Cloudbusting

Rating: 8/10 (17 February 2013)

So I had 3 hours to devote my attention to this film, because like Inception it takes no prisoners. You have to immerse yourself into it and concentrate on the tortuous plot otherwise there is no point; this is a digi-Intolerance on acid.
Plot has Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in various guises and in various times and places linking various seemingly disparate stories together. By turns it's fun, deadly serious, tender, brutal, inane, heavy, obvious, incomprehensible, fast and ponderous: it's quite a journey. The production values are generally tremendous even when aided by cgi cartoonery, the acting, sets and make-up to these old eyes are wonderful to behold. So much happens it's impossible to convey except it's such a roller-coaster of fairly swift intercutting that (if the plot intrigues) you need to see it for yourself. Favourite bits out of many: The out of Delius amanuensis' suicide and his lovers' distraught discovery; the cops chasing the deviant revolutionaries in the future and all the flying cars almost out of Metropolis - if you pardon the pun teleportation is just around the corner, the benefits to global capitalism will ensure its development sooner rather than later; Hanks' top-hatted gravelly-voiced alter-ego in the other world almost out of Beetlejuice, a very effective startling character; Tom Gramps at the beginning and end  I wish I'd listened more to the words of the Kings Of Leon now; Berry as a hip chick in 1973 – was she and Professor Hanks supposed to be smoking a perfectly manufactured spliff? Least satisfying bit was the thumping of the Sassanachs in the pub for the modern farce section.
Very entertaining nonsense, even has nice music for the 10 minute fade out, and I'll hopefully watch it again. However I prefer Intolerance - if for no other reason than because the connection between its individual stories was coherent and had a thematic integrity; the clue was in its title. This has nano connections.