Meanwhile, the next day

My friend Logan Tiberi-Warner and I have started a pop culture blog, because we think the internet needs more pop culture blogs from people who are like five years behind the times and really only like Star Trek. My first post is about Cloud Atlas:

I read the book in a seventy-two hour binge (it’s a long book, okay) because it was extremely delicious and kind of like obsessively watching Olympic figure-skating, in that I was completely in awe while it was happening and could have cared less the next day. It’s great writing (if your definition of “great” is “highly entertaining,” which I’ll admit mine sometimes is), but the message – in a nutshell, In Every Age of Darkness There Is A Pinprick Of Light – is, let’s be honest, banal. This is not a hugely profound book. It’s about as profound as Terminator II or Aliens or The DaVinci Code, which YES HAVE MOMENTS OF GREAT PROFUNDITY but aren’t really going to break the mould of humanity’s understanding of itself. This isn’t Tolstoy, people. So the movie, in taking on the message, which I’ll shorten to IEAODTIAPOL, as a guiding aesthetic and narrative principle, loses some actually quite engaging and interesting storylines and characters in favour of A Very Important (If Pretty Unoriginal) Message: Slavery is bad, be nice to people, do unto others, and so on.

Read the whole thing here!