If you haven’t read the novel CLOUD ATLAS, I suggest you do so. It is one of those books that is at both bizarre and relatable in a way that divides people right down the middle. Many are puzzled by the novel while others love it unquestionably. It was also considered to be unfilmable, until the Wachowskis and Tom Tywker teamed up to bring it to the big screen.
Plot: CLOUD ATLAS presents six narratives that evoke an array of genres, from Melvillean high-seas drama to California noir and dystopian fantasy. There is a naïve clerk on a nineteenth-century Polynesian voyage; an aspiring composer who insinuates himself into the home of a syphilitic genius; a journalist investigating a nuclear plant; a publisher with a dangerous best-seller on his hands; and a cloned human being created for slave labor. These five stories are bisected and arranged around a sixth, the oral history of a post-apocalyptic island, which forms the heart of the story. Only after this do the second halves of the stories fall into place, pulling the themes into focus: the ease with which one group enslaves another, and the constant rewriting of the past by those who control the present.
Doesn’t that sound awesome? Filimg has been underway for quite a while now with an amazing cast that includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, Susan Sarandon, and Hugh Grant. In a recent interview for THE PIRATES: BAND OF MISFITS, Hugh Grant updated his prior comments about just how weirdly wonderful the movie is going to be.
It’s the strangest film, strangest script, strangest offer I ever had. To play six small parts, all of them appalling killers and rapists, and some of them 85-year-old men and others Korean slave drivers. I thought maybe they were having a joke at my expense when they asked me to do it. So I said, ‘Is this a joke?’ And they said, ‘No man, we love you!'” Grant recalled in a pretty convincing American accent. “And so I said, ‘All right, I’ll do it,’ and I loved it.” With all those characters to play, one would assume Grant had a favorite. And, boy, did he. “It was hard not to love being the Korean slave owner,” he said. “My slaves were Korean girls who were replicants serving in a fast food restaurant a few thousand years in the future, all in tiny little uniforms, and my job is to corral them and abuse them.”
Hugh Grant playing a Korean character? That could play as either brilliant (a la TROPIC THUNDER) or incredibly racist. Either way, my interest is now fully piqued. No word on whether or not the film will still be released in 2012 as originally scheduled or if it will push to next year. Either way, count this as one of my most anticipated movies of the next year.
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