise its option. Everyone passed. “Cloud Atlas” seemed too challenging, too complex. The Wachowskis reminded Warner Bros. that “The Matrix” had also been deemed too demanding, and that it had taken them nearly three years to get the green light on it. But the best the studio could do for “Cloud Atlas” was to keep open the possibility of buying the North American distribution rights, payment for which would cover a portion of the projected budget.

Since Costa Rica, the Wachowskis and Tykwer had viewed the dramatic trajectory of the script as an evolution from the sinister avarice of Dr. Goose to the essential decency of Zachry, with both characters embodying something of the Everyman. Tom Hanks, they agreed, was the “ultimate Everyman of our age.” “Our Jimmy Stewart,” Lana called him. They sent their script to Hanks, and he agreed to meet with them. On the way to his office in Santa Monica, the siblings received a phone call from their agent, who told them that Warner Bros. had decided to hold off on a distribution deal. “Cloud Atlas” had been subjected to an economic-modelling process and the numbers had come back too low. The template that had been used, according to the Wachowskis, was Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain” (2006), because it had three autonomous story lines set in different eras; “The Fountain,” which had a mixed critical response, had lost almost twenty million dollars.
 
“The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies,” Lana told me. “So, as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modelled.” The template for “The Matrix,” the Wachowskis recalled, had been “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 Keanu Reeves flop.
 
In the parking lot outside Hanks’s office, the Wachowskis and Tykwer shook off the bad news before going in. Hanks had read the screenplay, though not the book. “The script was not user-friendly,” he told me. “The demands it put upon the audience and everybody, the business risk, were off the scale.” But he was interested in working with the directors and intrigued by the challenge of playing six different roles in one film. Hanks was in the middle of reading “Moby-Dick” and, when the filmmakers sat down, he engaged them in a discussion of Melville’s masterpiece. Lana pointed at a poster for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which was serendipitously hanging on the wall of Hanks’s office, and said, “ ‘Moby-Dick’ and this—that’s what we want to do.” “I’m in,” Hanks said. “When do we start?” Looking back at that meeting, Hanks told me that he had been particularly impressed that the Wachowskis “were not ashamed to say, ‘We make art!’ ”
 
With Hanks on board, the directors went back to Warner Bros. to plead their case. They insisted that a project as narratively complex as “Cloud Atlas” had no precedent and therefore no template. They presented the overarching story as a tale of redemption, of the continuity of essential human goodness, whereby individual acts of kindness have unforeseeable repercussions. They broke the story down into a simple progression: “Tom Hanks starts off as a bad person,” they said, “but evolves over centuries into a good person.” Warner Bros. was convinced, and the studio was in for distribution, but with a lower offer than the directors had hoped for.
 


T he projected budget for the movie was around a hundred and twenty million dollars. The only other guaranteed money was coming from the German Federal Film Fund. The directors tried to drum up investment from other European sources, but near-catastrophic reversals continued. “We realized we wouldn’t be able to raise the amount of money we needed in a normal way, selling territories for distribution,” Grant Hill, who has worked as a producer with the Wachowskis since the two “Matrix” sequels, told me. “So we started talking with distributors about taking equity in the project.” Eventually, the production signed up a number of investors, including four in Asia, whose contributions totalled about thirty-five million dollars. But this financing structure was inherently unstable. With so many separate investors, each providing relatively small amounts, the entire project could teeter if one of them pulled out. With troubling frequency, the filmmakers had to contemplate giving up. “It is hard to grasp how often this movie has been dead and resurrected,” Lana said. Each time they reread the script to see whether it was worth proceeding, they emerged more determined, even if they had to revise it to fit the diminished budget. But what they would not give up—the scale and the complexity of the project—was exactly what was worrying potential investors. “I’ll never be attached to anything like this in my life,” Tykwer said. “It is that one thing I actually waited for when I wanted to be a filmmaker.”

When a European investor said she would contribute to the project, then withdrew her support in a text message, the directors were desperate. But then, in the winter of 2010, the Wachowskis sent the script to James Schamus, the head of Focus Features, NBCUniversal’s art-house-films division. Schamus called them the next day and offered to handle international sales for the movie. Reading the script, he told them, had brought back what it was like to see “2001” for the first time. Schamus teaches film theory and history at Columbia University. In his office there, the level of his excitement not quite compatible with the bow tie he was wearing, he told me, “The true genius of the screenplay is that it’s ridiculously narrative. They’ve managed to keep almost every little block of storytelling a cliffhanger. They’ve managed to make you feel the kind of propulsive movement that makes you want to keep coming back.”

Schamus cooked up a plan to presell the movie at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, that May. He and the filmmakers pitched the movie directly to an audience of distributors. “We got on the stage of the Olympia Theatre in Cannes and spent forty-five minutes in one of the most ridiculously fun cinephile conversations you can have,” Schamus said. “I was giddy at the end.” The three hundred industry people present seemed to enjoy it, too, a few of them approaching Schamus afterward to share their enthusiasm. But the numbers were disappointing, barely reaching fifteen million. Word of the weak presale spread, and scared a few investors enough for them to flee the production. When news of the decampment got out, more investors backed off. “It is super frustrating that people think that it’s like a stock market,” Andy said. “You bet on the movie you like because you have taste. It’s not like buying Shell Oil. You get into the movie business because you like movies. Not because you like money.” The projected budget had to be pared down to about a hundred million dollars, which, with all the contingency fees and financing costs, meant an eighty-million-dollar shooting budget. This still made “Cloud Atlas” one of the most expensive independently financed movies ever. The Wachowskis, in addition to deferring their directing fees, invested some of their own money in the project, betting their livelihood on its success. “No work of art can ever really testify to the scale of its own impossibility,” Lana said. One of the Wachowskis’ favorite films is Jacques Tati’s “Playtime” (1967), for which Tati built a set the size of a small town on the outskirts of Paris. The project ruined him financially and almost ended his artistic career. The Wachowskis, however, did not appear daunted by the risks of “Cloud Atlas.” “When you have repetition of calamity, the calamity begins to lose its emotional weight,” Andy said, with a shrug.



B y June, 2011, the cast included, in addition to Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, and the Korean star Doona Bae. The Wachowskis moved to Berlin to join Tykwer, with the financing still in flux. Lana and Andy were going to direct the nineteenth-century story and the two set in the future, while Tykwer took the narratives set in the thirties, the seventies, and the present. The plan was to work with two different crews but to collaborate closely.
 
Around Thanksgiving, I visited the set in Babelsberg and sat behind the Wachowskis as they shot a scene from the post-Fall story line, in which Hanks’s Zachry takes Meronym (Berry), one of the last of a tribe known as the Prescients, people who still have some access to pre-Fall technology, to a defunct satellite-communication center, where she hopes to put out a call for salvation for her people. Old Georgie (Weaving), a hallucinated devil whom Zachry can’t shake, urges him to kill her. (In addition to Zachry and the malevolent Dr. Goose, Hanks also plays a thieving hotelier in the thirties, a nuclear scientist in the seventies, a memoir-writing thug in the present, and an actor who plays Timothy Cavendish in a movie in the twenty-second century.)
 
Berry was suffering from a cold that day, in addition to her sore foot, so the Wachowskis were working on closeups of Hanks and Weaving and hoping that she would be well enough to shoot in the afternoon. There was no apparent anxiety on the set. The Wachowskis were casual and relaxed. A second camera was added, and they discussed the setup with their director of photography, John Toll, a 1995 Academy Award winner for “Legends of the Fall.” Hanks was in his chair, entertaining a crew member. “I work for free. I get paid for waiting,” he quipped, quoting Orson Welles. The Wachowskis decided to use 50-mm. and 100-mm. lenses, going for some extreme closeups and a few “ ‘Batman’ angles.” Lana climbed a ladder to point the viewfinder from above at Hanks’s stand-in. She joked with a camera assistant, while Andy, in a Motörhead T-shirt, began each suggestion to a crew member with “It might be quite nice . . .” When I asked why Lana was always the one looking through the viewfinder, while Andy covered the sight lines and the over-all architecture of the shot, they were stumped by the question. Mitchell refers to the two as “a kite operation”: “Andy is on the ground, handling the spindle, anchored, while Lana is up there, performing the loops.”
 
Ron Wachowski remembers watching his children direct a scene on the set of “Bound.” Not having discussed anything between themselves, Larry and Andy got up from their chairs to talk separately to the actors, then sat back down without exchanging a word. Each of them already knew what the other one had said. “They have the same picture in their mind without talking,” he told me. “I watched two bodies and one brain.” The phrase “two bodies, one brain” is often deployed by people who have worked with the Wachowskis. According to James McTeigue, who was their first assistant director on the “Matrix” films, “There’s a little bit of myth in it. The unification of mind comes through the filmmaking.” The siblings develop their ideas together, arriving at a common vision after a long process of creative negotiation; by the time they’re on the set, all possible disagreements have been worked out. Their relationship, if anything, has improved since Larry became Lana. “She’s a lot easier to work with than Larry,” Andy told me. “Understandably, Larry had issues, but he could take them out on people. On me. Lana is much more open-minded.” “They have the best marriage I have ever seen” is how Ron Wachowski puts it.
 
If the Wachowskis have a kind of marriage, their cast and crew are their family. (Toward the end of the shoot, Hanks even took to calling them Mom and Dad.) Steve Skroce, who has storyboarded for them since the “Matrix” films, told me, “After the success of the first ‘Matrix,’ they were able to get points on the box-office, video games, etc. They had a dinner at this great Italian restaurant in Santa Monica and all their key collaborators were invited. At each place setting was a golden envelope with a check inside. I’m not sure who got what, but I know what I received was far beyond what I could ever have guessed or hoped for.”

At Babelsberg’s Stage 9, on one of the two monitor screens, Weaving, as the devil Old Georgie, was now hissing, “Lies . . . nothin’ but lies,” while Hanks’s lower lip trembled. In the script, much depends on whether Zachry will decide to obey Old Georgie’s command to kill Meronym, so Hanks went through a series of takes exploring his moral entanglement. When Old Georgie advised Zachry to “slit her throat,” Weaving relished the succulence of the sibilants, and the directors giggled with joy. The set was rudimentary: the control room of the satellite-communication center would be completed with computer-generated imagery, imagined by the Wachowskis down to the minutest detail. The scene in the control room, for example, features an “orison,” a kind of super-smart egg-shaped phone capable of producing 3-D projections, which Mitchell had dreamed up for the futuristic chapters. The Wachowskis, however, had to avoid the cumbersome reality of having characters running around with egg-shaped objects in their pockets; it had never crossed Mitchell’s mind that that could be a problem. “Detail in the novel is dead wood. Excessive detail is your enemy,” Mitchell told me, squeezing the imaginary enemy between his thumb and index finger. “In film, if you want to show something, it has to be designed.” The Wachowskis’ solution: the orison is as flat as a wallet and acquires a third dimension only when spun. Mitchell, who had been kept in the loop throughout the process (and has a cameo in the film), was boyishly excited by the filmmakers’ “groping toward exactitude.” “I was like Augustus Gloop in the Wonka factory,” he told me. “I’ve witnessed a long sequence of decisions, which I never had to make while writing a book. Intellectually, I know it’s a replacement, but I don’t feel a loss at all.”
 
Weaving now lowered his voice to reach the outer ranges of whisper, his tongue menacingly close to Hanks’s ear: “How long you goin’ jus’ stand there an’ let a stranger keep fuggin’ your b’liefs up ’n’ down ’n’ in ’n’ out!” The Wachowskis exchanged glances and nods. Hanks’s face tightened into resolution as he walked out of the shot.



E ventually, Ralph Riach recovered from his illness and was able to finish his scenes. The production went over schedule by only a few days, and the shooting of “Cloud Atlas” was completed in December. In March, the Wachowskis and Tykwer flew to Los Angeles to show a hundred-and-seventy-minute cut of the movie to Warner Bros. executives in Burbank. A small group, including Jeff Robinov, the Wachowskis’ former agent and the current president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, had gathered for the morning screening. The directors were nervous, not only because much depended on the reaction of the studio honchos but also because Hollywood executives were not their ideal audience. If what you’re aiming for is rebellious originality, the suits should have trouble liking and understanding your work. The directors introduced the movie, then left the screening room. When the film was over, the executives tracked them down in a nearby office and delivered a spontaneous burst of applause. “That almost never happens,” Lana said afterward, with a disbelieving head shake. Perhaps, she added, the applause would translate into an enthusiastic marketing campaign—starting with placement of the “Cloud Atlas” trailer before “The Dark Knight Rises,” Warner’s flagship 2012 summer release. (In the event, that didn’t pan out.)

The Wachowskis had told me that one of the “orgasmic” moments in their filmmaking process is showing a movie to their friends and family. I attended that screening, later the same day. “Cloud Atlas,” I discovered, would have been the perfect movie for a Wachowski family film orgy. It seemed poised to usher audiences into an era of imaginative adventure filmmaking beyond the mindless nihilism of “Transformers” or “Resident Evil.” The movie carefully guided the viewer through its six story lines with just enough intriguing unfamiliarity, while succeeding—nearly miraculously—in creating a sense of connectedness among the myriad characters and retaining Mitchell’s idea of the universality of love, pain, loss, and desire. Doona Bae, who plays (among others) Sonmi~451, the “fabricant” who evolves into full humanity in 2144, was a revelation. The Wachowskis’ formal boldness, balanced with heartwarming redemption, was a perfect match for Tykwer’s precise filmmaking and gorgeous music. (He and his musical partners composed the “Cloud Atlas” soundtrack before shooting even started.) In addition to applause at this screening, there were tears and triumphant hugs. The Wachowskis and Tykwer were visibly touched. Their rocket ship had reached its cosmic port. (The movie will première at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and open nationwide on October 26th.)
 


T he previous fall, the “Cloud Atlas” production had spent six weeks on location in Mallorca. The Wachowskis were shooting scenes set on the Prophetess,  the schooner on which much of the nineteenth-century story takes place. The filming proved challenging—the weather was not coöperative; the ship was hard to maneuver; shooting in its cramped spaces was difficult—but through it all Lana had, she said, “a self-awareness of gathering memories . . . a sense of witnessing” something extraordinary. More than ever before, she was convinced that the experience of making “Cloud Atlas” was going to be special.

One day, the siblings had planned a helicopter shot of a nearby mountain. Andy and Lana hoped to swoop down from above with an aerial camera. But, as the helicopter was ascending, a mass of clouds moved in, and the Wachowskis and the camera crew found themselves lost in whiteness. While waiting for the fog to disperse, the helicopter climbed above it. “The sun was butterscotch yellow,” Lana recalled. “And there it all was, you know—an atlas of clouds.” She and Andy watched the celestial landscape until a hole opened in the cloud bank and the helicopter was able to sink through it and below to discover the verdant landscape of their imaginary world. ♦


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline oilgun

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #40 on: September 10, 2012, 11:16:10 pm »
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.

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #41 on: September 11, 2012, 04:10:28 pm »
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.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #42 on: September 12, 2012, 06:44:09 am »


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)

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #43 on: September 12, 2012, 11:19:18 pm »

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.



"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #44 on: September 12, 2012, 11:33:01 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.




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'!   :laugh: :-*




"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #45 on: September 13, 2012, 09:12:39 am »





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!    :)

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #46 on: September 14, 2012, 06:47:59 am »


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.
 
* * * *


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #47 on: September 14, 2012, 10:33:02 pm »

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 AtlasHugo 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.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


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and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #48 on: September 15, 2012, 07:43:37 pm »

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.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #49 on: September 16, 2012, 10:58:29 am »




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.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #50 on: September 16, 2012, 04:28:59 pm »





At TIFF: Hugo Weaving, Tom Hanks, James D'Arcy, Halle
Berry, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae



"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #51 on: September 16, 2012, 06:04:53 pm »



At TIFF: First Row: Susan Sarandon, Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowsky, Andy Wachowsky, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Xun Zhou,
Hugh Grant
At Back: Keith David, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving (behind Andy Wachowsky), James D'Arcy (behind Tom Hanks),
Jim Sturgess (behind Halle Berry), Doona Bae, David Gyasi, Ben Whishaw (hidden by Xun Zhou)


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #52 on: September 16, 2012, 07:10:49 pm »

http://collider.com/cloud-atlas-movie-review/192919/




Cloud Atlas
Review
Rating: 9.4 out of 10

by Matt Goldberg   
Posted: September 9th, 2012 at 3:44 pm

TIFF 2012:
CLOUD ATLAS



“My life exists far beyond the limitations of me,” a character notes in Cloud Atlas.   By the same token, The Wachowski Siblings and Tom Tykwer‘s film exists far beyond the limitations of genre, narrative, identity, and time.  It is a work of sweeping ambition, engrossing stories, compelling characters, and powerful emotions.  The filmmakers have taken David Mitchell’s novel, and rebuilt it into a captivating sextuplet filled with love, hate, redemption, damnation, bravery, cowardice, and more.  Through skillful editing and astounding performances, Cloud Atlas  is a cinematic experience like few others, and it will leave viewers in awe.

Cloud Atlas  spans across six stories in six different time periods with the lead cast playing different characters in most or all of the narratives (I will use the names of the corresponding stories from the novel to make it easier to differentiate the tales later in the review)  The six stories are: the voyage of Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) across the Pacific Islands in 1849 [The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing ]; the relationship between amanuensis Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) and composer Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent) in 1936 Europe [Letters from Zedelghem ]; reporter Luisa Rey’s (Halle Berry) dangerous investigation into a nuclear power plant in 1973 San Fransisco [Half-Lives: A Luisa Rey Mystery ]; the constant, but perhaps deserving, misfortunes of vanity publisher Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent) in 2012 England [The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish ]; the fabricant Sonmi~451 (Doona Bae) and human Hae-Joo Im’s (Sturgess) action-packed escape from authoritarian forces in 2144 Neo Seoul [An Orison of Sonmi~451 ]; and Zachry’s (Tom Hanks) perilous journey with the mysterious Meronym (Berry) in Big Isle, “106 Winters after The Fall” [Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After ].






The movie opens with Old Zachry beginning a tale in front of an unknown audience, and then the filmmakers provide the opening scenes to the above stories in chronological order [To be precise, Tykwer directed Adam Ewing, Luisa Rey,  and Cavendish while the Wachowskis handled Zedelghem, Sonmi~451,  and Sloosha's Crossin' ].  From there, the film cuts between the narratives usually through visual rhyming, a shared moment (like a character entering a room in one story, and a character exiting a room in another story), or an actor who’s playing two different roles (like cutting from Luisa Rey to Meronym).  It sounds complicated, but the connections tend to flow elegantly, although it can be a bit distracting if there’s no connective tissue.  But these are minor bumps that are quickly forgotten as we’re enraptured by the latest plot development in each tale.
 
And they’re all terrific stories.  In terms of their narrative breadth, they’re relatively narrow.  They’re basically short films contained to a particular genre.  There are two period pieces (Ewing  and Zedelghem ), a pulpy thriller (Luisa Rey ), a comedy (Cavendish ), and two sci-fi yarns (Sonmi  and Sloosha’s ).  Like all good adaptations, the filmmakers have streamlined the plots from the book, and come away with propulsive narratives that never lose their momentum.  Anthology movies are almost always a mixed bag, but Cloud Atlas  is the exception to the rule.  The Luisa Rey  story is a tad weaker than the others because it lacks an emotional arc, but there’s not a single plotline where we check our watches and wait to go back to a story where care about.
 
Even if there was such a plotline, it would swiftly fade.  The sweeping pace of Cloud Atlas  is perfectly timed down to the second.  Editors Alexander Berner and Claus Wehlisch have worked a miracle, and used cinema’s unique quality—the edit—to its full potential.  The film positively sings as it moves between stories and crescendos at narration that breaks the bounds of time and space.  It is the most crucial element in the film’s central theme of how we are all tied together through our actions and our fates.






Notions such as past lives and intertwined destinies can come off as hokey, and if they’re to be explored, then the artist (or artists, as the case is here) must leap with complete abandon and total confidence.  There is no half-measure in a film of this size, and the filmmakers’ wholehearted commitment is why Cloud Atlas  manages to transcend new-age notions that would be worthy of derision.  Furthermore, such a reading is far too literal and misses the point shared by each story; a point perfectly summed up by one of the characters: “our lives are not our own.”  It is not simply a matter of the individual repeating throughout time.  It is how he or she treats others.
 
Distilled into their basic element, each actor’s major characters share a single defining trait.  Hugo Weaving’s characters are sadistic, Berry’s characters are inquisitive, Sturgess’ characters help the enslaved, etc.  But not everyone is locked into a single trait throughout lifetimes.  Before Cavendish, Broadbent’s characters are selfish.  It isn’t until his experiences in Ghastly Ordeal  that he is finally able to change.  This isn’t a matter of karma.  It’s a matter of giving to others rather than taking for one’s own survival.  Broadbent’s overarching character makes this change in one story, but it’s what Hanks’ characters wrestle with over the course of the entire film.  His characters move though thieves, liars, cowards, and finally to someone who must resist a devil that’s followed him throughout time.  Hanks’ characters are not the center of the universe nor are anyone else’s.  None of these characters are giants of history.  They simply continue to criss-cross across not only time and space, but also race and gender.







Cloud Atlas  is greater than the sum of its parts, and its parts are stunning.  Cavendish  is hilarious, Sonmi  is pulse-pounding, Zedelghem  is melancholy, Ewing  is treacherous, Luisa Rey  is exciting, and Sloosha’s Crossin‘  is something else entirely.  Sloosha’s Crossin‘  was my least favorite story in the book due to its unbroken length and the difficulty of reading through a slang-filled dialect.  But in the film, it works marvelously and becomes a beautiful, unforgettable tale where we happily accept characters who call technology “smart” and call truth “true-true”.  Translating the story directly to film and leaving this bizarre dialect intact requires a glorious mixture of fearlessness, insanity, and unbound imagination.
 
This kind of imagination—to transcend genres, settings, and identities—requires a certain kind of genius.  Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer have shown that genius with Cloud Atlas.   It is an ambition rarely seen in modern cinema, and rarely realized due to budget constraints (the film was independently financed).  The audacious, daring vision of Cloud Atlas  is to be cherished because it pushes the bounds of what we’ve come to expect from movies.  It is a forceful reminder of cinema’s power, and why it stands apart from other art forms.
 
For all the complexity of its editing, its actors with multiple characters, and the jumps between genres and setting, Cloud Atlas  is beautifully simple in its central theme.  The characters narrate their philosophies, but it doesn’t come across as moralistic.  All of the characters are writers.  They use different forms, but they’re all narrating their lives.  They’re looking inwards to create connections, and in so doing, forge a legacy.  They leave behind more than they were in a single lifetime.  Even if their messages are misunderstood or reinterpreted, the authors’ bold, declarative words still echo through the lives of others across time and space.  Through the gorgeous, life-affirming lens of Cloud Atlas,  our lives exist far beyond our limitations.



"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #53 on: September 27, 2012, 12:44:13 am »



http://badassdigest.com/2012/09/08/movie-review-cloud-atlas-is-overwhelming-odd-and-utterly-completely-amazing/



Movie Review:
Cloud Atlas  
Is Overwhelming, Odd And
Utterly, Completely Amazing

The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer have created
a seminal movie of the 21st century.


By Devin Faraci
Published September 08, 2012






Writing this review after only one viewing of Cloud Atlas  feels foolish, like taking a calculus test after only finishing basic addition and subtraction. I walked out of the theater, three hours after the movie started, feeling overwhelmed and moved and almost physically stunned by what I had seen. But mostly overwhelmed; at such a length, with so many stories weaving back and forth, and with so much to say, the new film from the Wachowskis (with Tom Tykwer) hits like you a tidal wave of cinema art, threatening to drown you if you’re unprepared.
 
There are many achievements in Cloud Atlas,  but perhaps the greatest is the way the film manages that tidal wave of information and emotion, allowing you to follow along with a narrative that ping pongs across centuries. Speed Racer  was a miracle of modern editing, a hyperkinetic barrage that managed to remain comprehensible, understanding how modern audiences process visual information. Cloud Atlas  leaves behind the hyperkinetic elements but still understands how we process information, and the Wachowskis and Tykwer have faith that the audience can, and will, keep up. The miracle at the heart of Cloud Atlas  is that it’s so sprawling, so dense, so interconnected but never confusing, never leaves the audience behind.
 
Once again the Wachowskis are pushing all of cinema forward, rewriting the language of visual storytelling.
 
Not every viewer will take to Cloud Atlas  as I did. I can foresee many of the complaints about the film, and most of them are - to be honest - valid. It is often over-earnest. It does, on occasion, edge right up to camp. The make-up effects are wildly inconsistent. Some of the accents and acting choices are problematical. But all of the complaints about the film will boil down to one thing that I can never see as a negative:
 
They tried to do too much.
 
I actually think they accomplished what they were trying to do. The word I would use for this movie is audacious. This is the boldest sort of filmmaking, and Cloud Atlas  is a movie that throws every single thing out on screen and gives 200% effort. That can make the moments that fail feel like bodyblows, but it also makes the moments that work - and there are way more of those - transcendent.
 
And if there are bits that don’t work, who cares? Do you critique a record-breaking runner on each of his steps, calling attention to his small stumbles? Or do you look at the entirety of the achievement with awe and wonder? Because yes, there are stumbles in Cloud Atlas,  but as a whole it is a remarkable, astonishing work of clear eyed vision and extraordinary optimism.
 
I have not read David Mitchell’s 2004 novel upon which the film is based, but I understand it’s one of those books that people see as unadaptable. At first glance the concept - six discreet yet subtly connected stories set from the Pacific in the 1840s to a post-apocalyptic Earth in the distant future - it seems as uncinematic a story as possible. Mitchell’s book presents each story as a half, moving forward through time, until it boomerangs back again, presenting the concluding half of each story, going backwards chronologically back to the 1840s.
 
That is not how the movie works. The movie opens with a series of quick sequences establishing each of the six stories, and then from there pings back and forth between them, transitions being dictated by on-screen action and theme. We might jump from Neo Seoul of 2144 to Belgium in the 1930s to San Francisco of 1975, and each transition could be dictated by a screen movement - a car turns right in 1975 and we jump to a hovercar coming into frame in 2144 - or by echoes between characters - a jailbreak in 2012 transitions us to a jailbreak in 2144 which transitions us to a chase in the post-Apocalypse. This is thrilling stuff, and the film masterfully builds to each transition, sometimes giving us just a scene, sometimes giving us a whole sequence, sometimes giving us simply a glimpse, before moving on.
 
But it’s like music - like the Cloud Atlas Sextet  written in the 1930 segment, a piece for overlapping soloists - and each segment is like an instrument or a musical phrase, playing off of other sounds and melodies, coming together and falling apart rhythmically and beautifully. This alone, the way the film is structured and moves within itself, marks Cloud Atlas  as one of the great pictures of the 21st century so far.
 
Thankfully there’s more to it than that. The structure itself is brave, but the Wachowskis and Tykwer doubled down on that. Over the course of their six separate-yet-connected stories they have placed an ensemble cast of just over a half-dozen leads in multiple roles. Most of the actors show up in every single story, often transformed by practical make-up effects. Halle Berry is a Samoan woman, an Indian partygoer, an old Korean male doctor, a futuristic archeologist. Tom Hanks is a salty ship’s surgeon, a post-Apocalyptic villager, an Irish streetfighting man. Hugo Weaving appears as everything from a demonic vision to a Korean villain to a Nurse Ratched type - yes, a woman. Again and again the actors pop up, sometimes anchoring the stories, sometimes just appearing momentarily in the scene.
 
It’s one of the bravest choices the film could have made. It’s a huge decision, one upon which the success of the entire movie hinges. No actor is ever unrecognizable (although that’s part of the point, and thematically it’s important that these faces keep reappearing over the centuries), although sometimes the make-up is distracting. When done up as a white woman in the 1840s Korean actress Doona Bae just looks weird. And sometimes the accents don’t quite work; while Hanks’ make-up as brawler/author Dermot “Duster” Hoggins makes him look exactly like the Brundleflied mating of Bob Hoskins and Ben Kingsley, his horrible, cartoonish accents undercuts his scene.
 
Some people will get hung up on these things, but they’re missing the point. Hanks’ bit as “Duster” is short, as is Bae’s turn as a white woman. The main actors in each segment are uniformly perfect, delivering performances that are nuanced and often heartbreaking. What’s great is that the six stories have different tones, giving each actor the opportunity to try something a little different in each segment. Tom Hanks gets to be really broad as the ship doctor in the 1840s, but is absolutely wonderful as the villager carving out a life 106 winters “After the Fall.”
 
Halle Berry is incredibly strong in the 1975 segment, which casts her as a journalist on the trail of a conspiracy surrounding a nuclear power plant, and Doona Bae is incredible as a fabricant (read: clone) in 2144 who helps begin a revolution in human thinking. Hugh Grant has a wonderful turn as a sleazy 70s guy. Tom Hanks has such a wide palette with which to play that you’re immediately reminded why he’s one of our great modern movie stars. James D’Arcy and Jim Sturgess also do remarkable work - including in the 2144 segment where they are both under heavy Korean make-up jobs. Everyone is great (although some of them aren’t great in every segment, to be fair).
 
While everyone has a moment to truly shine in the film, a couple of actors are especially magnificent. Jim Broadbent gives two astonishing performances in the film, one dramatic and one delightfully comic. In the 1930 segment he is Vyvyan Ayrs, a world famous composer rotting away in his mansion, while in the 2012 segment he’s Timothy Cavendish, a less than heroic book publisher who ends up involuntarily committed to an old folks home. He pops up in other segments - a boat captain, a blind violinst, a futuristic human - but these two are where he truly gets to show off, and he gets to show off in very distinctly different fashions. I’m not an Oscars guy, but this feels like an Oscar-winning performance to me.
 
There’s another amazing standout, though: Ben Whishaw is shattering as Robert Frobisher, a rent boy who finally finds an outlet for his stunning musical genius only to see it torn from him. The stories in Cloud Atlas  can be uneven - the Pacific 1840s story is sort of dorky, and the Wachowskis might be too in love with the scifi action in the Neo Seoul segment to make the larger message have enough impact - but the Frobisher piece is certainly the standout bit of brilliance in the whole film. It destroyed me, leaving me crying silently as it wrapped up.
 
In terms of stories that I loved, the post-Apocalyptic segment truly sent me. Everyone speaks a pidgin English that feels like a Creole variation on Anthony Burgess ’ Nadsat, and the savage design of the future is thrilling. Tom Hanks is Zachry, a lowly dweller in the valley, whose people are often under attack by cannibalistic Kona (led by an unrecognizable Hugh Grant). They are visited occasionally by members of an outside society, the Prescients, who are the last vestiges of technologically advanced humanity - everyone else has abandoned a dying Earth for the stars. This and the Frobisher story both left me wanting more in the best way possible, as each created worlds in which I wanted to luxuriate and spend time. In the future Halle Berry wears a very Queen Amidala-esque white jumpsuit, but the Wachowskis aren’t really riffing on the Star Wars movies. They’re just creating something else huge and epic and engrossing.
 
The whole movie is epic. This is a film that is epic in the old-fashioned sense, an epic that spans not just time and the map but the very geography of the human soul. In many ways Cloud Atlas  is the ultimate atheist film, as it posits your afterlife being not a continuation of your consciousness but an eternal reverberation of your own little solo. Actors reappear to represent a resurfacing of... what? Souls, if you’re into that. Problems and ideas and hopes and dreams, if you’re more secular. In Cloud Atlas  every crime and every kindness echoes across time, and the actions of a man in 1840 leads to a global change in consciousness 200 years later. It’s a simple sentiment when spelled out like that, but in action in the film it has a breathtaking meaning.
 
Cloud Atlas  is sometimes silly, and it’s sometimes pretentious and it’s sometimes overstuffed. But every single one of those things, to me, is a positive. It’s an exceptional piece of filmmaking, one of the bravest works I have ever seen. The Wachowskis have followed the poorly received final two Matrix  films and the bomb of Speed Racer  with a three hour meditation on the nature of human interaction, featuring a few actors in many make-ups. Some may see that as self-destructive, but I see it as incredibly heroic.
 
I walked out of Cloud Atlas  utterly overwhelmed. Days later I’m still processing it. It’s a movie I could write about for days, the kind of film where each shot, each transition, is worthy of discussion and dissection. I haven't even touched on the way that the telling of stories - through letters, memoirs, movies, manifestos - is used to speak about our endless human connection. There are so many aspects of the film I've only brushed past in this review, giving scant words to magnificent things.
 
I can’t wait to see it again. Until I do I’ll hold on to the feeling this movie gave me, an incredible sense of hope for the future of cinema. And the future of humanity. How many movies give you that?


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #54 on: September 28, 2012, 04:13:46 pm »


http://www.firstshowing.net/2012/tiff-2012-cloud-atlas-is-a-cinematic-revelation-on-a-grand-scale/




Toronto 2012
             TIFF 2012:
Cloud Atlas
is a Cinematic Revelation on a Grand Scale

by Alex Billington
September 8, 2012




"Fear. Belief. Love. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives."



It's the movie of the year. A bold, ambitious, grand storytelling accomplishment that I dare say is a true cinematic revelation. I have been anxiously/impatiently waiting to finally see filmmakers Andy & Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer take on adapting David Mitchell's epic novel Cloud Atlas,  which seamlessly blends six different storylines in an attempt to look at the meaning of life and the decisions that impact this universe. I will forever be able to say - I was there, at the Cloud Atlas  premiere, that ended with an enormously deserving standing ovation.
 
Cloud Atlas  found me at the perfect time in my life and the paths I happen to be on myself, converging at the right time and the right place tonight for this experience to pay off perfectly. In short - they pulled it off. The Wachowskis and Tykwer have made a movie that truly pushes the boundaries of cinematic storytelling. It pushes, even challenges, the audience itself to seek the brilliance within it, while also ask that they try to discover something about themselves while watching it. Not many movies come close to doing that, in any way. And those that are unmoved by the way this pushes the audience must be, unfortunately, blind to the revelations within. Cloud Atlas  is an achievement of the grandest of scales. It may forever change your life.
 
As most should already familiar from the trailers, Cloud Atlas  attempts to intertwine six century-spanning storylines. Everything from: a ship traveling across the Pacific in 1800s harboring a freed slave; a legendary composer working on his final moving piece with a young amanuensis; a journalist putting integrity above all else; an elderly book publisher living out his final years; a "fabricant" clone becoming independent and fulfilling her destiny in future Seoul; and the transcendence of love across time and space in the far future. There's no point in me attempting to explain the stories, how they intertwine, or why, because that is the revelation itself. It may take 3, 4, even 10 viewings to fully understand, and that's the brilliance within it.
 
I have always believed, and will continue to believe, that the Wachowskis are filmmakers who make movies that are ahead of their time. They make the kind of movies that stand as strong, and even grow, with time; that years down the line will be recognized as achievements (even if they're not the biggest financial hits). The kind of movies that, those who look for more out of experiential entertainment can find in them, if they choose to. If you accept their challenge in this, as the audience, to embrace what is presented, you too will discover the revelation, but it's truly up to you and you alone - to look for and find that magnificence within.
 
Cloud Atlas  blends the various storylines and actors used throughout into a masterpiece of storytelling. It cuts between each segment, but never leaves the viewer confused or out of touch, unless they're too lazy to follow along. The dialogue in each timeframe is unique, but nonetheless lyrical, sometimes poetic, used in ways to convey the sense of depth they're exploring simply by living. I can see where some might gloss over the more revelatory nature of the segments, and instead scoff at the occasional levity and absurdity (Tom Hanks as a gangster? Wow no way!), but I believe that speaks more about them that it actually does the film.
 
Whether or not I understood every scene, I certainly felt the emotion, deep down within me. By the end I was wiping away tears. Tears of joy, out of pure happiness, from realizing that they have accomplished what I thought might not be possible. Tears because, remarkably, my mind might have been starting to come to an understanding of life and this universe merely through a presentation of a few different meaningful stories. How do they all connect? What does it all mean? What is life about? These are questions that I kept asking, and will continue to ask, every time I see it. Every person in the world could give a different answer, a different interpretation, again it comes down to what the watcher him/herself is looking to get out of it.
 
Not only is Cloud Atlas  an achievement in storytelling, it is a technical masterwork as well. Especially the cast, and their make-up. Many of the actors do indeed appear in all six stories, playing people of different race and sex. Here it's not even asking the viewers to suspend their disbelief, because it's all pulled off with perfection, making it look like there isn't even a make-up job to be worried about. This is who they are, their soul captured in a different character. Again - what does it all mean? Why is Tom Hanks' character bad in one storyline, good in another? I honestly think it's just the century-spanning, multiple-lifetime character arc that we get to see many of these individuals go on. That is their path to one of the big revelations in this.
 
As for the cast, everyone shines. Tom Hanks runs the show appearing in all six, but is matched by Hugo Weaving (a total badass as always), Halle Berry (stands out in many ways), Jim Sturgess (particularly impressive), Hugh Grant (in his best roles yet), James D'Arcy (very endearing) and Doona Bae as the pivotal Sonmi-451. Tykwer and the Wachowskis' give us a taste of almost every genre, every kind of emotion, entertainment and intrigue in every form. While it could have been even longer, exploring each segment further, it's concise enough to my tastes, and gave me more than enough to believe in each storyline. I didn't want to find myself disinterested with one waiting for the next, and thankfully never felt that was the case.
 
What more can I say besides see it yourself and go in optimistic? Movies to me have always been about what you, personally as the viewer, take from them. How they impact you. What they mean to you. And I truly believe if you keep yourself open to it, Cloud Atlas  can be a revelation and change the way you view life on this world. At the very least, it's a massive cinematic accomplishment on the grandest scale, an utterly enchanting, moving, remarkable storytelling masterpiece. Let it affect you. Discover the revelations yourself.
 
Alex's Toronto Rating: 10 out of 10


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #55 on: September 28, 2012, 10:57:31 pm »




The raw video of the press conference (51:48)


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnG5zbg8NoM&feature=related[/youtube]
Streamed live on Sep 9, 2012 by tiff

http://tiff.net/festival


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #56 on: September 28, 2012, 11:51:34 pm »
Very entertaining. While Tom was speaking, I couldn't take my eyes off Ben Whitshaw!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline oilgun

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #57 on: September 29, 2012, 03:52:30 pm »
I've been in love with Ben since Perfume


Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #58 on: October 03, 2012, 01:28:56 am »


http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/cloud-atlas-toronto-film-festival-8122033.html



Toronto Film Festival
Cloud Atlas

By Kaleem Aftab
Tuesday 11 September 2012



Susan Sarandon and Jim Broadbent in Cloud Atlas



A bold, ambitious and fun attempt to adapt David Mitchell's time-jumping novel, Cloud Atlas  is a return to form with the Wachowskis. The novel contains the same big idea that commonly crops up in the Wachowski oeuvre, whether as director or producers, that humans should look beyond the physical realm and understand that space and time are malleable.

Whether that's true or not is arguable, but one thing's for sure, it does make for fantastical movies--not even Terry Gilliam in his pomp was this grandiose. As with the work of Gilliam, the Wachowskis often have a problem with self-control.

The success of the original Matrix  movie has been like a poisoned chalice as it gave them final cut on all their projects and left to their own film-making devices their work has often been self-indulgent and unintelligible.

Here they seem anchored by the use of Tom Tykwer as co-director, whose film Run Lola Run  successfully told a tale from various perspectives and Mitchell's text. Six separate through-the-ages stories are conjoined: a sea adventure from the mid 19th century, a 1930s meeting of composers, a journalist investigating corrupt corporations in the 1970s, a present day tale of an author publicly murdering a critic, a futuristic tale of rebellion in a totalitarian society and an undefined postapocalyptic dystopia.

The common theme is that each tale is about a search for liberty and truth. The big difference from the novel is in the structure. While the book tells each story consecutively and then as stories within stories, the movie crisscrosses the tales jumping through space and time at will.

Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Jim Broadbent, Ben Whishaw, Susan Sarandon, Doona Bae, Jim Sturgess and Keith David all play multiple roles in the film. The action starts with a shot of the stars before focusing on a mumbling man lost at sea.

Underneath all the prosthetics seems to be Tom Hanks? Part of the fun of this movie adaptation is trying to work out what star name is under the make-up. At one point, Berry shows up as a white aristocratic Jew, Whishaw as a blonde woman.

As a device, the multiple roles allow the viewer to immediately know which are the heroes and villains. Ultimately, this is a film about ideas rather than plot. It’s a tricky marriage between blockbuster action and textbook philosophy.

Although the space opera is occasionally bumpy and disorientating, the end result is intoxicating.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #59 on: October 07, 2012, 04:52:05 pm »




Updated Cast list (in Progress)





Tom Hanks is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                    Dr. Henry Goose
                    in Letters from Zedelghem: (?)
                    a blackmailing hotel clerk
                    in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                    Isaac Sachs
                    in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                    Dermot 'Duster' Hoggins
                    in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                    "Timothy Cavendish"
                    in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                    Valleysman Zachry and
                    Old Zachry (30 Years Later)
                    in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                    a Narrator
                    and ?

Adam Siviter is Hoggins Impersonator
                    and ?

                                                     Halle Berry is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                                                                         a Moriori
                                                                         (an enslaved Island Native)
                                                                         in Letters from Zedelghem:
                                                                         Jocasta Ayrs
                                                                         in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                                                                         (and who has a comet-shaped birthmark
                                                                                                                                                       between sholderblade and collarbone):

                                                                         Luisa Rey
                                                                         in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                         an elderly (male)
                                                                              Korean Doctor
                                                                         in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                                                                         (and who has a comet-shaped birthmark
                                                                                                                                                       between sholderblade and collarbone):

                                                                         Meronym
                                                                         and ?

Hugo Weaving is in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                         Bill Smoke
                         in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                         Nurse Noakes
                         in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                         a Korean Pervert ('Control'?)
                         in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                         Old Georgie
                         and ?

                                                     Jim Sturgess is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                                                                           Adam Ewing
                                                                           in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                           Hae-Joo Im
                                                                           in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                                                                           Adam Bailey
                                                                           and ?

Doona Bae is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                    Tilde Ewing
                    in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                    (and who has a comet-shaped birthmark
                                              between sholderblade and collarbone):

                    Sonmi-451,
                         a clone 'fabricant'
                    in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                    The goddess Sonmi
                    and ?

                                                     Jim Broadbent is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                                                                             a Sea Captain
                                                                             a blind violinist
                                                                             in Letters from Zedelghem:                                                  
                                                                             Vyvyan Ayrs
                                                                             in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                                                                             Timothy Cavendish
                                                                              a Narrator
                                                                              and ?

                                                     Robin Morrissey is Young Cavendish
                                                                              and ?

Ben Whishaw is in Letters from Zedelghem:
                       (and who has a comet-shaped birthmark
                                                 between sholderblade and collarbone):

                       Robert Frobisher

                       a blonde woman
                           (Hugh Grant's wife??)
                       and ?

                                                     James D'Arcy is in Letters from Zedelghem:
                                                                             Rufus Sixsmith (young)
                                                                             in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                                                                             Rufus Sixsmith (old)
                                                                            "Rufus Sixsmith"
                                                                             in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                             The Archivist
                                                                             and ?

Xun Zhou is in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                  Yoona-939
                  in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                  Rose Bailey
                  and ?

                                                    Keith David is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                                                                         Kupaka
                                                                             (the Maori Chieftain)
                                                                         in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:                
                                                                         Joe Napier
                                                                         in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                         Ankor Apis
                                                                         and ?

David Gyasi is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                     Autua
                         (the escaped Moriori Native)
                     and ?

                                                   Hugh Grant is in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                                                                        Alberto Grimaldi
                                                                        in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                                                                        Timothy Cavendish's
                                                                             brother
                                                                        in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                        Seer Rhee
                                                                        in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                                                                        a Cannibal (Kona Chief)
                                                                        and ?

Susan Sarandon is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                          Madame Horrox
                          in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                          Ursula
                          in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                          Yellowface (the Abbess?)
                           a Narrator
                           and ?




« Last Edit: October 08, 2012, 10:33:06 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
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  • Posts: 10,011
Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #60 on: October 07, 2012, 10:00:13 pm »


http://social.entertainment.msn.com/movies/blogs/the-hitlist-blogpost.aspx?post=f6291502-498b-4389-ae7c-e3dd345692a4




Rating: 4/5
TIFF Review:
Cloud Atlas
Uneven, unprecedented
and ultimately moving

By James Rocchi
Sep 9, 2012 3:46PM






Adapting David Mitchell's symphonic novel "Cloud Atlas," co-directors Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have taken on an exacting and exhausting challenge; Mitchell's book leaps between eras and sets of characters and, at the same time, connects them all -- thematically, spiritually -- with resonances and connections among and between.

It's got an all-star cast and a tremendous amount of action to be sure, and is in that fashion completely part of Hollywood as we know it -- and, at the same time, it is so full of passion and heart and empathy that it feels completely unlike any other modern film in its range either measured through scope of budget or sweep of action. It is an epic film, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and at the same time it's about moral choice and moral action in the face of amoral power and amoral cruelty, a laser-blasting and knife-fighting saga about how, with struggle and sacrifice, the workings of the world can turn, slowly, towards something like justice and something like peace, and just because we may not live to see them does not mean we should give up.

The film leaps between times -- an ocean-going expedition to conduct the legal transactions of slavery during the Victorian era, a volatile relationship between a composer and his apprentice in the '30s, a reporter's investigation of a nuclear plant in '73, a comedy of errors for a publisher exiled against his will to a nursing home, a near-future struggle between the haves and have-nots of a radically different Korea and the search for long-lost knowledge in what's left of Hawaii long after 'The Fall.'

The tones of these segments vary wildly and vary well; for those who object that this kind of genre-jumping seems confusing or overly ambitious, let it be pointed out that most people's lives do not, in fact, fit comfortably into one genre. Or, for another counter-argument, no one who sees "Cloud Atlas" will sigh "God, not another sci-fi/farce/romance/thriller/survival/age of sail saga. …" Many will suggest that "Cloud Atlas"'s philosophical points -- that love is better than hate, life better than death, freedom better than slavery, art better than censorship -- will strike too many as empty platitudes we all accept as true. But if that's the case, why is our world in the state it's in?

Apparently the breakthrough that the Wachowskis and Tykwer had in their preparation was to have the film's cast take multiple roles throughout the film; a ship's doctor at sea is a blackmailing hotel clerk is a nuclear scientist is a thug-turned-author is a father in the cooling ashes of the apocalypse. It's a meditation on the connectedness of all things, and small ripples becoming waves, and at the same time there's plenty of peril and action and fast-cuts and comedy. And when you watch, say, Tom Hanks throw himself into all the iterations named above, for but one example, it's a demonstration of both talent and daring on the part of every performer. Some of the make-up, it should be noted, does not work -- an artificially aged Hugh Grant looks like he's wearing a mask of unbaked Pillsbury Crescent Rolls -- and some of it does, and some of it works precisely because it does not, like an actress putting in contacts and makeup and dying her hair to play a woman of standing and privilege in an age when no woman of her race would have had that standing and privilege, and we are less thrown out of the film's world than we are inspired to think of our own.

Another of MSN's film critics will review "Cloud Atlas" at greater length (and, if I might be pardoned for suggesting so, after greater length of contemplation) when it's released later in the year. But after being buffeted and battered by the era-hopping nature of the film last night, I still found the pieces and shards harmonizing with each other even beyond how the film fades, say, horse hooves into train wheels to connect them. And even a day of time -- to step back, and look at every bright-glittering shard in the film's mosaic to see and contemplate the larger picture it seems to make (even with some off colors and too-sharp edges) -- rewarded me for doing so. And the finale -- sad, true, having travelled far but with still so far to go -- is unexpectedly, startlingly moving and emotional. For fans of all three filmmakers, who've been waiting for "Cloud Atlas," the question has been if the wait is worth it. And just on the grounds of ambition and ethos, it most definitely is. Most hundred-plus million-dollar films want to inspire you to buy the toy, get the game, read the comic and change your purchasing habits; "Cloud Atlas" wants to send you out of the theater inspired to do real work for real change. If that's a 'messy failure,' then let us hope Hollywood's other directing titans are foolish enough to put bold big ideas in their films to finally go with the big budgets and big effects to give us even more of such fascinating, breathtaking and captivating errors.

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #61 on: October 22, 2012, 09:37:33 pm »




Updated Cast list (in Progress)





Tom Hanks is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                    Dr. Henry Goose
                    in Letters from Zedelghem:
                    a blackmailing hotel clerk
                    in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                    Isaac Sachs
                    in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                    Dermot 'Duster' Hoggins
                    in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                    "Timothy Cavendish"
                        (a character in a historical movie,
                         seen in an orison by Sonmi~451)
                    in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                    Valleysman Zachry ("105 Winters After 'The Fall' ") and
                    Old Zachry (30 Years Later)
                    
                    a Narrator
                    and ?

Adam Siviter is Hoggins Impersonator
                    and ?

                                                     Halle Berry is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                                                                         a Moriori
                                                                         (an enslaved Island Native)
                                                                         in Letters from Zedelghem:
                                                                         Jocasta Ayrs
                                                                         in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                                                                         (and who has a comet-shaped birthmark
                                                                                                                                                       between sholderblade and collarbone):

                                                                         Luisa Rey
                                                                         in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                         Dr. Ovid, an elderly (male)
                                                                              Korean Doctor
                                                                         in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                                                                         (and who has a comet-shaped birthmark
                                                                                                                                                       between sholderblade and collarbone):

                                                                         Meronym,
                                                                            a Prescient

                                                                         and ?

Hugo Weaving is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                         Haskell Moore
                         in Letters from Zedelghem:
                         Tadeusz Kesselring
                         in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                         Bill Smoke
                         in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                         Nurse Noakes
                         in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                         'Control'? Mephi?
                         in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                         Old Georgie

                         and ?

                                                     Jim Sturgess is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                                                                           Adam Ewing
                                                                           in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                                                                           a (blond) thug
                                                                           in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                           Hae-Joo Im (Chang?)
                                                                           in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                                                                           Adam Bailey
                                                                           (Zachry's brother-in-law)

                                                                           and ?

Doona Bae is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                    Tilde Ewing
                       (the wife of Adam Ewing)
                    in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                    a Mexican woman
                    in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                    (and who has a comet-shaped birthmark
                                              between sholderblade and collarbone):

                    Sonmi-451,
                         a clone 'fabricant'
                    in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                    The goddess Sonmi

                    and ?

                                                     Jim Broadbent is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                                                                             a Sea Captain
                                                                             in Letters from Zedelghem:
                                                                             Vyvyan Ayrs
                                                                             in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                                                                             Timothy Cavendish
                                                                             in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                             a blind violinist
                                                                             in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                                                                             a Prescient

                                                                             a Narrator
                                                                             and ?

                                                     Robin Morrissey is Young Cavendish
                                                                              and ?

Ben Whishaw is in Letters from Zedelghem:
                       (and who has a comet-shaped birthmark
                                                 between sholderblade and collarbone):

                       Robert Frobisher
                       in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                       a hippie clerk in a record store
                           in San Francisco
                       in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                       Georgette, a blonde woman--
                           (Hugh Grant's wife)

                       and ?

                                                     James D'Arcy is in Letters from Zedelghem:
                                                                             Rufus Sixsmith (young)
                                                                             in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                                                                             Rufus Sixsmith (old)
                                                                             in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                                                                             Nurse James and
                                                                             "Rufus Sixsmith"
                                                                              (a character in a novel)
                                                                             in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                             The Archivist

                                                                             and ?

Xun Zhou is in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                  Yoona-939,
                      a clone 'fabricant'
                  in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                  Rose Bailey (Zachry's sister)

                  and ?

                                                    Keith David is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                                                                         Kupaka
                                                                             (the Maori Chieftain)
                                                                         in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:                
                                                                         Joe Napier
                                                                         in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                         General Ankor Apis
                                                                             (a rebel leader)

                                                                         and ?

David Gyasi is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                     Autua
                         (the escaped Moriori Native)
                     in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                     Lester Rey
                     in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                     The Prescient President

                     and ?

                                                   Hugh Grant is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                                                                        Reverend Horrox
                                                                        in Letters from Zedelghem:
                                                                        a hotel concierge
                                                                        in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery:
                                                                        Alberto Grimaldi
                                                                        in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                                                                        Timothy Cavendish's
                                                                             brother
                                                                        in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                                                                        Seer Rhee
                                                                        in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                                                                        a Cannibal (Kona Chief)

                                                                        and ?

Susan Sarandon is in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing:
                          Madame Horrox
                          in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish:
                          Ursula
                          in An Orison of Sonmi~451:
                          a male mathmatician or scientist
                              (a historical figure seen in an orison by Sonmi~451)                                                  
                          in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After:
                          the Abbess

                          a Narrator
                          and ?





« Last Edit: October 26, 2012, 04:20:31 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #62 on: October 24, 2012, 08:01:26 pm »


James D'Arcy as Rufus Sixsmith and Ben Whishaw as Robert Frobisher in Letters from Zedelghem




Hugo Weaving as Bill Smoke, Halle Berry as Luisa Rey and Keith David as Joe Napier in Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery




Jim Broadbent as Timothy Cavendish and Hugo Weaving as Nurse Noakes in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish




Hugh Grant as Seer Rhee, Doona Bae as Sonmi-451 and Jim Sturgess as Hae-Joo Im (Chang) in An Orison of Sonmi~451




Jim Sturgess as Hae-Joo Im (Chang) and Doona Bae as Sonmi-451 in An Orison of Sonmi~451




Doona Bae as Sonmi-451 in An Orison of Sonmi~451




Tom Hanks as Zachry and Halle Berry as Meronym in Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After




"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #63 on: October 25, 2012, 01:56:43 am »


http://www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/a-new-featurette-shows-why-cloud-atlas-is-an-actors-dream-for-tom-hanks-and-the-cast




A new featurette shows why
Cloud Atlas
is an actor's dream for
Tom Hanks and the cast


The stars of the film discuss
the challenge and opportunity
it represented


By Drew McWeeny
Friday, Oct 19, 2012 9:15 PM


Click for video:



One week until "Cloud Atlas" lands in theaters, and I still have no idea what the general public is going to make of it.

They seem to be getting the word out, and it's certainly a hard film to describe to someone who doesn't know the book and who doesn't automatically get excited when they hear who made the film.  It helps that they have Tom Hanks attached, although I do wonder if he means the same thing to young audiences that he does to the over-30 crowd these days.

One thing that will help make people curious is by talking about the way the recognizable cast vanish into the various characters they play over the course of the film, and that's something the ads seem to be emphasizing.  I thought it was pretty great that Hanks slipped into character on "Good Morning America" and almost immediately dropped an f-bomb.  I'll have some video interviews with the cast going up next week, including one with Hanks, and one of the things I discussed with him is how people expecting a "regular" Tom Hanks film are going to be flabbergasted when they see some of what he does in the film.

I have loved Jim Broadbent from the very first time I saw him in "Brazil," and one of the purest pleasures of "Cloud Atlas" is just seeing someone give Broadbent a wide range of things to play.  He is more than up to the challenge, and I think he does some of the best work of his career here.  I love those moments when filmmakers look past the way someone is normally cast and they use them in some unexpected fashion, like when Christopher Lloyd finally got to play a romantic lead in "Back To The Future III."  Here, I feel like Broadbent gets to play such a range of types that it serves as a powerful illustration of just how great a character actor he can be.

We've got a new featurette for you today that will explore just how these actors approached the challenges inherent to the material, and next week, we'll have more video interviews for you.  In the meantime, if you haven't already read my interview with Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, please do.  They make the best possible case for their own film.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline serious crayons

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #64 on: October 25, 2012, 07:57:37 am »
It's safe to call him "our Jimmy Stewart," though.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/24/tom_hanks_everyman_no_and_stop_using_that_term.html?tid=sm_tw_button_chunky

Tom Hanks Is Not an “Everyman”
By David Haglund
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2012, at 1:11 PM ET

In Cloud Atlas, the literary adaptation directed by Tom Tykwer and the Wachsowski siblings which opens this Friday, Tom Hanks plays five major roles: a 19th-century English doctor, a 1930s English hotelier, an American nuclear scientist in the 1970s, a thuggish British writer in 2012, and a tribesman of indeterminate background sometime in the very distant future. (He also has a cameo of sorts as a probably British actor in the 22nd century.) It’s a daring, ambitious feat. And it fails spectacularly.

Why? For all his considerable skill, Tom Hanks simply isn’t the kind of shape-shifter who could pull off something like that. So why cast him then? The reason is obvious: He is the “ultimate Everyman of our age,” to quote the film’s directors. “Our Jimmy Stewart,” as Lana Wachowski says, echoing hundreds of people before her. Therein lies the problem: Tom Hanks is not an “Everyman,” and neither was Jimmy Stewart. What they both are is affable, handsome-but-not-too-handsome heterosexual American white guys with middle class backgrounds and largely British ancestors who generally portray good guys in the movies. (Stewart’s parents were of Scottish descent; Hanks’s mother had Portuguese ancestors, but his father’s side was mostly British.)

That is a very specific thing! And it is no coincidence, of course, that these are the sorts of men that the word “Everyman” typically follows around. The term dates to a time and place where anyone who was not a straight, white (and arguably even British) man was explicitly regarded by law and social norms as inferior to those who were. Its earliest known use is in the 15th-century English morality play The Somonyng of Everyman, which depicts the path of an allegorical figure toward salvation through Christ.

It’s true that the term broadened somewhat during the last several decades: Denzel Washington, for instance, is occasionally referred to (and cast) as an “Everyman,” even though he’s black and exceptionally handsome. More typical, though, is the Newsweek piece from last year in which Steve Carrell is described as the “new” Everyman, someone “in that Tom Hanks, Jimmy Stewart, Jack Lemmon category.” Gay men almost never get the label—and the clunky term “everywoman” has never really caught on. (The idea of being “every woman,” as popularized by Chaka Khan, is a distinct notion, which involves the ability to “cast a spell,” “mix a special brew,” and “put fire inside of you”—hardly ordinary traits. Another related but ultimately quite different notion is the idea of being “everyday people”—note the inclusive, gender-neutral plural.)

The whole concept of the Everyman is a pernicious one, however well intended. It perpetuates bogus received ideas about what sorts of characters are “relatable,” and, more broadly, who is “normal” and who is not. It’s long past time for the term to be dropped into history’s dustbin and left there.



Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #65 on: October 25, 2012, 02:06:59 pm »
I think David Haglund needs a bran muffin.

Or maybe a bowl of bran flakes.

 8)
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #66 on: October 25, 2012, 02:25:14 pm »

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.


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #67 on: October 26, 2012, 04:58:57 am »


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.)


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #68 on: October 26, 2012, 12:02:26 pm »

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).


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #69 on: October 26, 2012, 01:04:20 pm »



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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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #70 on: October 27, 2012, 10:10:35 am »
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/10/cloud-atlas-review/



Three-View Review:
Cloud Atlas
Swirls With Ambition
By Hugh Hart, Lewis Wallace and Angela Watercutter
10.26.126:30 AM



How ambitious is Cloud Atlas,  the cinematic adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel that weaves together six seemingly unrelated stories from across space and time? The film spans the globe — and multiple centuries, from the 1800s to the distant future — as it unreels its cosmic message of interconnectedness.



Cloud Atlas  is so sprawling that it required three directors: Andy and Lana Wachowski (the Matrix  trilogy) helm a trio of stories set in various futuristic scenarios; Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run ) handles three segments set in the past and the present. Even more unusual, a handful of actors (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae and others) portray roles in each of the substories that blur the lines of gender, race and humanity.



The R-rated experimental film, which opens Friday, is so audacious in its scope and execution that we figure it deserves three reviewers as well. As with all movies based on literature, it’s important to note whether the reviewers have read the book in question. Having read Cloud Atlas  seems to add to the enjoyment of seeing the film. (For the record, Wired  reviewer Angela Watercutter read the novel; Hugh Hart and Lewis Wallace did not.)

AW = Angela Watercutter
HH = Hugh Hart
LW = Lewis Wallace




ACTING

Tom Hanks and Halle Berry do a considerable amount of heavy lifting to manage the breadth of the six roles they each play, and hats off to Hugh Grant for finding new ways to manage “creepy” (1970s chauvinist nuclear energy asshat, plantation-running reverend, etc.). But the Best Chameleon awards go to Hugo Weaving and Jim Broadbent, and even though Jim Sturgess is great by the time he’s playing a fabricant-rescuer in Neo-Seoul, it’s hard not to think that the Wachowskis are really missing Keanu Reeves these days. — AW


Ensemble anchor Tom Hanks lives out an actor’s dress-up fantasy, but even at a hefty 2 hours and 40 minutes, covering six stories in five centuries means playing archetype sketches — stilted robot “fabricant,” kindly scientist, intrepid reporter, sleazy publisher — more than three-dimensional portraits. Breakout Ben Wishaw shows the most soulful intensity as reprobate composer Robert Frobisher. — HH


Doona Bae’s wide-eyed portrayal of “fabricant” clone Sonmi-451 is effective, but Tom Hanks seems to have the most fun when he’s playing the minor role of a thuggish author. David Gyasi’s intense take on Moriori stowaway Autua is the movie’s most compelling performance. — LW






DIALOG

The futuristic patois spoken by Hanks in his juiciest role — a mutant lingo somewhere between Uncle Remus laughable and Jar Jar Binks annoying — would undermine even the most accomplished actor. (Halle Berry never really had a chance with the “true-true.”) — LW


Up through the 2012 storyline, conventional dialog functions efficiently to move the plot forward. But in the future, things get weird: In Korea, “pure-bloods” enslave “fabricants” on their way to “exaltation,” effectively embodying a brainwashed population, but when Halle Berry and Tom Hanks chitchat in Creole-flavored patois — well, you just have to get used to it. — HH


In an attempt to stay true to Mitchell’s prose, the film’s directors (and book adapters) kept a lot of the future dialects that the author created for Cloud Atlas.  Difficult to follow on paper — and almost as hard to keep up with on-screen — the dialog might be the thing that most alienates audiences, no matter how authentic it is. (Side note: Things that are eternally romantic in Mitchell’s prose seem downright cheesy coming from the mouths of trained thespians.) — AW






VOICEOVERS

Characters go deep not when they’re talking to other people, but in voiceovers that state big themes. In case you missed it the first time: “Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and future. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” — HH


By turns eloquent and pretentious, the voiceovers truly help tie together the disparate stories. The way the voiceovers sometimes overlap storylines is a testament to the film’s powerful editing. — LW


Dear Reader: While being told what’s happening can be downright annoying in some films, when putting a story on screen that was written largely in the form of letters, journals and book-within-a-book formats, having steady narration is necessary. — AW






SOUNDS & MUSIC

The past sounds rich and majestic, while the future sounds intriguing and new. Kudos to the sound designers and soundtrackers, who add an impressive heft to the film’s impact. — LW


The taut orchestral score keeps crying wolf — you think the action is peaking, but there’s a lot more to go. Plot-driving “Cloud Atlas Sextet” is good but not spine-chilling. The record store clerk says he can’t quit playing the old vinyl recording of the score requested by Halle Berry. Really? It’s not that memorable. — HH


Hearing what co-director Tom Tykwer did with the “Cloud Atlas Sextet” is one of the film’s real pleasures. (Tykwer composed the soundtrack with his musical partners before shooting even started.) In the book, Robert Frobisher’s sextet is the soundtrack that ties many of the storylines together — and its composition is key to understanding the story’s structure. Hearing what it might sound like is remarkable. –AW






SCI-FI VISION

David Mitchell talks a lot of crazy about the future in the Cloud Atlas  book — for example, entertainment devices are just called “sonys” — and describes a lot of gizmos that leave much to the imagination. Thank Sonmi the team behind the Matrix  trilogy got a crack at bringing it to the screen: The Wachowskis add a bit of high-flying action that wasn’t as explosive in the novel, but makes for some sweet-looking futuristic sci-fi. — AW


The hovercraft chases and death-ray shootouts look cool enough, but the most chilling vision of the future comes during a retirement ceremony. So much for golden watches. — LW


Neo-Seoul reveals chilling vistas of customers gone wild during a Happy Meals-meets-Hooters restaurant staffed by mini-skirted fabricants. The lingo takes some getting used to: Instead of saying, “I wasn’t born to save the world,” Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) says, “I wasn’t genomed to alter the reality.” — HH






EDITING

The editing is probably the most impressive element of the movie. Keeping this constellation of stories and details from turning into a muddled mess — even for a viewer who has zero familiarity with the source text — is a keen accomplishment. — LW


Hop-scotching from farce to realism to fantastical storylines, the Wachowski siblings and Tykwer use elements and actions to bind one century to the next. Explosions, fire, gunshots and chases recur eternally through the centuries, like some kind of karmic echo chamber. — HH


Much like pimpin’, tying together six stories shot by three directors into a single three-hour movie ain’t easy. It could’ve been a hot, jumbled, nonlinear mess but somehow Alexander Berner did it: The way one character’s dialog illuminates another’s plight ties the film together in a way that’s fairly masterful, even when it’s a little overwrought. — AW






MAKEUP

In order to make the same-actor-in-multiple-roles motif work, most of the main cast of the film at one point or another plays someone of a different race or gender. Every so often — like when Hugo Weaving is playing the world’s most unappealing woman — it’s a little distracting. — AW


An Oscar-quality arsenal of beards, freckles, tattoos, wigs and moustaches disguise well-known actors to dramatize the film’s notion that bodies are just the window dressing for souls embarked on a long, long journey. — HH


The makeup is so imaginative and effective that the end credits, which flash pictures of each actor in all their roles, prove to be one of the movie’s most enlightening segments. — LW






DIRECTION

The most revolutionary thing about putting Cloud Atlas  in the hands of three different directors might be that it doesn’t feel like it was made by three different directors. Matrix  helmers Andy and Lana Wachowski have been directing together since the beginning, but the fact that they brought in Tom Tykwer without it messing up their vibe is impressive — it’s also a testament to the film’s artful editing. — AW


Three-headed directing beast smartly divvies up the storylines with Run Lola Run  director Tykwer lending a naturalistic vibe to the 1936, 1973 and 2012 chapters. This leaves Lana and Andy Wachowski to dress up the fantastical stuff. The visual textures vary (two cinematographers were employed) but the theme is spacious enough to bring all the characters and their urgent conundrums into the same tent. — HH


On paper, turning Cloud Atlas  into a successful movie sounds impossible. On the screen, the film’s three helmers make it look effortless. And that’s basically amazing. — LW






SPOT THE BIRTHMARKS

“But what do they all mean?” That’s every viewer of Cloud Atlas regarding the birthmarks that appear in the film. Truth is, the comet-like skin markings are meant to be enigmatic. Nearly every narrator in the book mentions either having one or seeing one, but their meaning isn’t explained. Presumably they indicate a connection between their bearers — the light from a single star takes ages to reach us, we are all travelers in the cosmos, blah blah blah — but there’s no Harry Potter-curse-scar reason for their existence. — AW


Halle Berry has one in 1973, meaning she’s a predestined catalyst for change — or something. Others share the birthmark, but blink and you’ll miss ‘em. The birthmark legacy doesn’t exactly pay off in a big way, but it’s a cool gimmick to suggest that nature encodes a larger design through the generations. — HH


At first, the recurring birthmarks seem heavy with portent, but in the end the whole thing seems more like a MacGuffin than a major element of the stories. Maybe I blinked and missed the momentous part. — LW






FINAL VERDICT

8
Like Watchmen before it, Cloud Atlas  as a written piece of storytelling often seemed unfilmable: The novel is so expansive that a few hours of film could barely contain all its finest points. To that end, Cloud Atlas  is the best movie version of the book anyone could ask for. Even when it is nearly collapsing under the weight of its own ambition, it holds up. — AW

WIRED A world-wide web IRL. Fabricants.
TIRED Occasionally impenetrable dialects.



8
While the movie’s grand ambition must be admired, it feels a mile wide and an inch deep. None of the stories really hammer home Cloud Atlas ' central uplifting message — that we’re all interconnected through time and space — as thoroughly as the masterful editing and incessant voiceovers do. High-minded and consistently interesting, it makes up what it lacks in traditional storytelling punch by pulling off an inspired cinematic experiment. — LW

WIRED Soylent Green  payoff.
TIRED Space rastas.



7
Big-budget Cloud Atlas  dazzles like a $100 million card trick. Filmmaker/magicians seem to shuffle the narrative deck with random abandon: Pick a storyline, any storyline and be amazed by what pops up. Beneath the chaos and makeup and costumes, the sometimes-silly Cloud Atlas  delivers the kind of soulful pageantry rarely glimpsed on the big screen. See it and be stunned. — HH

WIRED Big-hearted connectivity theme: What goes around comes around.
TIRED 2012′s senile retirement home escapees’ farcical shtick runs out of gas early.




« Last Edit: October 27, 2012, 04:11:56 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #71 on: October 27, 2012, 06:12:12 pm »


  http://www.vulture.com/2012/10/guide-to-the-characters-and-connections-of-cloud-atlas-confused.html


  Your Guide to the
  Characters and Connections of
Cloud Atlas

  By Jennifer Vineyard
  Today at 12:30 PM




If you've watched Cloud Atlas  and you're still a bit confused, it’s easy to see why. Each of the six intertwined stories takes place in a different era and assumes the tropes of completely different genres. Actors play multiple roles across the film, switching ages, races, and even genders from tale to tale. Tracking those actors is somewhat key to understanding the connective plot, in which various souls are reincarnated or migrate over time — crossing the ages like clouds cross the skies. (In the book, you could track the reincarnation by the bodies that shared a comet-shaped birthmark; in the film, the birthmark just signals our protagonists, and the actor triggers the reincarnation.) See Hugo Weaving? Then you've got the bad soul who will only get worse over time. See Tom Hanks? Then you've got the recovering soul who starts off bad but will become (mostly) good over the course of his journey. Here is a guide to the karmic chameleons of Cloud Atlas.  (Note: to avoid confusion we will mostly refer to the characters by the names of the actors who play them.)



OUR SETTINGS
A ship crossing the Pacific in 1849;
the home of an elderly composer in 1936 Edinburgh [not Zedelghem, Belgium, as in Mitchell's book--JG];
San Francisco and a nearby nuclear power plant in 1973;
London and an Edinburgh nursing home in 2012;
Neo-Soul, the capital of a half-ruined Korea in 2144;
a valley and a mountain on a post-apocalyptic Hawaii in 2321.




TOM HANKS
Who he plays:
A doctor poisoning Jim Sturgess in 1849 in order to rob him;
a hotel manager in 1936 who extorts Ben Whishaw's composer;
a physicist working at a shady nuclear power plant in 1973 who agrees to help investigative journalist Halle Berry;
a roughneck author in 2012 who throws a critic off a balcony;
an actor playing Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent’s character) in a movie watched in 2144;
a cowardly (and birthmarked!) goatherd in 2321 who helps Halle Berry’s Meronym, a representative of the last vestiges of advanced civilization.

His soul journey: He goes from a shady murderer who says, "The weak are meat; the strong do eat," to someone who learns courage and selflessness.

Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: His movie inspires a clone in 2144 to set off a revolution; that clone, Sonmi-451 becomes a goddess to his postapocalyptic tribe;
the turquoise buttons he steals from Adam Ewing’s vest in 1849 are around his neck in 2321, Hanks’s character having found them in the forest;
Hanks’s goatherd has a nightmare in which he sees all the other timelines.




JIM STURGESS
Who he plays:
Young and gullible (and birthmarked) lawyer Adam Ewing, on a journey from the South Pacific to notarize a contract between plantation owner Hugh Grant and Ewing's father-in-law, Hugo Weaving. Ewing helps an escaped-slave stowaway (David Gyasi) and ultimately condemns slavery;
a hotel guest in 1936;
a father in 1973;
a soccer fan in 2012 who gets in a pub fight to help some senior citizens;
a Korean freedom fighter in 2144 who saves clone/slave Doona Bae and starts a revolution;
a doomed tribe member in 2321, whose brother-in-law Tom Hanks is too scared to save him from cannibal Hugh Grant.

His soul journey: He starts off reluctantly helping one slave to becoming an abolitionist and ultimately becomes a revolutionary dedicated to ending all slavery.

Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: He keeps a journal that Ben Whishaw’s 1936 composer becomes engrossed by.




BEN WHISHAW
Who he plays:
A cabin boy in 1849;
bisexual (and birthmarked!) composer Robert Frobisher in 1936, who apprentices himself to Jim Broadbent while sleeping with Broadbent's wife, Halle Berry, and writes the beautiful Cloud Atlas Sextet ;
a record-store clerk in 1973 who can't get the Cloud Atlas Sextet  out of his head and helps Halle Berry find it;
the wife of Hugh Grant in 2012 and sister-in-law to Jim Broadbent;
a tribesman in 2321.

His soul journey: He doesn't seem to learn much over time, remains morally ambiguous, and will sleep with anyone, no matter whom it hurts.

Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: He writes letters to his true love, Rufus Sixsmith (James D'Arcy), in 1936, which Halle Berry reads in 1973;
strains of his Cloud Atlas Sextet  recur throughout several timelines.




HALLE BERRY
Who she plays:
A slave from an aboriginal tribe in 1849;
the white Jewish trophy wife of Jim Broadbent in 1936;
the gutsy (and birthmarked!) journalist Luisa Rey who follows in the footsteps of her famous reporter father (David Gyasi);
a hip Indian chick at a party in 2012 who intrigues Tom Hanks;
a male Korean doctor in 2144 who helps free a clone;
an advanced being in a primitive postapocalyptic world in 2321.

Her soul journey: She goes from being someone with no power to humanity's last hope, and she evolves into a higher being as she follows her impulse to help other people.

Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: Her 1973 story becomes a manuscript that Jim Broadbent reads in 2012;
she wears the same necklace in 1936, 1973, and 2012;
her 1973 line “For the last half hour, all I could think about was throwing you off your balcony” literally comes true with Tom Hanks’s 2012 character.




JIM BROADBENT
Who he plays:
An arrogant ship's captain in 1849;
a composer in 1936 who takes on apprentice Ben Whishaw and attempts to claim the younger man's work as his own;
the morally ambiguous (and birthmarked!) vanity press publisher Timothy Cavendish, who benefits from the death of a critic at the hands of his author, Tom Hanks;
a Korean street musician in 2144 and
an advanced being known as a Prescient in 2321.

His soul journey: He starts off by being pompous and self-serving but learns humility over time.

Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: His grand mansion in 1936 is his nursing home in 2012; the film of his "ghastly ordeal" in 2012 is watched by a clone slave in 2144;
his 1936 character has a dream of the Papa Song café in which Sonmi-451 works.




DOONA BAE
Who she plays:
The white wife of Jim Sturgess and daughter of Hugo Weaving in 1849;
the wife of Jim Sturgess and mother of James D'Arcy's niece in 1973;
a Hispanic woman working at a factory in 1973;
Sonmi-451, a (birthmarked!) clone or "fabricant," who is genetically engineered to be a worker drone but starts to think for herself and sparks a revolution when she's aided by freedom fighter Jim Sturgess.

Her soul journey: She goes from being a powerless figure to a goddess revered by a simple tribe, the only link they have to their preapocalyptic past.

Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: Her recorded statements become the tribal wisdom of a tribe in 2321.




HUGH GRANT
Who he plays:
A reverend and a plantation owner in 1849;
a hotel clerk trying to collect from Ben Whishaw;
the owner of a nuclear power plant in 1973 who wants it to fail and kill millions;
the cuckolded brother of Jim Broadbent who tricks him into committing himself to a nursing home;
a Korean restaurant manager in 2144 who sleeps with his clone workers;
the leader of a band of cannibal warriors in 2321.

His soul journey: Despite a charming exterior at first, he never really cares about anyone, and this only gets worse over time; he devolves into a pure savage.




HUGO WEAVING
Who he plays:
The father of Doona Bae and father-in-law of Jim Sturgess in 1849, who is involved in the slave trade;
a Nazi in 1936 who is a friend of composer Jim Broadbent;
an assassin in 1973;
a female nursing home orderly in 2012 who torments elderly Jim Broadbent;
a Unanimity authority figure in 2144;
a Devil-like figment of Tom Hanks's imagination in 2321.

His soul journey: He's a figure of evil, control, and enslavement who never displays any loyalty or learns anything over time, and eventually devolves until he's just an idea.

Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: His line as Nurse Noakes, “Because you’re new, I will not make you eat soap,” mirrors the food that fabricants eat in Neo Seoul;
his line, “There’s a natural order to this world,” which he utters as a futuristic functionary, is repeated at film’s end by his slave-owning businessman.




KEITH DAVID
Who he plays:
Like Halle Berry, a slave in 1849 working for Hugh Grant;
the security chief at Hugh Grant's nuclear power plant in 1973, who goes rogue to protect Halle Berry;
the leader of a resistance movement in 2144;
a Prescient working alongside Halle Berry in 2321.

His soul journey: He goes from being a slave to a leader, someone who throws off the shackles of evil employers/bad governments.

Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: He appears to be a kindred spirit with Halle Berry.




JAMES D'ARCY
Who he plays:
Ben Whishaw's lover in 1936 and recipient of his letters;
an older version of his previous character Rufus Sixsmith, who gives Halle Berry damning evidence that his nuclear power plant is unsafe;
an orderly at Jim Broadbent's nursing home in 2012;
and finally, a patient Archivist in 2144 who interrogates clone Doona Bae.

His soul journey: A little muddled. He goes from being a passive listener to someone who takes a stand against a big wrong back to a passive listener of a tale of injustice.

Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: The letters he receives from Ben Whishaw in 1936 are read by Halle Berry in 1973;
Hugo Weaving’s assassin shoots him in the mouth, which mirrors the suicide-by-gun death of his lover, Frobisher.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #72 on: October 27, 2012, 08:15:16 pm »



Simply.
Amazing.
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHHycz7T_c[/youtube]
Published on Oct 24, 2012 by hrcmedia





Also Posted in The Equality Agenda thread, BEYOND Amazing speech by LANA WACHOWSKI for receiving the HRC Visibility Award:
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,50204.msg639502/topicseen.html#msg639502
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #73 on: October 27, 2012, 11:51:52 pm »
What a wonderful talk!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #74 on: October 28, 2012, 04:48:22 am »


What a wonderful talk!


It isn't it??  :) :) :)


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
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Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #75 on: October 28, 2012, 09:30:15 pm »

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/27/cloud_atlas_meaning_what_does_the_wachowskis_movie_say_about_reincarnation.html


  The World According to
Cloud Atlas
By Forrest Wickman
Posted Saturday, Oct. 27, 2012, at 10:53 AM ET




Top row: Tom Hanks in three different roles in Cloud Atlas.
Bottom row: Halle Berry in three different roles in Cloud Atlas.




The first question you’re likely to have after walking out of Cloud Atlas  is: What was up with that leprechaun ? But you’ll probably have some more substantive questions nagging you as well. Like: What did it all mean? What are the Wachowski Siblings and co-director Tom Tykwer trying to say about reincarnation, revolution, and the fate of mankind? And how do the movie’s six narrative strands fit together? Herewith, is our best effort at sorting it all out:


Reincarnation

The film casts a number of actors in multiple roles across time to underline the themes of reverberating actions and eternal recurrence in David Mitchell’s novel. But the movie seems to believe in a more direct process of reincarnation than the book, which merely suggests reincarnation as a possibility.

The Wachowskis have suggested that each actor in the movie plays a soul that evolves across time. As they told The New Yorker,  “Tom Hanks starts off as a bad person … but evolves over centuries into a good person.” The soul depicted by Hanks goes from being a murderous quack (Dr. Henry Goose) to a physicist (Isaac Sachs) to a cockney gangster (Dermot Hoggins) and finally to a troubled tribesman of the post-apocalypse (the Valleysman Zachry); the soul played by Halle Berry goes from being a young Polynesian native to a Jewish composer’s wife (Jocasta Ayrs) to an investigative reporter (Luisa Rey), and so on.

But is it that simple? If Hanks always plays the same soul, then what happened between 1970 and 2012 to turn him from a whistle-blowing scientist into a murderous memoirist? Hanks’ progress, if indeed it’s from a “bad person” to a “good person,” hardly seems to follow a linear path. Also: the filmmakers decision to use nearly all of their actors in multiple roles is arguably as confusing as it is clarifying. Are all the characters played by Hugo Weaving the same soul? Perhaps—they’re  certainly all evil. But what about Halle Berry? In 1973, when she’s a muckraking journalist, and in “106 years after the Fall” (well into the future), she’s heroic. But in the 1930s she’s the mostly silent and occasionally adulterous wife of an egotistical composer.


Birthmarks

Which brings us to the comet-shaped birthmarks, which one character in almost every plot possesses. In Mitchell’s novel, the birthmark is thought to suggest that everyone who has one is actually a different incarnation of the same person. But in the movie, different actors, including Ben Whishaw (when he’s portraying Robert Frobisher) and Halle Berry (when she’s playing Luisa Rey) are seen with the birthmark. So which is it: Are all the characters played by Tom Hanks the same soul? Or is each character with the birthmark the same soul?


Good vs. Evil

There may be a way to resolve this question. Perhaps only some actors play the same soul across time—including Tom Hanks and possibly Hugo Weaving—while other actors play different incarnations of the same soul (i.e., the soul with the birthmark). This interpretation might also help explain how the filmmakers see the six storylines connecting. There are essentially three main characters in each story. One, who the Wachowskis have said embodies “the Everyman,” is played by Tom Hanks. The second is a force of conservatism, evil, and oppression, who is represented (because it’s a Wachowskis film) by Hugo Weaving. The third is a force of good who can see beyond superficial differences of race, sexual orientation, and genetic engineering, and who is represented by various actors, all of whom own the birthmark: budding abolitionist Adam Ewing, the composer Frobisher, journalist Louisa Rey, fabricant Sonmi, and hero of the future Meronym. (Note: These characters have the birthmark in the book, and some certainly have it in the movie. Do they all? We can’t quite remember. If you do, let us know in the comments.)


Interconnectedness

However they work, exactly, the device of actors playing multiple characters across time and the device of repeating the birthmark across time both convey one of the film’s major themes: The interconnectedness of all human life. This theme is also underlined by events in each narrative. One individual’s actions—Sonmi’s standing up against an oppressive corporatocracy, or Robert Frobisher’s completion of his haunting sextet (itself about eternal recurrence)—are shown to have effects reaching far into the future. Frobisher’s sextet is heard again and again across the film, and Sonmi’s rebellious speech seems to eventually become scripture to the people of the future. And it’s not just their words and speeches that resonate down the ages, but also their stories: Just as in Mitchell’s novel, each character tells his or her own story, and each of these stories is shown being read (or in some cases, watched) by the people of the future. Our actions, the movie seems to be saying, don’t just affect our present: They’re shaped by mankind’s past and will in turn shape mankind’s future.


Prejudice and Oppression

Often in the film’s stories, the evil force that the hero is fighting against is a form of imprisonment rooted in some kind of prejudice. In the earliest tale, Adam Ewing fights against the American institution of slavery. In the 1930s, Frobisher is threatened with imprisonment on account of his homosexuality. In the Neo Seoul plot, Hae-Joo Chang and Sonmi 451 fight against a totalitarian government that treats clones like cattle. Each of these systems insists on the fundamental difference between the dominant group and the dominated one, thus violating the fundamental principle of interconnectedness.


Revolution and Change

So how do you go about effecting change in the world of Cloud Atlas ? How do the forces of good wage their eternal battle with the forces of evil? It’s worth noting that each story plays out in remarkably similar ways. What allows each hero to prevail over his oppressor is, in nearly every case, a recognition of himself in another.

Take, for instance, the story set in 1849. The hero is Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess), who recognizes himself in the slave Autua (David Gyasi) as he’s being whipped. As a result of this moment of recognition, Ewing decides to help Autua escape from bondage and Autua in turn saves Ewing’s life. Later, Ewing rises up against his slavery-supporting father-in-law (played, of course, by Hugo Weaving) and becomes an abolitionist. In the story set in 22nd-century Neo Seoul, Hae-Joo Chang (Jim Sturgess) recognizes his other in the genetically engineered fabricant Sonmi-451, and together they lead an uprising against an oppressive regime (their rebellion will fail in their own time, but echo meaningfully into the future). After the apocalypse, Zachry (Hanks) and Meronym (Berry) are able to look past the differences of language, culture, and skin color to unite and start a new civilization on a distant planet.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #76 on: October 28, 2012, 10:13:55 pm »

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/25/the_cloud_atlas_phrasebook_your_guide_to_yibberin_the_true_true_language.html

 
The Cloud Atlas  Phrasebook:
Your Guide to Yibberin’ the True True
By Forrest Wickman
Posted Thursday, Oct. 25, 2012, at 5:08 PM ET




Zachry (Tom Hanks) and the demon Old Georgie (Hugo Weaving) in Cloud Atlas.



Of all the intermingling plotlines in Cloud Atlas,  perhaps the most daunting is the sixth and final one, which concerns a future tribe of Hawaii-dwellers called the Valleysmen, one of whom is played by Tom Hanks. What makes it daunting, even frustrating, is the Valleysmen way of speaking. The English of the future has become a post-apocalyptic pidgin, which is frequently difficult to understand.

But you don’t have to sail into that future land unprepared. The best way to pick up a little Valleysmen would be of course to read the book, but in case you won’t have time to do so before you see the movie, we’ve cobbled together a guide. You’ll want to know that to judas,  for example, means to betray, and that the Valleysmen of the Big I  have a diresome tendency to add the suffix –some  willy-nilly to all their adjectives. We focused on those parts of the lexicon that feature in the movie, but of course this glossary could be helpful to Old Un  readers of the book as well.

Anyway, that’s enough of my yibberin’.  But if you want to cogg  what’s going on in the film, mem’ry  a few of these phrases. Yay,  that’s the true true.



babbit – n. baby. I got the tenderlies like she was my own babbit slumbrin’ by me.

Big I – n. the Big Island of Hawaii, home of the Valleysmen and the Kona. Savages on Big I norm’ly had more gods’n you could wave a spiker at.

cogg – v. to know or recognize. I cogged for the first time there’n’then. I knowed why I shudn’t kill this Kona.

curio – n. curiosity. But her answers didn’t quench my curio none, nay, not a flea.

The Fall - n. the apocalypse, 106 winters before the time of the Valleysmen, described as a period of flashbangin’.   Back when the Fall was fallin’, humans f’got the makin’ o’ fire.

far-far ­– adj. very far. I cogged she was far-far from her own fam’ly’n’kin.

howzit  - interj. Valleysmen greeting similar to “How are you?” or “How’s it going?” Past Cluny’s Dwellin’ a bro o’ mine, Gubboh Hogboy shouted, “Howzit.”

judas – v. to betray, sell out. Whatever Meronym’s cause for scalin’ this cussed mountain, I din’t b’lief she’d ever judas no Valleysmen.

Kona – n. a violent tribe of cannibals, enemy to the Valleysmen, and its tribesmen. If I’d been rebirthed a Kona in this life, he could be me an’ I’d be killin’ myself.

mem’ry – v. to remember. You’ll mem’ry I, Zachry, was curled in my hideynick in the Icon’ry.

minder – v. to mind or care for. I’d the goats to minder.

nay – adv. and n. no. Used also for emphasis, like the Biblical nay. I won’t answer nothin’, nay, so don’t ask no more.

Old Georgie – n.  A devil in the belief system of the Valleysmen, resembling a leprechaun in appearance. An’ ev’ryun knowed how he’d done a deal with Old Georgie.

Old Uns – n. The old ones; the people of Earth who lived before The Fall. Old Uns s’vived the Fall b’yonder the oceans, jus’ like you, Zachry.

Prescient – n. The survivors of the Fall, usually darker-skinned, who still wield pre-Fall technology. The Prescient’d got her spesh gearbag with her an’ I thanked Sonmi for that.

presh – adj. precious. The whole true is presher’n’rarer’n diamonds.

scav – v. to scavenge or steal. She’s scavvin’n’sivvyin Big Isle Smart what truesome b’longs to Valleys-men!

–some – suffix, similar to English –ful. Used in adjectives like diresome, scarysome, wondersome, politesome, lustsome.

sivvy – v. to search. Why don’t you sivvy thru my gear again an’ thief my spesh Prescient Smart yourself?

Smart – n., also adj. The futuristic technology held by the Prescients. It din’t need wind nor currents neither, ‘cos it was driven by the Smart o’ Old Uns.

Sonmi – n. The One Goddess of the Valleysmen. Used in phrases like by Sonmi, meaning by God, and thank Sonmi, meaning thank God. Valleysmen only had one god an’ her name it was Sonmi.

spesh – adj. special. Makin’ ‘cusations against a spesh guest, it jus’ ain’t politesome, Zachry.

spiker – n. A sharp weapon, such as a knife. Also v. to stab (esp. with a spiker). What he said next was a spiker thru my guts.

true true – n. the truth, esp. in contrast with conventional wisdom. Then the true true is diff’rent to the seemin’ true?  See also: the hole true.

Valleysmen - n. the more civilized, Sonmi-fearing tribe of post-Fall Hawaii. Meronym knows a lot ‘bout Smart an’ life but Valleysmen know more ‘bout death.

yibber – v. to talk, jabber, or gossip. Also n. a rumor. Shut up your yibberin’ an’ sleep now.

yarn – v. to tell a story. Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an’ a few yarnin’s got a lot o’ true.

yay – adv. and n. Yes. Used also for emphasis, like the Biblical yea.  Yay, but fleas ain’t easy to rid.


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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #77 on: October 29, 2012, 11:27:23 am »




[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o75FEJUXVtA&feature=related[/youtube]
Published on Oct 13, 2012 by Snouty Pig




This is an extensive inside look of Cloud Atlas  featuring interviews with Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and a round-table discussion with the Directors and some behind the scenes footage. Cloud Atlas  arrives October 26, 2012.

Cloud Atlas  is a six stories in one film with actors playing themselves across different centuries sometimes male, sometimes female sometimes alternating between good and bad. The three directors previously stated of the film that it is "massive in scope" but "relative to normal life, to human beings" while being "political" with "lots of action" where characters represent the core concept of "an idea of connectedness and karma".

https://www.facebook.com/cloudatlas

http://cloudatlas.warnerbros.com/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/

Some of the songs from the trailer/inside look:

"Sonera" by Thomas J. Bergersen


"Outro" by M83.
=1m38s

Visit http://www.snoutypig.com for movie news, articles, and more.


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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #78 on: October 29, 2012, 05:15:22 pm »
So, John, have you seen it?  And what do you think? 

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #79 on: October 29, 2012, 05:23:42 pm »

So, John, have you seen it?  And what do you think? 
 :)


Crazy Person JG saw it at the 12:01 Midnight Showing Thursday night/Friday morning at the 42nd Street AMC. I really liked it a lot. First 30-40 minutes, and I was interested, but I bit detached, but then--boom, I was there.

There WERE problems, a couple of issues I can't reveal at the moment for their spoilerish natures, BUT. I really, really enjoyed it. Three hours--go like nothing. TOTALLY absorbed. I cried. What else can I say? I'll be seeing it AGAIN, and that soon.



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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #80 on: October 29, 2012, 06:37:13 pm »

Crazy Person JG saw it at the 12:01 Midnight Showing Thursday night/Friday morning at the 42nd Street AMC. I really liked it a lot. First 30-40 minutes, and I was interested, but I bit detached, but then--boom, I was there.

There WERE problems, a couple of issues I can't reveal at the moment for their spoilerish natures, BUT. I really, really enjoyed it. Three hours--go like nothing. TOTALLY absorbed. I cried. What else can I say? I'll be seeing it AGAIN, and that soon.

Thanks, John.  Sometimes I prefer friends' reviews over the professionals'.  Especially obsessive friends!  8)

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #81 on: October 29, 2012, 06:58:10 pm »
Awesome to hear! :D
"chewing gum and duct tape"

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #82 on: October 30, 2012, 01:00:08 pm »

Simply.
Amazing.
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHHycz7T_c[/youtube]
Published on Oct 24, 2012 by hrcmedia



Wow, that's easily the best acceptance speech, and one of the best speeches period, I've ever heard.



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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #83 on: October 30, 2012, 02:06:57 pm »


Wow, that's easily the best acceptance speech, and one of the best speeches period, I've ever heard.


I agree.



http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/24/lana_wachowski_s_visibility_award_speech_cloud_atlas_director_on_coming.html


Lana Wachowski’s Moving Speech
About Being Transgender

By Katie Kilkenny
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2012, at 2:15 PM ET



Director Lana Wachowski speaks at a panel discussion following the Cloud Atlas U.S.
premiere.




At the beginning of her acceptance speech for the Human Rights Campaign’s Visibility Award in San Francisco last Saturday, director Lana Wachowski professes that she has never given a speech—or at least, not since the eighth grade. Given the candid, humorous, and heartrending account of coming out as transgender that follows, you wouldn’t know it.

Wachowski, who helmed The Matrix  and this fall’s Cloud Atlas  as part of a directing duo once called “The Wachowski Brothers,” has always carefully guarded her privacy. Until recently, she had not made a public appearance for her films in years. “People have mistakenly assumed that this has something to do with my gender, “Wachowski says in the speech, “it does not.”

The speech provides a rare glimpse of Wachowski’s sharp wit and her experience rebuffing binary gender classification. You can watch the whole thing below. (There is also a transcript .)



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHHycz7T_c[/youtube]
Published on Oct 24, 2012 by hrcmedia


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Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #84 on: October 31, 2012, 10:35:03 am »
I walked out of the theater last night after seeing Cloud Atlas thinking about this thread. Had it not been for the numerous postings it may have not caught my attention, I was composing something to express my amazement at seeing this film, and it included much profanity for emphasis, as I felt empowered to do so.

This movie needs to be seen, all 2 3/4 hours of it, OMG, it is the righteous slap in the face to convention, the declaration of thought over fear, Ayn Rand can kiss my ass. She wishes she could tell a story this good.

This came at just the right time for me, I had been feeling down and trapped and alienated from family and friends locally over this presidential election and this story reminded me: All life is suffering, everything is a struggle and it is worth it. I left that theater feeling like I could, I could give my life for something, and not be afraid of it. Love is a force of nature, love goes on.

Go see this movie.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #85 on: October 31, 2012, 11:34:32 am »



I walked out of the theater last night after seeing Cloud Atlas thinking about this thread. Had it not been for the numerous postings it may have not caught my attention, I was composing something to express my amazement at seeing this film, and it included much profanity for emphasis, as I felt empowered to do so.

This movie needs to be seen, all 2 3/4 hours of it, OMG, it is the righteous slap in the face to convention, the declaration of thought over fear, Ayn Rand can kiss my ass. She wishes she could tell a story this good.

This came at just the right time for me, I had been feeling down and trapped and alienated from family and friends locally over this presidential election and this story reminded me: All life is suffering, everything is a struggle and it is worth it. I left that theater feeling like I could, I could give my life for something, and not be afraid of it. Love is a force of nature, love goes on.

Go see this movie.



I'm so glad you liked it, Truman!!   :)





Ben Whishaw as Robert Frobisher in Cloud Atlas
atop the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK



James D'Arcy as Rufus Sixsmith and Ben Whishaw as Robert Frobisher in Letters from Zedelghem Edinburgh



James D'Arcy as Rufus Sixsmith in Letters from Zedelghem Edinburgh


« Last Edit: October 31, 2012, 11:49:59 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #86 on: October 31, 2012, 12:08:58 pm »
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Cloud-Atlas-Infographic-Explains-Karmic-Journeys-Movie-Characters-33823.html


  

  MOVIE NEWS
Cloud Atlas
Infographic

Explains The Karmic Journeys
Of The Movie's Characters

Author: Kristy Puchko
2012-10-29 15:55:56



Here at Cinema Blend, we haven't been shy about our admiration for the Wachowski Siblings' latest epic effort Cloud Atlas.  With friend and colleague Tom Tykwer, Andy and Lana Wachowski dove deep into David Mitchell's supposedly unfilmable novel that encompasses six narratives in six different worlds, and somehow produced a movie that is not only one of the year's biggest cinematic spectacles, but also full of symbolism and a plethora of engaging storylines.

But beyond the adventures of the book's heroes—like Adam Ewing, Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Somni-451 and Zachry the goat herder—Wachowski Starship and Tykwer invented new character arcs by giving their cast multiple roles over the film's extensive timelines. In doing so, they not only bolstered Mitchell's theme of reincarnation, but also created character arcs that transcend lifetimes. Below, we break down how each of these characters rise and fall in in terms of their moral values over the course of Cloud Atlas.  As you might guess, this is entirely constructed of spoilers.









Scroll to see enlarged images:

Scroll to see enlarged images:


Please note: VERY oddly, this infographic does not show Ben Whishaw or Zhou Xun at all!

In any case, if you wish, click for
some spoilers.

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #87 on: October 31, 2012, 12:10:06 pm »
All life is suffering, everything is a struggle and it is worth it. I left that theater feeling like I could, I could give my life for something, and not be afraid of it. Love is a force of nature, love goes on.

Go see this movie.

Tru, was your name Siddhartha in a previous life?  :)
"chewing gum and duct tape"

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #88 on: October 31, 2012, 01:30:05 pm »
I doubt it, but I did have a dog named Sidartha Guitarma. She was the smartest dog in the world.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #89 on: October 31, 2012, 01:36:28 pm »
That graphic is very helpful keeping it all straight, and I wouldn't worry about spoilers, this storyline is so complex I think spoiler alerts are just not even applicable.

I need to check the library and see if they have the book, there are some tremendous lines in the movie, the one about "what is the ocean but a bunch of drops" something like that. When I get the DVD, and I will, I'm going to have to watch it with the subtitles again.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #90 on: October 31, 2012, 01:41:33 pm »
And I mean to tell you this movie has it all, horror, pain, despair, comedy, angst, nostalgia, love, music, sex, heights, underwater scenes, it is like a cross between The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming and Soylent Green.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #91 on: October 31, 2012, 02:08:29 pm »
That graphic is very helpful keeping it all straight, and I wouldn't worry about spoilers, this storyline is so complex I think spoiler alerts are just not even applicable.

I need to check the library and see if they have the book, there are some tremendous lines in the movie, the one about "what is the ocean but a bunch of drops" something like that. When I get the DVD, and I will, I'm going to have to watch it with the subtitles again.



Something you might find interesting, Truman, and which you probably didn't catch during the Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery  section: three of the actors are only on screen as photographs.

David Gyasi, previously as the escaped slave Autua, is also seen in a photograph as Lester Rey, the father of Luisa Rey (Halle Berry), while




Jim Sturgess (as Adam Ewing in the past and Hae-Joo Chang in the future)

and

Doona Bae (Tilda Ewing, Adam's wife and Sonmi-451, Hae-Joo Chang's lover)

are shown in a different photo as the parents  of Megan Sixsmith, the niece of Rufus Sixsmith (James D'Arcy, who was the lover of Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw).  



Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess (who are a couple three times over in Cloud Atlas ) as themselves.



James D'Arcy (Rufus Sixsmith) with 'sister-in-law' Doona Bae and 'brother' Jim Sturgess in Luisa Rey
and in 2144 Neo Seoul, in An Orison of Sonmi~451
they are (L to R) the Archivist, the 'Fabricant' Sonmi-451, and the rebel leader Hae-Joo Chang.





Of course, maybe you did notice the photographs--the credits (with illustrated vignettes!) at the end of the film are a great help!   ::) :laugh:

Anyway, interesting!


« Last Edit: November 01, 2012, 09:26:01 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #92 on: October 31, 2012, 11:03:36 pm »

This same historic country house is
shown in two of the Cloud Atlas
stories directed by Tom Tykwer--


Ben Whishaw as Robert Frobisher and
Jim Broadbent as Vyvyan Ayers in Letters from Zedelghem Edinburgh





Overtoun House in Dumbarton, Scotland, UK



Jim Broadbent as Timothy Cavendish and Hugo Weaving as Nurse Noakes in The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish


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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #93 on: October 31, 2012, 11:28:07 pm »




"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #94 on: November 01, 2012, 02:22:37 am »



This is beautiful.
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V38t2wF1jzw&list=UUtoMyXF4VFY3cB8fUcn7N4A[/youtube]
Published on Oct 24, 2012 by amctheatres


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM7DoEyu3Js&feature[/youtube]
Published on Oct 17, 2012 by TVsTalkingPictures


Ben Whishaw and James D' Arcy Talk Cloud Atlas


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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #95 on: November 01, 2012, 02:48:16 am »



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iw2ErfCC30&feature[/youtube]
Published on Oct 19, 2012 by ShowbizJunkies


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CV13fzt_Vw&feature[/youtube]
Published on Oct 16, 2012 by GG gloriagallery


Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess


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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #96 on: November 01, 2012, 02:56:04 am »



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrw7NVO8Qk0&feature=related[/youtube]
Published on Oct 18, 2012 by FilmsActuTrailers

"But what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?"


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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #97 on: November 02, 2012, 01:39:14 pm »
Spoiler...





Why did the music artist kill himself?  I missed why he found it necessary to do so.....

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #98 on: November 02, 2012, 02:54:33 pm »
Eric, I think I'm going to need to read the book. After seeing the movie yesterday, I have combed through this whole collection of literature, beautifully assembled by our wonderful Archivist John Gallagher, and I am still pretty speechless. You all know me well enough now to know that that is an unusual condition for me.

To take a stab at an answer, maybe Robert Frobischer lost his music, The Cloud Atlas Sextet, and since he felt it was the culmination of his life's work, he thought there was nothing else to live for.
"chewing gum and duct tape"

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #99 on: November 02, 2012, 03:05:27 pm »
I remember it as he got away with the composition after shooting the old composer, but police were looking for him and the composer had already threatened to ruin him. He left the composition to Rufus Sixsmith along with a letter, and the music got recorded because Halle Berry's character locates a copy in 1973.
"It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you, Jack, I swear."

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #100 on: November 12, 2012, 11:26:23 am »


http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cloud-atlas-poised-international-comeback-389267



Cloud Atlas
  Poised for International Comeback

 The fantasy epic grosses more than
 $10 million in its first international
 berths in Russia, Ukraine and Turkey.


  by Scott Roxborough
  6:39 AM PST 11/12/2012


   



COLOGNE, Germany – Cloud Atlas  may have fallen to earth domestically but the fantasy epic could be reborn oversees if its performance in Russia and Ukraine is any indication.

The ambitious multilayered drama directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and German helmer Tom Tykwer grossed $9.71 million in Russia and Ukraine over the weekend, the first two territories on its international roll out. Together, the two Eastern European markets outperformed Cloud Atlas ' U.S. bow, where the Warner Bros. title earned about $9.6 million on its opening weekend.

The film's impressive $9.1 million (RUB 282 million) opener in Russia, on more than 1,400 screens, was enough to secure the number one slot in the territory. The film beat out all competitors including Ben Affleck's Argo,  which knocked Cloud Atlas  into second slot in its U.S. debut. Cloud Atlas ' Russian bow, is blockbuster size for the territory. The new James Bond, Skyfall,  opened at $8.6 million in Russia.

“I always believed in the film...we treated it like a blockbuster in Russia and tremendous support from the exhibitors and and our studio partner 20th Century Fox Russia,” Alexander van Dulmen, whose A Film Russia released Cloud Atlas.  “It was a tremendous marketing achievement. Personally, I'm extremely pleased that a brainy movie like this one has done so well in Russia.”

Van Dulmen also praised Ukrainian distributor B&H Film who bowed Cloud Atlas  on 120 screens.

Cloud Atlas ' strong performance in Russia bodes well for the film as its picks up its international roll-out. X Verleih, the distribution arm of Cloud Atlas ' Berlin-based producers X Filme, will bow the film on around 600 screens in Germany November 15. The release, which X Verleih is handling together with Warner Bros. Germany, is a tentpole equivalent in the territory. Sony Pictures released Skyfall  on 789 copies in Germany.

Commenting on Cloud Atlas ' strong international start, the film's producers, Stefan Arndt and Grant Hill, said they were “delighted that our the first international  releases are repaying our belief in this special film.” In addition to Russia and Ukraine, Cloud Atlas  pulled in an additional $1 million from Turkey.

All eyes are now on Germany, where Cloud Atlas  will have to face off against Skyfall.  The new Bond has delivered the best first and second weekend ever for the franchise in Germany and has sold some 4 million tickets so far in the territory.

Argo,  which debuted at number six in Germany on 150 copies, looks less threatening to Cloud Atlas  here.  The German release of 3-D actioner Dredd,  which Universum is bowing together with Disney next weekend, however, could siphon off a few German sci-fi fans that would otherwise end up in the Cloud Atlas  camp.

In the U.S., Cloud Atlas  has so far grossed around $23 million after 17 days.


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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #101 on: November 13, 2012, 03:50:19 am »


Cloud Atlas
   Release dates


Canada 8 September 2012 (Toronto International Film Festival)
Canada 26 October 2012 
India 26 October 2012 
Turkey 26 October 2012 
USA 26 October 2012 
Pakistan 27 October 2012 

Netherlands 5 November 2012 (Amsterdam Film Week)

Belarus 8 November 2012 
Kazakhstan 8 November 2012 
Russia 8 November 2012 
Bulgaria 9 November 2012 
Iceland 9 November 2012 

Germany 15 November 2012 

Czech Republic 22 November 2012 
Greece 22 November 2012 
Hungary 22 November 2012 
Slovenia 22 November 2012 

Lithuania 23 November 2012 
Poland 23 November 2012 

Netherlands 29 November 2012 
Portugal 29 November 2012 
Thailand 29 November 2012 

Estonia 30 November 2012 
Sweden 30 November 2012 

Brazil 25 December 2012 
Norway 26 December 2012 
Chile 27 December 2012 

Hong Kong 3 January 2013 
Argentina 3 January 2013 
Italy 3 January 2013 

Denmark 17 January 2013 
Singapore 17 January 2013 

Australia 21 February 2013 

Ireland 22 February 2013 
Spain 22 February 2013 
UK 22 February 2013 

Belgium 13 March 2013 
France 13 March 2013 
Japan 15 March 2013
 

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #102 on: November 15, 2012, 10:33:45 pm »
I'm enjoying the book. The first story was a bit of a slog, but once I was 20 pages in it became engaging, when Autua appeared. I love his use of I: "You kill I."

Here's a lovely passage from the second story where Bruges is being described:

"Sixsmith...arrive in that six o'clock in the morning gnossiennesque hour. Lose yourself in the city's rickety streets, blind canals, wrought iron gates, uninhabited courtyards--may I go on? Why thank you--leery Gothic carapaces, Ararat roofs, shrubbery tufted brick spires, medeival overhangs, laundry sagging from windows, cobbled whirlpools that suck your eye in, clockwork princes and chipped princesses striking their hours, sooty doves, and three or four octaves of bells, some sober, some bright."
« Last Edit: November 16, 2012, 11:29:23 am by Front-Ranger »
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #103 on: November 17, 2012, 06:01:17 pm »



I'm enjoying the book. The first story was a bit of a slog, but once I was 20 pages in it became engaging, when Autua appeared. I love his use of I: "You kill I."

Here's a lovely passage from the second story where Bruges is being described:

"Sixsmith...arrive in that six o'clock in the morning gnossiennesque hour. Lose yourself in the city's rickety streets, blind canals, wrought iron gates, uninhabited courtyards--may I go on? Why thank you--leery Gothic carapaces, Ararat roofs, shrubbery tufted brick spires, medeival overhangs, laundry sagging from windows, cobbled whirlpools that suck your eye in, clockwork princes and chipped princesses striking their hours, sooty doves, and three or four octaves of bells, some sober, some bright."




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnossiennes_(Satie)

Gnossiennes (Satie)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Gnossienne" is the name given to several piano pieces by the French composer Erik Satie in the late 19th century.


Characteristics

Satie's coining of the word "gnossienne" was one of the rare occasions when a composer used a new term to indicate a new "type" of composition. Satie had and would use many novel names for his compositions ("vexations", "croquis et agaceries" and so on). "Ogive," for example, had been the name of an architectural element until Satie used it as the name for a composition, the Ogives.  "Gnossienne," however, was a word that did not exist before Satie used it as a title for a composition. The word appears to be derived from "gnosis"; Satie was involved in gnostic sects and movements at the time that he began to compose the Gnossiennes. However, some published versions claim that the word derives from Cretan "knossos" or "gnossus" and link the Gnossiennes to Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur myth. Several archeological sites relating to that theme were famously excavated around the time that Satie composed the Gnossiennes.

The Gnossiennes were composed by Satie in the decade following the composition of the Trois Sarabandes  (1887) and the Trois Gymnopédies  (1888). Like these Sarabandes and Gymnopédies, the Gnossiennes are often considered dances. It is not certain that this qualification comes from Satie himself – the sarabande and the Gymnopaedia were at least historically known as dances.

The musical vocabulary of the Gnossiennes is a continuation of that of the Gymnopédies  (a development that had started with the 1886 Ogives → Sarabandes → Gymnopédies → Gnossiennes ) later leading to more harmonic experimentation in compositions like the Danses Gothiques.  These series of compositions are all at the core of Satie's characteristic 19th century style, and in this sense differ from his early salon compositions (like the 1885 "Waltz" compositions published in 1887), his turn-of-the-century cabaret compositions (like the Je te Veux  Waltz), and his post-Schola Cantorum piano solo compositions, starting with the Préludes flasques in 1912.


(and etc.)


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #104 on: November 17, 2012, 07:35:03 pm »
Great word! I'm just POed that I can't use it in Words With Friends. Too many letters. I discovered another great word today...wartycabbage. Don't you love it?

Suddenly I think I understand why Cloud Atlas underperformed at the box office recently. It seems like many of my friends were saving up their movie watching time for Twilight Zone. Eventually it will find its audience I'm convinced!
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #105 on: December 13, 2012, 08:24:45 pm »
Congratulations to the Wachowskys and Tykwer for the Golden Globe nomination for Best Score!
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #106 on: January 09, 2013, 04:30:43 pm »

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnossiennes_(Satie)

Gnossiennes (Satie)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Gnossienne" is the name given to several piano pieces by the French composer Erik Satie in the late 19th century.


Characteristics

Satie's coining of the word "gnossienne" was one of the rare occasions when a composer used a new term to indicate a new "type" of composition. Satie had and would use many novel names for his compositions ("vexations", "croquis et agaceries" and so on). "Ogive," for example, had been the name of an architectural element until Satie used it as the name for a composition, the Ogives.  "Gnossienne," however, was a word that did not exist before Satie used it as a title for a composition. The word appears to be derived from "gnosis"; Satie was involved in gnostic sects and movements at the time that he began to compose the Gnossiennes. However, some published versions claim that the word derives from Cretan "knossos" or "gnossus" and link the Gnossiennes to Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur myth. Several archeological sites relating to that theme were famously excavated around the time that Satie composed the Gnossiennes.

The Gnossiennes were composed by Satie in the decade following the composition of the Trois Sarabandes  (1887) and the Trois Gymnopédies  (1888). Like these Sarabandes and Gymnopédies, the Gnossiennes are often considered dances. It is not certain that this qualification comes from Satie himself – the sarabande and the Gymnopaedia were at least historically known as dances.

The musical vocabulary of the Gnossiennes is a continuation of that of the Gymnopédies  (a development that had started with the 1886 Ogives → Sarabandes → Gymnopédies → Gnossiennes ) later leading to more harmonic experimentation in compositions like the Danses Gothiques.  These series of compositions are all at the core of Satie's characteristic 19th century style, and in this sense differ from his early salon compositions (like the 1885 "Waltz" compositions published in 1887), his turn-of-the-century cabaret compositions (like the Je te Veux  Waltz), and his post-Schola Cantorum piano solo compositions, starting with the Préludes flasques in 1912.
(and etc.)


This should have been included in the infographic Emotions For Which There is no word in English.
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #107 on: January 11, 2013, 06:55:22 pm »
Wow, I thought this would be sure to get some Oscar nominations, for Best Makeup if nothing else. What happened?  :-\
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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #108 on: January 12, 2013, 12:28:35 pm »
Wow, I thought this would be sure to get some Oscar nominations, for Best Makeup if nothing else. What happened?  :-\

You're not alone!

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/11/oscars_nominations_2013_the_true_true_snub_is_cloud_atlas.html


Slate
This Year’s Real Oscars Snub? Cloud Atlas.
By Chris Wade
Posted Friday, Jan. 11, 2013, at 11:12 AM ET


Following the announcement of the 2013 Academy Award nominations yesterday morning, Oscars pundits rushed to round up the year’s biggest snubs. Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow wasn’t nominated for Best Director. Neither were predicted nominees Ben Affleck and Tom Hooper. Matthew McConaughey wasn’t honored for giving the performance of his career in Magic Mike. But no one is talking about what I think is this year’s biggest omission: Cloud Atlas got screwed.

What makes this especially frustrating is that no one, not even the people who financed the film or those who put it in theaters, appears to be fighting for this movie, which is easily one of the most ambitious and arguably one of the most cinematic films of the year. At this point it seems to exist purely in some fever dream; it was unceremoniously shuffled in and out of cineplexes by an apparently embarrassed distributor dealing with one of the year’s biggest box office flops. It was largely derided by critics who, save for some notable exceptions, seemed unwilling to engage with this mesmerizing film, at best finding it a goofily endearing “big weird mess,” as Slate’s own Dan Kois argued in our Spoiler Special.

Though it is impractical-bordering-on-impossible to summarize the plot, the film weaves together six stories across 500 years, elliptically connecting them through themes of bondage, freedom, passion, and jealousy. It features a diverse collection of characters played across race and gender by Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, and others, often so heavily transformed by makeup it’s hard to tell who’s who. It asks how our actions resonate across time, and many segments transition through clever thematic juxtapositions that seek to comment on the cyclical nature of human suffering and joy. If it sounds heady, it is—and also thrilling, romantic, frustrating, funny, enigmatic, and, most of all, sincere.

That sincerity is, as I argued with regard to the Wachowskis’ previous work, one of the things that turns people off most about this movie. The three directors adapted David Mitchell’s incredibly elaborate novel with an earnest dedication to its questions. That those questsions are not then answered might be easy to interpret as artistic failure.

It’s true that the Oscars often ignore the most artistically challenging films. The Master was only nominated in the acting categories; Holy Motors was shut out altogether. There’s an irony in seeing the Academy celebrate the dreamlike power of the movies at every one of their ceremonies and then pass over the films that actually draw on that power most brilliantly. But it’s particularly disappointing when they ignore directors, like the Wachowskis, who do so in the language of Hollywood, with Oscar-friendly stars and terrific action sequences along with heartfelt emotional storylines. What I suspect is unforgivably missing, as far as the Academy is concerned, is the thematic hand-holding that will make sure every audience member knows “what it all means.”

If there’s one thing the Academy hates, it’s mystery. Films that underline every emotional payoff and moral truth get recognition, but movies that indulge at all in the weird and the sublime get snubbed, even when they have Oscar pedigrees, even when they try to do everything the Academy otherwise celebrates. It makes Oscar Nominations Day a frustrating affair every year. But clearly I’m just one little Old Un, yibberin’ and yarnin’, sivvyin’ for the true true.




Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Re: CLOUD ATLAS: Lana Wachowsky & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowsky: OCT 26
« Reply #109 on: January 13, 2013, 02:24:03 pm »
Yes, they certainly have been snubbed, but then again it is the "Academy" so they should take that as a badge of honor.
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