Tag Archives: Ben Whishaw

REVIEW: Cloud Atlas

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Cloud Atlas
Directed by: Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski
Written by: Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski (screenplay), David Mitchell (novel)
Starring: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent and Hugo Weaving

Tom Hanks and Halle Berry have come unstuck in time.  Over the course of Cloud Atlas’ wildly ambitious 172 minutes, the two mainstream Hollywood actors and a plethora of others- Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant- appear as wildly different characters in just as wildly different time periods, from California in 1973 to post-apocalyptic Hawaii hundreds of years from now.

The six varying and intersecting narrative threads in Cloud Atlas are stunningly shot and at times narratively captivating.  As adapted by Andy and Lana Wachowki and Tom Tykwer (who all co-wrote and directed), it amounts to a beautiful mess.  There are too many narrative threads and characters to begin with, and adding poor execution and editing to that just makes it worse.

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ARCHIVE REVIEW: I’m Not There

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I’m Not There
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Written by: Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman (screenplay)
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, and Richard Gere

Where to begin?  Here is a movie with almost no beginning and no end, an interwoven tale about both the same person and six very different ones.   It’s fitting that a movie about such a radical is filled with radical notions of its own, at least about filmmaking.

Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is a visionary look into the life and ever-shifting personas of Bob Dylan.  You don’t hear his name once during the two-and-a-half hour journey into his head, but at the end you get something you don’t usually get from biopics: a true understanding and examination of the subject.  We don’t follow a single artist as they are discovered to have musical talent,  inevitably become famous and then acquire famous people problems.  All of these things happen in I’m Not There, but to different characters in different ways.

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