Ancient Logic

From Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail: King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England. Cloud Atlas has earned, I believe, a fairly unshakable reputation as a great piece of literature. In common with all great works of art it is heartfelt, complicated, courageous, and a lot of fun. The book came out in 2004, can more be said? One aspect that especially interests me, a day or so after having finished it, is its ability for whipping up truly impressive structures of vapor. This book artfully and consistently drives the home the artificiality of its narratives while simultaneously...

Cloud Atlas is loud, confusing, awkward, painfully earnest, and a lot of fun. The best way I can explain it is take a half dozen really good trailers for movies you would normally not bother seeing, draw together some obvious thematic parallels and let the trailers find their own way towards a coherent movie. It's like a movie created only from the 'good parts' if by 'good parts' we extend our meaning to include the necessary quiet sections of introspection and character development that appear in trailers right before the music swells and the marquee actors names flash on the screen. If you don't know much about this movie or the book from which it is adapted, then here's the short version: six stories, taken from a variety of time periods and genres, weave in and out of each other's story lines, the characters from each story in someway influencing or informing the characters of the next. In the movie this idea is reinforced by the gimmick of having ...