Women and Hollywood: I was belatedly watching "Cloud Atlas" at my local Cineplex, catching up on movies that I hadn't seen because, thanks to Hurricane Sandy, I no longer had my Manhattan to upstate NY umbilical cord. I hadn't read all the reviews when "Cloud Atlas" premiered in Toronto because, as I recently told Steven Gaydos, executive editor at Variety, "I see the movie and then I decide." But this was a case where the gaseous critical response to "Cloud Atlas" had wafted in my direction, a skepticism and negativity reflected in Rotten Tomatoes' stingy 63 percent fresh. So, I'd postponed seeing an adventure that was completely radical among contemporary American films in the gleeful, optimistic way it played musical chairs with male and female, young and old, and future and past. By creating a movie that starred Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Huge Grant and blurred the boundaries between men and women, the Wachowski siblings (Andy and Lana), and Tom Tykwer, adapting David Mitchell's genre-busting best-seller, took some major risks. And they created an entertaining, ambitious movie that went beyond feminism to an all-embracing humanism that wasn't naive enough to believe that evil didn't walk the earth in wingtips or stilettos or bare feet.
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