Andy and Lana Wachowski haven’t been able to match the brilliance of their cultural touchstone movie The Matrix with anything else they’ve done. Not with the increasingly banal sequels to the film, and certainly not with the visual f/x abomination Speed Racer. The recent Cloud Atlas was their closest effort, a thoughtful, engaging but ultimately overreaching film based on a twisty book by David Mitchell. Into this troubled oeuvre comes their latest movie, Jupiter Ascending, a…Read More
Review: Cloud Atlas
Storytelling in our culture is in a bit of a rut. We’ve become far too accustomed to narratives that start before a precipitous event, have something dramatic transpire, then have it all resolve such that the protagonist overcomes obstacles both external and internal. Elapsed time? 90-100 minutes total. Simple. Boring. That’s why when a film like Inception comes along, it generates so much discussion: It forces us to question the very nature of dreams and…Read More