Liked it a lot but didn’t love it.
The movie tries to do and be too much. It is six mini-movies (each of which could have been given the full movie-making treatment) that are connected by a tenuous thread. And I’m not convinced about the benefit of the creative casting decisions (Hugo Weaving as Noakes, in particular, but the many manifestations of Hanks and Berry as well).
Here ya to, medstar: Cloud Atlas Wiki
mmm
:rolleyes:
I saw the film last week, I never read the book but I didn’t have trouble following the story. I thought it was pretty cool, not mindblowing, no, but I enjoyed it. I liked the makeup effects, though some were better than others, and the dialect in the Tom Hanks valley man segment took some getting used to. He sounded like something out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
I liked the movie, but Tom Hanks should never be given roles where he has to do accents other than his own – the Dermot Hoggins character being the prime example. What accent was he even trying to do? Cockney? Irish? It was no recognizable accent at all.
I suspect that was an intentional allusion. There were a lot of allusions to other works. I also noticed allusions to Metropolis, Blade Runner, and the book of Exodus, among others.
Same here really…Liked it but it wasn’t as amazing as it seemed to want me to think it was (it certainly did give off that aura), and there was still something missing in the connectivity of the stories. Perhaps I’d find it if I read the book, but I don’t know, the movie didn’t really make me want to read the book. It left me wondering, if we took out all the “Hey, it’s that guy!” actor recognizing and fancy costumes and makeup, would I be left with a fairly generic stand-up-to-opression message and not much else? Not sure. And yeah, I really couldn’t understand a lot of the Mountain Man dialogue.
Why the eyeroll? Moulin Rouge isn’t a good movie. If you’ve ever seen movies from the MGM age of musicals, you wouldn’t claim it was your favorite musical.
First you talk about people “claiming” they like Moulin Rouge, and now you’re talking about them saying it’s their favorite musical. Goalpost moving much? And anyway, I’m a huge MGM musical fan, and I love Moulin Rouge. They’re two totally different types of movies.
Is is that difficult to believe that someone just feels differently about the movie than you do? They can’t actually like the movie, they must be lying?
What’s a goalpost?
I’m just saying I thought Moulin Rouge was one of the worst movies, musicial or non, I’ve seen personally. Most of the people I’ve dealt with, who really are into the arts don’t like it. Where as the people I know who claim to love it don’t know any thing about musicals. My whole opinion is both are overrated movies, Moulin and Cloud, imo don’t bring any thing new to the table.
I didn’t read the book, but I agree with your first comment. A lot of stories didn’t seem fleshed out to me. I had no trouble following the story lines. I just didn’t get invested in the characters. Thus, I didn’t really care what happened to them. If the book was just like the movie, I would attribute a lot of it to lazy and gimmicky writing. The minute something interesting happened, we got switched into another story. I can just imagine the author or film maker thinking this movie is so deep or some kind of game changer when in my mind I was thinking “Why are you telling all of these stories when you can barely tell one in a decent fashion?”. :rolleyes:
Another thing I disliked, the Cloud Atlas wasn’t that good. All of the characters act ike it’s the best piece of music EVAH. Seriously? They couldn’t have composed a more captivating piece?
Moving the goalposts. Essentially, changing the standards needed to prove a point.
And people don’t have to “know anything about musicals” to like Moulin Rouge. (Whatever that means. Do they have to take a test or something first?) They just need to know what they like. If they thought Moulin Rouge was an interesting, well-made movie with characters they liked, then the numbers of other musicals they’ve seen is irrelevant.
I don’t have a problem with anyone not liking a movie for whatever reasons they choose. If you didn’t like Moulin Rouge or Cloud Atlas, that’s completely fine. (My feeling on the latter are decidedly mixed, in fact.) But if you claim that the only way people could possibly like a movie that you don’t like is because they’re lying or because or they’re ignorant, then I definitely have a problem with that. Holding up how most people you know feel about a movie (if that’s even accurate) as some kind of standard is pointless.
Dudes, pls start another thread about Moulin Rogue, OK?
To expand on my thought about Cloud Atlas:
My main problem with the movie was that I thought they could have taken the “six different stories” concept a lot farther than they did. As they are, all the stories themselves feel kind of the same. They all have the same pacing. They all sort of look the same in the sense that they’re very polished and Hollywood-looking. All the stories reach their climaxes seemingly at once.
What I liked about the book was how each section had its own different voice, and I would have loved to see that echoed in the movie, with each story being shot in a distinctly different style and having a particular feel. The Frobisher section could be in black and white, the Luisa section could be a gritty, 70s-style thriller in the style of The French Connection, the Ewing section could be Merchant-Ivory style with a macabre twist, and so on.
As it is, I think the movie’s okay. But I would have loved to have gotten the sense of wonder out of the movie that I did from the book. As strange as it sounds, I think the movie suffers from a slight lack of imagination.
This too. I got secondhand embarrassment just watching Hanks during that segment.
And where did I ever say Moulin Rouge was my favorite musical? 
What a strange thing for you to say.
And Soylent Green, both in the nursing home segment and then again in Neo-Seoul.
Slaughterhouse Five hasn’t come up yet?
It’s a good idea. But I was just grateful for the movie we got. The solution of rapid cuts was already a pretty massive departure from the nested stories in the book, but I thought it was both daring and successful: indeed necessary for the medium of film.
The fact that all the stories feel sort of similar isn’t a bug, though, it’s a feature - the editing was undertaken to highlight the similarities, by cutting from a similar theme in one story to another in another. This is all to undescore the theme of “eternal return”, that humanity plays out the same plot (with different details) over and over - only the choices made change: whether to adopt the weak preying on the strong as self-evident natural philosophy, or to attempt to transcend that.
That said, I think it would have been grand to have the contrasting styles.
On that really jumped out at me was the composer and his musical transcriber were Delius and Fenby - which didn’t seem necessary. Delius was paralyzed and blind, and this guy seemed perfectly capable of jotting down his own damn tune.
Six movies for the price of one! The individual stories were fine, but the connections was just not there for me aside form the same actors, so it seemed either like they wasted an opportunity.
I had low expectations but I really liked it. And they needed subtitles for a lot of parts of it, not just the After the Fall segment.
Just saw it yesterday.
Count me in as another one who could follow the individual stories, but didn’t get what they had to do with each other.
Question: The one ‘after the fall’ who did they send that message to at the top of the mountain?