Why Inception Didn't Save the Movies

Inception is not the savior of all cinema. It's a good movie. It's an even better action movie. But what else is it? Sure, as I stated in my five star review, it's intelligent and complex and we don't get that much in movies anymore, especially summer ones, but it kind of stops there. Maybe if people wouldn't have built it up as something to be compared to the second coming of Christ before they had even seen it than it would have had a deeper impact on me. When I'm looking for action and confronted with psychology, I'm intrigued. When I'm looking for psychology and confronted with action and fractured narrative, I'm entertained. See the difference?

In fact, Inception may be, now upon thinking about it, the most self-reflexive movie I can think of that forecasts its own shortcomings. Like it's hero Cobb it breaks it's own rules and becomes the victim of it's own psychobabble. One of Cobb's musings within the film is that an idea is like a parasite that is impossible to kill. It will simply latch onto the brain and grow until it has consumed the person's entire life. It's funny then that the film itself wouldn't heed its own ponderings. The film is, narratively speaking, ultimately rendered too mechanical because it focuses on an idea that seems to consume the every aspect of its telling.

The idea is that dreams can be entered and manipulated; that they have different layers and levels and such. The film's dialogue concentrates so heavily on talking about dreams and explaining different forms of dream logic, and discussing different waking mental states and philosophies about the nature between dream and reality and how it is possible for one to corrupt and consume the other, that by the time it is over we know everything about dreams but next to nothing about the characters in the film or what they are doing. As Jim Emerson and David Edlestein have rightly criticized, the entire film is more a narrative maze than an involving meditation of the division between dream and reality as Nolan's The Prestige was.

It's ironic then that this hasn't been a problem with past Nolan films. In his two best films The Dark Knight and The Prestige Nolan also created films about ideas and such but the difference was that the ideas were represented by the characters as opposed to the characters being at the service of the idea. Thus, to understand the idea was to understand the character. So when Nolan drew in ponderings on Darwinian order in The Prestige or created the Joker as a Freudian study in the uncanny in The Dark Knight, that was a way in order to help us understand the character while also dig deeper into the overall thematic elements that Nolan was exploring. The Joker was so scary because his ideas about society and chaos and evil were ultimately human and not that unbelievable either, thus we understood the psychology oh his character on a human level and could relate to him as such. But once we understand the nature of dreams in Inception, what are we left with but a bunch of masterful action sequences and a trick ending?

Interesting enough, Jim Emerson wrote yet another of his anti-Inception posts in which he beats an already dead horse to death again as is usual for him. However, he stars the article off with an interesting quote from Stephanie Zacharek that states, "If the career of Christopher Nolan is any indication, we've entered an era in which movies can no longer be great. They can only be awesome, which isn't nearly the same thing."

She's absolutely right, about Inception and Memento anyway. Inception is an awesome technical tour-de-force and that's what I awarded my five stars based on. As an action movie it's about as good as they come. However, as the saviour of cinema, Inception is a false prophet.

Inception (5 out of 5)

Inception is best appreciated as an action movie. That is, after all, what it is. Sure it’s so complex that it folds in and upon itself time and again, it chews on endless psychobabble about dreams and unconscious’ and how reality and dream can overlap and be mistaken and replace each other and, on top of all that, it swims with all of director Christopher Nolan’s thematic stand-bys: Freud, Darwin, Jung. But really what it does first and foremost is satisfy Godard’s inkling that you only need two things to make a movie: a girl and a gun. In terms of girls and guns, Inception's just about got ‘em all beat.

Although the plot is complex by definition and trying to explain its every nuance here would be a near impossibility the concept is relatively simple: Inception is almost the exact same movie as Nolan’s The Prestige except, instead of a trick within a trick within a trick it deals with a dream within a dream within a dream. I guess Renoir was right when he said that filmmakers are destined to make the same film over and over again. Think about it: both films are about men driven to extremes by the death of the women they love, both deal in threes, both characters exist in worlds where fiction and reality are easily confused, both feature men who are consumed by the unreal, both are about extracting secret information from a nemesis and both end on the same ambiguous thematic note. This time there’s just more boom boom along the way.

So anyway, here goes: Leonard Dicaprio plays Cobb a man who uses futuristic technology to build dream worlds for his enemies, go into them and steal secret information from them while they don’t know that in reality, they are somewhere dreaming. The dream can, as we are show in the confounding opening sequence that throws us headlong into the plot, can exist on multiple levels of consciousness in which the dreamer can be taken into another dream.

Cobb used to be a great architect until the death of his wife, which forced him to flee the country, who keeps appearing in the dreams because he can’t let her go. It’s possible, you see, for a person in the dream to reflect their own subconscious memories and so therefore Cobb hires Airadne (Ellen Page) to build the dream worlds for him because, if he doesn’t know the layout, it will be harder for Moll (Marian Cotillard) to find them when they are in the process of an excavation and ruin everything.

The newest job is risky because it involves not extraction but inception: going into a persons head and planting an idea, which will grow into a reality and consume their life. This is to help businessman Saito (Ken Wantanabe) take over his competition. The mechanics of the plot can be, from here on in, left up to the viewer to discover.

What’s incredible about Inception is what an assured big budget filmmaker Christopher Nolan has become. Inception is the kind of film every filmmaker dreams of making but only gets the chance to after they’ve broken half a billion at the box office or won an Oscar. It’s a deeply personal, affecting film, filled to the brim with intelligence and interesting ideas. There was once a time when movies were based on original concepts and made by great filmmakers who not only knew how to entertain, but trusted the audience enough not only to be able to follow along but want to. Avatar was such a film last year. Now Inception is another.

However, like all personal films by filmmakers who have found the power to not be pushed around by studios, Inception isn’t perfect. Like Nolan’s monumental The Dark Knight, the story is most interesting after it gets on with setting up context and explaining itself. A lot of the dialogue that relates specifically to dreams sounds more like psychology 101 lectures than actual talk, but once the story gets in motion and feels comfortable rolling forward, it’s nothing short of big budget, edge-of-your-seat excitement that is second to none.

Nolan’s greatest asset as the architect of this story is in his ability to juggle three or four levels of reality at the same time without confusing the plot and does a brilliant job of showing how, when something happens in one dream state, it affects what is going on in another, as is the case with the films very best sequence in a hallway corridor without gravity. It’s an action sequence for the books. Inception may not be the saviour of all cinema as some predicted it to be but it certainly is the best action movie out there right now. It may even be the best action movie since The Dark Knight. That’s no small feat.

One Minutes Review: The Tracey Fragments (2 out of 5)

Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments is not a film, it's a digital media experiment. The problem with experiments though is that sometimes they push so hard and so far that all they end up proving is that they are possible. That's kind of the approach on display here. The film doesn't really have a story other than that the main character Tracey (Ellen Page) is a depressed 16-year old from a dysfunctional family who has been disowned after her younger brother who thinks he is a dog has disappeared. We don't get to know much about the characters except what Tracey tells us. "I'm no different than any other normal teenage girl who hates herself," or "You heard the story about the retarded couple who had a kid? That was me." McDonald's approach to this material, which would be typical angsty teen indie melodrama otherwise, is to constantly split the screen up into fragments. At any given moment we are subjected to anywhere from 4 to 12 different images parading across the screen at one time, sometimes adjacent to one another and sometimes within one another; sometimes within the same scene from different angles and sometimes showing us something completely different. The technique allows us to understand Tracey on more of a psychological level than on a traditional story level but it seems as though McDonald isn't using this visual technique for any better reason than to show us that he can. Conversations with Other Women is a great underrated film that used a split screen in order to add another layer of depth and intelligence to a story that would have been otherwise typical melodrama but here, despite some scenes of power and heartbreak, McDonald's hand seems to be ultimately closing on thin air.

Buying into the Hype: Why It Doesn't Matter if Inception is Any Good

The point of advertising is to try convince the consumer that they want something that they don't necessarily need. Movie advertising is kind of the same way: it's to convince people that a movie is maybe better than it actually is. And truth be told, on some occasions, the movies linked to the ads are about as good as we hope they are.

But look at District 9. Last summer I was travelling through Pennsylvania where we stopped at a McDonald's for lunch (really wish they had those southern style chicken sandwiches in Canada) and, on the side of my drink cup, was an alien with an X through it and a logo that said No Alien Zone or something like that. I had no idea what District 9 was about at the time (only knew of it by name) but in that moment I translated that clever bit of advertising into expectation of a great movie. After all, a movie advertised this cleverly must be just as clever no? Well District 9 was clever, but not enough to be more than simple summer entertainment. However, by that point it didn't matter if the movie was good or not, the hype machine has spun its wheels and the ads had done their job and people, despite the film's many misgivings, was deemed to be great.

I hate basing my expectations for movies off of ads and trailers and whatever as I've made perfectly clear before. Although I expect Inception to be a great film, I will still go into it this Tuesday with a blank critical slate. I want it to be great, but I'm prepared for it not to be as well. A lot of bloggers are saying it is in fact great. Some of these people I respect and some I don't. One critic who I do respect, David Edelstein, said it wasn't. He didn't like The Dark Knight either. That's fair. Even though I thought the Dark Knight was the best film of the year two years ago, in a sense, I had more respect for Edelstein for turning in a negative review, losing the film its 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, because it showed that he had at least stopped and thought through the movie. He's not a contrarian critic like say Armond White. If David Edelstein says a movie is bad he must have (his own) good reason.

I haven't read the Inception review in question yet because I don't read any in full before I have my own on paper, but here's the point: Edelstein was hung out to dry by both peers and viewers alike for his review of the Dark Knight. He's caught flack again for his Inception review (despite it now only sitting at 83% on RT), but why? Just because everyone says Inception is a great movie, Edelstein is a lousy critic for looking inside himself and not finding reasons to like it? The problem is, as I maybe alluded to before, Inception (along with Tarantino and Scorsese films and many others) are advertised as great films, and people buy into that. I'm not trying to pass judgement on Inception for I have yet to see it or anyone who wrote a good positive review of it, but once people build anticipation, once the hype starts rolling, people stop thinking about the reasons why movies are great and instead just accept that, well, it looks great, everyone says Christopher Nolan is a great director, it must be great.

Too often we as movie fans let this laziness sink over us because it's easier than dealing with a movie and all it's parts. We fail to form true opinions and argue them fully and, to another extent, we fail to understand film itself. What if, and you never know, Edelstein is the only right opinion across the board? I'm sure the people who rushed to the battle lines never took that into consideration first?

I'll explain with an example. I took a first year film class which had both Memento and Antionioni's Blow-Up on the syllabus. People left the Blow-Up screening in anger. No one knew what to do with it and thus passed it off as garbage. I didn't like it either, but I wasn't satisfied with my dislike of it; that was too easy, and once I began to deal with it, deconstruct it and build it back up in my mind, it revealed itself as a great film and I understood why it was such. Everyone, of course, loved Memento but, you know what, it's not a great film. It's a good one where a young director is experimenting and finding his voice, but it's not a lot more. Once you break it down you're left with nothing really but a hip, stylish, post-modern film noir that people like because it is "different."

Nolan has, of course, with Batman Begins, proved that he was a great director, solidified it with The Prestige and made sure the title was sticking for good with The Dark Knight. I expect he will continue on in that tradition with Inception but, you never know. The first step is being courageous enough to admit that.

I guess what I'm saying is, what happened to the days before trailers, when people went to films because they wanted to know if they were good or not and they broke film down in order to talk intelligently about it? Did that die with Pulp Fiction when people started liking it just to let everyone know how hip they are? I'd love to read a good review that called Goodfellas one of the worst movies ever made and justified such a bold stance because it would mean, if nothing else, that at least someone took the time to think about a film intelligently and share what they found. That's more admirable, I think, than another person saying that Goodfellas or anything else is good because, ya know, Scorsese is God, it's different, it's hip, it's got good dialogue, etc. You can get those conversations anywhere on the street, shouldn't we, as critical voices, be using our medium for something of more substance, or is that too much of an inconvenience?

What do you think?

It's Finally Here!

I started blogging when I was halfway to ending my education. I went back to school after working for a year because I felt like I was standing still and didn't have the practical skills that would get me out of my parents house and lead me to a career. There were times when I put more effort into blogging than homework.

Then, when school ended I had no job, no prospects and nothing to do but blog. However, when June rolled around and I felt like I was no closer to getting a job than I was in April I started to get worried. The number of posts I did a month dropped significantly because I was focusing so much time on forwarding resumes and was so drained and put off by the lack of callbacks that, by the end of the day I just didn't have it in me to write.

Well I'm both glad and sorry to say that my number of posts per months is probably going to go down again because, at long last, I'm employed. It's a film job too. I'm a sales assistant for a film sales company in Toronto called Forward Motion Entertainment. Let's hope it out because I'm very very excited for it. I'll continue to blog as often as possible and I will always be posting as many new reviews I can so fear to all those lovely people who have continued to read and comment for the past five months.

The Celebrity Connection- Leonardo DiCaprio

Inception opens in less than a week. It's the movie everyone is getting all hot and bothered over this summer. The early reviews have been almost unanimously positive, some even calling it a masterpiece (I think even Kubrick's name came up on Anne Thompson's blog) but I'm still holding my reservations even though my expectations are huge as well. After all, even though Christopher Nolan is now a great director, his non-Batman movies, with the exception of maybe The Prestige, have been more admirable than outright great. There was a lot of talent and promise on display in Following, Memento and Insomnia but it just wasn't quite breaking through to the levels that it did in the Batman movies, especially The Dark Knight. So let's hope that The Dark Knight wasn't a fluke; that it's success was due to people appreciating a good movie and not only wanting to see a fallen star and that Inception does very well. On that note, in order to, if you will, add my two cents to the Inception buzz, check it out:

Is Michael Pitt just Leonardo DiCaprio in disguise? You decide.

Toy Story 3 (4 out of 5)

Pixar Animation Studios spends so much time creating timeless family films it’s no surprise that every couple of years they need to phone one in. That’s not to say that films like A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Cars and now Toy Story 3 are bad, they just don’t possess the sweep and the pull of Pixar’s greatest work. They exist, more often than not, to be light and amusing as opposed to vast, exciting, adventurous, and to pull the imagination to the end of the world and back. They’re still magic little films but they’re not the first ones you grab off the shelf when you need a fix.

Toy Story 3 picks up mere days before Andy, now 17, is moving off to college. The toys, stored in a chest, desperate to be played with one last time devise a failed attempt to lure Andy back into his toy chest for one more go. Mom orders Andy to box up all his stuff to separate what will go with him, what will go to the curb and what will collect dust in the attic. Andy, seeing the cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) and the gang one last time as he roots through his stuff has one brief moment of Proudstian revelation in which he is transported back through all of the great times he shared with his favourite cowboy. It’s funny after coming of age, to look back over life and see what objects seem to have created deep physiological connections that can trigger emotional responses at a mere glance.

So Andy throws Woody in the college box and bags up Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and co. to go to the attic, but the bag is mistaken as trash and heads for the curb instead. Knowing that Andy would be devastated to lose his old friends, Woody runs to the rescue but the toys all think they have been junked and, out of equal parts spite and heartbreak head for the back of the van where a box of toys is to be donated to the Sunnyside Daycare.

This is great opening stuff. Not only has director Lee Unkrich put us right back into engagement with these beloved characters but he, along with writer Michael Arndt of Little Miss Sunshine fame, seems to really understand the psychology of toys. The movie not only understands the important, unbreakable emotional connections that children form with their favourite toys, who, in a sense, are always there through the most important moments of childhood, but it also understands what the owner means to the toys; how they are dedicated to Andy and will forever be there for him whenever he needs them. All they ask in return is to never be forgotten about. Andy may grow up, but does one ever really grow out of their childhood toys? This is what is so special about Pixar films: no matter their subject they always understand there characters, first and foremost, in relation to their dramatic surroundings.

But then the toys get shipped to Sunnyside, which seems great at first. All the other toys welcome them with open arms and assure them that here there will always be kids that will want to play with them and when those kids leave it’s no matter because more just as eager will soon arrive. The daycare is run by the old bear Lotso (Ned Beatty) who ships the new toys to the Caterpillar Room where the young children, all riled up from recess, lay waste to them.

In the meantime, knowing his true intentions, Woody escapes the daycare in an attempt to get back to Andy. Back at Sunnyside it turns out that Lotso was once the favourite toy of his owner until he and his accomplice Big Baby and Chuckles were forgotten about one day on a picnic and quickly replaced. Feeling betrayed by his owner, Lotso became bitter and now rules over the daycare with an iron fist along with Baby, Ken (Michael Keaton) and others.

The long middle section at the daycare is essentially one complete action sequence. The toys are trapped, Buzz is reprogrammed, and Woody returns to rescue them in a sequence that plays more like Escape From Alcatraz than the cute adventures of past films, until it finally ends in a junk yard before the fires of hell in which the heroes become less like toys and more like your standard action hero.

The film ends strong with a final scene so touching and moving that it’s a shame the midsection couldn’t live up to the bookends. The action is entertaining enough but these films have always gotten most of their mileage from showing the toys acting like, well, toys. Even what happens to Lotso is a missed opportunity. What could have been one of the films biggest emotional moments becomes no more than standard movie villain commuperance.

And yet, when the toys are being toys, the film has a magic all its own. It’s neat to see how the toys use their specific capabilities in order to evade Lotso and his goons and Unkrich, a veteran Pixar man, knows how to get big laughs out of small places. When Ken first appears on the balcony of his dream house he takes the elevator down and it moves, not like a real elevator but like a cheap toy one. It’s stuff like that that keep Pixar at the top of the heap.

Of course there is always the sentimentality, like is the case with old toys, of picking up with these characters so many years since we last saw them. Tom Hanks, still the most endearing man in Hollywood, is perfect as Woody, the good hearted do gooder, Allen is still doing Buzz as what he is: the best movie part the man has ever had; Joan Cusack is lovely once again as cowgirl Jessie, Michael Keaton is the best choice one could imagine for Ken and no actor other than Beatty as Lotso could play a lovable bear with dark tones lurking just below the surface.

And then the film ends with a classic Pixar moment in which Andy and the toys both find solace in each other one last time before the inevitable must happen. The film opens musically with Randy Newman’s You Got a Friend in Me. It could very well have ended with Tom Waits’ I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.

Note- Toy Story 3 was my first 3D movie experience and confirmed to me that 3D is both a gimmick and a distraction that is not worth the extra money. I’m curious if, when the DVD of this film arrives, I will connect with it on a deeper level in two dimensions than I did in three.