My 19 year old daughter Lily and I attended the opening day of CLOUD ATLAS.
I would suggest you watch this little "overview" before continuing...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubk647t944A&feature=BFa&list=PLVfin74Qx3tWq2dnqX5f4WlRrR5b-pEZ7 Movies can be a lot of things ranging from mindless entertainment, spectacle, diversion, exploitation and such to straight storytelling.
What movies almost never are is what CLOUD ATLAS is.
What is it?
Damned if I know unless I use the words "ambitious" and "profound".
It is also very, very demanding of its audience.
You've heard of those language courses that are Total Immersion, right? Y ou are not allowed to speak your native language or rec eive instruction except in the language to-be-learned. The same is true of Cloud Atlas, the film.
You are dropped into the history and future of mankind to sink or swim and make of it what you will.....or not.
If you can't handle that--what then? You are done for, baby cakes! S urvi ve or Per ish.
There are 6 stories (or lifetimes) portrayed---all of which---self-reference each other backward and forward. This is inexplicable at first.
The characters in each lifetime learn things (or fail to do so) and it affects the quality of their life in the next lifetime.
They may be heroic or villainous, male or female, good or evil, intelligent or clueless.
Just as a culture's Mythos neatly and compactly "explains" the meaning of existence and the rewards that await excellent behavior---there is an ultimate "Truth" which may devast atingly rip that Mythos to shreds and expose it for the Lies it hides.
Maybe in each of the 6 stories there is only 1 Truth that exposes all the lies and all the Mythos through all of history.
The bea uty and majesty of the photography and the dazzling bravura of the futuristic primitivism is a fea st for the eyes.
The music is old school romantic era Golden Age melody dovetailing seamlessly with electronica and ambient Tron-style DaftPunk-esque throbbing and thrumming. Eleg a ntly and tastefully, of course:)
The acting is practically flawless.
I have but one complaint--and it is a big one--I could understand maybe 20 ou t of every 100 words certain characters spoke. This was due to the Pidgin- slang permeating certain regions and time period s reflected in those character's dialogue.
The Epic sweep of this film is a veritable Tsunami of ambitious investment of time, money, talent and focus.
It stands or falls on each and every audience member's ability to hang-in-there-and-stick-with-it.
Roger Ebert gives this film 4 *'s after having gone back for 3 viewings! His conclusion is that it IS WORTH IT.
Your mile age may vary.
Those who dismiss the movie do so confidently that their time was wasted.
Fair call.
As for myself---I fe el like I was standing at the edge of a vast ocean when a giant wave struck without war ning. My senses will never be the same:)
This "review" is my encouragement/warning to you!
Terry
What you have total belief in, you never "think" about again.
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CLOUD ATLAS: a movie or a life experience?
by Terry 18 Replies latest social entertainment
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Terry
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botchtowersociety
I want to watch this.
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Christ Alone
I'm even more excited than I already was to see this film after reading that review, terry! Not excited at only understanding 20 words out of 100 tho...
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Terry
Translating 'Cloud Atlas' Into the Language of Film
By DAVID MITCHELL
My 2004 novel "Cloud Atlas" opens in 1850, with a notary on an island-hopping voyage from the South Pacific to San Francisco. But that narrative gets interrupted by another story, set in the 1930s, about a young composer who finds a memoir written some decades earlier by the notary; which story in turn is interrupted by another, involving a journalist and a physicist, whose letters recount the 1930s narrative; and so on, for a total of six different time frames. In the novel's second half, the "interrupted" narratives are continued, and the novel ends with the conclusion of the 1850s memoir.
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Warner Bros. Pictures MAKING AN 'UNFILMABLE' NOVEL: Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess in 'Cloud Atlas.'
This "there-and-back" structure always struck me as unfilmable, which is why I believed that "Cloud Atlas" would never be made into a movie. I was half right. It has now been adapted for the screen, but as a sort of pointillist mosaic: We stay in each of the six worlds just long enough for the hook to be sunk in, and from then on the film darts from world to world at the speed of a plate-spinner, revisiting each narrative for long enough to propel it forward.
Thinking about how a novel's structure must be made "film-shaped" has led me to these habits of successful adaptations.
First, the bagginess of novels becomes cinematic tautness. A novel can afford to take its time; meandering is a virtue. Dickens, Thackeray and their contemporaries had magazine pages to fill and needed a scale as full-grown as that great 21st-century narrative format, the DVD box set. And who wants to read a novel that lacks fallow areas and downtime—and thought? By contrast, a film costs at least $100,000 per minute, and after 180 minutes, the human eyeball is in danger of melting, so it has to deliver the plot more quickly.
Second, suggestiveness in novels becomes exactitude in film. Too much detail clogs text like cholesterol clogs arteries, and three sentences of description per roof/landscape/face are normally ample. The trick is to "stroke" the reader's imagination into life and get it to do the work for you. In a film, however, detail cannot be suggested: It is either shown or it isn't. Something similar occurs to dialogue. There are no readers to "hear" a particular line in their own way. The take used by the director becomes the one final version.
The third habit of adaptation might be called "Honey, I Shrunk the Cast." Novels like "Bleak House" and "The Lord of the Rings" have room for dozens of characters and time for major ones to wane and minor ones to wax in importance. But an adaptation must perform triage on the novel's cast or else the viewer will lose track of who's who (and the characters won't be around for long enough to develop anyway). The "Cloud Atlas" film is near the outer limit, with about eight major characters.
Fourth, just add music. Musicality in novels is only figurative: Books don't (yet) have speakers, though e-books are working on it. Music is an extra character that can amplify emotion or subvert it or stitch a narrative together. A gifted score-composer can somehow transform the essence of a book into music and have it waft through, like the Holy Spirit.
Fifth, and last for now: All roads lead to closure. The unwritten contract between author and reader does not contain a clause saying, "I, the author, do faithfully promise to reveal the ultimate fates of the major characters," but films do, which is why so few of the films with four or five stars from the review of posterity end in uncertain futures for the principle players.
Adaptation is a form of translation, and all acts of translation have to deal with untranslatable spots. Sometimes late at night I'll get an email from a translator asking for permission to change a pun in one of my novels or to substitute an idiomatic phrase with something plainer. My response is usually the same: You are the one with knowledge of the "into" language, so do what works. When asked whether I mind the changes made during the adaptation of "Cloud Atlas," my response is similar: The filmmakers speak fluent film language, and they've done what works.
—Mr. Mitchell is the author of "Cloud Atlas," the film adaptation of which opens nationwide on Oct. 26.
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Terry
I'm even more excited than I already was to see this film after reading that review, terry! Not excited at only understanding 20 words out of 100 tho...
I would suggest either reading the novel first or, at a minimum, going to Wiki and reading the synopsis of the plot first.
You will never figure out certain things on your own no matter how many viewings transpire. It is better to have the structure firmly in mind!
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palmtree67
I saw this movie yesterday and I agree with Terry here:
I would suggest either reading the novel first or, at a minimum, going to Wiki and reading the synopsis of the plot first.
You will never figure out certain things on your own no matter how many viewings transpire. It is better to have the structure firmly in mind!
I really liked it and want to watch it again.
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glenster
The Colbert Report Thurs, Oct 25, 2012 Tom Hanks
http://www.hulu.com/#!watch/417533 -
moshe
For me this was a profoundly disturbing movie. In the future we are gentically designed and owned by the Corporation for a purpose, ie, mentally docile human-cattle to be worked 19 hours a day, 365 days a year. An accelerated metabolism enables this superhuman output. Corporations quest for profits has a not so happy ending planned for it's labor. Get your retirement while you can.
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botchtowersociety
Moshe if our minds are free they cannot take us. We will kill them if they try to enslave us. It wil be a glorious battle. Ignore the Hollywood fatalists. They are dead walking. This not our destiny.
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Terry
The World According to Cloud Atlas
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Posted Saturday, Oct. 27, 2012, at 10:53 AM ET
19Top row: Tom Hanks in three different roles in Cloud Atlas. Bottom row: Halle Berry in three different roles in Cloud Atlas.
Photographs by Jay Maidment/Warner Bros. Pictures.
The first question you’re likely to have after walking out of Cloud Atlasis: 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 22 nd -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.
PreviouslyThe Cloud Atlas Phrasebook: Your Guide to Yibberin' the True True
Spoiler Special: Cloud AtlasTom Hanks Is Not an “Everyman”
Lana Wachowski’s Moving Speech About Being Transgender
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