AoG's (and whoever) Official Movie Review Thread™

[nietzsche]

Wild Tales. 10/10.

Amazing! Must watch.



(this was my 11,111th post)

[mrswdk]

Sausage Party, 9/10 although the shitty ending reduces it to around a 7/10.

But still good ^0^

[Army of GOD]

Arrival - 6.4/10


Somehow they made aliens very dry and boring. The characters are generic and crap. They had some interesting concepts (interpretation of a completely unknown form of communication) but man did the execution come up short.

[nietzsche]

Gran Budapest Hotel - 0.1/10

One of the worst movies ever.

[nietzsche]

Cloud atlas: 6/10
I was really thinking that this was being a fantastic movie really under rated after the first hour... But the watchkovskis (however you spell it) failed. The movie is not bad, but I thought it would brick in together much better towards the end. It s all a bit in the "matrix mindblowing kinda thing". They tried to renew themselves with a very original concept (6 storylines narrated together taking place in 5 different centuries and with basically the same actors).
Anyone saw this movie and has an interesting read on all of it?

It's all about eastern spirituality/philosophy. The concepts it deals with as far as I can remember is reincarnation, "everything happens now", "oneness", everything connected, etc. The same actor playing a different role means the same soul having a different reincarnation, sometimes carrying issues from life to life.

With these kind of movies is difficult to know how much the author of the original idea and screenplay as long as the director believes or understand these concepts or are just simply borrowing an idea in order to appear deep.


About Tarantino: Best is Pulp Fiction, then is Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill. From there there are some good ones, others that are not as good, but contain the same sort of feeling. I mostly agree with all you said. There's another movie, written by Tarantino that I really liked: True Romance.

Yes, of course I got the whole reincarnation stuff. Nevertheless, I don t see the link between all the characters a given actor plays. Take tom hanks... He can be a bad guy or a good guy.
If this is all borrowed to easter spirituality, then karma isn t operating as bad things done in previous lives don t grant them "bad birth" in futuristic storylines. The whole scenario that looked like a well oiled war machine is actually not well thought through. Ido. T know, given that nothing is in order, I might need to put all 6 timings to see how they all actually evolve.. But it feels like karma isn t working properly.

True romance was good, but to tell the truth I watched it in theaters when it came out and never watched it again... That was over 20 years ago lol.

I know you lived in India trying to make it in Bollywood but the idea of karma is not completely agreed by all the spiritualism proponents. Some say one creates karma by carrying over issues. You probably are aware of the idea of everything being a play in which we help ourselves get over issues.

As I said, its unclear to me if the writer of the movie is proposing a whole theory or just borrowing parts of what he knows/agrees upon.

Best theory I found:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/27/cloud_atlas_meaning_what_does_the_wachowskis_movie_say_about_reincarnation.html

The Wachowskis have suggested that each actor in the movie plays a soul that evolves across time. As they told The New Yorker, “Tom Hanks starts off as a bad person … but evolves over centuries into a good person.” The soul depicted by Hanks goes from being a murderous quack (Dr. Henry Goose) to a physicist (Isaac Sachs) to a cockney gangster (Dermot Hoggins) and finally to a troubled tribesman of the post-apocalypse (the Valleysman Zachry); the soul played by Halle Berry goes from being a young Polynesian native to a Jewish composer’s wife (Jocasta Ayrs) to an investigative reporter (Luisa Rey), and so on.

But is it that simple? If Hanks always plays the same soul, then what happened between 1970 and 2012 to turn him from a whistle-blowing scientist into a murderous memoirist? Hanks’ progress, if indeed it’s from a “bad person” to a “good person,” hardly seems to follow a linear path. Also: the filmmakers decision to use nearly all of their actors in multiple roles is arguably as confusing as it is clarifying. Are all the characters played by Hugo Weaving the same soul? Perhaps—they’re certainly all evil. But what about Halle Berry? In 1973, when she’s a muckraking journalist, and in “106 years after the Fall” (well into the future), she’s heroic. But in the 1930s she’s the mostly silent and occasionally adulterous wife of an egotistical composer.

There may be a way to resolve this question. Perhaps only some actors play the same soul across time—including Tom Hanks and possibly Hugo Weaving—while other actors play different incarnations of the same soul (i.e., the soul with the birthmark). This interpretation might also help explain how the filmmakers see the six storylines connecting. There are essentially three main characters in each story. One, who the Wachowskis have said embodies “the Everyman,” is played by Tom Hanks. The second is a force of conservatism, evil, and oppression, who is represented (because it’s a Wachowskis film) by Hugo Weaving. The third is a force of good who can see beyond superficial differences of race, sexual orientation, and genetic engineering, and who is represented by various actors, all of whom own the birthmark: budding abolitionist Adam Ewing, the composer Frobisher, journalist Louisa Rey, fabricant Sonmi, and hero of the future Meronym. (Note: These characters have the birthmark in the book, and some certainly have it in the movie. Do they all? We can’t quite remember. If you do, let us know in the comments.)

Interconnectedness

However they work, exactly, the device of actors playing multiple characters across time and the device of repeating the birthmark across time both convey one of the film’s major themes: The interconnectedness of all human life. This theme is also underlined by events in each narrative. One individual’s actions—Sonmi’s standing up against an oppressive corporatocracy, or Robert Frobisher’s completion of his haunting sextet (itself about eternal recurrence)—are shown to have effects reaching far into the future. Frobisher’s sextet is heard again and again across the film, and Sonmi’s rebellious speech seems to eventually become scripture to the people of the future. And it’s not just their words and speeches that resonate down the ages, but also their stories: Just as in Mitchell’s novel, each character tells his or her own story, and each of these stories is shown being read (or in some cases, watched) by the people of the future. Our actions, the movie seems to be saying, don’t just affect our present: They’re shaped by mankind’s past and will in turn shape mankind’s future.

that's easy: time is not linear, it's a mind's construction.