- This topic has 13 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 12 years, 11 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Those Wachowskis are back you guys.
And this time they brought Tom Hanks with them. Blonde Tom Hanks.
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
I’ve got this one in my list of movies I want to see along with ‘Looper’ and ‘Django Unchained’.
I like titties.
I support that list with all my might for it is much the same as my own.
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
You know, this confuses me. It looks interesting, but what the hell is that stuff? Cautiously optimistic.
Yeah, looks ambitious as hell, which is something you gotta love about those Wachowskis. They’re not interested in pumping out your Standard Hollywood Fare so even if they fail, at least they fail big. You gotta respect the ones who swing for the fences. And I too was confused as a drawerfull of wallabies until I looked up the wikis on the novel and the film.
It looks like Hanks plays four characters, Jim Sturgess plays three (one of which is Asian?) and Halle Berry and Jim Broadbent play two each. So yeah. Ambitious. As hell.
Does it have kind of a The Fountain-y vibe to you?
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
Sorta. And I agree – I’d rather see someone go big and fall short than make a well made safe movie. But still – looks like a lot of storylines to tie together. And Halle Berry – I just hope she doesn’t detract. She’s been fine before, but she’s also sucked tsetse fly balls before too.
I’m hopeful because it offers something more than your simple need to “tie” story lines together… instead, it eludes to the possibility that these stories have the people in common, their choices and the invisible forces that scope their lives (destiny I guess). The worry I have is that they will do too much to try to either “cross” time, or universes to do exactly what I don’t want them to do… try to make the universe make sense with a big red bow on top. My hope is the reflective narration does nothing more than offer a suggestion to how and why, and empower our character(s) to take hold of their own destiny and make their lives their own. Bonus points if that winds up to be an illusion that is reflected in the other times (realities) that were not represented by memories and documentation presenting another layer to the great mystery of the universe and our perception of our place in it.
I’m probably hoping for too much here though, because I don’t know if general audiences can digest that without some set of or over-arching plot with a visible and identifiable peak, to which they can tie their own personal satisfaction. People are stupid… and as much as we want filmmakers to quit treating us like we are, they already know the truth… make movies for the masses.
Any of y’all see the 8 page profile in the New Yorker? — http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/10/120910fa_fact_hemon
Also, the new trailer is regular-lengthed but to me it does a better job of making it seem like this whole shebang may even make sense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKZj6lA9ICs
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
Early reviews suggets they either pulled it off or damn near pulled it off. 74 on Rotten Tomatoes for a film this audacious and extraordinary can’t be a bad thing.
http://badassdigest.com/2012/09/08/movie-review-cloud-atlas-is-overwhelming-odd-and-utterly-completely-amazing/
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/cloud_atlas_2012/- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
There’s a very fun hour long interview with Hanks over at The Nerdist podcast. He barely mentions Cloud Atlas but he is all awesomely Hanksy so it’s worth a listen.
http://www.nerdist.com/2012/10/nerdist-podcast-tom-hanks/
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
Did you see how they got him on that podcast? Kinda cool.
Yeah, they mention it in the show. Chris Hardwick is so damn chipper he’s hard to take sometimes so I don’t listen regularly but when they get a good guest it’s a fun show. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was on there last week too. That episode’s fairly boring for the first 20 minutes but after that it’s good.
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
So we saw this last night (Rob and I) and Ithink we both left kind of wanting to process the movie a bit more. I’m not going to mess this shit up for you or anyone, so let me keep this simple for now.
The movie looked amazing. As for how it came off… well, I thought it was good. I really felt like they just had a very specific vision that that they weren’t able to bring us close enough to, or wanted to make us question how our choices affect everything ever –and even though they damn near come out and say it specifically, I just don’t feel like the message was in the movie. At least one of the stories was just kinda there, and another one just felt like it was thrown together to prop up the consequences they needed to tie the whole thing together. I enjoyed at least one of the stories enough on their own, and enjoyed the overall story enough. I think in terms of the movie, it was all kinda there, but only the presentation had that foot-deep shine. The rest of it was good enough to make it work, or just kinda meh.
Now, I really thought that a lot of the acting was pretty good in this movie, but what was really fun/impressive was watching everyone play so many characters (several of which I missed identifying during the viewing). I’d call it very-well-executed-and-quite-fantastic-looking meh.
Will I watch it again? Probably. Once. And only to see if I can see more subtle connections and threads to the character themes and the overarching story, as well as more closely observe ‘who’ is behind the makeup in a few cases.
I will say that regardless of what I think of the movie, if you’re a fan of movies in general, it deserves to be seen in a theater, preferably opening weekend. We know how Hollywood likes to copy itself many times over – it’d be awesome if they took the “big idea movie” thing and tried to replicate it a hundred times. It’s better than all these dumb horror movies.
From what I’ve read, this is pretty divisive. Those who love it REALLY love it, but there are many that probably will get irritated that things don’t clear up sooner. There are 6 different stories to follow, and about an hour in, I finally started to settle in. Up to that point, I had to keep reminding myself to be patient.
As Bryan said, the movie is breathtaking in certain sequences. Every time period has a distinctive look, and it’s impressive how effortless it seems. The acting can range from being pretty awesome to pretty poor – some of the accents were a bit off in my opinion. Had to be fun for the actors though.
I think the biggest single problem is that things started to come together and I expected a huge payoff, and for me, it just didn’t work. To quote another review I read, there are more answers than questions, and in a movie like this, where you do have to pay attention, I like to be rewarded with something to think about during those end credits. I’ve read that there are those that cried during the movie, like a huge epiphany hit them, and that they were thinking about it for days afterward. I don’t really see that it even needs to stew – everything is right up front and spelled out. I actually felt a little let down with that — at the beginning, it felt so smart, like I was struggling to find my footing, and then when it all comes together, it felt so spoon-fed that I was like, “Oh, it’s over? That was it?”
I think if you shoot for the moon and you don’t quite get there, I tend to give the filmmakers a lot of credit just for trying. In this case, the movie is so beautiful that it’s hard to fault it too much, as it is superbly made. I’d give it three stars out of four, but I have a hard time saying I’d watch it again.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.