Early Reviews: Is 'Cloud Atlas' A Triumph Or A Disaster?

Early Reviews: Is 'Cloud Atlas' A Triumph Or A Disaster?

It's an extremely ambitious movie, so it's probably a little bit of both, like Malick's films, or Sokurov's.

Scoopy's Sixth Law: Sometimes when you try to climb out of the shit and reach for the stars, you just dislocate your shoulder. That doesn't mean you should keep wallowing in the shit.

So far Cloud Atlas has received 73% good reviews (11 out of 15), but some of the bad ones are really bad:

"The problem isn't that this is one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life; the problem is that it's seven of the worst films I've ever seen in my life glued together haphazardly, their inexorable badness amplified by their awkward juxtaposition."

And some of the good ones are paeans:

"CLOUD ATLAS left me with an incredible sense of hope for the future of cinema. And the future of humanity. How many movies give you that?"

Today's lesson: one man's pretentious mess is another's epic masterpiece. In my overview, I called Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son "unwatchable" and "the most pretentious movie ever made."

I elaborated:

"It has all the worst elements of Northern European filmmaking. It is filled with gravitas and self-pity. The dialogue is self-consciously meaningful. The acting is exaggerated and hammy. The pacing is -- I can't say slow because merely slow movies seem like that first scene of "Roger Rabbit" compared to this. At one point I stopped to see if my DVD player was broken because nothing was moving - and it was in 8x speed at the time, working perfectly.

Here's what happens. A mother is dying in bed. Her son comes in and asks her if she wants to go for a walk. She does, and he carries her outside for a while, then carries her back inside. He sets her on her bed, goes out for a walk on his own, stands in a field and watches a train go by, returns to his house to find his mother dead in bed.

The end.

About 50 words of dialogue in the entire movie. Maybe a half dozen different camera set-ups. Virtually no sound.

Oh, and I should mention that most of the scenes are filmed through distortion techniques - colored or curved glass or maybe special lenses, that make the film seem like it is being shown in the wrong aspect ratio with the colors desaturated.

I have no problem appreciating the work of the Russian masters. I have said that Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev is the Pieta of filmmaking. Having offered that preface, let me hasten to add that I couldn't stand this film. It is irritating, pseudo-intellectual hokum masquerading as art. It is mimimalism as a pure intellectual exercise."

On the other hand, the San Francisco Chronicle hailed it as "one of the great films of the decade -- a dreamlike, rapturously beautiful gem."

So there you have it. Just call me Phil. Phil Istine.