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Non-Review Review: Cloud Atlas

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2013.

Cloud Atlas is a bold, imaginative, creative, frustrating, original, inventive, exhausting and ambitious piece of work. It’s a film that really forces the audience to collaborate, to try to force the pieces of story on the screen to fit together into a structure that is both rewarding and unique. Coming out of the film – which has been dubbed “the most expensive indie movie of all time” – I was left with the impression that Cloud Atlas is a film where everybody is going to hold a slightly different perception of what the film is, and what it’s about. I can very honestly say that Cloud Atlas is quite unlike any other film I have ever seen, and that sense of experimentation and the sheer skill to force the narrative into a shape that makes some sort of sense, unique to almost each viewer, is one massive accomplishment.

Sweet music…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Adam Ewing, arts, Ben Whishaw, Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell, Edinburgh, Film festival, Film Festivals, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, hugo weaving, Movie, Soylent Green, tom hanks | 11 Comments »

Noir A.D.: Why Sci-Fi Is Better Hardboiled…

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Darren

We’re currently blogging as part of the “For the Love of Film Noir” blogathon (hosted by Ferdy on Films and The Self-Styled Siren) to raise money to help restore the 1950’s film noir The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me). It’s a good cause which’ll help preserve our rich cinematic heritage for the ages, and you can donate by clicking here. Over the course of the event, running from 14th through 21st February, I’m taking a look at the more modern films that have been inspired or shaped by noir. Today’s theme is “cyber noir” – the unlikely combination of sci-fi and film noir to make an oh-so-tasty film.

Nobody’s entirely certain who it was that came up with the idea of combining peanut butter and jelly. It isn’t exactly a logical leap, after all. The most popular theory seems to be that it was American soldiers, who had been issued with ration packs containing peanut butter and jelly during the Second World War. With these two items in their packs, the soldiers decided to pair them up and eat them as part of the same sandwich. However, though this might suggest that the two were thrown together by coincidence, they stayed together because they just work so well. So it is with science-fiction and noir, that most unlikely of combinations which can’t help but go down a treat.