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

http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/cloudatlas/widget/images/slideshow/12.jpg

http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/cloudatlas/widget/images/slideshow/15.jpg

http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/cloudatlas/widget/images/slideshow/16.jpg

http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/cloudatlas/widget/images/slideshow/18.jpg

http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/cloudatlas/widget/images/slideshow/17.jpg

more here http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/07/25/cloud-atlas-photos-tom-hanks-halle-berry-exclusive-first-look/

long ass trailer http://www.joblo.com/video/player.php?video=cloud-atlas-long-trailer

Running time 164 minutes

why is this not a tv show

Haha wau this looks fucking terrible. I will definitely go and see it.

I'm assuming Tom Hanks's character has just been made up for the film version?

Where does that Guy Ritchie-style gangster subplot in present day London fit in?

As if that weren’t complicated enough, each cast member plays multiple roles ... “We thought about these individual characters as aspects of larger characters,” Lana Wachowski says.

I'm just trying to understand ... why we keep making the same mistakes ... over and over.

DEATH LIFE BIRTH FUTURE PRESENT PAST LOVE HOPE COURAGE

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED

CLOUD ATLAS

matt it's part of the 'ghastly ordeal of timothy cavendish' bit in the book

i don't know if it's because it's completely transparent when done well but why does it seem like nine out of ten films have no decent way of ever representing 'and then he read a book', 'and then he wrote a letter', 'and then he watched a film'

this could turn out to be okay, i think

i dont really know what this is, but that trailer's pretty gonzo!

can i just

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

This looks like it could turn into the adaptation of Never Let Me Go.

i like the ott display but if the movie leans as hard on the humorless right here right now vibes as the trailer implies its going to be maybe the worst

tom hanks narrating abt life

the book was fun i hope they kept it fun

can i just

― Hungry4Ass, Thursday, July 26, 2012 8:32 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yes

is that tom hanks, because in that still he looks disconcertingly like john travolta

that is tom hanks

i don't know about this btw. i think cloud atlas actually is one of those bits of work which is guilty of 'reaching for significance' or whatever (sunt lacrimae rerum, ad infinitum) but it gets away with it due to props and skill on mitchell's part -- and those props and that skill include doing talky stuff really, really well, and being pretty adept at pastiche of familiar styles that doesn't look like he's just doing author x

and i don't know if that makes the wachowskis a good match. i know v little about the run lola run guy. also, are they directing different segments? that is probably a good idea if they are.

You would have to be actively trying to fuck up the Luisa Rey section in film, but they might manage it. The Cavendish section really needs to retain the comedy of the original. The Adam Ewing bit and the sci-fi sections could be really po-faced and terrible. I'm worried about what they'll do to the Frobisher character and his music.

ahah the music in the trailer is also kind of ... 'this is what i've been hearing in my dream!!! *circle of fifths*'

ctrl-h 'props' 'chops' on that post above. god i stared at that for like a minute going 'what is wrong here'

What if life
Is a book
Divided into seven parts?
What if the story of man
Dovetails from one chapter to the next?
What if
We spell it out for you in film?

There's no way the Wachowskis will not fuck this up. Between this and Baz Luhrman doing Gatsby, and Keira Knightley doing Anna Karenina, there are going to be some incredibly vulgarised movies of great books soon.

Bad books too: Life of Pi

Cloud Atlas is good but it's not in Gatsby/Anna Karenina territory! The thing about Cloud Atlas is that it would actually make brilliant schlocky Hollywood cinema but I don't really trust the Wachowskis not to blow it.

fantastic (long) interview: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction-no-204-david-mitchell

I liked the story about the businessman in Hong Kong and the mythical story best. I liked the dystopian stories least. (Dystopia seems hard to imagine or temporary, fleeting, and situated.)

"dammit weed" lol

so psyched.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/new-david-mitchell-novel-out-next-autumn.html

I was a bit this way and that on de Zoet but this is goi to be grebt:

The Bone Clocks.

while i loved this book and plan on reading everything else of his i was in exactly the same position as nabisco

My weird nagging issues on this are totally mechanical, though -- he does so much to toy with the idea that there's a mechanical in-the-book connection between all these characters, but he doesn't have one! For some reason this bugged all hell out of me: why keep hinting that you've got a concrete, non-thematic explanation for the form when you really, really don't? The many airy allusions to reincarnation are blown apart by (among other things) Luisa Ray: Cavendish would have been born around the point Frobisher died, so why is there a character from a thriller shoehorned between them? This wouldn't normally be a problem, but there's something about the form that leads you to believe the second halves of the story will give you a change to figure something out about the connections -- not something thematic, but something physical -- and yet with a lot of those second halves he seems to be writing purely for plot, just enjoying wrapping up the tales themselves, as if most of his content was on the page by the middle section, and everything thereafter is just tidying up.

So beyond the center section, I was mostly just chopping through to get the thing done, pushing through a lot of pages looking for some connections that didn't seem likely to crop up.

before the second half i was CONVINCED there was some epic connection that was going to string them all together. my best guess was some kind of rift in time thing where adam ewing somehow travels through time to the post apocalyptic future. zachry refers to "pa n' adam" being captured by kona, so i thought maybe autua was zachry's father, and he and adam had traveled through time due to something that would conspire once they'd reached hawaii. would've worked out perfectly, too, since frobisher hadn't found the second half of adam's diary yet, and luisa hadn't read the second half of frobisher's correspondence yet. then some connection with the nuclear reactor, her father maybe? i hadn't worked out the details past that point. anyways, IMO kind of a missed opportunity and i do agree with nabs that it hinted too much at a connection that wasn't there. but oh well, still an amazing read. is the new one good?

also if luisa is fictional then so are zedelghem and pacific diaries, no? i got the impression it was true crime but as n points out that blows apart the reincarnation thing, although i think mitchell might have just legit fucked up in that regard, as there's an ironic in-joke where timothy cavendish says that he would edit out the suggestion that frobisher and luisa are the same person, at which pt the reader is supposed to knowingly lol like, dude you are that person too!