The New York Times has a review this morning of Cloud Atlas, and this paragraph jumped out at me:
The movie insists — repeatedly and didactically — that a thread of creative, sustaining possibility winds its way through all of human history, glimmering even in its darkest hours. A beautiful notion, and possibly true. But unfortunately not quite true-true.
I love that “not quite true-true.”
I’m still curious to see Cloud Atlas. It’s hard for me to resist a film that aspires to be interesting, intellectually, at some level. I liked The Tree of Life, Magnolia, Apocalypse Now, and 2001. It’s how I’m wired. Maybe I’ll like Cloud Atlas for similar reasons. But I’m a bit disoriented by its title. Is it:
- unironically promising the audience a map to the landscapes of change;
- something meaningless pretending to be meaningful (a Daniel Dennett “deepity”); or
- deliberately oxymoronic?
And the actual trailer itself comes off, at least to me, as Green Mile meets Waterworld. But what say you? Hype or ripe?
I posted the extended trailer for Cloud Atlas a while back. It looks like a great thrill ride that I’d love to go see, but no movie is going to convince me to bet my life on some “better life” to come after I die.
I think the author took the title from a series of Toshi Ichiyanagi’s compositions of the same name.
Thanks for the clarification.
–Santi