Cloud Atlas Shrugged
Our Cloud Atlas. When it first came out we were looking at the hardcover edition when this stranger said, “An intellectual, ay?” We backed away from the book and didn’t buy it till it appeared in paperback. Read most of it during a six-hour train ride. That was a great time.
Putting Words in Halle Berry’s Mouth
by David Mitchell in the NYT
“So how does it feel?” is the question you hear when your book completes the long ascent from production purgatory to movieplex. Well, first there’s a primal kick: actors speak dialogue you wrote years ago, and all those nonexistent people are now real. They find flashes of humor or menace you never spotted, and soon all memory of how you imagined the character before the actor muscled in is gone.
But what is he really saying about the Wachowskis/Tykwer adaptation of his novel?
A. He loves the movie.
B. He doesn’t love the movie but is too polite to say so. (Don’t knock big bucks.)
C. He hates the movie so he dances around the truth by pointing out the differences between novels and cinema.
D. Something else
Speaking of Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead is Fifty Shades of Capitalism.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
November 9th, 2012 at 12:46
Beautiful cover! Had no choice but to buy the single copy with the movie poster cover for fear that I might not finish it before the movie comes out here.
The Fountainhead, my first voluntary attempt at ‘intellectual’ reading. Snippets that stayed with me after more than a decade:
– If there’s someone sacrificing, there’s someone collecting the sacrifice
– The sexual assault scene later claimed as love
– Dominique’s lashes which make her eyes look rectangular (jealous!)
– Rourke’s designs that cut the sky
– Dominique’s naked pose as her glorification of life
– Rourke’s pity at his architect-rival who really wanted to be a painter (hmm, timely personal reminder)
November 9th, 2012 at 14:28
Check out Aleksandar Hemon’s piece in the New Yorker on the making of Cloud Atlas if you’re into what the Watchowskis were up to.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/10/120910fa_fact_hemon
If that’s not enough, there was a very enlightening interview by Chris Hardwick at his Nerdist.com podcast of the Watchowskis and Tom Tykwer about the movie, the rigors of putting it together, tying philosophy, art, morality, and many other random elements into a cohesive whole with the adaptation of Mitchell’s book, and even something about fake noses in the movie.
November 9th, 2012 at 16:15
I have that edition of Cloud Atlas at home! (Thanks, Jessica.) And it took me two days to finish it; I practically didn’t leave the house once I got past the first third of the book.
Judging from what I’ve read from books and blogs about the screenwriting process, I’m going with a combination of B and D. on the quiz: didn’t love it, didn’t hate it. Mitchell talks so much about the process of making the movie with Tykwer and the Wachowskis, but not enough about what he really thinks of the final cut. I say he saw the movie and can’t figure out what the hell happened to his original notes – and I won’t be surprised if the three directors caved in to a some amount of pressure from the studio execs to cut a few things out during the making of the movie.
If the Hemon article cited by volume-addict is any indication, however, it does seem like most of the folks who worked on the movie were quite cooperative.
November 11th, 2012 at 09:33
by his words i surmised that he loved the process of his novels’ transition into film but he never really shared his thoughts on the finished product… he didn’t say he hated the film, but he didn’t say he loved it either… so i’m going to choose D in the quiz.
i saw this edition of the book but i missed buying it… any chance of this book being part of this blog’s raffle?
November 11th, 2012 at 11:11
Ha ha ha.I laughed at “Speaking of Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead is Fifty Shades of Capitalism” It is! Haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey, but there’s a lot of sex in The Fountainhead(some of it rough, violent and bordering on rape), perhaps too much in a book that tackles a somewhat serious issue.