Inception

[neeley]

Dora the Explorer in Incepción.

[bklynred]

I just snorted my soda, thanks.

[Malle Babbe]

Live action Dora is criminally adorable...

[huntergrayson]

I should have made it clearer in my first post, I would be less annoyed at the dreams not being "dreamlike" enough if they didn't amount to being so generically actiony.  Despite the ads/advance hype declaring "OMG, it is SO MIND-BLOWINGLY ORIGINAL that you've never seen anything like it EVER and Nolan has actually performed an Inception and put an entirely new Sui Genersis idea upon the medium itself", a good 75 % of the film amounted to explode-y shoot-outs/car chases/etc. that are torn directly from Heat/Bourne/Batman Films and every Bond movie with a set-piece in the snow.  The thing that I thought was the most gorgeous/original was the zero-gravity hotel level, and even that had an element of Matrix/Crouching Tiger to it).  . (Regarding the snow scene, I love Mark Lisanti's Tweet that maybe the one thing the film was missing was a scene explaining that Cillian Murphy's Rosebud was The Star Wars Hoth Attack Generator Playset).  I guess somehow in my mind, I figured/expected that (1) the Dark City-esque stuff with Page building stuff and defying physics with her mind would somehow come more into play in the levels -- we got one moment with JGL pushing a guy off the Escher-Stairs -- but the Hoth "level" - which was supposed to be the most maziest-of-the-mazes, right?, soon boiled down to "oh, fuck, there are people shooting at us, let's cut through the air vents and ignore the maze" -(2) that things would become/feel more "dreamlike" as we moved up/down the levels -- *especially* once Fischer became aware/was told that he was within a dream -- but they all remained pretty "logical" - thusly, the shifts in consciousness to the next level started to me to feel like the characters were merely moving onto the next level of a video game.  

Maybe I would have liked it more if the main emotional story "clicked" more with me.  But it just didn't.  Nolan, to me, always spends way too much time being enamored with his overly elaborate plot structures/narrative "puzzles" and not nearly enough time on developing characters that are rich enough not to feel like mere pawns in that puzzle.  Seriously, he lucked the fuck out with casting this thing - the crew had about as much dimension as the lesser parts of the Ocean's 11 crew, except with much better actors/more charismatic  Thanks to JGL, Page, Hardy, Murphy, etc, they felt like
more than cardboard.  GoldenFleece - I love that theory but  if I buy into it, I think Nolan is The Architect - always building the structures, but creating "twists" to fool the projections/the audience - which ties into the a theory brought up here that is further discussed in NY Mag (warning to others: massively spoilery article) with there beinganother hidden Inception done on Dom with the "idea" of him needing to move on from regret by confronting Mal/letting her go which to me means that Araidne being the one in charge of planting the idea.     

I guess even though I didn't love this, I like thinking about it/analyzing it - it's just too bad I never *felt* much of anything beyond a visceral action excitement.      

[GoldenFleece]

Jul 20, 2010 0:52:21 GMT -4 @huntergrayson said:

a good 75 % of the film amounted to explode-y shoot-outs/car chases/etc. that are torn directly from Heat/Bourne/Batman Films and every Bond movie with a set-piece in the snow. 

Nolan talked about Inception being inspired by the Bond series, so the snow sequence looking like something out of On Her Majesty Secret's Service was likely intentional.

I think an examination of reality vs. dreams done within the framework of a typical action movie—for instance, can Saito clear Cobb's name with one phone call because Cobb was just dreaming the whole time, or because all-powerful businessmen simply exist in summer blockbusters and the audience is expected to accept the reality of such characters at face value? Was that alleyway in Mombasa narrowing on Cobb some sort of hint about a dream world squeezing him in, or did he, in "real life", stumble onto a plausible architectural quirk that conveniently added to the suspense of a standard chase sequence?, and so on, and so forth—is an unusual approach the idea and I think it adds to the concept of Inception being a commentary on the nature of films, and the "rules" of their self-contained worlds.

 GoldenFleece - I love that theory but  if I buy into it, I think Nolan is The Architect - always building the structures, but creating "twists" to fool the projections/the audience - which ties into the a theory brought up here that is further discussed in NY Mag (warning to others: massively spoilery article) with there beinganother hidden Inception done on Dom with the "idea" of him needing to move on from regret by confronting Mal/letting her go which to me means that Araidne being the one in charge of planting the idea.

I definitely think of Nolan as the architect in his role as the director, and the last shot of the wobbly totem is him performing an inception on the audience, but within the framework of the film itself, I see Cobb being that director whose personal issues/demons are getting in the way of his creative process, to the point where he has to rely on others for pretty much everything, because he knows he can't trust his instincts anymore. Like an M. Knight Shyamalan, but with self-awareness. Yet the idea that Ariadne could be performing an inception on Cobb is entirely plausible given the way the movie is constructed. I like how it seems that the movie was designed to be appreciated and interpreted in multiple ways. Sometimes I've followed other stories with fairly complicated mythologies, yet the writer is very eager to declare that only one explanation is right, and anyone else who sees it another way is severely misguided.

[huntergrayson]

He needs to be inspired a couple more times because all the snow fortress action in OHMSS is fast-paced yet crisply clear in terms of frame to frame action, as well as how things are interacting and placed within the physical space of the shot/set (most likely due to the director being the editor of the previous Bond films) but the snow fortress invasion here was a muddled mess. Sometimes Nolan pulls off action scenes amazingly well and others, well, not all the whiz-bang forward momentum in the world can disguise the messiness -- several times, I'm like "wait, WHERE are the bad guys? Where the hell did that just show up from? Is stuff just popping up out of nowhere?" And I'm not just talking about magically appearing freight trains.

Okay, yeah, that totally makes sense - I get Cobb as director proxy. I just wasn't buying Cobb as Nolan-specifically-as-director proxy. Because he does seem to me to be more of the anal-retentive puzzle-maker type than the typical director haunted by his personal issues/demons -- oddly enough, for someone plunging into a dreamworld, I don't see him revealing/wrestling with his id often on screen - where's the spontaneity/the sex/etc. - so I wasn't seeing, say, Stewart as Hitchcock in Vertigo or Mastrioni as Fellini in 8 1/2 as the comparison. But that doesn't mean that Cobb doesn't work as the substitute for the "director type" - just a different type of director than I think Nolan is.

Apparently, the dude who played the chemist was the only cast member who refrained from saying "no comment" when pressed about the ending while MTV was asking them questions about the red carpet and he said "use your ears, not your eyes" - so the alleged sound of the totem wobbling/falling after the cut may be all-important, but, like others here, the immediate audience "OHHHHHHH!" prevented me from hearing it."

On that note - why would Cobb use Mal's totem -- doesn't JGL say to Page to never ever let someone use or even touch your totem and don't use anyone else's? Why doesn't Cobb have one of his own?

[Baby Fish Mouth]

Jul 20, 2010 4:23:34 GMT -4 @huntergrayson said:

On that note - why would Cobb use Mal's totem -- doesn't JGL say to Page to never ever let someone use or even touch your totem and don't use anyone else's? Why doesn't Cobb have one of his own?

He took Mol's totem as his own after she died. She was the only other person who knew its properties, so it was okay.

I've also heard another explanation, which is that the top really wasn't Cobb's totem anyway. His kids' faces were his real totem.

[addison]

Jul 20, 2010 9:21:08 GMT -4 Baby Fish Mouth said:

Jul 20, 2010 4:23:34 GMT -4 @huntergrayson said:

On that note - why would Cobb use Mal's totem -- doesn't JGL say to Page to never ever let someone use or even touch your totem and don't use anyone else's? Why doesn't Cobb have one of his own?

He took Mol's totem as his own after she died. She was the only other person who knew its properties, so it was okay.

I've also heard another explanation, which is that the top really wasn't Cobb's totem anyway. His kids' faces were his real totem.

wow, that's interesting - haven't heard that before. I did wonder why he never looked at his kids faces in the dreams. in the final scene with Mal he turned his head to avoid looking at them

[Babycakes]

Just saw it, and it was killing me not to come to this thread the past 3 days.

1. Liked it a lot. But nowhere near as much as I loved Dark Knight.
2. I thought the concept, and characters were the best part of the film, but not the execution, if that makes any sense.
3. It was a mind-fuck and a half, but a pleasant one.

Also, I'm either going deaf at 29 or coupling a heavily-bombastic score with a heavily-accented cast was a bad idea, because I seriously was straining to properly hear/understand a good third of Watanabe and Cotillaird's lines.

4. OMFG I got maybe 85% of Cotillaird's lines, and maybe 40% of Watanabe's. Cillian's accent was perfect. Nolan should have insisted on a dialogue coach to make sure they could clearly vocalize some of that vital exposition.
5. I liked Ellen Page for the first time in a long time. Loved JGL. Seriously, get in me. You can too Tom Hardy. Wear the suits!
6. The score didn't bother me as much in the movie as it did in the trailer.
7. The ending? The top fell, he saved KW, he woke up, he was cleared of the charges, and he's back with his kids. The. End. Lalalala I can't hear you!! Lalalala

[SApril]

I saw this on Friday and then today. It was even better the second time around. It went by quicker, and of course, I had read up on the different theories, so I knew what to look for.

A couple of questions/obversations:

1. When Cobb talks to his kids on the phone, the girl sounds about 9-10 years old. But at the end, she looks about 4/5. Actually, I think the girl/boy at the end is not the same as the ones only shown from the back throughout the movie.
2. Ok, somebody explain the phantom hospital they were all going to go to at the end. It was never shown, right? Araidne and Cobb ended up in his memories instead.
3. When Cobb is in a dream state, he's wearing his wedding ring. But for the final scenes after he wakes up on the plane, I can't tell if he's has it on or not. And I was looking for it on the second viewing.
4. The totem. I didn't hear the totem fall at the end. Even when the screen went black.
5. What was Cobb's kick in Saito's limbo? It was never shown. So we really don't know if Cobb woke up or not. I assumed Saito did a murder/suicide, but then didn't Yosef say in his dream that just shooting Saito wouldn't work because they were in too deep?

I loved all the suits.