Consider me convinced.

I listened to the Cinefantastique podcast on the movie, and at the very least it sounds like a good adaptation of an un-filmable book. The story there was told out of order, and you jumped from time period to time period with no idea of where you were until you figured it out from context. The only real complaint was the movie cut between segments too fast, that there was no time to laugh at a joke or cry at a scene because you're sent to another story with a different mood before you could really react (this came from the one reviewer who had read the book)

Great review Dorkman. I wish I could agree with you, but I'm glad you loved it.

Here's my problem with it. Yes, the editing is extremely impressive and they pull that aspect off, no question.
However, to me, the whole movie comes off as empty and pointless, and the primary reason is this:
For the most part, each individual story is like the "Surrogates" of its respective genre.

We get the most generic and uninteresting mystery story (an evil corporation? way to stretch those narrative muscles), a pretty generic sci-fi blade runner ripoff (with a protagonist who does almost nothing except get dragged around by the badass hero who has pretty much 0 characterization, a story about a white guy freeing a slave which makes him feel better about himself (which plays out exactly to the letter like you'd expect).

Even the stories that could potential be more original and interesting, like the far future one and the escaping old people one, are greatly undercut by the lack of runtime. Plot points get dropped all over the place (the mobsters from the beginning of the Cavendish story who completely vanish, Susan Sarandon suddenly showing up at the end without even a scene of the two re-uniting).

And it's totally understandable to me that this is simply an unwinnable problem you run into by trying to cram 6 stories in 2 hours 40 minutes. My contention though, is that this either needed to be a mini-series, or they should've made some hard choices and cut 2 of the storylines and fleshed out the other 4.

The fact is that as outstanding as the cross-cutting is, aside from being interesting on a theoretical level, it all goes to waste because the stories are mostly generic, forgettable, and uninteresting, like watching rough story outlines before the writers put in any of the interesting details or quirks that would've made them unique.

And that's a damn shame, cause I really wanted to like it.