Come anticipate the Wachowski/Twyker film of CLOUD ATLAS

This shit cray. Absurdly long trailer below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DhJsPW862k

What do you think of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas?

not sure which should be the thread for the movie, but just linking to the other one for the reference of ILXors in the post-apocalyptic future

http://i.imgur.com/Ux2Sa.png

The uncanny valley cgi yellowface of all fucking things is putting me off.

Nah this thread is necessary - keep the movie stuff in here from now on I reckon.

the other board is called I Love BOOKS. How was i supposed to know to look all the way over there?

oh dear this looks really really bad. but may be fun. some of like line deliveries in the trailer are cringey as hell.

May have to be a DVD job 'cos with the book I simply skipped the chapters with the characters I had no interest in and read the other 4 characters. Can't really do that in the cinema.

I'm already sort of offended by the Irish gangsters in the trailer

i hope the whole film is edited, narrated, scored & intertitled like the trailer.

http://i.imgur.com/7GQ5M.png

Gosh, I think it looks pretty swell. Swell, in this case, being anavery intentionally chosen word. Swelling music, swollen emotions, bloated construction. But it looks good. Y'all are a bunch of cynics. (Granted, I never saw the Matrix sequels or Speedracer or Bound, so maybe I have more than the average amount of good will for Lana and Andy and Tom Tweaker).

anavery = a very

I just realised i spelt his name wrong in the thread title. The movie doesn't look as bad as i was expecting in fairness

oh man, that trailer.

as i remember it, the connections between the stories in CA was a thin conceit that gave Mitchell an excuse to tell awesome stories and play around with genre, period, and structure (ie what he does). seems like it might be hugely over-played in the movie (although i would buy that it's just something they needed to get out of the way in the trailer, which would otherwise look completely schizophrenic if you hadn't read the book).

I haven't read this, but this trailer makes it seem like it should rightly be about 10 hours long in order to not be completely incoherent.

this looks horrific; Innaritu sci-fi.

at work so can't watch the trailer, is this gonna have all 6 stories in it? are they gonna use the same folding/unfolding structure as the book? could be a glorious mess

so twykler directed some and the wachowskis direct some is that correct

ugh fuck this

it looks awful from the preview but just cause the tone is so humorless, the ott visuals are sweet and the actual movie could have a totally different vibe

this looks horrific; Innaritu sci-fi.

― Simon H., Thursday, July 26, 2012 2:04 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

innaritu wouldnt go in for all those explosions and chases

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7s82woJ261qa9bmvo1_400.png

whats going on w/toms ear there

that's a matte painting, right?

I loved the book, and the movie looks spectacular. Did they actually pull it off? I thought it would be impossible.

Apparently copyright blocked now?

Hmm, yeah, all of the ones popping up on YouTube seem to blocked now.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/cloudatlas/#videos-extralarge

Trailer up on Apple now. I never read the book—I don't even recall really hearing about it, for that matter—but this looks like a fascinating disaster. Count me in.

it certainly looks like it'll be pretty to look at if nothing else. i may actually get to see this in the theater if it comes out in november, hurray! the book is awesome, kind of the best thing ever. but it's not the kind of thing that could be too easily filmed? eh, maybe thats not true, not like there isn't good plot, dialogue, etc. it's just kind of complex, certainly an awful lot of information/characters/worlds etc to fit into 2 1/2 hours.

you know what would be frikkin cool, but will never happen? if they actually made 6 (six) one and a half hour movies, cut each of them off in the middle right where the book does, then made you wait a week to see the next installment. like charge $3 a pop or something? i mean, obviously Thats Not How Things Are Done, but i for one would totally dig seeing it that way

AWESOME i was waiting for more sci-fi about christ since prometheus was such a let down

it's like the fountain squared

the future parts look as good as AI though, always a good sign

This looks like really overwrought and ponderous. Descriptions of the book sound terrible too. Is that what passes for a Nebula award nominee these days?

i haven't heard of this book nor have i read it but i have opinions about it now the people who made the matrix are making a movie of it

The Matrix was also nominated for a Nebula. Oh the shame

xp exactly!

lol the declining standards of scifi awards *sniff*

(havent actually read the book this judgment is based on)

the book is good and has been uniformly praised by those who have read it fwiw

the book is really good. looking forward to this even though that trailer is pretty ponderous.

trailer has some moments tho the "everything is connected" tag kinda bums me out.

also if yr not familiar with the book or with mitchell then say what u will about the trailer or the wachowskis but please reserve judgment on those.

feel like the ponderous right here right now aspect of the trailer could easily just be the trailer as thats a vibe thats often cultivated in trailers

everybody should read Cloud Atlas (and Jacob de Zoet)

its a p sweet book but i dont really get everyone declaring mitchell a genius

like in comparison to its inspiration if on a winters night a traveler cloud atlas comes of kinda conventional and forced

the effort at laying out the more formal narrative and making it magical shows its seams, and i think his voice is rather more suited to the olde tyme trader than it is to some of the other characters

i find calvino p annoying but the mitchell book fun. like one of the best pageturners of the past decade. i thought the london-lit-scene+gangsters and the composer segments were the best (the most 'his' in terms of voice, maybe; the central section a bit too directly riddley hoban, the noir kind of forgettable)

ugh now there are two 'come anticipate' threads lined up in new answers. i wish people would stop doing that.

he puts on ridiculous makeup and goes oogie boogie and scares tom hanks in the future and then hugo weaving keeps showing up as tom waits it's really magical

http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2012/1030/grant_wb_cloudatlashugh_300.jpg

enjoyed this.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, November 4, 2012

me too. and h4a otm: "dang if it didn't sorta move me anyway...i dunno, i just find it endearing that they made this crap and took it seriously"

also brine: "Hugh Grant quietly ruled this movie btw"

it's ridiculous and embarrassing and the makeup is often atrocious, "my father was a scientist but he believed in love" made me want to claw my ears out, and wtf yellowface future, but i kind of loved it anyway. jim broadbent is terrific every moment he's onscreen. and hugh grant, hugo weaving, doona bae, ben whitshaw, james d'arcy, all punching like champions. dunno about hanks and berry, but you know, stars. wish more movies were half this crazy.

why do all the asian men look like aliens?? how did anyone look at that makeup and think "yes ppl watching this will totally suspend their disbelief and interpret these faces as belonging to humans"

in the book, the rich of neo-seoul alter their facial features, skin color etc extensively with surgery or bio-engineering or whatever, simply to be high fashion. for instance, there's a plot point where a freshly escaped somni walks through a crowd in an expensive dress and everyone is like "gasp! some rich edgy type has altered her features to look like a somni, how daring! this will be all the rage next season i'm sure of it" etc etc

so, werid, slightly fakey looking asians = fits perfectly with the source material fwiw

the movie might have at least touched on that

I got that loud and clear from this film; not surprised the book spent more time on it, but it's easier for books to do that. a lot of what I like about this film is that it does a fair amount of the world-building with set design and visuals, instead of the normal hilariously awkward expository dialogue exchanges between characters.

also, not the future: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/26/bagel-head-forehead-injections-japan-saline_n_1916188.html

i dunno, there seemed to be a fair bit of outright exposition in the sonmi story. after all, she first described her own working life and then had a larger world shown and described to her. plus the whole thing was an illustrated interrogation scene. and yeah, i figured that something had to be up with all the weird-looking pseudo-asian faces, but a passing comment or somesuch wouldn't have hurt, i don't think.

did like the slow, show-don't-tell parceling of expository info in the post-collapse story.

the movie might have at least touched on that

you're not wrong but hey CA was already 3 hours long, they were probably cutting everything not completely essential to the storyline. other than that nice smashing-the-chinashop scene of course, which comes (loosely) from the book as well and which i thought was lovely even if it didn't advance the plot

tbh it's hard for me to imagine what seeing this would be like without having read the book (twice!) already. i'm probably going to wind up doing six passes at this thing overall - i've seen the movie twice now and am currently halfway through a 3rd reading of the book, can't imagine not giving the movie a 3rd shot when it comes out on bluray as well.

yes i am a bit ocd about books and movies i like a lot

exposition of somni story is also straight from the book - that whole section is nothing but a transcript of somni~451's final interview before execution, and comes in pretty early with a "let's start from the beginning, what's a typical day like for a server etc" thing

thing most missed from movie adaptation of book: in post apocalyptic hawaii, marijuana is called "dammit weed"

Was neo-Seoul as creepy in the movie as it was in the book?

I wonder if this is making its money back

lol no it bombed

i think the wachowskis are kind of starting to get appealing in their commitment to awful ideas

I think the fact that there's a pensioner escape adventure stuck into the middle of the novel/movie just adds to its strength.

I just with they had held off on the dude's speech skills as long as they did in the book

like how they immediately frontload the thing with tom hanks in weird makeup doing bad accents. lets you know what you're in for right off the bat. "ok, this is kind of terrible, but maybe it'll be an entertaining kind of terrible." and it was!

why didn't anyone tell me that this movie is THREE HOURS LONG?!

i was amused/entertained by the absurdity for 2 hours, but the last hour was torture. when i saw the little kids around the campfire and they were like "more grampy more" i almost shouted NO! NO MORE! but i was too busy worrying if this was really going to be the end.

i can't believe i sat through this whole thing

i sort of loved this as a hilarious trainwreck, but i'm seriously wondering at the people who have been talking this up as a "grand renouncement of cynicism" and claiming that people who don't like it "don't like cinema"

who are these people

every review i've read is middling

b-real and sen-dog both gave it 8 bong rips out of 10, and they both seemed very pleasantly befuddled over it. so there's that.

they didn't actually go so far as to call it a "grand renouncement of cynicism" tho

crazy young people, not critics from what i'm aware

Watching this drunk was the right idea. Sort of glad I didn't finish reading the book.

The makeup in this reminded me of Nothing But Trouble.

lol, otm, tho without the musical dicknose

I enjoyed it! Much zippier and less laboured than I feared, and at times fairly resonant. The trans-racial and -gender prosthetics never failed to raise a giggle, but in a film this inherently ludicrous (and so utterly embracing of artifice) it didn't really matter. Quite fun figuring out who was who as well.

yeah i didn't mind the hour or so i caught (on screener), but the folks i was watching it with were nodding off and i can't say I'm driven to catch the last TWO HOURS (omg) esp since i hear SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER there's not much of a pay-off beyond "stories, how about 'em!"

The threads sort of come together thematically by the end if you squint a bit.

W...T...F...?

Final line of the movie: "The aristocrats!"

I finally went to see this last night and had pretty low expectations that were more or less met. The Timothy Cavendish storyline definitely worked the best, mostly because a) Jim Broadbent is great, b) they bothered to give the main character a personality and c) it got the human element right as a result. Its scope being so much smaller probably helped as well.

Frobisher section was alright, Ben Whishaw is a really good actor and more or less carried a paper thin character. Although they did ruin that character, in the book he's much more of a waspish Lucky Jim figure, which would have worked much better on screen than wimpish figure they went with. The music for the Cloud Atlas Sextet was less naff than I'd expected though.

The structure and pacing of the film was all wrong and the Luisa Rey section probably suffered the most for that, no tension, no sense of the stakes really mattering, breaking away at awkward inconvient points. You'd think a boilerplate 70s thriller would be the easiest to adapt but no they fucked it up.

The sci-fi sections are probably the weakest in the book, the action sequences in the Somni storyline were pretty fun because that's what you go to the Wachowskis for, but the woman playing Somni was either terrible or given nothing to work with. The post-apocalyptic section was borderline unwatchable, Tom Hanks and Halle Berry aren't any good at the best of times but there was zero chemistry between them and they were hindered even more by the ludicrous direction choices and incomprehensible dialogue.

The decision to reuse the same actors again and again led to some atrocious casting and make-up choices but surely nothing worse than Hanks's preposterous Irish gangster.

Three worst bits for me were Hanks' gangster, the scene just after with three cackling stereotypes, and the "My father was a scientist" at the end.

Other than that I enjoyed it a lot - certainly can't think of anyone else that I would've rather directed it.

I appreciated that all of the linkage is story, but I particularly liked that the Halo Jones figure that freed the world and became a spiritual icon is inspired by an overblown account by a self-aggrandising literary agent of a four-person escape from a nursing home.

I did detect/project a bit of author-dabbling-in-different-genre in that I imagined David Mitchell thinking "Ah-ha-ha-ha I shall tell them that the 12-year attendants are ascended and then everyone will be shocked when it turns out they're actually killed" which, really, no.

I still like Max's idea of a 12-part BBC or HBO series with a different director for each story.

The decision to foreground the reincarnation element to the story was weird, like the book only kind of hints at it and this was really hammered home. But it doesn't make any sense even in the book - Luisa Rey and Timothy Cavendish would clearly have been alive at the same time. The book sort-of wriggles out of it by blurring the lines of fiction within fiction but there's not really any such move within the film.

I feel bad that it was hamamered home, because I completely missed it. If you mean the tattoo, I assumed it just meant "Hello I am your protagonist for this chapter".

The decision to reuse the same actors again and again led to some atrocious casting and make-up choices but surely nothing worse than Hanks's preposterous Irish gangster.

― Matt DC, Saturday, March 30, 2013 7:49 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

*nothing better

I did detect/project a bit of author-dabbling-in-different-genre in that I imagined David Mitchell thinking "Ah-ha-ha-ha I shall tell them that the 12-year attendants are ascended and then everyone will be shocked when it turns out they're actually killed" which, really, no.

Quite the opposite, really. In Mitchell's version there's a big moment when the scales fall from Sonmi's eyes, but the dramatic effect is developed bc she's the only one who hasn't seen it coming from page one.

Final line of the movie: "The aristocrats!"

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, March 20, 2013 5:51 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

so a few half-formed thots because i just saw this. i imagine a lot of this has already been said here and elsewhere...

i was disappointed when i found out that they abandoned the "nested" structure of the book for a birth of a nation style cross-cutting between the different stories.

and it's not really because it doesn't make sense. you could even argue that Mitchell's structure for the novel was an attempt to present something through a literary technique that cinema has by now taken for granted--that ability to effectively present multiple different scenes/places/actions as if they are happening concurrently.

but i think by doing this they have missed a big part of what made the book so compelling. the book effectively goes forwards, and then backwards, in time. in that sense the causal processes and repercussions cascade both forwards and backwards, and i think a real link, often a moving one, is shown between individual actions and history, both in what happens beyond this moment and how what we do now reverberates backwards into the past (because "caused" by it)--almost as if it were a mutually causal process between past and future that creates this moment we are in.

cinema has the "cut"--something i dont think can really be effectively recreated in literature. and what's so useful about a cut is that while it establishes a difference it also more fundamentally establishes a continuity. so when you start cross-cutting between the different stories, sure you powerfully gesture towards a continuity that's certainly implied in the novel, but at the same time you flatten everything out into (imo) banal simultaneity--history and the past and the future are flattened out into a chronological holism. i think this leaves you with a rather empty platitude (everything is connected) rather than the more nuanced and even profound aspects of the novel which preserve the difference between individuals and the past and future while also showing the underlying continuities in more complex ways. so in the movie it's not so much an "eternal recurrence" but an endless "now"--and i think for a lot of reasons (ethical and political ones looming largest, but for me just plain old philosophical ones) its puts an enervating and even hollow complacency in place of the novel's urgency.

I think that's a fundamental difference in the media though - you get to put the book down and ruminate on effects and reverberations, the film (particularly one that is trying to fit into three hours a book that took a lot longer to read) has to keep moving, to trust that you'll pick up on connections afterwards.

i can't remember the last time i did so much research to figure out if i wanted to watch a movie on netflix. i read about this movie all morning. and read this thread. still can't decide. it's the hanks conundrum.

Start watching it and then fall asleep/ quit - that's what I've done at least twice. Same with Jupiter Ascending actually.

it's awful

if i want to fall asleep i'll just put on almost any french drama that netflix might have streaming. better than ambien!

or sense8

i'm like scott in that i keep wavering on whether or not i want to try to watch it. i did like the book a lot so i'm curious in how they try to do it, even if it's kind of awful.

T/S: cloud atlas v. sully

between the surprisingly fast pace of the separate plotlines and the uncanny prosthetics and effects for the actors' appearances, I thought Cloud Atlas was intriguing and worth a watch even if it doesn't quite hang together. I suppose "intriguing but doesn't hang together" describes most of the Wachowskis' output (although Jupiter Ascending was not intriguing at all, just straight sucked)

fun b minus, some very fuckin questionable decisions, some real cool bits that will stick with me. understood one of every five lines in the hanks/berry postapocalypse section so that seemed particularly generic and dumb. amazing how little actually happens in this - six episodes of six middling TV shows - and how i was nonetheless drawn to stick it out. something weird happens when yr cutting between six different stories at the same emotional moment --- what would be a two-minute scene of the tension rising in the face of impending doom becomes a twelve-minute experience of the same. like that audio trick where it sounds like the tone is perpetually rising, an infinite tension. cool trick.

what was the handoff supposed to be from the 70s paranoia thriller to the jim broadbent old-people farce? like i loved that his impact on the future of humanity was that his pretentious, self-serving novel of his dumb experience got turned into an oscar-bait tom hanks movie that inspires a 22nd-century revolution (i will not be subjected to criminal abuse!). ... but how did halle berry's investigative journalism give rise to his caper? he has a copy of her novel......? does this inspire his rebellion............?.... ...somehow.....? seems kind of a major thing to leave vague when the movie seems to be aiming for some thing where the events of the 18th century story reverberate all the way to humanity being able to live on as a passel of hanks/berry grandkids hearing stories around the campfire on alpha centauri. huh.

some real cool bits that will stick with me

― Doctor Casino, Monday, October 16, 2017

trust me, they won't

six episodes of six middling TV shows - and how i was nonetheless drawn to stick it out.

You had more stick-to-it-iv-ness than I did.

maybe the right mood was on me but fuckit i just enjoyed this pretty much as it wanted to play it

watching and loving SPEED RACER has made me want to come back to this someday. the wachowskis' unembarrassed sincerity and optimism about the human spirit and the potential to make a difference is really appealing to me in 2018.

you're gonna love sense8

just saw a screening of this and loved it
(except for the yellowface which was erm, questionable. but that section was still fun cyberpunk action!)
god bless the Wachowskis for swinging for the fences and their genuine belief in humanity