Because Everybody Else Has One

Kicking off this week's movies with a biggie, we have what is easily my most Jewish movie review ever! This review is also up at Channel 24 .   What it's about A retelling of the Biblical story of Noah, the man chosen by God to save himself, his own family and two of each kinds of animal from a flood that is to submerge the entire world and wipe out the rest of humanity. What we thought Even as far as “religious” films go, Darren Aronofsky's cinematic adaptation of the story of Noah has drawn a quite staggering amount of controversy – most especially by the more conservative Christians and Muslims out there who abhor Aronofsky's very obvious refusal to adhere to a literal understanding of the story as it is presented in the Bible. Generally, this sort of controversy says little about the quality of the film in question, but that's actually not the case this time. In my years writing for this site, I don't believe I have ever reviewed a film throug...

Cloud. Atlas. Even its title is epic. Also up at Channel 24 in slightly abbreviated form. What it's about From a 19 th century voyage across the Pacific to a fight for survival in the post-apocalyptic earth of the future, the six stories that are inter-cut throughout Cloud Atlas are connected by a recurrent musical theme and a sense that there may be more to human existence than that which exists between the womb and the grave. What we thought Whatever you might say about the film, you can't help but admire the sheer chutzpah involved in trying to bring so ambitious and so audacious a project as Cloud Atlas to mainstream multiplexes. Even at its most simplistic, Cloud Atlas is a film that, through six divergent stories of entirely different genres, tries its hand at tying these divergent threads together to create a thematic whole that deals with the karma, the cyclical nature of human existence and redemption through the reincarnation (be it literal of fi...