Come anticipate the Wachowski/Twyker film of CLOUD ATLAS

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.

ya its one of those things i liked a lot but still found overrated, prob not worth complaining abt, but you do deserve endless rebirths in bewildering literary wastelands for calling calvino annoying

its funny because were talking abt the book in the one abt the movie xp

from the trailer, at worst i think this is gonna be a beautiful failure, so i am hyped

agree that Cloud Atlas is not nearly as daring formally as many reviews seemed to suggest. but it's also generous and funny and compassionate and unexpectedly moving and mitchell writes a good sentence, which you wouldn't think would be so hard to find these days and yet.

the book is great, really ingeniously constructed. I think you would dig it, Alex.

it's formally "daring" the way A Thousand and One Nights is formally daring - nested narrative structures are as old as literature

I guess what I'm saying is I don't think he's a genius for using a really old literary tactic, but he does do it very well and his approach to it is engaging

i like the book a lot but not quite enough to be sufficiently perturbed by the prospect of the film being crappy to avoid watching it

xxxp I am intrigued enough by the recommendations to have already requested it from the library. It doesn't sound like my thing, but I'm willing to give it shot.

the book is great, really ingeniously constructed. I think you would dig it, Alex.

― Dunn O)))))))) (Shakey Mo Collier), Saturday, July 28, 2012 9:11 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dont really get this... Seemed like some short stories, tenuously connected

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2012/08/03/03_hugo-weaving.o.jpeg/a_560x0.jpg

re: the third of those: i think i convinced myself in the trailer that i didn't see that

http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/halle-berry-cloud-atlas-white.jpg

'halle-berry-cloud-atlas-white.jpg'

this looks mega stupid, but so does the book on reading the wiki synopsis. but people seem to like it a lot so...

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

I couldn't finish CA but loved Ghostwritten and Black Swan Green. Jacob de Zoet was entertaining. This could be a disaster though.

A description of the book probably sounds a bit goofy but somehow cumulatively it becomes quite affecting. I liked the two "future" stories and the first story best.

you all flipped out over 'goon squad' too and i thought that was garbage!

"things happen... to people... in time" whoa buddy

I've liked all of Mitchell's books tbh. haven't read Jacob De Zoet yet.

agree w/Ryan that the two future-sequences were best but then I wish more people wrote books like Riddley Walker so

He's just a really entertaining writer, whatever you think about his conceits. Didn't like Goon Squad

never even heard of it

lol I think the entire reason I read Mitchell/Cloud Atlas was cuz it came up on that thread where I was whining about how much I hate modern fiction

hugo weaving

he's a caracter

you all flipped out over 'goon squad' too and i thought that was garbage!

Whoa whoa whoa let's be clear, I thought goon squad was mostly garbage too, this book is way different

this looks like a disaster. and the book, i don't know. i dug the dystopian future korea clone breakout story and the composer knave stories. the rest. eh.

his last two books are close to amazing, especially the thousand autumns of jacob de zoet but even it breaks down with a weirdo samurai raid plot to end things. but i still love it.

ryan/shakey mo OTM

goole OTMish wrt Goon Squad. it's nbd but sweet.

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