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demoncleaner -> RE: Cloud Atlas (22/2/2013 5:40:04 PM)
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Quite honestly the single most hellishly awful film I think I have ever seen...and I own a Godard boxset.
I enjoyed the book, the thing about the book is that it's absolutely an anthology of unconnected stories, any attempt by Mitchell to join the novellas is Mitchell being cheeky. He's a cheeky scamp trying to pass his anthology off as a novel, but we absolutely forgive him this because in one volume he's exhibiting a varied and comprehensive talent for tackling, (and succeeding at) disparate literary styles. It's a while since I read it but I would contend that Mitchell's interconnecting devices are by and large witty in-jokes. The in-jokes being centric to this one volume of stories. The Wachowski's either misunderstand this, or are wilfully ignorant of it, jealous of the epic one-piece they set about humping these different tales into a shapeless and maddeningly indulgent melange. The irony is that if they and Twyker had separated the stories out, "Black Mirrored" it then what they have in the can could, to some degree be considered as successful as Mitchell was in accomplishing their different cinematic genres. But this abuse of structure means that watching this film is like watching TV with your grandad, when something is actually in danger of getting good they turn it over and I'm like "Oi! Grandad! I was watching that you prick!"
I have to say that I did find potential in it, maybe for the first hour, Jim Sturgess seemed quite good. Hugh Grant for a time seemed like he could pull off the unlikely feat of being the dark horse talent of the piece. I actually really wanted him back on screen when he was off (that was a first). The Timothy Cavendish piece became quite funny at about the hour and a quarter mark. After spending what seemed like a fucking month in a kibutz with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry I realised I wasn't enjoying it. I realised it was quite rubbish but I had a kind of giddy masochistic thing going where I began to relish the idea of certain people I know seeing this, or the general public seeing this. I began playing a bit of a game in my head where I thought of everyone I know who has ever irritated me and I wondered if I could diagnose them as being actual paid up wankers by estimating if they would be the sort of people to like Cloud Atlas. I thought of the wasted lives of wankers writing thesis after thesis about the meaning of this doggerel. Michael Jackson, if he was still alive, would love this film I decided. It's practically fucking Moonwalker after all. This would be Michael Jackson's favourite film I decided. All this gave me a certain masochistic thrill. I have never walked out of a film in my life and I don't see a reason why I ever will, so such is the pleasure one has to glean in a moribund 3 hour imaginative fucking hammock like this. But then there was another hour to go, and I stopped enjoying even the masochism. I began to think that the Wachowskis probably love the same films I do, like me, they probably love 2001 and The Tree of Life (to name just two famous patience-testers). But they seem to have come away from those films with a different message. What they seem to have elicited from those films is a sense that people (patient people like me) really will sit through fucking anything. (And I have a Godard boxset). The defence of cultural idiocy like this is that the creators are just ahead of their time. If that is true, then in this case then the future is one of an appreciative open-minded public of bilious bores and spectacled wankers.
In summation, this is the Wachowskis of the Matrix sequels, absolute intellectual charlatanism and the only hint of Eternal Recurrence I got from this was the sucker feeling of having gone back to take another punt on them. If I wanted a 3 hour seminar on the profundity of things from a bunch of clueless, moneyed, over-indulged intellectual fucking midgets I would join the Scientologists.
There will be worse films than this. There will be far less competent films than this. But there won't be many that over-estimate their worth doling out quite so long a punishment of a bewildering inarticulate regime as this does.
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