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Thursday, November 1, 2012

Why We Need More Movies like Cloud Atlas




          Cloud Atlas isn’t a very good movie. Let’s just make that clear from the start. Sloppily executed, despite the Wachowskis’ and Tom Tykwer’s obviously sincere efforts, it’s a cloying, bizarre, epic mess that aims for the stars without ever managing to get off the ground. There were a couple of bright spots, to be fair – namely, the lovely score and a couple of performances, though those were mostly too limited in screen time to be fully appreciated – but they did little to compensate for the film’s abundant flaws. Plus, no matter how much those involved try to justify it by saying the movie was about transcending race and that it was a necessary and understandable decision from an artistic standpoint (it really wasn’t), the use of yellowface in Cloud Atlas is depressing and offensive, made worse by how poorly and lazily it was done. Moreover, you know that we’d all be rightfully up-in-arms and that no one would be writing articles like this if they’d used blackface, which is probably why the filmmakers didn’t attempt it.


Jim Sturgess, you’re a terrific actor, but just…no.

                 
         All of this is to say that I could write an entire blog post about my issues with Cloud Atlas (or you can just read my fellow blogger WordMaster’s review, which sums them all up pretty accurately), or even one focused solely on why its use of yellowface is so problematic, but right now, I’m here to explain why this is exactly the kind of movie we as an audience should demand more of.


          I don’t think anyone was particularly shocked to see Cloud Atlas land with a whisper at the box office when it debuted this past weekend, given the complex nature of its storyline coupled with a 3-hour running time. With a budget at $100 million, it’s one of the most expensive independent movies ever made, making its $9.4 million gross all the more dismal. Though I didn’t think the movie was very good, and its difficulties in attracting an audience are completely unsurprising, this is a bit of a shame, because you know a bunch of studio executives are labeling it as more proof that moviegoers don’t want complicated, risk-taking fare.

          Whatever you think of the end product, Cloud Atlas is undeniably one of the most ambitious movies to grace theaters in a good long time. Do a quick Google News search of the film, and pretty much every article you find will have that word buried somewhere. Hopping around the world with a sprawling cast of characters (the actual cast is a bit smaller since nearly all of the central actors play multiple roles) as it crosses genres and time periods while touching on a number of philosophical ideas, it’s the kind of movie that generates a lot of discussion, at least among those few who actually saw it, and polarizes people into “love it” or “hate it” camps. Had it been better executed, it could’ve been a masterpiece; to those in the “love it” camp, it already is.

          Now, this isn’t technically an original movie, since the material comes from the masterful (and, in my opinion, vastly superior) 2004 novel by David Mitchell, but considering that the book has been often deemed un-filmable, it’s certainly a bold, daring cinematic venture, the sort that comes around no more than a couple of times each decade. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is perhaps the closest comparison, and even that, at least from what I can tell as someone who hasn’t yet seen the movie, doesn’t look like nearly as demanding and intricate a task; after all, it only incorporates three separate storylines, whereas Cloud Atlas boasts a half-dozen. The Wachowski siblings and Tykwer deserve some commendation for even making the attempt at all, regardless of whether you think their gamble paid off.

           Unfortunately, I doubt Hollywood is going to see it that way. Yes, I understand that it’s a business, and from an economic standpoint, maybe you can’t really fault studios and investors for skipping over such high-risk/most-likely-low-reward projects like Cloud Atlas that don’t have a clearly defined, pre-established audience in favor of more conventional options. However, from an artistic perspective, the industry’s reluctance to support fresh, unique filmmaking is as frustrating and tiresome as all the complaining about that reluctance.

As anyone who’s read this blog on a regular basis can probably tell, I love a good blockbuster as much as anything, and I think there are a lot more of them than all the bitching naysayers would like to believe, but lately, I’ve started to crawl towards some sort of critical mass overload on my tolerance for the usual parade of sequels, reboots, remakes and board/videogame adaptations. Every so often, we’ll get a hit film that will somehow challenge Hollywood’s preconceived notions of what can be successful, movies like Inception and Avatar (people will watch movies not based on pre-existing material too!) or, even though I wasn’t the biggest fan, Bridesmaids (female-driven movies can also make money!). Ultimately, these movies are mostly treated as flukes and rarely start any significant trends – at least not the trends you’d hope for. Instead of spawning studio interest in more original material for blockbusters, Inception and Avatar mostly just gave us, respectively, a marketing obsession with putting BWHAAAM foghorns in every single trailer and the ongoing 3D craze. Likewise, while Bridesmaids has launched a new trend of R-rated comedies aimed toward women, no one seems to have realized that viewers liked Kirsten Wiig’s film not because of the crass vulgarity and sex jokes, but because it featured a supremely talented cast, well-rounded and relatable characters and a story that the filmmakers and writers had obviously put some actual thought into.

By the same token, just as movies that stray from the formula and manage to become hits are treated as random strokes of good luck, when a film that’s expected to be a huge blockbuster bombs, studios typically seem to dismiss it as a victim of misfortune or circumstance, not as red flags signaling that perhaps they should reexamine industry conventions. For instance, when the family board game-based behemoth Battleship tanked spectacularly this past summer, Hollywood wrote it up as the unfortunate side-effect of The Avengers’ box office dominance at the time, which, granted, was likely a significant contributing factor to Battleship’s failure to bring in an audience. The point is that, rather than paying any attention to the real lessons to be learned here, studios blamed it on outside variables unrelated to the movie itself so that they could maintain the status quo. As further proof of this, not only have these geniuses failed to realize that maybe people aren’t too interested in movies based on board games or blatant cash grabs reeking of corporate excess, but they decided the proper thing to do was to green-light even more of them.
                                 
‘Cause when I look at the movies showing at my local theater, I think,
“You know what we really need? A Candy Land movie starring fucking Adam Sandler.”

                
          Of course, this isn’t to say that every film that flops should be deemed an irredeemable disaster that should be held as a cautionary tale for future generations until the end of time, or that every surprise hit ought to be treated as a glittering beacon of hope, a bible from which we can glean the secrets to making quality, sure-fire successes. In fact, the very opposite is frequently true, with great movies sometimes failing to find an audience and not-so-good ones somehow exploding into the zeitgeist (see: Blade Runner for the former, Paranormal Activity for the latter). The truth is that a movie’s financial success often has little to do with how good or bad it is, because if it were that simple, we’d all probably be a lot happier with Hollywood and Fright Night would’ve been the nice sleeper hit it deserved to be. However, because Hollywood is a business, it doesn’t matter whether a film earned its box office intake, only whether or not that intake is enough to produce a profit.

          Now, bringing this discussion back to Cloud Atlas. The problem with elaborate, complex ventures like this is that they tend to cost shitloads of money to make, not to mention to advertise and sell, and more often than not, they’re unable to bring in that much revenue in return. Like Cloud Atlas, the aforementioned The Fountain barely made a dent at the box office, ending up with a $10.1 million gross in the U.S. that was meager even for its relatively modest $35 million production budget. Cinematic history is littered with ambitious passion projects that turned into financial catastrophes, from the infamous Ishtar and 1963’s Cleopatra (which was actually the highest grossing film that year but was so expensive to make that it still took a loss) to Waterworld and Gigli. A lot of these movies are genuinely pretty bad and probably shouldn’t have been made at all, let alone for such extravagant sums of money, but occasionally, it pays off and you get a Titanic or Inception, instead of a John Carter. The movie industry is at its best when studios and filmmakers are willing to take financial and especially artistic and intellectual risks; if everyone played it safe for fear of not making a profit or because they didn’t think audiences would “get it”, we probably wouldn’t have works like Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now or even The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

           You could point to a variety of reasons for why Cloud Atlas flopped: the threat of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast; the book, which is acclaimed in literary circles and technically a bestseller but hardly has the same cachet with mainstream audiences as, say, The Help; long but not particularly informative or enlightening trailers; the diminishing star power of Tom Hanks and Halle Berry; or even the controversy over its racial politics. However, its failure doesn’t mean audiences don’t want to see ambitious, intellectually challenging fare. It would be a shame if filmmakers let high-profile disappointments like this or any of the aforementioned films discourage them from creating movies that strive to do more than just serve as a trivial two-hour diversion, that take risks and push boundaries. After all, I’d much rather watch an interesting, creative head-scratcher like Cloud Atlas than a Twilight reboot/sequel/spinoff/whatever the hell they’re planning on doing or more Star Wars films. All of them are going to cost money, so why not, every once in a while, spend it on a project that’s at least attempting to do something different?

             Cloud Atlas was a mess, but I wish we could see more messes like it.



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