Thursday, October 25, 2012

Cloud Atlas Rumble: A Movie and Book Critic Square Off


A scene from the epic drama “CLOUD ATLAS,” distributed domestically by Warner Bros. Pictures and in select international territories.
 A scene from the epic drama “CLOUD ATLAS,” distributed domestically by Warner Bros. Pictures and in select international territories.
Movie critic David Edelstein and book critic Kathryn Schulz engaged in a long conversation over the new film Cloud Atlas, based on the 2004 novel by David Mitchell. A shorter version of this exchange originally appeared in the October 29 issue of New York Magazine.

David Edelstein: Do you want the true-true? I think the film of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is dumb-dumb. Andy and Lana Wachowski (the latter once Larry, and her transformation into Lana might well tie into the notion expressed in this film and the Matrix trilogy that identity is fluid and that physical boundaries are made to be transcended) and Tom Twyker have seized hold of Mitchell’s enlivening literary tour-de-force, passed it through the Benihana chopper, and extruded the most jaw-droppingly woo-woo piece of sci-fi-romantic drivel since The Fountain.
I’ll leave it to you to enumerate Mitchell’s accomplishments on paper, but one thing I loved about the novel was that each of its six subplots — the “Pacific Journal” slave melodrama of the nineteenth century, the epistolary section from the early twentieth, the paranoid-conspiracy seventies thriller, the present-day totalitarian old-age Kafkaesque yarn, the clone-war adventure of the near future, and the postapocalyptic jungle saga of the distant one —each had its own integrity, its own style, its own present tense. From the start of the movie, the Wachowskis and Tykwer give us a hash of crisscrossing plots tied together with music (in a desperate attempt at fluidity) and featuring the same actors with laughably egregious makeup jobs. Our dawning awareness in the book of the all echoes and crosscurrents and themes and variations become fast-food metaphysics on a cartoony canvas.

Full story at Vulture

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