What is this? I honestly don't know.
Is it a (God forgive me for the use of the word...) masterpiece? Is it just a vehicle for the poor player of Phoenix that struts and frets his hour upon on the stage? Is it somewhere in the middle? It's damn hard to tell.
It seems for the most part, Joaquin Phoenix's fairly brilliant work here is mired in a sub par script. The writing is where the film starts and kind…
"A half finished book is, after all, a half-finished love affair." - Robert Frobisher
Cloud Atlas is itself a half-finished love affair - to life, love, birth, death, the soul. It does not neatly come together, nor does it contain any true, solid arcs of story. Piecemeal, it is strung together, just like this existence of ours, and it is only half-finished until it is eclipsed by its ending, death.
All these stories come and go, intertwined, ever-connected by the…
Funny in parts, but mostly loud and brash; and you'd think it'd be a more enjoyable experience overall bringing these two together. Instead, it feels like just one long, tepid SNL skit.
While wonderfully filmed by Meirelles and featuring two lovely pieces of performance by Pryce and Hopkins, it's essentially just Old White Man Oscar Bait with a pretty good World Cup coda.
Its technical achievement is stupendous: 95 minutes, one shot. What it manages to say in that 95 minutes may be even greater as it manages to capture the ideas of life, existence, art, death, history being in the past, moving on, moving forward all within its images, camera movements, and dialogue between our unshown narrator and the man in black guide. It's a extraordinary film, one that deserves to rank amongst the greatest in cinema for its technical mastery which matches its grandiose representation of ideas. This is what great film/art is about.
“ I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man just like you." – Lancaster Dodd
Much like his character Mr. Dodd, Paul Thomas Anderson seems to be hopelessly inquisitive, and thus a confounding, enigmatic auteur and artist… which makes it hard to believe he is a big name Hollywood director. Take away Terrence Malick, and he’s probably the closest director Hollywood has that has not…
