I remember when the Wachowski brothers were geniuses for the Matrix and were going to lead us to a promised land of science fiction….hell, I remember when they were both actually brothers. They can’t take credit for V for Vendetta, they merely produced so their post-Matrix record is pretty freaking dismal. Is Jupiter Ascending going to stop that slide? Read the synopsis, take a look and you tell me.
In the new film
from “The Matrix” directors, opening in 3D, 2D and IMAX 3D theaters on July 25, 2014, Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) was born under a night sky, with signs predicting that she was destined for great things. Now grown, Jupiter dreams of the stars but wakes up to the cold reality of a job cleaning toilets and an endless run of bad breaks. Only when Caine (Channing Tatum), a genetically engineered ex-military hunter, arrives on Earth to track her down does Jupiter begin to glimpse the fate that has been waiting for her all along – her genetic signature marks her as next in line for an extraordinary inheritance that could alter the balance of the cosmos.
Killing Time 
I like you, Sleepless, but Cloud Atlas is INCREDIBLE. The makeup is terrible and the actors take overacting to a whole new dimension, yet the film is a near-work of visionary genius and the saddest bomb in the history of cinema. It balances the six story lines with such perfect editing and pacing that it makes you want to weep. So say I. And, as long as I’m voicing unpopular opinions, Speed Racer is fun. I think I’m the only person in the world who liked it more than the first Iron Man. The Matrix Sequels were pretty dismal, though… Reloaded was the biggest movie disappointment of my life.
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Ok, mutually, much love to my reviewing brother, but your crack habit is just making me sad. Cloud Atlas was AWFUL! It was honestly one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Tru tru. The makeup isn’t just bad, it’s kind of overtly racist. I would sit through Reloaded twenty times in a row before watching this again. Speed Racer MORE than Iron Man? Dude, you’re making me sad. I’m like wanting to send you a care package. Nurse Hugo Weaving. COME ON! AAAAAAAAAAA IT’S IN MY HEAD AGAIN!!!
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Cloud Atlas fits in with my high-wire-act philosophy of film appreciation. If a filmmaker tries something—really, really TRIES something, something weird that has never been done before—he has an enormous advantage over a middle of the road filmmaker who takes no chances. And this holds true even if the high-wire-act movie is bad. To give you an idea, Lynch’s Dune and Coppola’s One From The Heart belong in this category; Howard the Duck does not.
Cloud Atlas is NOT a bad movie IMO, but it IS the biggest high-wire act of all time. If you just make a leap and accept, for example, that Hugo Weaving plays multiple roles, including one in drag and another as some kind of Leprechaun-Satan… if you make that leap and go with it, you will discover that the film is a perfect execution of what it sets out to do. But you have to let the flaws go. You have to look beyond them.
I don’t know if what I’m saying makes any sense at all; I just feel as though the Wachowskis are the good guys. Professionally and personally they’re weird iconoclasts who have made it in Hollywood on their own terms, and I like them. They managed to get the most expensive independent film of all time made, and a strange one that flies in the face of Hollywood’s cookie-cutter mentality. And I felt good going into the theater to support their work.
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I just realized that in my last comment it sounds like I’m saying that a perfectly-executed film has flaws. What I meant to say is that Cloud Atlas executes its premise in the MOST perfect way possible. Even Orson Welles could not have pulled off Cloud Atlas to perfection.
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Well, technically they are…siblings…I suppose as one of them had a sex change operation which is why everyone calls them the Wachowskis now and not the Wachowski brothers. I dunno. Cloud Atlas had seven stories going at once and they were all bad to me. I tried. I went in rooting for it. I even tried my best to understand what in the seven hells Halle Berry and Tom Hanks were saying in the aboriginal future where we talk like autistic cats. I can admire having the guts to try, but if you TRY to make a MOVIE and instead make a giant pile of MONKEY FECES (don’t know how to bold for emphasis so we’re going with caps)….yeah, no I can’t salute that. But everyone has their films they admire that people have wild disagreements over. Cloud Atlas has a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than the last Hobbit which is a perfect argument for the increasing uselessness of it as a tool for evaluation. This year a good portion of my favorite films (Now You See Me and About Time for ex.) are in the 50’s on RT. Thor 2 is about 30 points behind Iron Man 3 and it’s such a superior film that it blows my mind. I don’t know if the metrics they use have changed, but I used to pretty much swear by it and now I just kind of regard it as a novelty.
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