Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 90 - Susan Sarandon

After a few weeks away, Matt and I got back to our series of artist profiles by discussing the life and career of Susan Sarandon, a favourite of ours who appeared in several entries in our Alternate 100 last year. In addition to discussing her breakthrough roles in the '70s, her career high points in the '80s and '90s, and her unique place in Hollywood as an actress who owns her sexuality while also displaying plenty of self-determination and agency, we use it as an opportunity to discuss sexism in Hollywood in general, and the ways in which Sarandon's choices as an actress both play into and challenge that same sexism. 

We also talk a little but about what's been going on in TV, including the ongoing troubles afflicting the Twin Peaks revival and the rapid rate at which Game of Thrones is using up its source material.

Film Review: Cloud Atlas (2012)

Ask anyone familiar with David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas about whether it can be turned into a film and they will tell you that it's "unadaptable." Not because of the story, which is actually quite linear, but because of the structure. Consisting of six separate yet subtly interconnected stories that span hundreds of years, from a nineteenth-century merchant ship to a far-flung futuristic wasteland, Mitchell cuts all but one story in half, then shifts from one story to the next as each reaches a cliffhanger, then returns to tell the second half of each story as the novel moves towards its end. (Or, to put it into numerical terms, the stories progress thusly: 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1.) It's a Russian doll of a novel in which each story contains the next, and as such would be dramatically frustrating in any medium.