Jim Broadbent and Hanks in Cloud Atlas. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Almost three hours long, a lugubrious sludge of mud soup called Cloud Atlas deserves a limp nod for pure guts, I suppose, but what I’d really like to do is burn it. Based on a genre-switching, era-hopping, style-abusing, tempo-thumping novel by David Mitchell that everyone has always labeled “unfilmable,” the labyrinthine, ridiculously bloated—$100-million, anybody?—head-scratcher of a movie is the mess that proves it.

Coming at us in sections like an exploding garbage truck, this adaptation is a single film that weaves an incomprehensible literary gumbo of unrelated stories in multiple time frames over a span of 500 years. Whew! In spite of the publicity poop about how six narratives are linked by the connective tissue of man’s relationship to man, nothing really intersects—except in preposterous threads only a nuclear physicist could formulate on both sides of an equation. All you can do while you puzzle over it like a board game is try to figure out which member of the hammy all-star ensemble, unrecognizable in lurid makeup, wigs, period costumes and rubber prostheses, is playing which man—or woman—while the viewer-unfriendly screenplay squirts and splatters all over the place. Characters fade into and out of past, present and future centuries with the grace of a battering ram. They include Tom Hanks, in his worst performance since Joe Versus the Volcano, as a crooked doctor who looks like Benjamin Franklin on the Pacific Ocean in 1849; a balding cockney skinhead who becomes a pop celebrity by throwing a critic off the roof of a literary party in 2012, and a dark-skinned one-eyed native goat-herder (you can’t make up this stuff) in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, in 2346, babbling away in a language that hasn’t been invented yet. Ben Whishaw is a gay composer in 1930s England who writes about his own murder in a diary; Halle Berry plays one of the last survivors of a lost civilization in 2346 as well as a crusading journalist in 1973 San Francisco, trapped in a stalled elevator in the middle of a power outage, whose life is endangered when she gets a scoop on a nuclear reactor meltdown, and then saved by the lover Whishaw wrote to in his lost journals back in 1936; and the marvelous Jim Sturgess is a robot warrior from a futuristic planet called New Seoul in 2144 who is persecuted for falling in love with a sexy, socially outlawed, genetically cloned slave. Susan Sarandon plays a medicine man. Faring best of all is Hugo Weaving, as a vicious Nurse Ratched wreaking havoc on a senile publisher in a nursing home, played by Jim Broadbent. Mr. Weaving has had plenty of experience. He was one of the drag queens in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. There’s more, but I hesitate to make you feel as tortured reading about it as I am telling you about it.

The book wove the various stories into each other like a lap dissolve, relating each sequence as it was being read by the person in the next chapter. In the movie, the jumble of aborted narratives crash and thrash like carnival bumper cars, fragmented and pointlessly failing to find a common theme. “Our lives are not our own—from womb to tomb, we are bound to others,” drones the narration, but as co-written and co-directed by Germany’s Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski, who created the abominable Matrix trilogy, the movie is a trash heap of rubber noses and implausible high school accents that give new meaning to the word “pretentious.” The actors are a game lot, but they should have stayed in bed. It’s ambitious and massive and fascinating to watch, like a public hanging. The sets, especially in the futuristic sci-fi thriller section, are inventive, and the real star is editor Alexander Berner (Resident Evil) for cobbling it all together. But the effect of so many characters and so many unsatisfactory plotlines is curiously bland and inconsequential. At the end of nearly three hours of metaphysical hocus pocus destined to attract the smallest number of paying filmgoers imaginable, you don’t know whether to laugh, boo or write career eulogies for all involved. I mean, Hugh Grant as a bloodthirsty cannibal? The prosecution rests.

rreed@observer.com

CLOUD ATLAS

Running Time 172 minutes

Written and Directed by Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski

Starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant

1/4

The directors are the Wachowskis of The Matrix and Tom Tykwer of Run Lola Run and Perfume (another literary adaptation, this one of a novel proven to be unfilmable). The trailer features stars like Tom Hanks and Halle Berry playing multiple roles (making literal the connections-through-time notion of the novel) and poor Jim Broadbent getting a plunger shoved in his face in the Martin Amis-esque section of the narrative. Here is the very long trailer:

What if God was one of us? (Getty Images)

Per Slate, only three Oscar-winning actors from the past ten years have thanked God in their acceptance speeches, while four have thanked Meryl Streep. All this and more in an obscenely detailed infographic tallying who has thanked whom, and in what position (first and last are most valuable, it would seem.) The biggest thing this made us remember was quite how LONG Halle Berry's speech was.

Meryl Streep, Oscar presenter (Getty Images)

The Academy has released an incomplete list of this weekend's Oscar presenters. Based on past experience, what categories shall they present. Here are our best guesses!

Christian Bale will present Best Supporting Actress; Melissa Leo will present Best Supporting Actor; Colin Firth will present Best Actress; Natalie Portman will present Best Actor. This gender-swapping return of last year's winners is a predictable tradition; the only thing surprising about it is that Melissa Leo won an Oscar one year ago instead of eight, which is how long ago it feels.

Halle Berry will present Best Documentary Feature and Short. This seems like her level of fame right now.

The cast of Bridesmaids will present Best Costume Design. Because women can make jokes about dresses!

Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone will present Best Sound Editing and Mixing. Only two charming young(ish, in Mr. Cooper's case) stars can get us excited about two seemingly indistinguishable categories.

Tom Cruise will present Best Picture. Doesn't it seem sort of weird that he never has? And doesn't it seem as though he's been fully rehabilitated?

Penélope Cruz will present Best Cinematography. Sure!

Cameron Diaz will present Best Art Direction. This is the sort of early-in-the-ceremony category for which it's perfect to have on hand an early-2000s star whose rep couldn't arrange something later in the ceremony.

Michael Douglas will present Best Director. He's already presented Best Picture twice but he's still a pretty prestigious guy. Practice saying "Hazanavicius," Gekko!

Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis will present Best Visual Effects. And do some sort of Rise of the Planet of the Apes-themed skit in the process.

Tina Fey will present Best Makeup. And tell a joke about how much makeup it takes to keep her from looking like either a wrinkled old man or an acne-scarred teenager in the process.

Tom Hanks will present the "In Memoriam" montage. He can't present Best Picture because one of his own films is nominated (the Academy's actually done this before when Jack Nicholson presented the prize to The Departed, but let's hope they learned from how gauche that looked) and his presenting Best Director would only call attention to the fact that he directed Larry Crowne last year. The only other thing someone with all Mr. Hanks's gravitas can do is present this segment.

Angelina Jolie will present Best Foreign Language Film. What a wonderful way for her to seem benevolent in defeat after not having been nominated for her own foreign film (which was not eligible in this category).

Jennifer Lopez will present Best Original Song. A theoretical actress and theoretical singer, Jennifer Lopez is the perfect simulacrum of a presenter of a music category at the Oscars.

Meryl Streep will present Best Adapted and Best Original Screenplay. "For actors [giggle, stern look over glasses], it all begins with a script," the star of The Iron Lady will inaccurately say.

Madonna (Getty Images)

Robert Dewey Hoskins, the 54-year-old drifter convicted of stalking Madonna in the late 1990s, is on the loose again in Southern California. Hoskins has also made threats against Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry, prompting Ms. Berry to consider moving overseas.

In 1996 Hoskins was jailed for 10 years after climbing a wall surrounding Madonna's home in the Hollywood Hills and threatening to cut her throat. Hoskins was shot twice after confronting a security guard on the premises.

Hoskins has been in and out of mental institutions since he was released from prison. In spite of being described as "highly psychotic with violent tendencies" if unmedicated, he was able to simply walk away from a facility in Norwalk, CA a week ago.

When Madonna testified against Hoskins in 1996 she described feeling sick to her stomach and "incredibly disturbed" to be in the same room with him. In a public statement released after the trial, Madonna said she hoped Hoskins's conviction would "let other stalking victims know that the system can, and does, work."

Hoskins continued to make threats after going to prison. The Daily News reported the following 12 years ago today; Hoskins had been incarcerated for 4 years at the time:

The Material Gal's stalker, Robert Dewey Hoskins, continues to threaten her from behind bars, according to prosecutors. Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Rhonda Saunders says Hoskins still presents a danger to Madonna based on a videotape of a prison interview with a police shrink and letters he has written to his family. Saunders would not disclose what Hoskins said on the tape or in the letters.

[Yahoo!/Reuters]

Hilary Swank, at a Santa Monica Cirque Du Soleil performance (Getty Images)

A selection of celebrities who have recently attended Cirque Du Soleil and been summarily featured in press on People or Us Weekly's web sites or PerezHilton.com, placed in ascending order of desperation for publicity:

• Christian Bale
• Halle Berry and Olivier Martinez
• Tim Tebow
• Pitbull
• Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Maddox Jolie-Pitt et al.
• Kylie Minogue
• "Pregnant Beyonce and hubby Jay-Z"
• Kristin Cavallari and Jay Cutler
• Perez Hilton

Kim Basinger dreamed of Oscar... and then she woke up.

What's the perfect corrective to the now-in-the-Farmers'-Almanac Oscar Season? How about This Had Oscar Buzz, a blog compiling all those movies that the punditocracy--or the publicistarati, or just Harvey Weinstein--told you were guaranteed Oscars? It'll make the mere fact that any The King's Speech gets to the Oscars seem miraculous once you consider how many I Dreamed of Africas had to stumble.

If she does nab the statuette, Portman won't be the first actress to stumble in her post-Oscar career. It's a tradition! 

Here, a guide to The Best Actress Oscar Curse. >>

Out in Los Angeles, Steven Spielberg, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, Bradley Whitford, Tom Hanks, Jamie Lee Curtis, Magic Johnson, Robert Zemeckis, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Berry Gordy and director-producer Reginald Hudlin have all pitched in. From New York, we have Cynthia Brill and Patricia Duff, who each gave $25,000. Ms. Duff's ex, Ron Perelman, gave $50,000, as did Def Jam executive Antonio Reid, Laurance  Rockefeller Jr. and his wife, Wendy, Citigroup's Ray McGuire, Sally Minard, Howard Milstein (two family members also donated the maximum amount), and five people with the last name Soros (including, of course, George).

Contributors will receive tickets to the ceremony and, more important, access to official balls and events. Whether the $500 folk will be attending the same parties as the $50,000 crowd is unclear, but it seems, shall we say, unlikely. 

Esquire's Web site has a feature about the making of its current cover, which features Halle Berry posed like Bill Clinton from the magazine's December 2000 issue.

First, Esquire juxtaposes the two Platon-shot covers so readers can see how similar they are, which everyone knows is a staple of bloggers the world over. (Media Mob takes this personally.)

Then the magazine offers the sort of scurrilous "Tale of the Tape" side-by-side comparison that bloggers love to rattle off, as in:

These are easy, quota-filling posts that belong to bloggers, not professional magazine writers and editors. Sure, these things might've once existed in magazines' fronts-of-book back in the day, but they belong to bloggers now. Bloggers need them.

What's next, Esquire? A blog entirely made up of YouTube videos and lists? Too late.