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Posts Tagged ‘Jim Broadbent’

 

Trailer Watch: Cloud Atlas domestic trailer

A little over a month after the five minute international trailer for Cloud Atlas hit the web, we now have a domestic trailer, which gives you the barest details of the plot(s) and showcases a few of the film’s stars. The film (like the novel) weaves together six separate-yet-connected stories: a 19th century sea expedition, 1930s Belgium, 1970s California, present day London, a dystopian future Korea, and a post-apocalyptic Hawaii.

Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Bae Doona, David Gyasi, Susan Sarandon, Keith David, James D’Arcy and Hugo Weaving star in the October 26th release. Andy and Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer co-wrote and co-directed the film.

Trailer Watch: The five-minute international trailer for Cloud Atlas is a stunner

Maybe it’s just me reacting to beautiful music and impeccable visuals, but the five-minute international trailer for Andy and Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer’s feature adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas sent chills down my spine. The trailer promises something incredibly, impressively ambitious, and it will be amazing if they can even come close to pulling it off.

Like the novel, the two hour and forty-four minute movie weaves together six separate-yet-connected stories: a 19th century sea expedition, 1930s Belgium, 1970s California, present day London, a dystopian future Korea, and a post-apocalyptic Hawaii. The film’s official synopsis describes it as “an epic story of humankind in which the actions and consequences of our lives impact one another throughout the past, present and future as one soul is shaped from a murderer into a savior and a single act of kindness ripples out for centuries to inspire a revolution.”

Head over to Indie Wire for more about the film, including interviews with the directors/co-writers. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Bae Doona, David Gyasi, Susan Sarandon, Keith David, James D’Arcy and Hugo Weaving star in the October 26th release.

Review: Another Year


Directed by Mike Leigh.
Starring Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, and Peter Wight.

Another Year, from Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake director Mike Leigh, centers around one blissfully happy family, Tom (Jim Broadbent), Gerri (Ruth Sheen), and their son Joe (Oliver Maltman), and a handful of profoundly unhappy satellites — chief among them Mary (Lesley Manville), a divorced, forty-something co-worker of Gerri’s, desperately lonely and unable to meet a man up to her inordinately high standards.

True to life, Mary finds Ken (Peter Wight), another friend of the happy couple’s, whose brand of loneliness is nearly identical to her own, “weird” and pushes away his (admittedly ungentlemanly) advances, steadfast in her belief that she could do better…  and, in fact, setting her sights on Tom and Gerri’s thirty-something son, in the process. Mary’s one-sided flirtation with Joe becomes complicated by the introduction of a new girlfriend, Katie (Karina Fernandez), but… as the title would lead you to believe, the film ends more or less where it began. The film has no climax, and few confrontations; those few that occur are largely by Tom, and he’s quickly glanced into submission, presumably out of some sense of propriety. The sad irony, of course, being that in some cases, tough love is the greater love that you can give someone you honestly consider a friend.

While it may be open to interpretation, and this is certainly colored by my own experience (as are all films), I felt some measure of quiet condemnation of Tom and Gerri’s relative inaction to their friends’ loneliness. They may not be responsible for their misery, but you can’t help feeling that the couple takes some satisfaction in surrounding themselves with the desperately unhappy, or that they could, just possibly, make a little more of an effort to help them. Judging from other reviews, that may just be my reading of it, having had a few spots of crushing loneliness myself, on a few occasions in my life (yes, I know, poor me), but in one early, telling sequence where Mary is invited over for dinner, she inquires about whether anyone else was going to be there, and Tom replies, “We want you all to ourselves.”

Tom, Mary, and Joe in Another Year

That is the real beauty of Another Year (and, indeed, all of Leigh’s films that I’ve seen): thanks to its flawless cast (largely consistent of Mike Leigh regulars), the characters are just so utterly real, that you love them, ache for them, become cross with them and tire of them like real people. Over the course of Another Year, Mary’s numbing misery of loneliness slowly and surely eat away at her, and you die a little each time. Ultimately, Another Year is a bit of a downer. But, you know, that’s how life is sometimes.

Another Year was released last fall in the UK and a few other countries. It is currently in limited release here in the States and will find its way to Australia later this month.