Cloud Atlas

So despite not really liking the Wachowskis' The Matrix, and having zero interest in Speed Racer, I did check out their most recent flick, Cloud Atlas. It received some pretty wildly mixed reviews- some praised it for being epic and ambitious, while others derided it as a giant mess full of questionable choices. It's nearly three hours long and constantly jumps back and forth between six separate stories and six different time periods and locations, and rarely do any characters show up in more than one story. We also get six different protagonists played by six different actors, and through the magic of Hollywood make-up, most of these actors show up in all six different stories as six different characters... seriously, among the six main actors and actresses you've got 31 separate characters. Then of course you've got supporting characters also playing up to six different characters each too. Sometimes they had to bend the rules to make this work, and this led to the big controversy the movie faced- racial make-up! For instance, Korean actress Doona Bae is the main character of a futuristic segment in Korea, but since there were no other roles for a Korean woman in other stories, they made her a white woman in the 1840's, and a Mexican woman in the 1970's. Halle Berry also plays a white woman. Keith David, a black actor, and several white British actors somehow becomes Korean (this was the really controversial part!). And just for the hell of it, Hugo Weaving plays a woman in one of his six roles, extending this to gender-bending. Of course it's tough to break down my opinion on this choice down to a simple "I approved" or "I disapproved." Obviously the subject becomes touchy when you have white people playing other races, but the Wachowskis had a diverse cast of interesting characters and were clearly very committed to the idea that lives several generations apart can be intricately connected, and as such it seems like the racial make-up was necessary to tell this story correctly. Then again, almost every one of them just looked undeniably goofy and it was a bit distracting every time they came up, especially Korean Keith David which took me out of the movie completely. Still though, what happened here was a bit more complex than Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Aside from that, I mostly liked Cloud Atlas. It managed to keep me entertained throughout, constantly bouncing from one story to another, rarely sticking with one for more than a minute, and intertwining the stories made for some great moments, especially when you learn about how one person's choice in one story has made huge, lasting effects in another. I wouldn't say it felt messy at all, in fact I'm surprised at how cleanly they pulled off such an ambitious idea. There are certainly a few moments that feel a bit out of place (Tom Hanks' hallucinations specifically) but there are more than enough great ones for me to forgive them. Still though, there seemed to be little consensus when this movie came out and as many critics hated it as loved it, so I'm curious- did anyone else see it?