Life and love, refracted.
Last night (Friday, 9 November) I'd intended to see the new James Bond movie, Skyfall (opening day in the U.S.), but, owing to the number of shithead teenagers and twentysomethings milling about the theatre -- nine of them cut ahead of me in line, and then proceeded to hold up the line while they argued amongst themselves over how they were going to pay for their tickets -- I opted at the last minute to see Cloud Atlas, the mondo-mega movie event from the Wachowskis (the Matrix franchise; Bound; V For Vendetta) and Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run), adapted from David Mitchell's 2004 best-seller novel.
From what I've read, the novel is even more complex and fragmented than the movie. The movie is definitely worth seeing in a theatre; the music and the size of the picture are important to the movie's impact, which will probably be lessened by viewing it on a TV or computer screen. There were several sniffles from the audience towards the end, and, as the lights came up, several couples whose female components snuggled into their male halves, even if the male half had fallen asleep during the movie. (The fact that I went to Cloud Atlas by myself enhanced my melancholy.)
Cloud Atlas seems to have been regarded by the critics primarily as an expensive stunt, if not a white elephant: six stories in six separate time periods and settings (which Mitchell in his novel rendered in pastiches of different styles and genres), with the major actors (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant, James D'Arcy, Keith David) playing several different roles of different sexes and ethnicities (I don't share the outrage professed by some at using "duplicitous" make-up to allow the actors to play different ethnicities), the movie's main New Age-ish theme of the interconnectedness of human lives, the impermanence of death and the immortality of love seems earmarked for hipster, and critical, derision. The cross-cutting between the different story- and timelines insulates Cloud Atlas from knee-jerk laughter as a linear narrative probably wouldn't (as Richard Brody has observed); the effect, to me, was akin to those of my dreams that feature permutations of hauntingly familiar characters and settings whose provenance and significance remain frustratingly out of reach. Like my dreams, parts of Cloud Atlas are unimaginative -- "banal" seems to be Brody's preferred adjective -- and some of the storylines' conclusions are improbably, even illogically, happy; but, for all that I wished for more detail (and I probably will seek out and read the novel sooner rather than later), there are moments of profound, even heart-stopping affect, and even a contrarian curmudgeon such as myself didn't object too much to the movie's sentimental ending.
The movie Cloud Atlas, in short, seems intended more as a waking dream (much like the last movie that I reviewed here), which is a valid goal for a movie. Indeed, if a movie's being trite, illogical and improbable automatically marked it as a failure, then I would perforce have to cast several of my favorite movies to the critical dustbin. I suspect that I would not be alone in that.
From what I've read, the novel is even more complex and fragmented than the movie. The movie is definitely worth seeing in a theatre; the music and the size of the picture are important to the movie's impact, which will probably be lessened by viewing it on a TV or computer screen. There were several sniffles from the audience towards the end, and, as the lights came up, several couples whose female components snuggled into their male halves, even if the male half had fallen asleep during the movie. (The fact that I went to Cloud Atlas by myself enhanced my melancholy.)
Cloud Atlas seems to have been regarded by the critics primarily as an expensive stunt, if not a white elephant: six stories in six separate time periods and settings (which Mitchell in his novel rendered in pastiches of different styles and genres), with the major actors (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant, James D'Arcy, Keith David) playing several different roles of different sexes and ethnicities (I don't share the outrage professed by some at using "duplicitous" make-up to allow the actors to play different ethnicities), the movie's main New Age-ish theme of the interconnectedness of human lives, the impermanence of death and the immortality of love seems earmarked for hipster, and critical, derision. The cross-cutting between the different story- and timelines insulates Cloud Atlas from knee-jerk laughter as a linear narrative probably wouldn't (as Richard Brody has observed); the effect, to me, was akin to those of my dreams that feature permutations of hauntingly familiar characters and settings whose provenance and significance remain frustratingly out of reach. Like my dreams, parts of Cloud Atlas are unimaginative -- "banal" seems to be Brody's preferred adjective -- and some of the storylines' conclusions are improbably, even illogically, happy; but, for all that I wished for more detail (and I probably will seek out and read the novel sooner rather than later), there are moments of profound, even heart-stopping affect, and even a contrarian curmudgeon such as myself didn't object too much to the movie's sentimental ending.
The movie Cloud Atlas, in short, seems intended more as a waking dream (much like the last movie that I reviewed here), which is a valid goal for a movie. Indeed, if a movie's being trite, illogical and improbable automatically marked it as a failure, then I would perforce have to cast several of my favorite movies to the critical dustbin. I suspect that I would not be alone in that.