Cinema vs. Literature: The Case of Cloud Atlas

Hey I know it's a crazy debate that is considered tedious even by the people who engage in it and incredibly dull to the vast majority of people, but to me it's a somewhat important debate – also I've always wanted to get my piece in. In my life I have watched many movies that started out as books. I even watched a series of movies pull an entire genre out of leftfield and into the mainstream (the 'teenage girls + Lord of the Rings = Twilight' formula).

I never really want to do the research. One masterful post about 90's action movies Judge Dredd and Demolition Man is the one piece of film criticism I've ever attempted (I wouldn't even call criticism that by a mile), but the fact that it came together at all is a miracle and premised heavily on my understanding of the 1990s and action movies. I would never put on airs about film. I didn't study film, I am no expert, and if I couldn't write a decent bit about it I wouldn't even dare tangle with such heady stuff. Just kidding: nothing is sacred and film deserves an honest thrashing beyond my abilities.

But so do books, which brings me to today's post, which will take all of my faculties firing at once. Books and film. Easy target. Why not the Jurassic Park series? Why not the Harry Potter series? Well, both of those movie series are premised on books written in the 90s and I don't want to overplay my hand. I want to up the ante, though, so I'm taking it up to the 2000s and the 2010s. Cloud Atlas, the novel, was published in 2004 by an English author named David Mitchell. It was a rather engaging, spirited, and creative endeavor that consisted of six stories and their mysterious interplay throughout the novel. With no one narrative, or style, it was consistently engaging to read, and the nesting of the stories (like so: 1/2/3/4/5/6/5/4/3/2/1 ), and their content lent the final conclusion an epic sense. What a book, David Mitchell. Good work.

For years I had encountered brief allusions to the book, and some people I know had read it, but nobody had recommended it to me. Then I came across a trailer for the movie version and the race was on: I had to read the book before the movie came out. I was determined to do that and then also go see the movie. Naturally it took until this very week (8 months after release in my region) for me to actually see the movie. Life interceded, but I did find the book and read it.

Between a book and the film inevitably made about it there is a chasm so wide it cannot be imagined. A book can take a year to finish but a movie only has the audience's attention so long. Therefore, any attempt made to transcribe an entire book into a movie (even if the visual medium optimally condenses meaning and collapses the long-windedness of writing into digestible, filmable scenes) would fall completely flat or be ludicrous or run for 9 hours straight. Film buffs and hardcore book worms don't even have time for that: the two mediums are a world apart.

That Time of The Year, Pt.2 : Based on a True Story

In 2011 this rule held true: if it was December there were a lot of movies coming out 'based on true stories'. I feel like 'based on a true story' is the sort of phrase that deserves to always be put in quotes. It stands out. I remember going to a theater and seeing two or three 'based on a true story' movies. Could be my memory is destroyed. You can check for yourself in many ways, I'm sure, but I will provide one.

I guess seeing a fabulous movie with roots in the mundane, grimy, desperate reality of life is a heart-warming thing. It's not terrible. You can't simply hate the story for being insipid or unbelievable. However, you can throw shovelfuls of shit onto the screenplay, script, and performances. I'm not one for 'true story' movies myself, but I can see the appeal. Recent Denzel vehicle Flight was also allegedly 'based on a true story' in the trailers. There is some discussion about that. Again, maybe my memory is shot.

It seems to me, after some reflection, that the winter months and the final weeks of autumn is the key season for 'based on a true story' movies. I guess film-goers need their hearts warmed, too. I will include in this discussion biographical films. I saw The Master this year in an independent cinema in late November. It fits the bill, even though the movie was released much earlier. I just wanted to say that I watched a movie. Was it good? Hell yeah it was interesting. I've never seen such a good, unbiased movie about Scientology in my life. The word 'Scientology' isn't even used once, as far as I know, in the movie. That's brilliant. L. Ron Hubbard is renamed. It's a work of art. Drags a bit. Philip Seymour Hoffman is in it and he's a masterful actor who positively keeps the damn thing going.

But I digress. Take one of recent history's most successful and critically lauded Milk, which was released on November 26, 2008. It was a movie 'based on a true story' and some might have called it a 'biographical film' or even a 'biopic'. I'm more or less an idiot, but even I can see this trend. I won't go ahead and say December is peak month for this type of movie, but it is certainly roughly in the middle. It is the median month for 'based on true story' entertainment.

Though, following this line of reasoning, every war movie ever made is 'based on a true story' and most crime movies as well. Then, let's get existential and very post-modern critical and just say that every movie and every book and every narrative ever is 'based on a true story'. Most music is probably born along those lines. Everything creative is partly 'based on a true story'. This is problematic, because I mean a specific type of feel-good, heartwarming, nonthreatening, almost unconscious type of movie. The type that would star Sandra Bullock and a minority actor, and you'd find your girlfriend watching it late one evening – absorbed, transported, and entirely quiet. Why can't she be like that when Ted is playing?

Except that movie with Sandra Bullock is not really so unconscious. I feel bad for considering it problematic. It's probably legitimately progressive, and probably has integrity as a work of art, as a consumer product, and as a social statement. I don't actually know, though. I never saw it. All I know is that, apparently, it was based on a true story, and according to that logic probably came out between mid-November and late-February.

Mars Then and Now

Our attitude towards the planet Mars is puzzling. It lies a long distance away and only by merit of being slightly more hospitable than Venus do we bother to choose it as the planetary neighbor to visit. In twenty or so minutes NASA will attempt a fantastic science-fictiony landing of another rover onto the red planet, in search of traces of water and cellular life or organic compounds. It's an interesting thing but I wanted to talk about the past.

Around 1999 the Mars madness was palpable. The Pathfinder mission was a huge cultural moment still somewhat in the spotlight and there was hype and references and exciting stuff. Upcoming missions made it seem all kinds of things were about to be discovered. It only makes sense that two big-budget movies would come out about Mars that year. It was the Deep Impact/Armageddon rule: find a cultural sensitivity and fight to the death to capture it perfectly in a movie.

In 2000, two Mars movies were released. Both were unscientific, dumb, melodramatic, action-packed, special-effects-laden, and not very remarkable. One was slightly more action styled. It was called Red Planet and was unapologetically stupid – as a film it was an abject failure. It tried to have 'deep' and/or 'thoughtful' undertones, but these didn't work out, because the film was about survival and strife and action. It was pretty cool as an action movie about Mars, but it was not sharp or exceptional. Wikipedia helpfully points out that it was a 'critical and commercial failure'.

The other movie was Mission to Mars, slightly more highbrow, slightly deeper, with less pervasive action scenes and a crippling addiction to nonsense and melodrama. It had a way better cast than Red Planet but the script was roughly just as bad. The main difference was the level of action. In Mission to Mars an important character takes off his helmet in space to discourage his wife from trying to rescue him from sure death. Melodrama, right? Pure melodrama, and out of all context of reality considering these are elite astronauts. Why even allow a husband/wife team? To make the story a little cozier, sure, but thoroughly unrealistic. The movie is still heartfelt in many ways and the ending, while cliche, dumb, and scientifically bankrupt (like the whole movie) is kind of touching in its absolute madness.

I suppose we're due for a Mars themed movie soon, depending on how this lander does in twelve or so minutes.

This Moment's Most Hypeable Movie

Out of nowhere I see this movie trailer on YouTube. It's about the David Mitchell novel. There was one part of it I have read, the futuristic cyper-punk dystopia, which I thought was pretty sharp on a few levels, both as genre fiction and social observation. So the trailer, to me, makes the film look like it's the next Inception. Except potentially more confusing.

So Tom Hanks is in this movie, they've got 'Outro' by M83 playing in the trailer, and the words "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED" show up on screen at one point  – really exciting stuff. In a five minute trailer I've seen a bunch of stuff out of the movie. They've referenced a bunch of concepts: metempsychosis (this one's about to trend, trust me), love, action, dialogue, narrative exposition... if you watch the trailer you will discern a dozen more. Considering the nature of the trailer, I wonder if I've seen a condensed version, which also makes me wonder, taking the unfinished book into account, if it's going to be a must-see.

It sounds like the sort of achingly metaphysical and deep movie that will keep people thinking until they reach their cars or have walked for a half hour. It definitely looks cool, and you can forgive any foreseeable cliches and laziness by the sheer variety of settings. It just seems like the trailer generously lays the movie out and, really, how hard is it to pair the movie with a neat little conceptual trailer, even if it has to be half as long?

It's got me thinking all existentially, even at this moment, and for me this is the most hypeable moment of this particular upcoming film release. Really there's always a reason to cheer when a book is turned into a movie, or concerning movies anything that's not a sequel, prequel, remake, or franchise reboot. I just wonder if Cloud Atlas will suffer in the same way Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did.

Anyways it's a cool trailer. It starts out with ethereal music and then kicks into more tense music and then goes insane. Dudes on horses, clones in a future dystopia, inspiring quotes. Then an explosion and a moment of silence and M83 and some more inspiring material. It's hard to resist, and in just a few months we get to see if it meets or exceeds expectations.

90s Science: Demolition Man vs. Judge Dredd

Science fiction movies in the 90s were all over the map. One year you might see gloriously well-presented dinosaur melodrama, the next year you might give up in distress and learn to appreciate art or literature. In many ways, the inconsistency of the past carried into the future. Some people talked about how the 'movies these days' were full of 'special effects', except in that time special effects were something rare and spectacular that tended to be applauded. That or they were incredibly shitty and overused. In many ways, nearly two decades later, things are similar.

90s movies had a certain quality that no longer really exists in the medium. Many of them were totally unwatchable wrecks, many of them aged horribly, and there was much lazy writing and gnashing of directorial teeth. Such is life. I post here today to summarize my experience with two Sylvester Stallone, marginal, action/sci-fi movies from the 90s. Abandon all logic and subtlety, ye who would be so foolish as to follow me. The movies are Demolition Man (1993) and Judge Dredd (1995).

Demolition Man is an insane movie. Stallone jumps out of a helicopter and explodes an entire building before the title sequence. Everything else after that is awesome, but muddled in a stupid, obtuse, poorly-written version of the future. But none of that matters because that future exists only so Wesley Snipes, playing a gleefully violent criminal, can fight Sylvester Stallone, who accidentally killed 20 children when he exploded the building from the beginning of the movie. Both of them were frozen in time because that's how sentencing worked in 1993's idea of 1996.

Demolition Man has an agenda so broad, and so stolen, that even dogs raise their eyebrows when they see it. The future is a utopia, peace and calm reign, but society atrophies because there is no aggression, no uncertainty, no explosions, and no action. Death is by natural causes, spicy foods are outlawed, and people get fined for swearing. It's the original Campy Darwinism. Sandra Bullock and company say shit in the opening half hour that sounds so hideously, hilariously, clumsily out of place that the only explanation is that a computer was given the scenario and two hours to write it. Apparently only intellectual-sounding words would make the future enough of a gutless wimp for two 90s badasses to thoroughly work it over.  "Info assimilated." "Mellow greetings."

In this future, which exists out of sheer laziness, society is childish, naive, and inherited by total fucking infantile eunuchs with too-large vocabularies. But it's still fun. Things get shot up. Wesley Snipes taunts everyone and shoots everything. The whole plot is a weird mixture of old utopia/dystopia books such as 1984, The Time Machine, and Brave New World mixed with basically every science fiction/action film up to its point. It's not particularly smart, or achingly funny, and the satire is dull, but nobody cares. Ten minutes in you know this movie doesn't care. You shouldn't, the movie told you not to. And there's just enough quality action, gun-play, and insanity that you feel okay when you watch it. This was the model for mediocrity. These days it seems awesome only because our current mediocrity is even more slick and bland than the future proposed in Demolition Man. The future-colloquial dialogue is feeble and stupid while trying to make a point about how weakness, pacifism, submission, and herd intelligence are related. Wesley Snipes' awesome action kicks, dozens of quality explosions, at least ten snappy one-liners, and all the swearing make this movie worth it. 1993 was probably just a simpler time.

Theatrical Thoughts

There was a short period in time when I went to see movies regularly. I mean a movie in a theater, with an audience, that you have to pay for. It was the season of Drag Me To Hell and Adventureland and other movies that were pretty enjoyable but not particularly great, in other words they were the type of movies you go to see because they are good enough, usually better than you think they'll be, and a decent way to spend a few hours. The two movies I named were the ones I remembered. They may have been the only two I watched around that time, but I saw them within a few weeks of each other, which barely ever happens.

Which gets me thinking: why does it take the prompting of a friend to get me to watch a movie? The answer that comes most naturally is: because most movies suck, because they can be seen at a discount later, and because most theaters in North America are full of people crinkling snack bags and dropping their garbage everywhere, not to mention the masturbators and the cell-phone rebels and the surly theater personnel.

Recently I saw True Grit on a discount night. Discount night means half-price, and half-price on a movie I want to see means that my odds of seeing it increase to 60%. So I walked over to the show, and the theater was busy, but everyone must have been going to another movie, because the True Grit theater was less than half full. This wasn't really surprising.

The first 10 minutes I had problems following any of the dialogue and felt like I had lost my ability to understand English. Sure I was buzzing a little, but that usually helps me understand any person's rambling. I was impressed by the dedication to olde tyme speeche the Coens (or their screenwriter) displayed. I got used to it, as well, but the attempt at authenticity surprised me so much that I couldn't really get into the opening, which is a shame, because the opening was fine. 

Many films that are historical or geographically isolated just give everyone a common accent (if it takes place before 1850 everyone has an English accent, if it takes place in Japan but is made in the West the characters are either heavily accented or have an English accent; if it takes place in Germany and is made in the West the characters speak English with a Deutsche accent) and keep the dialogue as modern as possible. True Grit goes for the accuracy, and does pretty good, although I don't know what people spoke like in the 1860's. It did take place in the 1860's, right? Or was it the 1840's? Goddamn it there were references to the civil war, so I'm going with late 1860's.

Well, most movies are still pretty horrible, and the more they are advertised the less faith I have in them. I doubt I'll watch another, in a theater, for at least the next two months.