watched this movie
cloud atlas an unusually idiotic and pretentious movie that i found myself generally enjoying nonetheless. was directed by tom tykwer(who is almost always awful) and the wachowski siblings(who are awful all of the time) and they REALLY REALLY REALLY TRIED HARD to make this some masterpiece cinematic experience. it isn't at all, literally not even for a moment, but the thing is just sufficiently character-driven that you can have some fun with it, and moves around fast enough that it doesn't really sink in how awful and inconsequential absolutely everything is in the movie.
the phenomena of the way the story is structured really helps the movie generally keep people's interest. or it did for me anyway(maybe i am getting soft). the movie is basically these six stories, all told in pieces, usually never lasting more than a couple minutes, where they just cut to another one of the stories when the scene or fragment of thought has completed. it's incredible how well this works to really strengthen the work as a whole, because each of these stories is oppressively stupid and unoriginal, but when you don't really get to see too much of any one of them, you don't really have the time to over-think anything you're watching, it doesn't really sink in until later how utterly worthless the images are. it's kinda neat how you spend the whole movie trying to connect dots, trying to make sense of all these images flying at you, then you get to the end and find that there really was no reason you should have been doing that in the first place and you were giving this stupid movie way too much credit. this somehow didn't really bother me, though i can understand why someone would find this completely intolerable.
the more i think about this movie, the more ashamed i am that i actually had fun with it, but i am a bit of a sucker for stories that just make a mess of things and play with narrative form rather than just expect you to sit in the backseat and drive along uneventfully with the adorable main character. i guess in their defense, i would say that the way the whole thing was paced was pretty impressive, shifting gears between reasonably disparate storylines while keeping a pretty steady mood and pace. that's not easy to do, and despite there being virtually no worthwhile images or moments in the thing, the pace and editing of it all creates the potential for some engagement that would not have otherwise happened if you had watched any of the stories in a linear manner.
dunno. nobody should be going out of their way to see this, but i think you could do a lot worse for idiotic mainstream movies nowadays. you probably should not be watching these movies anyway, though. that shit isn't good for you.
although it's a definite MUST-WATCH if you are a die hard keith david fan and stay up all night watching commercials in the hopes of hearing him pitch a car or something with that great voice of his. they even give him something to do for a couple minutes, before the directors quickly forgot what they were doing and went around filming even more scenes of the token gay guy wandering around aimlessly for half the movie trying to find a good place to shoot himself in the head. also also also they have keith david play a korean in this movie, which makes about as much sense as gratuitous teeth metaphors and hugh grant playing a cannibal(both of which this movie has).