I jumped on the grenade.

tl;dl for everyone, he hated it because it deliberately made no sense, which effectively makes it critic-proof and an inferior conduit for wisdom you might otherwise garner from a film that "makes sense." He thinks they're hiding behind nonsense because they can't make real sense anymore.

Basically, he's the exact opposite of paulou. Discuss.

Well, while I can't stand Confused Mathew (so tired of obnoxious nitpickers on youtube), you'd still have to go a long way to convince me Cloud Atlas is anything but a misguided failure. Well intentioned, ambitious, and smartly edited, but a bad movie nonetheless. I'll wait until the DIF on it, but I don't think you'll sway me on this one (and I'm hardly in the minority judging by both the critical and commercial response).

I'm not pissed off that you're posting the videos, but I know I will be if I watch them. If you think Smith (who I've given up on in the last few years -- anything before he discovered pot is entertaining enough) or Matthew have an interesting point, I'm happy to discuss the point if you summarize it here. But I don't have the patience to sift through their blather to find it myself.

I can understand that. In those last couple minutes of the video (after Trey walked away), Matthew expresses confusion over Roger Ebert's belief that Cloud Atlas was one of the best films of the year, even though he admittedly didn't fully understand it. I think Matthew feels that to be a contradiction of sorts, or that one cannot occur without the other.

I'm not sure I agree. There are lots of films I love but don't understand or "get", simply for how they effected me or my experience of them. Alternatively, there are films that I didn't understand AND didn't like, such as Mullholland Drive. I think the key distinction is that once Mullholland Drive had been explained to me (by DiF), I came to the conclusion that I still didn't like it because I felt the movie failed to adequately explain those things to me and I found the execution of telling that story to be very poor.

I think Matthew's view that understanding or not understanding a film equates to it being good or bad is a bit too simple-minded. It's never that cut and dry.

At the start, he yells at the movie for having "No characters, no plot, no story", which is similar to his rant about The Avengers. Though I haven't seen Cloud Atlas, I'm willing to declare that statement isn't true, just off of having seen that 5-minute trailer.