Fernando and I are moving in a week. Well, hopefully we are. Amber Manor gave us a Tuesday to move in and sign our lease and such, and sadly, Fernando works during the week at ridiculous hours. He applied for the day off, but I don't have high hopes- the company he works for are dickheads. Either way, I have to start packing and cleaning this week, and I can't really motivate myself to do it yet. Oh, I will later today, it's just we have so much stuff, so much crap, it's daunting to think about moving that myself, which I'll probably have to do if Fernando can't get the time off.
This weekend, we saw Inception. It's the latest in Christopher Nolan's pantheon of amazing thrillers, and I have to say, I found Inception to be the cornerstone of his works. The plot itself was perfectly paced even though the running time is well over 2 hours; I wasn't bored once. It pulls you right in to its world, so even when at first you're not entirely sure what's going on, you're never confused enough to pull away from the experience. Then the viewer proxy enters in the form of a highly talented and skilled dream architect named Ariadne, and through her, we learn about this world where dreams are plundered for information and sold, where there is a basic tenant that while extraction is possible, inception (the planting of an idea) is not. But Dom Cobb believes otherwise, and as we discover more about him, we learn that the reason he believes so is because he's done it himself. This serves the purposes of businessman Saito perfectly, for he wants Inception performed on a rival businessman. The whys are not really explored, and I found them almost to be irrelevant- it's not the purpose of the narrative to understand why.
As the team Cobb assembles enters the dream within a dream within a dream, I found the tension and suspense to be at almost unbearable levels, since it's not in just one plane, but FOUR. I was talking to Fernando about this after we left the movie, and he noted that the reason we cared was well done. For when you're in a dream, if you're killed, you wake, but in this multilayered dream that is necessary for inception, if you are killed, you enter limbo- you are lost. This fed well into the climax that built on itself for it felt like almost an hour. Joseph Gordon-Levitt takes the cake in the most thrilling sequences when he wrestles and disarms gunmen in a state of freefall weightlessness. ( I read that he performed his own stunts).
It would be easy to write this movie off as spectacle and an excuse for amazing stunts if it were not so tied in to melancholy, grief, and the strange barren landscape of dreams. Nolan captures this perfectly- the ultimate climax has such weight that when the movie had ended and the credits were rolling, Fernando and I sat in the dark not speaking for quite awhile, trying to digest what we had seen. It was like when you wake up after a particularly vivid dream, and you lie there staring at the ceiling, trying to catch it.
In other words, SEE THIS MOVIE.
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No. This movie sucks. It's too difficult to understand, and because it's too difficult to understand, I must infer that Nolan made it difficult to understand so as to hide the fact that it has no substance. And thus he's being a pretentious dick.
ReplyDelete(This applies, but not limited to: Rashomon, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Quijote, Anything ever written by Jorge Luis Borges, any painting ever painted by Dali, ever, The Usual Suspects, The Machinist, anything written by russians, ever, the entire concept of propositional logic, women [ yes, women are complicated out of spite, thus pretentious] and taxes. Cooking a turkey is pretentious too: it's too hard for the payoff received.