Cloud Atlas

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Anyone going to see this? Looks pretty epic.

http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/watch-epic-6minute-trailer-cloud-atlas.html

[Rafiq]

The book had some 'anti capitalist' rhetoric about "capitalist totalitarianism". Looks like a Chris Hedges wet dream.

Though it just so happens I like the guys who wrote the Matrix.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Looks poor. Didn't care for the Matrix trilogy at all.

[Rafiq]

Looks poor. Didn't care for the Matrix trilogy at all.

It does look like cheap spiritualist garbage, yes. But the Matrix was great, materialist propaganda.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Lol, how? The Matrix's plot looks like it was written by an anime nerd who read bits from the wikipedia pages on Nietzsche and Existentialism for 30 minutes and decided he was a philosopher.

[Rafiq]

Lol, how? The Matrix's plot looks like it was written by an anime nerd who read bits from the wikipedia pages on Nietzsche and Existentialism for 30 minutes and decided he was a philosopher.

Well, whether the writer was aware of it or not, it was, indirectly materialist in nature. Namely that their lives, the lives we perceive to be our own, i.e. in capitalism, existed only for the production of life, namely, that of the machines. Also, the fantasy land they were living in was the product of conscious design, but we can clearly tell when Neo awakens he's living in a material reality devoid of such, and that his fantasy land was 'bourgeois' (in this case, the machines) ideological mystification. Films can't be interpreted literally, you know. It's meaningless.

[Yuppie Grinder]

I think you're reading too much into it.

[theblackmask]

Though it just so happens I like the guys who wrote the Matrix.

One of them isn't exactly a guy anymore.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/matrix-director-sex-change-larry-wachowski_n_1720944.html?ir=Gay+Voices

[cynicles]

I think you're reading too much into it.
Actually that about that was pretty accurate.

[Pricey]

The book was excellent, it was in the style of 'If on a Winters Night a Traveler' by Italo Calvino, but from the trailer it seems the curse of Hollywood has struck again and they have butchered the plot and feel of the novel.

[Dodo]

Can't believe this movie got no attention here. I just watched it. And the amount of goosebumps I've had was crazy.
I would have expected this movie to stimulate marxists in a special way.
The movie was, the way I see it, an AMAZING handling of the theme of dialectics.

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

“I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.”

“Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”

“...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.”

“Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we
imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.”

“Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.”

"& only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

“History admits no rules; only outcomes.”

“- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters.

-Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.”

“Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.”

“Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.”

“By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

[Lenina Rosenweg]

I liked Cloud Atlas. I thought it was a good film about resistance and solidarity against tyrrany.A few online leftists and liberals snarkily dismissed it-Salon.com said it wouldn't be successful because it had white actors playing Asians and the World Socialist Website thought it was reactionary (of course what they think is "reactionary can encompass almost anything).

One criticism I might have...in one of the retrospective videos it made a lot of "Solzhenitsyn in Vermont"..and seemed to point to an individual solution (of course the pub scene was definitely working class solidarity against toffs).

Overall though I loved it. The book is on my reading list.

[Црвена]

I've only read the book, but I got the impression that the author is socialist, or at least anti-capitalist. Solidarity was a big theme, "An Orison of Sonmi~451," was a capitalist dystopia and "Shoosha's Crossin' an' Evrythin' After," was the result of a capitalist dystopia if people are brainwashed and the revolution never happens.

[KurtFF8]

I enjoyed the film. It came out for a weird time for me, I was working at a movie theater at the time so I got free movies, and we had a union election around the time it came out, so I remember watching that film to kill time before the vote later on in the day (I believe it was the same day at least)

[Ele'ill]

I saw the movie and thought it was too mega-movieish although I loved the trailers and premise. I've thought about reading the book a few times but am worried the movie has left a permanent impression on my mind.