Topical Ponderings: The Death of the Real

Has cinema become terrified of that nasty thing we call the real world? What is the source of the current obsession with revamping fairytales? Simon Fearn investigates.

A few years ago, the winner of the prestigious Eurovision Song Contest (not really) was a Norwegian twelve year-old who grinned his way through a chorus of "I'm in love with a fairytale, even though it hurts". My inability to recall the singer's name is evidence enough of the song's success, but our obsession with fairytales has persisted. When I (not unreasonably) wanted to go and see Danny Boyle's Trance at Uttoxeter's Cineworld, I was confronted with unspeakable horror. Their four screens were filled with Oz: The Great and Powerful, The Croods, Jack the Giant Slayer and Hansel and Grettle: Witch Hunters. It seemed not to occur to them that people over the age of twelve might like to go to the cinema. But even more alarmingly: two of these films were fairytale-based action movies which are becoming something of a pandemic and one of them was a prequel to a children's book (which apparently has hidden depths concerning Great Depression related satire, but even so). Why are we so obsessed with bloody fairytales?

There are probably many explanations. Escapism is now in vogue in an era where the Germans think its acceptable to take 40% of someone's money out of their bank account. The latest Hobbit film was a telling example of this longing to hark back to some sort of pastoral netherworld without George Osborne condemning us to increasingly depressing budgets. Perhaps people are just running out of ideas. This would explain why every October we're treated to yet another Paranormal Activity film which is a carbon copy of the last one. Perhaps fresh tales can never have the same impact as the old ones, which is why shady Hollywood film makers wish to milk the cash cows of childhood fables.



Can the opening scene of 28 Days Later be described as iconic?

In a recent interview with that demon of our airwaves, Chris Evans (I am often forced to listen to Radio 2, and am shocked that Evans doesn't know when Easter is), Danny Boyle said that he tried to give his films an element of the mythological. Then Chris Evans went on to insult him by saying "there is a chance that no one will like your film". But aside from my desire to be the architect of Chris Evans's destruction, Boyle has a point. In 28 Days Later there's that iconic scene where our hero wakes up in a deserted London, that cannot fail to send shivers down your spine. That sequence has seeped into out cultural fabric, and was adapted by US zombie fest series The Walking Dead.

And if we're going to talk zombies, they've been attacked from every imaginable angle with varying degrees of success. We've come a long way from Romeo's iconic Night of the Living Dead, we now have the zomcom (Zombieland), zombie romance (Warm Bodies) and zombie psycho-drama (BBC3's fantastic In The Flesh). Is it just me, or did someone, someday have a good idea and everyone's just milking it for all its worth? Is it the same with fairytales?

Last year there were two films about Snow White (Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman). It's a story about nasty fruit (which has itself been ingrained in our psyche since Eve made the mistake of listening to a talking serpent), vain women and short people. Do we honestly need two films about it? I've already talked about out obsession with vampire films in a previous article, and the idea of modern vampires all stems from a book by Bram Stoker, whose tedious use of the epistolary form bores even the most patient reader.

If we include the modern vampire story as a fairytale, then our definitions includes practically everything that's had time to sink into our psyche. The practise of allusion in novels mean that old books never quite die, and great authors will be quoting Shakespeare till kingdom come. And perhaps that's why we have this reverence for classic literature, but yet we don't share this respect for more modern books. I'm not of the belief that fiction has got worse, so why are older books considered far superior to some of the most exciting, experimental works of the 20th century?

If pressed, I wager most of us know the basic plots to Hamlet, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations. And they are iconic tales, beautifully crafted in such a way that every moment deserves the historic significance we give it. Unlike the fairytale adaptations that cinema is currently churning out, they were beautifully constructed with a view to telling us something about the human condition that fairytales can never quite achieve. So it seems peevish to say that they've sunk into our psyche simply because of age and constant allusion in younger texts. Indeed, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has become iconic, with big brother and room 101 sticking in our minds. But is this the way Orwell wrote his masterpiece, or simply because there have been TV shows called Big Brother and Room 101?

Taking this into consideration, it's difficult to say whether iconic tales are iconic because of their individual merit or because of the constant brutalisation they receive at the hands of profit hungry morons. The latter seems to be the case when more people have heard Kate Bush's song Wuthering Heights rather than read Bronte's novel, and as a result of this Heathcliff has become some kind of rugged, tempestuous romantic hero. The song fails to mention that he murders puppies or the horrific way he treats his wife to get at Cathy. And so these elements of Heathcliff's character fail to register with many of us. This also explains the appeal of fairytales. Most of them aren't very good, but we all know them from childhood, so this explains the curious desire to see them played out on the big screen.

Those who are a fan of postmodern philosophy (and I doubt there are many of you) may be aware of a theorist called Baudrillard, who famously said that Disneyland exists to make the rest of America seem real. He believed that we're so overwhelmed by simulations (yes cinema, that does include you) that much of our experience of the real world is constructed around representations of it (how does seeing countless on screen couples say "I love you" influence how we say the famous three words). Baudrillard also said that we are desperately looking for reality as we realise everything that we thought was real is so dependant upon simulation that it can be dismissed as fake. But on this point he seemed to be wrong. We seem to have given in, let ourselves be overcome by the death of the real. When we once searched for gritty realism in our films, or social satire on the latest political outlook, now we seem to be churning over our culture, trying to remodel old ideas. It as if we're trying to worm our way into the comfortable fabric of our cultural history, scared of our future and in denial of our present. Is this just a passing fad, or is this our future? If it is, then I can see my trips to the cinema becoming more and more infrequent.

Simon's Revision Tips: Twin Peaks

Feeling down at the prospect of hours in front of a desk revising your way to certain doom? Simon Fearn has some advice.

Yesterday, I faced the depressing task of constructing a revision timetable, consigning myself to endless hours of trying to memorise dates, places and philosophers. Looking at the stoic columns of revision slots stretching out to envelop the forthcoming days, I felt despair creeping up on me. The only solution was to take the advice a slightly odd FBI agent gave me a few days previous. "Every day, once a day, give yourself a present.". So I followed Agent Cooper's advice, and scheduled a Twin Peaks break every day at 1:30pm, to be enjoyed with a slice of killer cherry pie.

You may be wondering what Twin Peaks is, and why I am prescribing it as the cure to your revision woes. And this surprisingly takes me to Bastille's debut album: Bad Blood. Slated as a rip-off of the synth pop that apparently only the now extinct La Roux is allowed to play, Dan Smith released an odd fusion of addictive vocals, anthemic choruses and classical references (the opener is called Pompeii). The best song on the album was entitled Laura Palmer. Despite the bland chorus lyrics ("this is your heart, can you feel it?"), it had intriguing references to "all the people of the town, cast their eyes right to the ground, in matters of the heart" and "such terrifying final sights". Who was the mysterious dead girl who went running out into the night, never to be seen again?

The titular characters of this anthemic song next shows up when she washes up as a corpse wrapped in plastic in 1990's Twin Peaks. Deep fault lines are revealed within an enclosed community, and practically everyone seems to be conspiring against everyone else. Then Agent Dale Cooper arrives on the scene, and things start to get really confusing. Dark figures haunt the dreams of the townsfolk, especially a terrifying vision of an animalistic man with long unruly hair. Then Agent Cooper starts basing his investigation on the testimony of an ethereal midget, who also feels the need to tell Cooper that "his favourite gum is coming back into fashion". This leads him to the seedy One Eyed Jack's Casino, owned by the insidious Ben Horne, where all manner of nasty things take place.

Essentially Twin Peaks is all about pairings and oppositions, togetherness and duality. The first series has so many couples conducting secret affairs that we're almost in soap opera territory, but these clandestine doings are conducting in quirky ways with the ominous threat of violence. Meanwhile, there seems to be inner conflicts within all of the characters. Bobby Briggs is one of the most complex characters on television: utterly wild, capable of acts of great love and great callousness, both altruistic towards his paramour Shelly Johnson and inherently selfish, determined to break away from his conservative military father, but then breaking down whenever someone breaks his fragile outer shell. Josie Packard is a similar case, throughout her time in the first series it seems like everyone is willing her downfall and she's the innocent victim, but then the tables are turned when it transpires that she is involved in some exceptionally dirty deeds.

The reason I recommend Twin Peaks to provide a break from the Sisyphean nature of revision is that there's so much going on in it that you can't help put be pulled in to the mysterious ways of the titular isolated American settlement. Plus, Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer are two of the most developed characters I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. Kyle MacLachlan can take much of the credit for the success of Special Agent Dale Cooper, who's idiosyncratic portrayal holds the whole thing together. Meanwhile, the uniting strand tying all the disparate threads into one cohesive plot is Laura Palmer. Despite being dead from the start (unless you believe she's somehow being reincarnated as her cousin Maddy, played by the same actress), her presence haunts proceedings, with each episode ending with the credits rolling in front of her photograph, she even has her own theme tune. A little like our introduction to Jay Gatsby through rumour, the only information we get about Laura Palmer is from the testimony of her friends, who constantly produce more extreme accounts of her wayward and confused personality.To complement these meaty characters, we have oddballs such as the Log Lady and the comically tragic Leeland Palmer.

The most delightful thing is that the second series just gets weirder and weirder. Cooper now has nightly visits from a Big Friendly Giant and Leeland's hair mysteriously turns white overnight. We gaily throw ourselves into the abyss of utter farce, which is strangely coupled by a darker tone as Laura's killer begins to make himself known. All this is ideal as light relief from revision. So treat yourself. Join Cooper and co. in David Lynch's postmodern comedy nightmare.

Topical Ponderings: Where Now?

How do you follow a hit film, book, album or TV series? Same again or pastures new? Bigger and bolder or smaller and more intimate? Is there anything in the final masterpiece? Simon Fearn has none of the answers.

It's now barely 4 days until Danny Boyle's latest offering, Trance, is released in cinemas. The famously eclectic director, arguably one of the best British filmmakers of our time, has produced the best zombie movie so far (28 Days Later), a mainstream re-imaging of bollywood (Slumdog Millionaire) and is about to tackle the sort of psycho-drama that Christopher Nolan thought he had a monopoly on. Furthermore, his leading man, James McAvoy can hardly be accused of being type cast, playing a doomed lover (Atonement), a plucky but ultimately hopeless university student (Starter for Ten) and softly spoken superhero Professor Xavier (XMen: First Class, alongside the equally versatile Jeniffer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender). This year alone he's tackling the roles of Macbeth, a slightly dodgy cop (Welcome to the Punch), a very dodgy cop (Filth), a cold hearted criminal (Trance) and an inadequate husband in forthcoming double film experiment The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: His and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Hers. The pair seem to be able to do just about anything, and not only that, do everything spectacularly.



However, things are not looking so good for James Franco, one of Danny Boyle's ex-leading men in 127 Hours. Franco flops big style in Oz: The Great and Powerful. The supposedly enigmatic 'wizard' should be played as a failed, but ultimately good man or a hopelessly corrupt dictator beyond redemption. Franco manages to miss both interpretations, aiming at a vague mess of the two. More intriguing is Disney's choice of director for their pointless prequel: Sam Raimi of Evil Dead fame. Back in 1981, Raimi was directing his leading man Bruce Campbell in a freezing cabin in the woods as Campbell tackled encroaching Deadites with his iconic chainsaw. True, now the film does seem ever-so-slightly dated, but at the time Raimi was pushing boundaries, managing to achieve the coveted title of Video Nasty. Now Raimi is directing Campbell again as "Winkie Gate Keeper" in his latest bland offering. What the hell is a "Winkie Gate Keeper"? The wooden acting and unnatural dialogue have  somehow carried over from The Evil Dead, but the run of the mill content reminds me of Tim Burton's abysmal Planet of the Apes remake, and just about every family film ever made. Hero finds himself in unfamiliar territory; hero meets love interest; hero does A Brave Thing; evil army amass to kill Hero and Accomplices; dramatic but ultimately pointless final battle; everything turns out alright in the end by some miraculous, but predictable, twist.

We can also blame Raimi for more family friendly fluff in the form of the Spiderman Trilogy, so it's not surprising that the thing he's most remembered for is his 80s gore fest. But can we blame him for his move to the mainstream? Would I still be criticising him if he continued in the line of low budget horror flicks? Hence the uneasy conflict between doing what you're good at and being eclectic enough to avoid being accused of being stuck in a rut. We can't all be Danny Boyle or James McAvoy.

Nowhere is it more problematic to find a formula and stick to it than in the music industry. Mumford and Sons were slated by their 2012 epic Babel, with Q Magazine  peevishly claiming that it was "just like the last one". But as the band claimed, it was evolution, not revolution. The foursome knew what sort of sound was there's and seemed to be constantly refining. True, Babel is the natural progression from Sigh No More, and none of the tracks are much of a departure for their winning folky formula, but it's a lot better than their debut. Surely that counts for something! The same is true of Florence & the Machine's Ceremonials. More epic pop anthems you say! What did you expect?

On the other hand, Paramore are almost unrecognisable on their latest single Now and sound like a somewhat annoyed version of Haim. Back in the days of Brand New Eyes, listeners would be slightly taken aback by Hailey William's singing "now-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow", and even now it's slightly annoying. Nevertheless, the band settle in to a comfortable Paramore-esque groove in the pre-chorus, reminding us that the teen-punk-pop angst isn't quite over yet (despite one of the tracks being called I'm Not Angry Anymore, yeah right!). The fact that they're making the bold (or lazy) decision to release a self-titled album seems to suggest that we're finally going to be treated to the true essence of Paramore. But then again, The Beatles's self-titled double album involved strange departures into the Wild West and the confounding Revolution 9.

When making a choice about how to pitch your next project in any of the arts, you need to make one key decision: bigger or smaller? Florence and Mumford both went bigger with superb results. Ellie Goulding laid on the synths in a big way in Halcyon, which while being infinitely more ambitious than the cutesy Lights, seemed to have both drama and subtlety. The cult BBC 3 series Being Human made the unwise (but possibly inevitable) choice of keeping going bigger, culminating in a hugely bizarre situation of the devil taking over the world and our supernatural heroes being stuck in some strange kind of dream world without even knowing about it. Tobey Whitehouse's constant pressure to raise the stakes ever higher meant the series had nowhere to go after its fifth run, and fizzled out just as he'd gone to the trouble of replacing all three of his leads. The truth is, although going bigger sometimes yields great results, its the obvious thing to do. A much braver decision is going smaller.

Take David Mitchell, postmodern visionary and general awkward genius. He followed the bonkers Cloud Atlas (which spanned hundreds of years and had a huge ensemble of disparate but interconnected characters) with the intimate Black Swan Green (a semi-autobiographical account of the day-to-day ordeals of a schoolboy stammerer living in the middle of nowhere, spanning just one year). True, when we think of Mitchell, we think Cloud Atlas, but Black Swan Green is perhaps more beautiful. Mitchell wields his characteristic way with words while maintaining the distinctive character of Jason, and make a single year in the life of a schoolboy look just as wondrous as centuries of human history. While I prefer Cloud Atlas, Jason Taylor is my favourite character from the two books.

With all this to think about, it's no surprise there's so many one-hit-wonders. Where was Richard Kelly meant to go after he stunned the world with Donnie Darko? If George Orwell had managed another book, how would he follow Nineteen Eighty-Four? It seems there's something in final masterpieces. If you have these big moments early in your career, then the rest of it is going to consist of you constantly weilding out the old behemoths while your latest, possibly more rewarding work, becomes a mere footnote. No wonder Radiohead got sick of Creep, with Tom Yorke wailing "this is our new song, just like the last one, a total waste of time" in My Iron Lung. The wait of history arguably turns the old visionaries like Sam Raimi into Hollywood's yes-men. Even Tim Burton suffers, not only was Planet of the Apes terrible, but so was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland, with Burton making the curious decision of trying to appeal to nine-year-olds. None of his recent works can live up to Edward Scissorhands or Big Fish, two films which seemed to capture the essence of Burton.

Danny Boyle seems not to have any of these worries, avoiding the woes of the disappointing follow up by making his films distant cousins rather than successors. But most mere mortals in the artistic world will always be pursued by their own back catalogue. The Raimis and Burtons of this world will hide in the big money and big audiences of Hollywood, the Paramores will stoically refuse to grow up and the Mumfords will develop at the pace of a snail playing a banjo. And so our artists heroically continue along the road to certain obscurity, but are capable of minor miracles along the way.

Ratings of films/books/albums/TV series mentioned:
Oz: The Great and Powerful- 3/10
Mumford and Sons: Sigh No More- 7/10
Mumford and Sons: Babel- 8/10
Paramore: Now (Single)- 6/10
Being Human: Series 5- 7/10
David Mitchell:Cloud Atlas- 9/10
David Mitchell: Black Swan Green- 8/10
Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton Remake)- 4/10
Big Fish- 8/10

The End of the Affair: Graham Greene

Maurice Bendix is very good at brooding, in fact his brooding can extend to just about anything. At the opening of this novel he broods about the opening of novels in a metafictional tone that may have seemed adventurous at the time, but seems distinctly ordinary nowadays. Then he goes on to talk about hate a lot.

Our narrator seems determined to colour the whole novel the darkest shade of black, offering only occasional light relief through a bumbling private detective Parkis and his trusty sidekick. Through his immense depression, the reader is pulled into the darkest recesses of Bendix's soul searching as he contemplates his stormy affair with Sarah, wife of the far-to-amiable-for-his-own-good civil servant Henry Miles. The novel starts some time after the affair has ended for unknown reasons and Maurice has been left broken and filled with hate. Henry unwisely places the idea to set a private detective on Sarah into Bendix's head, and things deteriorate from here on in. Why did the affair end? What is the boundary between love and hate, are they one and the same? And how much are we meant to read into the ominous comment at the end of Chapter One?

We start off liking Bendix, which is good as we have to spend a great deal of time with him, but as his obsession with Sarah is reignited he changes from satirical, downbeat observer (he is a writer after all) to jealous maniac. The increasingly crazed, inhuman Bendix begins spouting all sorts of self-loathing remarks, but occasionally he has something very intelligent to say: "In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”

Nevertheless, it's never good to have a narrator/protagonist who's all "Me! Me! Me!". Nick Carraway learns to take a backseat, occasionally throwing the odd barbed comment while he lets his idol, Jay Gatsby dominate. Great Expectations, the book that inspired Greene to attempt a first person narrative, was led by the charming Pip. True, he made some fairly naff decisions, but his concern for others, his fascination with the world around him and his biting, but not over-the-top, self criticism gave the epic novel its character. In The End of the Affair, Bendix's only interest in others is to insult them and tell them how they haven't got it as bad as him. In effect, he's acting like a stroppy teenager, and the reader may have an overwhelming urge to yell at him to "get over it". After all, Greene only portrays his longing for Sarah as sexual desire, so its hard to have much sympathy for him.

But aside for our moaning narrator, the book has many merits. For starters it conducts one of the greatest literary U-turns I've ever experienced, introducing its main theme of religion more than halfway through the novel. Apart from fleeting references to God at the beginning, it seemed like it would be a straightforward examination of the nature of love. But when Maurice gets hold of Sarah's diary, a huge chunk of the book is dedicated to her Catholic guilt, and the novel's conclusion is fraught with religious angst.

Sarah's section is actually the strongest in the novel. It does that wondrous trick of reinterpreting everything that's gone before (much like the divine psychoanalysis at the end of Sebastien Faulk's Engleby). While Maurice at times simply appears sexually frustrated, you can sense Sarah's world falling apart around her. Her awakening conscience seems destined to lead to her doom from the start.

While Greene's novel is unlikely to make you believe in God by its series of flimsy 'miracles', it does suggest the implications of a God and the pain of belief. Would you really want a God that kept you in an unhappy marriage and tore you apart from the ones that you love? Bendix is caught in the unpleasant situation of being adamant that he will remain an immoral person, but unable not to believe in God. You sense that if the novel where to continue, Bendix would take the same path of self destruction as his lover.

So The End of the Affair isn't groundbreaking, but it plays with some serious themes in an entertaining manner, although at times you feel you may be crushed under the weight of despair. The novel has flaws, Smythe seems to be simply an object for Bendix's hate and an antithesis to Sarah's developing Catholicism, but if you accept these flaws then satisfaction is guaranteed.

Cloud Atlas

August 2012. I found myself in one of the worst places in the world: Houston Airport, Texas, awaiting a 13 hour flight that would take me back to Blighty after a month in the wilds of Ecuador. Alas, my only company for this arduous journey was Robinson Crusoe, and although the novel was great if you happen to get stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere, it offers little in the way of entertainment. After a stroll though an incredibly overpriced bookshop, I saw an article in a magazine about the Wachowski siblings (creators of The Matrix) and Tom Tykwer adapting a seemingly unfilmable, but brilliant book for the screen. Intrigued, I found said unfilmable book and decided to see if it was as good as everyone said it was. It may have been the most expensive book I've ever bought, damn you Americans! It was called Cloud Atlas.

October 2012. The Cloud Atlas film performs dreadfully in the USA. There are complaints about Jim Sturgess's "yellow make-up" when playing Hae Jo Chang, and much fun is made of the odd decision for characters to play multiple roles throughout the film. Empire ruminates that part of the reason for the film's failure is its strong message against exceptionalism and individualism, the foundations of "the land of the free". It seemed Cloud Atlas had hit upon an uncomfortable truth, as Sonmi-451 reveals, “Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

February 2013. The British release of Cloud Atlas. After it's poor performance in the US, it had a limited release in the UK. The Newcastle Vue wasn't showing it! After finishing a 5000 word essay on the book (David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: Power in a Postmodern World, if my parents are to be believed it's practically indecipherable and a great causer of headaches) I headed off to the cinema. I don't think I've ever been as excited to watch a film in my life before. I'd seen the fantastic trailer after I'd finished the extraordinary book, and had been waiting for the movie for months. And so I settled down as the film's ominous opening began, a palpable air of tension reigned over the room. As the six narrative strands were introduced in the space of about 5 minutes, my cinematic companion noted "this is mad!". And he was quite correct.

So what is Cloud Atlas? Essentially, it's a crazy story about reincarnation across history into an imagined future. But I think it's one of the few films that really represents humanity, how we are and how we should be. Audiences may suffer from tonal whiplash: we switch from a hilarious story of a vanity publisher (the fantastic Jim Broadbent) trapped in a care home (including an episode involving a cat which is every male's nightmare ) to the futuristic world of Neo Soul where old clones are butchered, and the cheap protein is used to sustain younger clones (and you thought the horse meat scandal was bad).

But isn't that what life is? A lot of films are tonally consistent, Winter's Bone and The Road manage the extraordinary task of maintaining a tone of desolation and utter despair throughout the whole miserable affair, but our lives (which are not our own) are neither bloody miserable or ecstatically positive, they're both. Cloud Atlas manages to mix some of the funniest scenes I've seen on the big screen with two of the most heartbreaking deaths you're likely to see this year. This is no mean feat.

This tonal ambiguity (or rather, tonal pendulum swings), is sustained by the fantastic editing. Every scene has some link to the next, despite the differences in time and geography. The fast pace is maintained for nearly three hours, which will probably be the fastest three hours of your life. And what's more, although we have a huge cast of characters across hundreds of years, we still care about all of them, contrary to Charlie Brooker's mocking of the film on Weekly Wipe. We touch on just about every genre, and the romance works lot better on screen than it did in the book (although perhaps power relationships were better developed in the original text). The film's major advantage over the novel is the more explicit causal link between past, present and future (a Korean clone is inspired by a film of Cavendish's Ghastly Ordeal)

The idea of having actors playing multiple is inspired, although this is what a lot of viewers get hung up on and find a distraction (leading to Q Magazine referring to Cloud Atlas as Mr. Benn: The Movie). Characters who were torn apart in one life are granted happiness in another, and the eternal presence of evil in our lives is represented by Hugo Weaving in a variety of menacing roles (including that of an evil nurse!), sometimes he's defeated, and sometimes he is victorious, but only ever in the short term. Meanwhile, Tom Hank's characters make a transition across time from killer to hero, where he is eventually reunited after been blown to smithereens with the major heroine of the piece, Halle Berry. Doona Bae's Somni and Ben Wishaw's Frobisher present us with the conscience of the piece, occasionally wowing with philosophical statements that make you question how you live your life.

Many critics have called this film "a well delivered mess", but I think they are confusing the word mess with complexity. Cloud Atlas is like nothing I've ever seen before in its scope and bravery, which is why although it has a limited screening, it was almost a permanent fixture in any self respecting movie magazine in the weeks leading up to its release. The fact that Charlie Brooker (satirist who makes bold statements against satire?!?) chose to ridicule it is saying something, the week before he was deconstructing Skyfall ("Why couldn't Sam Mendes write an essay on why Bond is still relevant rather than killing lots of people?"). Even if you can't stand it, you have to look at Cloud Atlas with some form of grudging admiration. Despite this it has failed to win any major awards, even pipped to the post for Tykwer's beautiful music (on repeat now in my head) by Life of Pi at the Golden Globes. Do you remember any music in Life of Pi? I don't.

The only minor flaws in the film can be found in relation to the book. Two of the most beautiful passages have been omitted, which means the title now makes no sense whatsoever. But this is a rarity in literary adaptations. Rather than take the Wallflower approach and effectively make a carbon copy of the source text (albeit, a very good copy), the trio of scriptwriters/directors have kept some of Mitchell's best lines, but have also added their own, which are equally good if not better. Whole sections of the plot have been changed, but rather than being annoyed at the cuts and embellishments, it seems to make more sense this way as a film. The Wachowski-Tykwer partnership seems to have yielded something very special, a film that is totally independent from its source text.

Back to the cinema. Among my party there was a general air of confusion, most of which originated from someone (mentioning no names, Oliver Getley) finding much amusement in a dog being shot. Lots of fun was had with the credits, when the elaborate game of dress-up was finally exposed and the actors' different roles were revealed. At 11:30pm,  I felt that I could watch it all again. In fact, the following week I was plagued by a desire to get back on the roller coaster ride that was Cloud Atlas, so the next weekend I took my father to see it. I was afraid I wouldn't enjoy it as much after only a week, but I couldn't haven been more wrong. By the time Zachary disappeared with Meronym under starry skies, I had found my new favourite film, and in my father there was another convert to the Cloud Atlas cause.

Rating: (predictably) 10/10