Film

Over the years

Cloud Atlas

About 45 minutes into the nearly three-hour Cloud Atlas screening I attended, some dude blew out his lips, sounding not unlike a bridled horse after piloting a carriage around Disneyland for half a day. Others stood up, shook their heads, and walked out solemnly with their popcorn corn tubs for the first of many refills. Cloud Atlas is one mightily ambitious film. Three directors at the helm, a high profile cast with most playing multiple roles, and many interconnecting story arcs spanning centuries. All things considered, it’s remarkable how cohesive the film is. While different directors handled different stories, the film doesn’t feel as if different directors were handling the shots. It has a nice, smooth, unified vision. Not smooth enough to please everybody, judging by the mass exodus from the theater I witnessed, but smooth enough to impress the likes of me. The directors are the Wachowski siblings (Andy and Lana of The Matrix movies) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run). They handled different parts of the movie with their own crews, while sharing the casts, who play a multitude of different characters that required them to often wear heavy prosthetic makeup. The cast includes Tom Hanks, who gets to play both virtuous and murderous men, often changing accents, wigs and teeth. Hanks looks like he’s having the time of his life in this movie, and it helps to propel the film, even when it threatens to go off the rails. Also on hand is Halle Berry, who has been getting some stinker roles lately. This is her best film in years, especially during a 1970s plotline that has her playing a reporter investigating a nuclear power plant scheme. Hugh Grant, having a fun year with his great

voiceover work in The Pirates! Band of Misfits, gets to play a host of disgusting people, as does Wachowski regular Hugo Weaving. The movie’s true intentions don’t start kicking in until halfway through its running time, making the first half a bit of a maze. My advice is to let go and be patient, because, narrative wise, it all comes together quite wonderfully in the end.by Bob Grimm I’m sure the makeup folks were working overtime on this one, and some of their work bgrimm@ is quite dandy. That said, much of it is prettynewsreview.com awful. Susan Sarandon has a fake nose at one point that’s so distracting it’s hard to follow what’s happening in the scene. I found myself3 staring at her nose and missing dialogue. I did like the transformation of Hugo Weaving into a female nurse as mean as Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But for every makeup success, there seems to be three failures. The film was budgeted at a little over $100 million, which is not a lot of money by Hollywood blockbuster wannabe standards. So, yeah, another $25 million for fake nose and teeth research might’ve made the film look less like a goofy costume pageant and more realistic. While there isn’t one story in Cloud Atlas that’s so amazingly good it would stand on its own, the feat of tying them all together is still impressive. For instance, there are two slavery stories, one involving Jim Sturgess as a slave trader in the past, and another involving Sturgess as an Asian slave revolutionary in the distant future. The film, like the novel by David Mitchell, suggests that acts of kindness and hatred at any moment can ripple through time and affect the future. It also suggests that there’s some sort of reincarnation at play, with people meeting each other again and again in different lives. And finally, it also suggests that no matter how good looking we are, we are doomed to have a really bad nose or fake looking wig somewhere down the line. I liked the idea that the Hanks persona could be a heroic man in the ’70s and a brutish killer in the present day. In that respect, Cloud Atlas certainly lacks in predictability. In the end, the film is more a magnificent curio than magnificent entertainment. It will certainly challenge audiences ill prepared for its length and numerous swirling stories. Ω

Even some of the actors found Cloud Atlasconfusing.

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4Argo Ben Affleck makes another meaty movie with this spellbinding recreation of the late ’70s/early ’80s Iran hostage crisis, and the strange CIA mission that helped to extricate six American citizens from Iran at a most inopportune time. Affleck directs and stars as Tony Mendez, who hatches an elaborate plan to pose as a Canadian film director scouting Iran for shooting locations, with the six Americans posing as his Canadian film crew. The whole scenario seems ridiculous, yet it actually happened. Having lived through this period of American history, I can tell you that Affleck does a terrific job of capturing the look and mood of the time. The late ’70s were sort of humiliating both in terms of our status overseas and the way folks were wearing their hair. Bryan Cranston, John Goodman and Alan Arkin are all superb in supporting roles. This one will be in the running for some Oscars.

3Frankenweenie Tim Burton directs this enjoyable blackand-white stop-motion animated movie based on his own short film about a family dog being resurrected … Frankensteinstyle! Burton made the short film 28 years ago. While the story isn’t an especially electric one, the art direction is superb, and there are enough good laughs to make it worthwhile. Also worth noting: Winona Ryder voices a young girl character that looks suspiciously like Lydia, her character in Burton’s Beetlejuice. Other voices include Burton alumni such as Catherine O’Hara and Martin Landau, once again using his Bela Lugosi voice from Ed Wood. A finale sequence involving a giant, Gamera-like turtle and rabid sea monkeys gives the film a nice retro-horror feel. It’s a little sleepy in spots, but too impressive in other ways to completely overlook.

2Hotel Transylvania This animated take on Dracula (Adam Sandler) and other big monsters like Frankenstein’s monster (Kevin James) and the Werewolf (Steve Buscemi) has a fun setup and some great gags. But its overall feeling is that of total mania in that it barely slows down long enough for you to take it in. It’s often unnecessarily spastic in telling the tale of a nervous Dracula dealing with his daughter on her 118th birthday—young in vampire years). A human (Andy Samberg) shows up at the title place, a building Dracula created to keep dangerous humans away, and his daughter (Selena Gomez) falls for him. The overall story is hard to digest, but there are some great moments, such as every time the vampires turn into bats (cute) and a werewolf baby knowing what plane flight somebody is taking by smelling his shirt (unbelievably cute). Even with the cute moments, there were too many times when I just wanted to look away because the animation was far too frantic.

1Paranormal Activity 4 In my humble opinion, the Paranormal Activityfranchise peaked in the final two minutes of the first installment. That would be when a rather boring movie about bed sheets moving by themselves actually became recommendable based on its startling ending. Since that moment, the series has been one scene after another of rooms where something—be it a sound, a shadowy figure strolling through, or a basketball coming down the stairs by itself—is going to happen. Or sometimes it doesn’t happen, and the director fakes you out. (The directors of this installment are big fans of the open refrigerator door fake-out.) Kathryn Newton plays a teenager living in a house where a mysterious kid moves across the street. Lots of strange things start happening when she Skypes her boyfriend, and you know the drill. There isn’t one legitimate scare this time around. This thing is played out, yet a fifth chapter is already in the works. It’s not going to stop anytime soon. 4The Perks of Being a Wallflower Writer Stephen Chbosky makes an impressive directing debut with this adaptation of his semi-autobiographical novel about high school kids in the early ’90s. Logan Lerman plays Charlie, a shy freshman looking to make friends who eventually winds up hanging out with a fringe group of students including Patrick (Ezra Miller) and Sam (Emma Watson). The new friends help Charlie come out of his shell, and he ultimately realizes things about himself that need to be examined. Lerman is especially good here as the film’s anchor, while Miller continues to exhibit the great talents he showed in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Watson gets to step away from her Hermione role, and she does so successfully, making Sam a complex, real kid. One of the better films about high school to come along in quite some time.

5Seven Psychopaths This is a wildly engaging movie from Martin McDonagh, the man who brought us the brilliant In Bruges, my pick for the year’s best movie in 2008. Like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson, McDonagh creates movies that transcend genres. Colin Farrell stars as Martin, a character modeled after the director. Martin is trying to write a screenplay called Seven Psychopaths, and he’s wracking his brain for seven characters with distinctive killing methods. The way these characters appear to him is part of this film’s unending fun. Sam Rockwell plays Billy, Martin’s best bud, a struggling actor who makes money on the side kidnapping dogs with Hans (a scene-stealing Christopher Walken). When they kidnap the beloved dog of a psychopath (Woody Harrelson) very funny and violent things happen. Martin is trying for depth and beauty with his screenplay, while Billy screams for shootouts.

1Silent Hill: Revelation 3D Another wasteful scary movie attempt, and a sequel to a movie that didn’t need one. The first Silent Hillmovie was a banal, loud mess, and this one follows suit. Sean Bean returns as the confused dad trying to save his daughter Heather (Adelaide Clemens) from the horrors of Silent Hill, where her mother (Radha Mitchell) still resides. Silent Hill is a cursed city that looks a lot like a cheap video game, strewn with strange stitched-up monsters and totally lousy amusement parks. (Stay off the merrygo-round!) The movie is an incomprehensible mess that’s a task to watch. It’s also hard to see the likes of Malcolm McDowell and CarrieAnne Moss wasting away in junk like this. Their parts are small, but they’re parts all the same. The first movie happened six years ago, so I thought we were safe from getting a sequel. Such was not the case. I will say there is a spider monster thing in the movie that is almost scary, and the little girl with the white face and black eyes sort of freaked me out. That amounts for about two minutes of this otherwise dreadful movie.

3Sinister Ethan Hawke, who did a great job looking scared in movies like Before the Devil Knows You’re Deadand Training Day, gets to put his awesome hyperventilating on display in this sometimes very spooky demon-in-thehouse yarn. Hawke plays a nonfiction writer long past his last hit who moves his family into a house where the prior family met their death hanging from their necks in the backyard. He finds some home movies in the attic, which turn out to be snuff films, and, rather than calling the cops, watches them as research. He soon discovers an evil force is after his family’s children, and he perhaps should’ve chosen a house where people didn’t die in the backyard or leave snuff films in the attic. And, like most horror movie idiots, he sticks around while very bad things happen. The movie has some bad performances from supporting players, but Hawke anchors it well. Much, much scarier than any Paranormal Activitymovie.

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