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David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was a magnus opus of language, structure, and storytelling albeit without much of a plot. The movie was a bit more scattered but hammered on the theme of connections in ways the book did not. Instead of there being one character that was iterating across time with a single thread connecting each to the next, the movie had many more parallels and appropriately six people that were implied to be versions hopping across time. The future plot lines dropped much of their invented language and, while this makes sense for a movie, I missed it.

The plot element of the 1830s notary’s good need rippling forward in time also isn’t much presented in the book.

Did I like it? Yes. Three hours is a bit on the long side but that breaks down to a little over a TV episode per each of the six time periods. I’m curious what the film would have looked like if it had followed the novel’s structure of ABCDEFEDCBA directly.

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I met The Avengers movie with some trepidation as this would be a chance for several of my childhood loves to be destroyed at once. The X-Men had made it through movie transformation largely unscathed and I could only hope the same would happen here.

Notes:

  • The entire second act seems unnecessary. Hawkeye shows that a single arrow can bring down the SHIELD heliship and Loki’s machinations to just release the Hulk seemed awfully contrived.
  • The writers forgot that Captain America’s superpower is that he’s always right. This is commandment in comics up there with “when Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman appears it means shit got serious”.
  • The alien invaders seemed very… defeatable. Their alien jet skis seemed to go down to small arms fire to the point where a group of Montana militiamen could have stopped them.
  • The movie was shot as a comic. Each scene was a cell and jump cuts were the norm.

I enjoyed the movie except for how contrived the middle third appeared to be. I wonder how Thanatos will make as an enemy. “What’s his MO?” “Wants to bang his sister, Death, and wants to impress her by killing all things.” Seems hard to make that family-friendly.

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A difference between group and individual travel was the necessity of synchronicity.  If we wanted to do something as a group, that meant I had to be awake which may sound trivial but I’m very comfortable with the organic sleep schedule “go to bed when tired/wake up when no longer tired” which didn’t quite jive with the rest of the car.  Suzie had seemingly replaced the sleep centers of the brain with an additional adrenal gland and John was able to enter some state of torpor in the car allowing him to be unconscious for 2/3rds of the day.  Mike and I required between 7-8 hours to be happy but he’s far better than I at passing up palaver for the pillow.  Sleep came quickly in Dallas as everyone (nearly) had their own bed.

This being our rest day, I didn’t feel bad with “events” starting with lunch at about 2 PM followed by a trip to a mall to walk around.  Most of the stores were pedestrian fair but there was a bonanza of fun at the not-quite-a-dollar store.

Dollar Store Cravaets

I'm secure with my masculity. Luckily, so is Mike.

Walking Party

Patriotic and festive, you double threat

Suzie, Librarian

She knows you have overdue library books and she doesn't like it.

The store also had a novel way of grouping items.  The combination of butane fuel, hair coloring spray, and silly string looks like it’d make for a fascinating evening.

Can Fun

Party Platter

After tooling around the mall for 9000 steps, we decided on a seeing X-Men: First Class at the theater adjoining the mall.  I questioned whether I’d be able to get into the theater with my wrecking ball of a DSLR.  Solution?  When asked, fake being “Ake”, the semi-retarded Swedish cousin of Dallas and reply to every question with “teekit?” while holding up my movie ticket.

X-Men: First Class was a solid B in my opinion with the standard plot liberties I’ve come to appreciate from the X-Men movies.  The characters were a bit thin but that’s going to happen when you’re up against Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in comparative acting ability.

We exited the theater into a sandstorm and a Burlington Coat Factory (NJ REPRESENT!) cart had attacked my car.  I wanted to submit a note saying “look what your cart did to my car” but those cases never hold up in court.

Cart Attack

Look what the cart did to my car.

We returned to the hotel to for Chinese food, laundry, and swimming, those items listed ultimately in order of increasing difficulty.  My fortune cookie revealed the wisdom of “You need to work on your exercise routine.”  Really?  Either the cookie was acutely aware that I was away from home, had a wicked sense of irony, or…. was just a random fortune (probably that one).  Laundry involved a quest to get quarters and the trade-off of a soap dispenser eating my change giving me full rights to kick it.  While our laundry was in, we went to the pool side and again, Apocatequil was giving Zibelthiurdos pointers.  Another time.

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I’m fine with improbability in movies.  1 in a million shots, superhuman sniping abilities, random things exploding that have no business exploding, I can deal with all of them.  The blatantly impossible, I will not suffer.

Joe and I saw Quantum of Solace and in one part the protagonist his temporary partner jump from a plane and fight to deploy the parachute.  I’m fine with the fact that they happened to extend their fall by dropping into a sink hole, I’m fine with the fact that a plane down an engine was able to climb skyward, I’m fine with the fact that a Douglas DC-3 was able to out maneuver both a helicopter and a SF .260.  But the fact that the parachute was deployed within a second of impact and neither person was harmed enraged me.  Not a f&#%ing scratch.  I litterally yelled in the theatre “he should be a puddle!”

Some other notes from Quantum of Solace:

  • There were six different people listed in the Costuming credits.  It’s James Bond, go to Costco and buy a 24 pack of Tuxedos and you’ll be fine.
  • I want to become a glassmaker in a town filming a Bond film.  So many windows, glass tables, chandeliers, and french doors are destroyed that one could power a small guild.
  • The director shouldn’t receive nearly as much credit as the stunt coordinator.  Anyone who can arrange a chase scene through a cathedral under a church under construction, a horsetrack and the roofs of Milan has far more skill and creative power than Quinton Tarantino.
  • Good thing Bond only subdues people that are the same suit size as him.  Infiltrating a dwarf convention or a symposium on Marfan Syndrome would be impossible.
  • There’s also an end scene I’m miffed at but that’d be a bit of a spoiler.
  • I’m glad I have a better phone than James Bond.
  • The movie has the same amount of plot action of a two hour movie but jams it into 20 minutes of exposition.  I’ve talked to four people about the movie but everyone’s missed 1/2 of what happened.  I had to consult the Wikipedia article during the movie to keep characters straight.