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Mike Wilmington

By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com

Wilmington on Movies: Cloud Atlas

CLOUD ATLAS (Four Stars)
Germany-U.S.: Tom Tykwer-Lana Wachowski-Andy Wachowski, 2012

I loved it. And for once, I’m speechless.

But I promise to get to it at greater length, next week. It’s a movie, after all, that can probably be watched repeatedly, and discussed endlessly. It’s divided the critics — some are fervently pro, some contemptuously con — in a way that usually  only the more interesting pictures can and do. It’s long, it’s complex, and it violates about half the rules for a big-budget big-audience movie, while following (and triumphing in) about half the others.

Cloud Atlas is based on the well-reviewed, much-awarded (or short-listed) British novel by David Mitchell, a book that links together six stories, ranging in time and place from the Pacific Ocean in 1850, to Belgium in 1931, to California in 1975, to the United Kingdom right about now, to South Korea in the near future, to  an island somewhere in the ocean somewhen past the Apocalypse.

The movie has a huge cast — topped by Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Brioadbent, Hugo Weaving, Hugo Weaving , Jim Sturgess and others — and it’s made even huger by the fact that the main actors keep popping up in all six films playing, different roles. In all but one case, that is:The role of whistle-blower Rufus Sixsmith is played in both Parts Two and Three by James D’Arcy. The makeup jobs are sometimes fabulous; you may be shocked, occasionally when you find out who’s playing who.

Mitchell arranged his novel in six parts, advancing chronologically, and those parts  kept breaking off in the middle to bring in part of the last chapter. Then he finished up with the resolution of all six stories, this time in reverse (or mirror) order. It’s a tricky structure, maybe not as tricky as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, with its tell-tale footnotes.  So, to lessen the confusion, I suggest you google and read a long synopsis before seeing it.  It would be best to read the novel first, of course, but I realize that’s not an option for lots of us.  Later, maybe.

The movie takes those six genre-mashing stories and interweaves them, cutting back and forth, as in Inception. Tykwer and the Wachowski apparently wrote this infernally complex script together, and then split up for the shooting: Tykwer and his team taking Parts Two, Three and Four, and the Wachowski handling One, Five and Six. As mentioned, the actors take multiple roles, and that’s not a stunt. The galleries of roles reinforce Mitchell’s theme of reincarnation and of souls traveling from body to body. The movie, meanwhile, has many forms itslef. It’s full of romance and mystery and action and spectacle and humor, and the overall form reminds you of nothing so much as D. W. Griffith and his four interweaving stories in that other madly ambitious epic, 1916’s Intolerance. (That got some awful reviews, too.)

You’ll have fun, in any case. Like Intolerance, this  movie is staggeringly, outrageously, madly, breath-takingly ambitious. I didn’t see Cloud Atlas at Toronto, where it reportedly generated a ten-minute standing ovation.  But I would have stood for fifteen, maybe longer. (I saw it at the Chicago’s best movie critic venue, the Lake Street Screening Room, at a critic’s screening for the Chicago Film Festival — where Cloud Atlas was the fest centerpiece.)

So…You must see it. For yourself. Even if you despise it, you’ll have fun vivisecting it afterwards. It’s 164 minutes long, and, as Roger Ebert has said, there’s not a boring second in it. Befuddling  maybe. Boring no.

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Wilmington

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon