(c) CINEMA BLEND
the movie Cloud Atlas, the new two-and-a-half hour film by the Wackowski's + Twyker based on the book by David Mitchell, is receiving 'quite a lot of stick' from the reviewers and critics. Some, oneself included, would wish that someone would throw THEM off the balcony of a penthouse suite during a book launch ... as happens early on in the contemporary timeline story about the failing author-turned-publisher.
Just grab those meanie moanie bitches by the scruff and tail and THROW THEM INTO THE NIGHT. Salt the back of the hand and down a shot of Tequila.
Everyone's a bitch when they have a job of work to do. Watch THE APPRENTICE and understand that, "I don't think you have the 'necessary ruthlessness' for this business." I mean, "What?" did last night's business-plan interviews episode (which I stumbled across the boardroom sequence of) really reveal that 'most successful businessmen' are heartless predatory psychopathic bastards?
Is that how 'your Consumerist world you call your own' is meant to be run, Dog eat Dog via the Isle of Dogs?
Well, there's plenty of Dog Eat Dog'ing in Cloud Atlas (literally) and this is used to great effect, not least in the parallel contemporary nursing home narrative where our failed publisher-cum-author-to-be soon finds himself. Abused by dykey nurses and pursued across town during a daring escape, "Soylent Green is people," he shrieks to the gawping faces of aged slop-diners at the back of the nursing home. He's a very bad boy.
And so are many of the other parallel narrative-characters in this story of potential wasted and lives screwed for PROFIT. Oh, yes, dear reader, don't think the Wachowskis (+ Twyker) have lost any of their anti-corporate Matrix zeal. This story oozes it, exemplified most strikingly in the future-Seoul narrative where a serving drone waits on her Consumers. Look, we're already there. Before she finds out where her thought patterns REALLY come from, along with her slop. We're already under THAT REGIME.
You'll notice I'm using lots of words like 'slop' and 'soylent green' and there are other 'link words' or 'visual cues' that would spatter through this review, were I to explore the 'word game' further. Suffice to say, this film cleverly links the parallel worlds and it's not like things done in a manner where 'one world affects the things doable in another world'. There's no 'rewriting the time loop' it's all fixed. But there is some glimmer of subversion of the linear timeline. There has to be. Or there's no HOPE that (if we want) we can have ANY WORLD WE SEE FIT TO LIVE IN.
Cloud Atlas (don't ask me how it compares to the book as I haven't read it, yet) is a glorious effort, a visual feast and a strong social statement: past folding into present influencing future. Get it, watch it, have a drink and some crisps ready for the long haul.
