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Originally posted by cljohnston108:
I'm smellin' some Oscar™ noms (maybe another one for Tom?).

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The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan CHAPTER 17

I've seen Ronnie fire a gun only once, but it was to great effect.

A couple had lost their child. A tiny child. A baby girl, who, like Lily's child, was stillborn. But the baby was terribly early, terribly small, and the whole thing so horrifying that when the couple was asked immediately afterward if they'd like the hospital to “take care of things,” they numbly agreed without knowing what they were agreeing to.

The hospital cremated the body.

They found this out a few days later, when the husband returned to claim the body. He was told it had been cremated; shocked, he asked for the remains; alarmed, the hospital told him there weren't any. Our bodies are mostly water, the man was told, and tiny babies like yours-they sometimes simply evaporate. There's nothing left.

The man returned to his wife, and then, beyond grief, even past rage, the two found me. I did what I could-I arranged a memorial service for their child, I offered to secure an empty burial plot where they could at least place a marker. But they wanted more.

So I summoned Ronnie. He talked with me, and then with the couple, and then he told them to meet him outside the hospital in two days' time, at 5 P.M.

Though it was July, the sky had gone dark early black with threatening clouds. The first drops landed on my windshield as I parked. I found Ronnie and the couple in the small play yard outside the hospital, and watched as he threw a handful of ashes north, then south, then east and west. The couple looked on, stupefied.

This sounds like a myth. It is not; I was there. (Though saying so makes it sound all the more mythic, I know.)

Ronnie dusted his hands of the ashes and reached into a small pouch. I expected him to remove some amulet or tiny mask; instead, he removed an old, rusted .38. (It may have been mine; the parishioners had given one to me “for my safety,” but I'd hidden or lost it and it had been missing for years.)

The wife looked terrified and grabbed her husband. The husband maintained a kind of crumbling defiance: shoot me, his face said. Shoot us both. We no longer want to live.

But Ronnie shot at God instead. He raised the gun over his head, shouted angrily, and fired. It's hard to describe how perfect an act this was, but the evidence was on the couple's faces, first the husband's, then the wife's: here was the angry retort they'd wanted to send to heaven, futile as an oath, but so completely satisfying.

Ronnie wasn't finished, though. Or heaven wasn't.

The rain began. Slowly, and then heavier and heavier. The couple started to move toward shelter, but Ronnie told them to stay. They looked puzzled, sad, depleted. Ronnie held his face to the sky, soaking it. Then, looking at the couple, he slowly wiped his face and presented them his hands, water pooling in the creases of his palms.

It was pouring now, so I couldn't hear what he said then, but I could just about make out his lips. She's here.

They were too stunned to move at first. Then the mother and father raised their faces to the flood and wept, as the clouds returned their daughter.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
The pleasure of watching it was more in enjoying the characters and wishing them well, than it was the satisfaction of the climactic scenes or the triumph of the good guys over the bad.

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A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law’s response: “Oh, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don’t tell me about justice. Ride to Tennessee on an ass and convince the rednecks that they are merely whitewashed Negroes and their Negroes are black-washed Whites. Sail to the Old World, tell ’em their imperial slaves’ rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium’s! Oh, you’ll grow hoarse, poor and gray in caucuses. You’ll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen. Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain and his family must pay it along with him. And only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean.”

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Hey Two, That bit you quoted from the book is (much condensed, of course) in the movie. Did you see it yet?

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Um. It's not at all edited like an omnibus movie. There are no "sections." Scenes flow from one historical period to another and back again throughout the movie. Basically, all the story arcs are experienced simultaneously.

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Originally posted by two:
If the movie is built the same...

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