Hugo Weaving

Cinequest: Mystery Road

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MysteryRoadCinequest spotlighted the contemporary murder mystery Mystery Road, set in the Australian outback.  An indigenous detective returns to his small town to encounter racist co-workers, a drunk and shiftless ex-wife and a resentful teenage daughter.  The daughter is a concern because her gal pals are starting to turn up murdered one by one.  Mystery Road is a solid but unexceptional police procedural except for two things:

  • the very strong lead performance by Aaron Pederson, who brings out the inner conflict within a guy who needed to leave his hometown and his marriage but is tormented by the consequences of those decisions; and
  • the movie’s climactic gun battle between guys using hunting rifles through telescopic sights – a real show stopper .

Hugo Weaving chews up some scenery with a supporting role as a cop with ambiguous motivation.  Weaving, with his supporting roles in The Matrix, V for Vendetta, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, etc., may be the world’s most financially successful character actor.  I first saw Weaving in the 1991 Proof, the breakout film for then 26-year-old Russell Crowe.  In Proof, Crowe plays a young buck who falls in with an eccentric blind man (Weaving) and an uncomfortably needy and manipulative woman (Genevieve Picot).  Proof (available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from iTunes and Amazon) is an excellent and oft overlooked film.  Mystery Road has its moments, too.

Cloud Atlas: more may not be better, but more is fun

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The filmmakers of Cloud Atlas clearly believe that more is better.  They give us not one, not two – but six stories spanning six centuries. They give us lots of movie stars: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant and more.  The actors each play multiple roles, with Hanks, Berry, Weaving and Sturgess playing at least six each – sometimes playing characters of different genders and different races.  There are costume dramas on the high seas of the 1840s and in 1930s England, plus two sci-fi settings – one recalling the high-tech, high-speed Tron and also a post-apocalyptic tribal future.   There are even two references to the sci-fi cult classic Soylent Green.  Cloud Atlas even had three directors.

Whew.

The six story lines are threaded together so we follow them until all six climax in the final hectic thirty minutes.  The six stories are each a series of cliff hangers.  As a character in one story falls into peril, the screenplay jumps to another thread, and on and on.

As it manically jumps from story to story, Cloud Atlas touches upon some Big Themes (good and evil, kindness and control, freedom, reincarnation), and we get the brush strokes of a New Agey theology (as if the world needs another theology).  This is where Cloud Atlas gets fuzzy.   Fortunately, the movie is so rapidly paced, that it never gets pretentious as we jump from story to story.

Is Cloud Atlas fun to watch?  Yes, there’s just too much fast-paced action going on, too much eye candy and too many engaging actors for Cloud Atlas to fail the fun test.  Is Cloud Atlas a great movie?  No, there just isn’t enough coherent substance in there to hook us emotionally.  Is it a Must See?  No.  Would I see it again?  No, but I’m glad I saw it once.