Inception (with implanted spoilers)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nUgdcKMLuY

As someone wrote on the WSJ movie blog, looks like Katamari Damacy the movie.

I'll put money on malaria mosquitos vs "an idea" any day.

A brief interview with Nolan that clears up nothing.

100% w/ Nolan on whatever crazy shit he comes up with at this point.

A more detailed story.

Looks fucking insane. My most anticipated movie of the year.

DARKKNIGHTFAN4EVA

Trailer for this was shown when I saw Iron Man 2 in IMAX yesterday and if nothing else it looked incredible on the big screen. Piece on Collider about it and some detail on shooting in 35mm, 65mm and Vistavision in order to obtain the highest possible quality:

http://www.collider.com/2010/03/25/director-christopher-nolan-and-producer-emma-thomas-interview-inception-they-talk-3d-what-kind-of-cameras-they-used-pre-viz-wb-and-a-lot-more

So this is basically "... and it was all a dream - THE MOVIE"

"The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a specialist in the new branch of corporate espionage -- he's a dream thief who plucks secrets from the minds of tycoons after pumping them full of drugs and hooking them up to a mysterious contraption."

He's checking to see if they literally become vikings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75o-F6ja2I

Wish we would have had this trailer before IM2 instead of a really long one for that Adam Sandler/Kevin James piece of shit.

I wish good directors would stop making movies with Leonardo DeShithead

really psyched about this, not really bothered by Leo. tbh Nolan's more personal movies (yknow $200 mil personal) seem way more successful than his Batmovies; the're not constrained by so many external needs and the storytelling comes through clearer. Kinda want him to just hurry up and get the next Batman out of the way so he can move onto something else i'm into.

NYT interview with Nolan.

getting absurdly excited about this now. this might just be because i had forgotten about it until a week ago, and had up to now written off this summer as having absolutely no 'big' films i'm interested in seeing.

still can imagine it being a failure easier than i can a success (financially, especially, but very possibly creatively as well).

http://www.nme.com/news/the-cribs/51783

He's checking to see if they literally become vikings

So excited to finally get a definitive answer to this question.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/a-man-and-his-dream-christopher-nolan-and-inception/

This is going to be the big-budget live-action comedy to beat for the summer. Nolan's signature inability to comprehend verisimilar dialogue coupled the movie star who clumsily plays himself playing a character in every film will deliver the laughs in spades.

Not sure why they want to schedule a Leo film against a solid-looking blockbuster starring Nicolas Cage, the master of self-aware, deconstructionist acting.

lol

omg early reviews are in and they're all glowing

so psyched

a quick perusal of the early reviews is filling me with too much expectation. will see it opening day, obviously, but must remember that i don't really trust these reviewers all that much.

A friend saw it and was very positive. Definitely planning on hitting the local IMAX opening night; if nothing else Nolan knows how to use that approach more than most. (That said I could still easily see this ending up like litel indicates; if anything Nolan admitted as much in the NYT interview!)

Warner Bros just lifted the embargo on reviews and they are uniformly positive, with some being ecstatic. I am really looking forward to this.

Variety: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117943 ... id=31&cs=1
Hollywood Reporter: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/fil ... 2197.story
Empire: http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/rev ... FID=136118
IndieWire: http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononho ... with_heart
CHUD: http://chud.com/articles/articles/24313 ... Page1.html
Awards Daily: http://www.awardsdaily.com/?p=23795
Cinematical: http://www.cinematical.com/2010/07/05/inception-review/
In Contention: http://incontention.com/?p=26044
Hit Fix: http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/2008-12-6-m ... equal-ease
Film School Rejects: http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/review ... eption.php
Ain't It Cool: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/45679
UGO: http://www.ugo.com/movies/inception-review-instareview
JoBlo: http://www.joblo.com/review-inception
Coming Soon: http://www.comingsoon.net/news/reviewsnews.php?id=67539
Wow Hollywood: http://wowhollywood.us/review-inception

can't help but wonder if they're looking at tracking for interest and going 'oh shit, let the reviews out'

sorry was not able to cut and the paste all those links in properly but google is your friend

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/jul/08/christopher-nolan-inception

cannot. wait. to. see. this.

:D

Tickets booked, starting to get pretty excited. I'm thinking the make-or-break point will be how well Nolan has handled the ensemble cast.

Yeah same I have mine for the Friday release date. This film is thing that dreams are made of.

is the thing that dreams are made of.

synecdoche new york 2: LOOK I HAVE A GUN

Will agree with any film review that starts out putting the boot into Aronofsky's Fountain

tbh I am completely stoked for this as well

there's no lineage with Avatar, as that interview above confirms, but I would like to see this, Enter The Void and SNY again in quick succession

All-positive reviews freak me out a little.

Also, sort of concerned that it seems to take place almost entirely in dreams but never crosses PG-13 territory.

What, all your dreams are R/X-rated gore sex fests?

They're all better than PG, lemmetellya

At least half of 'em are a "hard R." xp

not even kidding there was an orgy in my dream last night

posts very much in charactarrrrrrrrgggghhhhh

All of my dreams involving Marion Cotillard & Ellen Page earn an R...for strong language and smoking.

http://www.bestweekever.tv/bwe/images/2010/07/Inception-Poster.jpg

I'm pretty excited about this one. I'm pretty fascinated by the topic of lucid dreaming in general and this movie will hopefully bend my mind a bit.

excited cuz the previews look cool (despite dicaprio), and i maintain faith that nolan will again someday make a movie i enjoy watching (despite everything since memento).

but i'm bummed by how bland the things shown in the preview are, if the movie takes place largely in dreams. when i saw the early previews, i couldn't tell whether it depicted a sci-fi scenario, hallucinations, the apocalypse, or what. now that we know it's the dreamworld, i'm a bit let down. dreams consist of bendy geography and matrix-fighting? and that's it? mine are a HELL of a lot weirder than that, even when they're PG-13.

suppose it's remotely possible that the film contains things not shown in the preview.

What is it about altering reality that makes one invest in a snappy wardrobe

movie is only 2 minutes 30 sec iirc so probably not

xpost

All-positive reviews freak me out a little.

I'm sure Mr White will be along soon to burst that bubble.

REALLY wanna see what Nolan-naysayer David Thompson thinks of this

Tickets booked formfriday at 4.10pm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/movies/04inception.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=movies

edelstein not feelin it - http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/67155/

Yay, a pan!

Finally a crack in the facade! I, for one, will be celebrating this film's artistic and hopefully financial failure by purchasing a ticket.

Me too! I just happen to think that if a few crits actually hate it there's a better chance it's actually an interesting movie that takes chances.

I'm serious! I'm actually going to to protest this movie by ironically purchasing a ticket.

I suffer from Meaningless Gesture Syndrome, which affects hundreds across the globe.

In addition to MGS I'm also sadly afflicted with Custosa Nervosa, which causes my eyelids to produce milk-secreting glands.

^

just a flavor of the mind-warping dream imagery you'll be missing out on by going to see the non-milklid-containing Inception. SAY NO TO NEUTERED DREAM MOVIES!

Vote with with your wallet!

Should I burn it, or throw it?

if you burn it, it will move to Miami to form one third of the foundation for a superwallet

went down from a perfect "100" to "77" in Metacritic, mainly because time out (80) and New York Magazine (40).

the trailer looks meh, but if it's fun as Memento was, i'm ok with it.

First time I've actually out and out enjoyed a movie by Chris Nolan, though this is as arrogantly conceived as Memento. Just better.

Is it okay not to dislike Inception?

who refused to accept that a negative view of the movie could be motivated by anything other than a perverse contrarian impulse or a desire to drive up hits on their individual websites.

What might give anyone the idea that Armond White gives negative reviews just to drive up hits on the NY Press website?

grammar problems ahoy in Armond's take

yeah where's the subbing

lol <3 u armond tho u big buffoon

But Nolan never critiques this as Neveldine/taylor did in Gamer.

like Grand Theft Auto’s quasi-cinematic extension of noir and action-flick plots, Inception manipulates the digital audience’s delectation for relentless subterfuge.

what

i know, i know

It isn't so much that he hates so many movies, its the ones he holds up as examples of what is done right. I mean, Gamer? Really?

he is a man of the people

saw it last night at a preview and i liked it.

Gamer is one of the most aggressively unpleasant movies I've ever seen.

sitting through Gamer all i could think was how much academics could and would have a field day with it. awful stuff though.

That blog post Gukbe linked to is way too long but I like what it's saying. I can't stand these whiny fanboys who get pissed off when a critic shits on their latest crush, especially as they appear so dim that they equate a proper, opinionated critic like David Edelstein or Stephanie Zacharek with a contrarian dick like Armond.

and finally A Prequel Comic

Seeing it on Tuesday. Psyched!

I'm glad there's "relentless subterfuge." That sounds like there's a lot of subplot pile-up and "but I knew that you'd see my gun!" "But I knew you'd know I knew!" I love that kinda shit.

now that Slant has given it one and a half stars, I'm starting to think the early critical hype was bullshit. Still interesting that the divide between the positive and the negative seems to be so wide.

Oooh, I'm usually in agreement w/ N. Schager, so I'm actually a bit worried now. (Still, not gonna actually read it until after I see it.)

yeah, i've largely avoided actually reading these reviews (aside from skimming for gems from Armond), but i'm not so sure. thankfully i managed to temper my enthusiasm over past week so i'm not that bothered.

The capitalization in that Armond review is weird.

also, Slant writers have an annoying habit of sneaking spoilers into their reviews. xxp

this is gonna rule who cares what a bunch of writer nerds say

I like the idea that Armond just furiously types out something in about 15 minutes, bypasses the subs, and just hits 'publish post'

I am so not expecting the greatest thing ever or anything, I just want a reasonably good film. If I get that, great, and if it looks fantastic on IMAX, even better, and I have hopes for both.

what did n. schager think about gamer?

I haven't seen it yet but from the reviews I have a feeling it might become rappers' new favourite movie when they want to make "deep" references to the nature of reality, a la The Matrix. Counting down to the first lyric to reference it.

he gave that one and a half star as well, cozen.

xpost

I thought Gamer was awkward enough to provide enough material for a film, but as an enjoyable 90 minutes or so, it wasn't fulfilling. I kept secretly hoping that any of the premises would eventually go overboard and make the whole thing ridiculous, but it was almost too balanced, if that makes any sense.

michael c hall performing a dance routine with his mind controlled cronies at the end wasn't all that balanced tbh

Guess I'm firmly in the not-that-bad/not-that-good camp.

chew on this, Gamer fans

um

dude should write about britney

michael c hall performing a dance routine with his mind controlled cronies at the end wasn't all that balanced tbh

Yup, this was the only scene that really *pushed* at the boundaries, but for some reason, it wasn't off into the utterly ridiculous realm. Probably just me thinking that, though.

we ah doolee appointed dream thieves

I'm going to c/p a bit of that rant at random here:

an oppressive virtual reality, within which an ultra-macho protagonist has to fight his way out of a situation in which everything has been rigged against him. The working-out of this plot is entirely formulaic and as-expected, up to and including the requisite happy ending and triumph of the macho figure. However, the movie’s adherence to these genre norms is so perfunctory as almost to be sarcastic. The macho action protagonist, Kable, is played by action star Gerard Butler (best known for his starring role as Leonidas in 300). But in Gamer, Kable is sketched out so minimally that Butler can barely be bothered to go through the motions required for the part; he is so inexpressive as to make Clint Eastwood look like a wild overactor in comparison. (Or perhaps I should say, to make Jean-Claude Van Damme look like a miracle of thespian subtlety in comparison; except that we now know that Van Damme really is such a miracle). Gamer‘s adherence to genre norms, both in terms of the plot and in terms of the requisite displays of jiggling breasts, loud explosions, and hyped up macho insults (such as those that one crazed killer — who of course is black — addresses to the white Kable at one point), seem to be little more than a framework upon which Neveldine and Taylor are able to hang their delirious inventions. Or better, it is as if the film’s genre normativity (in terms of plot, character, gender, etc.) expresses and exposes the way that neoliberal ideology explicitly forecloses any possibility of social change. As the neoliberal mantra puts it, “There Is No Alternative”; any alteration of social arrangements is literally unthinkable. Gamer’s strict adherence to

yeah, I probably ruined my ability to have an opinion on the film by skimming a little bit of Shaviro's blog before viewing.

this is the DREAMSCAPE remake, yes?

http://wherethelongtailends.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/ds2.jpg

is this even on at IMAX in the UK?

gamer would have ruled if gerard butler played a stathamy bad-ass instead of a sulky family man

ok I'll bite, what was arrogant about Memento? (the only thing I've seen by him I could stand)

yeah I don't really understand how a movie can be "arrogant"

it's on at the real imaxes coz: bfi, manchester, etc.

wot u mean real?

http://forum.videohelp.com/images/guides/p2035529/imax.jpg

i mean it's not on at the big mulitplexes that have been rebranded as imax for the post-avatar era even though they are not using imax projectors and the screens are much smaller

no imax in scotland btw

or not being called "imax" at the multiplexes for some reason

ellen page is my new obsession - after seeing juno again (and warming to it) and also whip it (which was pretty good for a barrymore movie). also she's doing a film on knitting (based on the classic stitch 'n' bitch book). so anyway yeah i gotta see it

imax glasgow 25m x 19m fwiw

I just want a reasonably good film. If I get that, great, and if it looks fantastic on IMAX, even better, and I have hopes for both.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 14 July 2010 17:54 (3 hours ago) Bookmark

this is what i look for in a film, too.

yeah so ner

xp

also: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100714/REVIEWS/100719997

lol sorry scotland.

going to see this at 9.30am sunday screening o_O : (

So far the only thing I'm mildly bummed about is Hans Zimmer replacing David Julyan to score Nolan's movies since Batman.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/inception,43128/

AV Club gives this an A-.

sitting through Gamer all i could think was how much academics could and would have a field day with it. awful stuff though.

― orakle-krake (Gukbe), Wednesday, July 14, 2010 4:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=830

going for midnight tonight, on not-IMAX. Stoked.

this is raadddddddd

there are a couple things that dont work and a huge (i think) plot hole but d-d-d-d-damn mostly it is just sweet

Watched Gamer and Law Abiding Citizen back to back with a friend one night. Incredibly masochistic, but pretty glad I did it. I thought the one thing Gamer did get right was the internet - an amalgamation of facebook, counter-strike and porn.

Actually also watched the opening sequence at uni - for a Sound Design class.

**spoiler**

still dont "get" the whole "limbo" thing? if you can just get out of it by killing yourself, why did leo and marion stay there for like 50 years? or did they never leave????????????

just got back. this was awesome. amazed I followed so well at this early in the a.m. and already being exhausted. loved the surreal nature of it...must see this again as I think it'll uncover more things.

dude help me figure out the limbo thing

#SPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERS#

@max -- I think the concept behind "limbo" was that it was raw mental activity, and you don't necessarily know right away that you're in it. Which makes sense as to why Leo's character had to 'plant' the thought in his wife's mind that the world wasn't real.

My interpretation is that Marion and Leo did leave. but, the Japanese guy was then in limbo since he then died before the "kick". they never showed him offing Leo, so whether they actually woke up at the end is debatable, as evidenced by them not showing whether the top stopped spinning.

Good lord I'm going crosseyed.

yeah i think that's where im at too--it was confusing as to whether or not ppl understood they were in limbo. and yeah the sense i got was the leo didnt leave at the end, cf the whole "you never know how you got to the place where you are in dreams" thing

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Agreed. It took me thinking for a full half hour on this, but I interpreted that they didn't know they were in limbo, or they did know, but limbo was so "blissful" in comparison to regular dreams, that nobody dared want to return. I'm leaning towards the latter now.

Just wow though.

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this film was fuckin nuts

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Yea. I'm glad I had a 40 something ounce soda to pump caffeine into me, because once ounce of fatigue, and I would have fallen too far behind to catch up.

Man that kid that used to be on Third Rock from the Sun was pretty awesome too

gf was swooning over him the whole movie

was it just me or did it seem like ellen page brought her own wardrobe to the set, it was like everyone dressed in these perfect retro suits and shirts and then theres fuckin JUNO in her g-damn bandana

heh I did notice that.

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(not really but I'm being safe)

It is kind of amusing to think that sans about 5 minutes, all of the action in the movie happened in a dream.

i liked this but it had the potential to be more.

it was mostly good though!

Man that kid that used to be on Third Rock from the Sun was pretty awesome too

― San Te, Friday, July 16, 2010 7:28 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

seriously! he was really good.

I've decided I ain't going to sleep. I have to be up in 3 hours to get ready for work. maybe a 1.5 hour nap. Ugh this movie! I'm going to go find me a totem now.

This wasn't about dreams as much as it was about navigating the rules of created worlds (the dream landscapes in the movie are even called levels like in video games. Not a spoiler.) It's basically a bigger, explodey-er, less squicky re-imagining of Cronenberg's eXistenZ as a heist movie.

The emotional beats felt kinda flat to be honest, but the spectacle was exhilarating.

yeah emotions were totally empty

nolan doesnt really give a shit about emotions as far as i can tell. everything in this movie is about bodies moving around in space--even ideas are given literal embodiment. tons and tons of machines doing machine-y things.

score is all loud n shit

the surrealism works quite in its favor though.

btw guys my dreams were FUCKED UP -- I got maybe 2.5 hours of sleep and I pretty much dreamed I was doing what the characters in the movie were doing.

just can't bring myself to roll the dice on this

do we have a leo dicaprio: c or d thread

This wasn't about dreams as much as it was about navigating the rules of created worlds

When Leo was teaching Juno how to make dreamscapes it seemed a lot like teaching someone how to make films. Create an immersive and realistic world but without directly ripping off something else, plant ideas in it for the audience to work out themselves without realising you're manipulating them, and don't mess around with the laws of physics too much because it'll make people want to physically hurt you.

nice!

I'm really looking forward to seeing this again, to see what else might be gleaned from a repeat viewing.

omfg

this was amazing

I'm glad to hear some ilxors fawning, because it seems more and more negative reviews are rolling out over the past two days.

NPR hated it.

Some of the press I take with a grain of salt. Namely these gems:

"None of this prattling drivel adds up to one iota of cogent or convincing logic. You never know who anyone is, what their goals are, who they work for or what they're doing.--Rex Reed

Uhm, I'm not exactly the best at keeping up with fast-developing movies, and I understood what was going on and had a vested interest in it. Talk about a smug "I didn't get it, so nobody will" review.

"Inception may have been directed by Christopher Nolan, but Nolan's dreams are apparently directed by Michael Bay.

Ahh, yes, because all surreal action sequences=Michael Bay.

With that being said, I do understand to a degree why some don't like it. It really depends on how you feel about emotionally detached, mechanical cinema. Most of the critique I see targets the stunted emotional content, which is a fair point (just not one that I personally cared about).

sorry that second review was from Salon.com

great costumes in this

I'm at work right now and all I can think of is the last 30 minutes of this movie. that does it, I gotta go again tonight. I'm not a big "see movies multiple times" in the theatre guy, but Nolan seems to have that effect on me.

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a lot of the complaints seem to be that it has no heart/is all cerebral sleight-of-hand. the scene near the end (or, at the bottom?) between leo and [his memory of] his wife, where he rejects his own projection of her, reminds her that they did grow old together (but is really talking to and maybe forgiving himself) was pretty moving...the stuff with the kids felt a little unreal throughout, which in retrospect makes sense.

this could have been a disaster many times over, but i felt like i was watching someone at the very top of their game operating with complete comfort and even flair in areas where a wrong move in any direction could topple the whole house of cards, which was pretty exhilarating. so many good scenes!

yea really the emotional center of the movie is Leo, and the other players really revolve around him and his aenema. I'm fine with that too.

it was all kinda

http://lechampo.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/cradle-thumb.jpg

Thoroughly enjoyed it. Lots to think about. Would definitely want to see it again reasonably soon.

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So, how much was "real"? 5 minutes, of none of it? Did the top fall?

Or not of.

this was pretty great. haters to the left.

Henry, please explain that picture reference to us philistines.

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I'm torn on whether the top fell. At least three times it buckled as if it was going to, but then didn't. The look on Leo's face when he returned to his house and saw his kids hinted that it might not have -- he seemed confused and disoriented, although that could also be attributed to seeing your kids for the first time in years.

In addition, he looked surprised when he woke up, as if he didn't know how he got there...which was different than the reactions of everyone else when they woke up (ie, their eyes opened, and they looked alert and relatively calm).

As far as how much of it was real, I'm pretty convinced that it was mostly real, but who can tell, really? Since the movie was playing on the "reality is what you know" theme (which has been done frequently), if you wanted to get real analytical, you could assume that the *rules* Leo explained were in the dream rather than reality, and then none of it was real!

I tend to go for the literal approach and assume it was all real except for possibly the reunion with his children, and of course the dream within dream sequences.

God I can't wait to see this again.

Yeah, the last 45 minutes were nothing if not zero gravity D.W. Griffith.

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hey guyz what if the movie iznt real?

Zero-gravity JGL is all-time great. That fight scene was astonishing, and played so low-key in so many ways, too.

This thread should be renamed Incept-SPOILER SPOILERS SPOIILLLLLLEERSS

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At one point quite early on, when I registered the top and that it was Mal's, I wondered whether maybe everything was Cobb inside her dream.

I'm convinced that Juno's name in the film is toomsignificant her her to be anything but a subconscious projection. DiCaprio as Theseus, Cotillard as Minotaur.

After this and GI Joe I am now utterly convinced that JGL will play Joker in the third Batman film by Nolan.

Although I will say this movie explains a lot. Extraction must be where the award winning screenplays I remember writing went!

also would love to see someone blame a one night stand on inception

locations in this were great. pretty much everywhere featured apart from about two scenes are places I could happily spend extended amounts of time in.

just bought my ticket for tonight (not in IMAX this time). this sadly makes the second consecutive Nolan film I've seen twice in the first 24 hours of release.

I'm going to need a loooooooong nap after this.

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ok as far as the end, the top thing, etc....

i swear that i noticed this when he goes thru customs at the end to meet michael caine....

when he's showing his passport to the dude, and he's flipping through it, i thought all the pages looked blank, like maybe that was some detail that wasn't fully fleshed out in the dream world..

unless i didn't see it correctly...or maybe it means nothing

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SPOILERS

At one point I got a little confused and thought Lukas Haas was the kid from Dazed & Confused who's in Waking Life (he isn't), and the thing about digital screens / clocks from that struck me as something that would have been awesome if up for investigation in Inception. I was kind of looking for writing or lack of all the way through.

Saw this this morning. Leo has just about mastered disguising what a bad actor he is. Aside from that, god, so many images from this are playing over in my mind.

Loved the style of it too, though I thought Leo, and some of the others (esp Cillian Murphy) were like Nolan surrogates in how they looked; the hair, the clothing...

I've gotta say, having never really liked DiCaprio when he was younger, he's really growing on me as he grows older and more Jack Nicholson-like.

^^^ I hated him in the Basketball Diaries days but have really enjoyed him of late. And his histrionics were well in check in this movie.

looking forward to seeing this at the IMAX in 2011

gukbe to the left

Just back from IMAX in m/cr. I thought there were some serious longueurs during the set-up and was actually getting a bit twitchy after an hour, but then the great sprawling finale from when they go "in" on the flight is *stupendous* and redeemed the whole film for me. Loved all the stuff with the team (Tom Hardy in particular is A+++ great) and Nolan's technique in holding the tiers of dream together was stunning.

Tom Hardy was indeed awesome, his interplay with JGL was first class.

A couple of real lols from their bickering, but he also seemed very at ease with the serious business of thumping/shooting/blowing people up. Mind you, if you've seen Bronson his dedication to the craft is pretty clear, an absolute brute in that.

Tom Hardy was indeed awesome

I looked him up on imdb to see why he looked so familiar to me, and it turns out he was that horrible Jean Luc Picard clone in Star Trek Nemesis!

He's phenomenal in Bronson. Good actor generally, I first noticed him in the BBC4 remake of A For Andromeda a few years ago. Always notice when he pops up randomly in something - a tiny cameo in Marie Antoiette, supporting role in Guy Ritchie's godawful Rock'n'Rolla. He usually plays nutters/weirdos. Hopefully this will lead to bigger, better roles.

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it was definitely a dream at the end--the kids were wearing the same goddamn clothes theyd been wearing all movie

spoiler

Haha, good, simple point. Well noticed / deduced.

yea when I see it later tonight there's like five items mentioned in this thread alone that I plan on taking a close look at.

i would probably have liked this more when i was 18 and smoked more wed. at that point i hearted the heck out of films about dreams/reality/memory/_____. like 'brazil' and 'existenz' got under my skin in a big way.

liked so much about this, and it's obviously amazing for a blockbuster, but it was never uncanny. (better than 'the matrix' though.)

too much exposition, and a little too little clarity about what was going on from time to time. my fave moment was probably the train coming down the street. but i don't entirely understand the limbo thing. the time differential is an interesting idea and very cinematic in execution, but the limbo idea felt way too far away from anything i've experienced.

lot of it reminded me of the collapsing memories in 'eternal sunshine', but not in a good way.

helped out by pretty amazing cast: hardy and jgl espesh.

maybe as i get older and jaded and lyfe gets more and more real i get less interested in exploring the idea that hey man dreams, reality, what's really real nahmean?

you smoke wed.

i actually dug the amoutn of exposition, i was impressed that it was pretty well thought-out, except for the time disparity between the different levels which they cheated a lot.

mostly i liked this.

when shit gets real though dude just can't direct a fast-paced action sequence to save his life.

also: shutter island much?

lol'd at max's line that leo shd've kept the accent

but yeah s0 much like 'shutter island'. tragic dead wife and all. liked 'em both.

probably going to see this again as part of 'curb your enthusiasm' type mix-up. might help.

juno's line 'whose subconcious is this' was lol but im kind of like -- that's a fair question? she designs the thing. but why is it only leo's mental artefacts who intrude.

sorta reminded me of that guinness ad with the big beat soundtrack from the 1990s, as well as 'intolerance'.

tragic CRAZY dead wife who he couldnt save from her craziness no less

sorta reminded me of that guinness ad with the big beat soundtrack from the 1990s, as well as 'intolerance'.

― I’ll put you in a f *ckin Weingarten you c*nt! (history mayne), Friday, July 16, 2010 7:54 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

oh man that is so one for the print campaign

guess i was also a bit disappointed that shit didnt get weirder and cooler the deeper they got. leo & marion really spent 50 years designing a generic-looking city with a bunch of their old houses?? they weren't having magical adventures and flying thru space and shit?

also the way the staircase thing finally got pulled out i really expected j g levitt to actually say "lol"

eternal sunshine handled dreams/memories way more "realistically" and interesting

also the way the staircase thing finally got pulled out i really expected j g levitt to actually say "lol"

― al-goreda (s1ocki), Friday, July 16, 2010 7:56 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i actually did "lol" because what he said was "paradox" and it was really dumb

leo & marion really spent 50 years designing a generic-looking city with a bunch of their old houses?

exackly! it was a really depressing place, and kind of empty of people? i dunno, the dreams that 'get' me are ones involving people i haven't seen in years. probably more like 'land of the lost' than the video game 'civilization' (iirc, i haven't played a video game in a while).

xpost

otm x 2

ken watanabe was pretty great too i thought

he looks kinda like jimmy smits

aha, not guinness, smirnoff, and directed by michel gondry. and using pre-matrix bullet-time.

boom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vj4jppqwkw

http://www.taoistic.com/images/chuangtzu-3.jpg

SPOILET

I kept expecting the kids to have horribly disfigured faces the way that he shied away from looking at them.

or clown faces

u know i did actually like this and thought the premise was pretty clev, and i give it props for making me give a shit about stuff that happens in a dreamworld - it actually felt like there were things at stake, people in danger, etc

was hoping theyd have lil leo faces

yeah the last 20 minutes or so were hella tenssse~

anyone else have trouble making out ken watanabe's mumbling in the first 30 mins or so

fuckin everyone mumbled in this movie

anyone else have trouble making out ken watanabe's mumbling in the first 30 mins or so

― al-goreda (s1ocki), Saturday, July 17, 2010 1:40 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yes. i was wondering if it was the particular screening i was in. but the dialogue was mixed too low, especially him. and at the end too.

inception: secretly a mumblecore film?

not enough sofas

o come one everyone's lying all draped all over the place all the time

(come on)

come on come al

max, what adjectives are you warehousing in case any beyond "sweet" are needed for films w/ actual substance?

pls 2 use only four syllable words to describe movie

I notice you Millennials love to use both "pretty dumb" and "great" to describe the same film

cuz u know, they're movies, just brain candy

anyways i want to militarize my dreamspace

u gonna bother to see this one morbs or just go on auto-complain mode for 400 posts

~~there is no difference between substance and surface~~

hey quick q who were they being chased by in that super-shaky-cam moombassa chase sequence?

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so, if it was all a dream at the end omg THEN his wife was right and she's now awake back in reality which leaves leo, well, where, snoring on the couch somewhere? oh god what.

xpost

the same dudes who the japanese guy gives the polyester architect to when theyre taking off in the heli, so, the powerful forces of the anti-extraction "maybe real world" ppl who have been attacked and robbed by leo et al? dont remember really if they are named...hmmm, good q.

when shit gets real though dude just can't direct a fast-paced action sequence to save his life.

― al-goreda (s1ocki), Friday, 16 July 2010 23:49 (Yesterday)

otfm. it's like the dude's afraid to use a long shot when people are fighting.

was it just me or did it seem like ellen page brought her own wardrobe to the set, it was like everyone dressed in these perfect retro suits and shirts and then theres fuckin JUNO in her g-damn bandana

No, this really annoyed me. It seems like she dresses the same way in every movie she is in.

I notice you Millennials love to use both "pretty dumb" and "great" to describe the same film

Maybe our hyper-accelerated brains are just better than you Bedrock residents' at embracing complexity and contradictions! How 'bout dem apples?

~~words~~ they mean so many things

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Mumbling, lack of clarity with certain things, some riles not necessarily being fully followed - all this unroll as being signifiers that the whole thing was a dream.

Apologies for 6am iPhone typos.

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Even better the second time, because I knew what to look for this time. Though I have to say, the average IQ of my fellow moviegoer had to have dipped at least 40 points from the first showing.

@Sick: I don't know that I buy that the "whole thing" is a dream. The totem Leo has falls over, and while that could happen in a dream, since the totem behaves differently in different environments, I have to think some of it was real. Also, the 'secret' that Mal had was the totem -- she owned it in the real world, so she had it with her in the dream. Locking it away meant she'd never have to know she was dreaming.

Now, interesting things I noticed the second time...

*Besides the ending, there are two other instances prior to the commencement of the inception where Leo spins the totem and the audience is not allowed to see whether it falls over or spins continuously.
*It is implied multiple times that being in 'limbo' can cause great harm to one's mind. When Saito says he will honor Cobb's agreement shortly after he is shot, Cobb replies that if he goes into limbo, he won't even remember they had an agreement. Yet he goes into limbo, and does remember, in the last sequence.
*Cobb's grandfather tells him that he never taught him to use shared dreaming to steal, implying that he only began using extraction illegally after he left the United States, after Mal died.
*It is never established how long Mal has been dead or how long Cobb has been gone.
*When asked how Mal was in real life, Cobb's partner says she was "lovely", implying that he knew her. This indicates that Cobb's partner knew Mal, which then means he knew Cobb prior to his involvement in illegal activity, and may have worked alongside him.
*Cobb is cognizant of the fact when he is in limbo that it is not reality. It is implied that Mal is too, as she consciously locks away her totem so that she won't know it is not reality.
*Cobb shows Ellen Page's character the house Mal grew up in inside the fourth layer of the dream, and it is a shoddy construction worthy of condemnation, hinting that Mal may have grown up in poverty.
*Cobb says he and Mal spent about 50 years in limbo, and there are shots of them 'growing old together', hand in hand, as elder adults. Yet when both lie on the train tracks, committing suicide and returning to reality, they are both their young selves again.
*The passport did have writing in it, although it was not clearly visible as to what it was.
============================================================================================================================

So, tying this altogether, I think we can effectively rule out that he was reunited with his children. Kids that young grow very quick, and it's never stated how long he has been gone, but I would guess at least a year or more. They likely wouldn't look exactly as he remembered them -- even if they were the same size, a different haircut, and as max suggested, different clothing.

I don't care who you are or what your connections are, clearing someone of murder charges likely takes more than a 5 minute phone call. Saito also admits he has no way to prove he can do it. I am guessing Saito admits in limbo that he has no way to clear Cobb of his crimes, that it was a ruse to get him to perform the inception. Cobb then probably stayed behind in the world he created and figured he'd never seen his children again, so that he would just trick himself into believing he did.

Since it was implied that being in limbo can cause harm to one's mind, I think we would have to assume the 50 years in limbo caused Cobb some psychosis and resulted in difficulty in telling the difference between reality and fantasy. It is possible that he never had children in real life. The children are never shown in any pre-limbo memory of Cobb's -- just limbo memories, and post-limbo memories. It is possible he conceived them while in limbo, and THAT'S why he can't see his children again -- because they don't exist.

Ok....someone else run with it, or I won't go to sleep tonight.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-07-13/film/with-inception-can-christopher-nolan-save-the-summer/

"One of my favorite brain teasers, or things to occupy my mind with when I have spare time, is that if you look in a mirror, left and right are reversed, but up and down are not. How is that possible? I've been trying to wrap my head around that for decades and I make no progress. If any of your readers have the solution, I'll be interested."

and fucking magnets, how do they work?

was it just me or did it seem like ellen page brought her own wardrobe to the set, it was like everyone dressed in these perfect retro suits and shirts and then theres fuckin JUNO in her g-damn bandana

her character was just a student, tho. also it's not like lukas haas dressed so great either, the architect seems like the nerd of the group.

I looked him up on imdb to see why he looked so familiar to me, and it turns out he was that horrible Jean Luc Picard clone in Star Trek Nemesis!

Did the exact same thing. Actually thought he did a good job in that, though (about the only good thing in the movie!). One of the best actors in this one for sure.

Anyway I liked the movie quite a bit, it's a solid enough puzzle film that often feels exhilarating, great for a first time watch. A second time viewing will be the test. I'm still unpacking the first twenty minutes or so, it was much more complicated the more I thought about it in light of the ending.

I had guessed it would be a 'down to the final frame' ending. HOW it ended was the surprise to me, I was actually shocked when it cut to black, it didn't feel as long as the film was to that point. Quite a 'lady/tiger' conclusion, at a remove. (I am also still trying to figure out how benign the possible endings/conclusions are.)

And where the hell did they film the snow fortress? I want one of those!

(Also, references to things like 2001 and The Conversation and etc. -- understandable enough...but I was not expecting Star Trek: The Next Generation's holodeck near the end there.)

Oh and WTF at Lukas Haas there. More in the sense of 'wait he's still being cast in things?'

One other thought -- I liked the relative blandness of the whole central idea of dreaming and sharing dreams as it was portrayed and accepted by the main characters. Very little gee whiz in favor either comfort or intrigued curiosity. In a very general way, it almost seems to reflect our understanding of science fiction as evolving concept, so much of what HAS been 'gee whiz' has been identified and accepted.

Yeah, it was almost Vonnegut-esque in terms of how it dealt with technology.

"This suitcase is a macguffin, we all know it's a macguffin, lets not do the robots behind the matrix thing, the red pill / green pill thing, let's not even bother talking about it, let's just get on with the story and the action."

Speaking of which, am I alone in liking how Nolan directs action scenes? People who think he's bad at it; who do you think is good at it?

In the case of this and Batman Begins I like that it's blurry and hard to follow; BB is about a mysterious shadow kicking shit out of people and this is about dream-violence; it's not appropriate to depict either of these things like a Bourne film.

I kinda loved this. No one seems to have as much fun messing with (relatively) CGI-free mindfuckery as Nolan does, but I also felt more invested than I thought I'd be in the emotional component. (And way more invested than I was in the similar parts of Shutter Island.) I was sort of annoyed at the ending though, felt like hedge-betting. I would have really liked a pat, happy ending for once, especially after the relentless last 90 mins, but of course Nolan don't roll that way. <3 Tom Hardy and JGL, wish we'd had more of them. Leo more tolerable than usual.

The more I think about it the more the end is... Nolan showing (once again) that he's making a film as well as telling a story. I think it's the perfect note on which to end the film.

Which is to say that... The Dark Knight had me consciously aware that Nolan wasn't trying to depict reality so much as transpose comicbookness into a filmic; at the time I wrote about the lack of blood despite the violence, the Jim-Lee-esque nature of Two Face's injury, etc, and I think the same thing applies here. Unlike some comic book movie directs Nolan didn't just recreate comic frames onscreen, and likewise he didn't try to make the representation of dreams here too weird and far-out; I know that my dreams inhabit weird emotional territory, have weird physics, etcetera, but the settings are pretty mundane, very much secondary in importance to the emotional territory that the dream is creating or inhabiting, and I thick Nolan goes for that here to an extent too by not making the dream environments too Burton or Del Toro weird (much as I adore Del Toro).

Note on San Te's observation; Cotillard's childhood house is falling into disrepair not because she grew up in poverty but because the limbo environment it is in has been neglected and is all collapsing. Her father (Caine) is an academic, and the huge dollhouse she has suggests she had a very nice childhood.

I think the fact that it's never really discussed what Caine is an academic of suggests the whole thing is a dream, too. Lots of things are left unexplained, because in dreams things are unexplained.

Maybe our hyper-accelerated brains are just better than you Bedrock residents' at embracing complexity and contradictions!

no, see, shit and complexity aren't the same. I knew your being raised in a world where Seinfeld was judged the apex of culture wd lead to this.

did u review this somewhere morbs? i'd be interested in what you have to say beyond "you young people are dumb, this is shit"

I did not. I will perhaps see it when it doesn't cost $12.50.

complexshitty

I was raised in a time where we tucked our shirts into our jeans, ate our cereal, and let our neighbors in any time they wanted. That all changed after the towers fell.

What did YOU have? Bellbottoms and Vietnam? Pssh.

Speaking of which, am I alone in liking how Nolan directs action scenes? People who think he's bad at it; who do you think is good at it?

yeah i thought he pulled it off here. the action in 'batman begins' was pretty poor though. he has a whole lot of get-out-of-jail-free cards in this, and the 'on her majesty's secret service' stuff didn't really do it for me. but the zero-g fight scenes were awesome, imo. and the opening sequences were brilliant too. wonder if they'll be even better second time round, with a clearer idea of what's happening.

and the 'on her majesty's secret service' stuff didn't really do it for me

Ha, good call and you're right there -- when I first saw the figures in the snowscape on the mountain, I thought the opening of The Spy Who Loved Me instead but that's far more apt.

I suppose another Macguffin might be the weep father/son moment with Murphy and Postelthwaite, in that on the one hand you think "Ah, cliched garbage," but then on the other the whole idea IS that it's cliched garbage planted deep.

I would like to know if they cast Cotillard before or after they had determined they wanted an Edith Piaf song as a cue musical cue.

musical cue musical music. Yeah.

Oh and WTF at Lukas Haas there. More in the sense of 'wait he's still being cast in things?'

He is Leo's best friend, that is the only explanation I can come up with.

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@Sick Mouthy -- fair point, that was something I thought up but your explanation makes sense. I still don't buy that it was all a dream though. that's too lazy for Nolan. way too easy a solution. some parts that the audience is led to believe are reality are dreams, but not the whole thing, IMO.

"Hey bro. So you get to betray me and then are bundled off by security dudes after I turn down shooting you in cold blood."

"...thanks?"

xpost there.

@history mayne--stuff made a lot more sense and connected better the second time around when I saw it. it was much easier to notice small things and not have to worry about connecting the dots as much.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER (OK can someone MARK THE THREAD TITLE AS *SPOILERS* cuz this is getting old)

did anybody else think the scene of Leo/Cotillard on the train tracks was a real pretty scene? that scene stuck with me a lot, with her face on the tracks looking at him.

I think the fact that it's never really discussed what Caine is an academic of suggests the whole thing is a dream, too.

I'd like to see a screenshot of his chalkboard.

Yes, I thought it was lovely in strange way. xp

Caine teaches Theory of Breakfast Cereal 101

OK can someone MARK THE THREAD TITLE AS *SPOILERS* cuz this is getting old

The movie's out! Fair game at this point; if you click on the thread and think we're not going to be talking about it then good grief.

Spoilers
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Cld well be something in the mumbling as signifier. About the only clearly enunciated scene was when Leo met Michael Caine, and came over all Leo and "it's my ONLY CHANCE so I MUST DO IT".

Snowscape: reminded me of CoD4. I thought it was going to be a deliberate gag at expense of games-playing young billionaire waster's subconscious.

xpost True, I'm still gunshy after on Yahoo message boards in 1999 people were crying that we ruiend the Sixth Sense ending for them. their sadness was so real :((((((

re: the mumbling, I don't know that we aren't overstating it a bit. other than a few things Watanabe's character said as the old man, I pretty much made out most everything that was said, and generally in movies there are always a few mumbled lines.

I'm still gunshy after on Yahoo message boards in 1999 people were crying that we ruiend the Sixth Sense ending for them. their sadness was so real :((((((

That should have been the first real indication that M. Night was bad for people in general.

M. Night is the Jose Lima of movie directing

can you not spoil the ending of sixth sense in the inception thread please? still got it to watch

Rosebud was Bruce willis's sled

you bast!

too much exposition, and a little too little clarity about what was going on from time to time.

― I’ll put you in a f *ckin Weingarten you c*nt! (history mayne), Friday, July 16, 2010 7:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban

it occurs to me that ~this is what dreams are like~ lots mental energy expended scrambling to explain nonsensical logic - most of the dialog was exposition but then yr still left going UH YEAH GUYS SYNCHRONIZED KICKS OKAYY - which is pretty hilarious and clever

one point of frustration - the leo incepted mol w/a dangerous concept in limbo reveal couldve been pretty weighty if they hadnt fucking given it away by having him say 'inception is possible, i incepted mol this one time lol' like just have him say 'its possible' or whatever - this bothered me

there were some nice meta touches that played symbiotically w/dreamscape constructs - like the ice comandos layout was so bond/video game overtly action movie to the point of being corny BUT then i mean juno grew up watching that shit so of course its gonna look like that BUT its also an irl action movie BUT then WHAT IS IRL LOL

tbf i couldve done w/90% less gunshots - its cowardly hedging against the sweet psychological imaginarium imo - tho i did v much enjoy the line 'his projections have become militarized' lol 'weve seen this before'

ps i dress beautifully IN MY DREAMS

max, what adjectives are you warehousing in case any beyond "sweet" are needed for films w/ actual substance?

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Friday, July 16, 2010 9:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hay morbs i made this thread for commenting on maxs gawker work, which imo is somewhow a fundamental betrayal of ilx I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX > GAWKER hope to see u there

After he said his cliche-o-rama bit about one last mission and then he could get back to his family, I kind of gave up and concentrated on my ice-cream.

o hai

in dreams 'you never know how you got there' w/all the exposition the dream warrior history was never explained past 'developed by the military for training purposes'

one point of frustration - the leo incepted mol w/a dangerous concept in limbo reveal couldve been pretty weighty if they hadnt fucking given it away by having him say 'inception is possible, i incepted mol this one time lol' like just have him say 'its possible' or whatever - this bothered me

well, tbrr (or not ha), uh, i didn't rly get how leo incepted mol when they were in limbo. what does that entail? how? incepting cilian murphbro entailed all kinds of charadery and inventing situations etc. how did he trick is missus. also, you know, it's just an idea. in fifty years you'd prolly incept loads of ideas into yr significant other, right?

That's what she...um, never mind.

also, has Leo's voice changed yet?

tbf i incept people all the time irl 'hay we should go see that new what is dreams movie' 'o ok sure'

he actually uses a kind of minnesotan thing here. an odd choice but effective.

xpost

him: "maybe there is no real"
her: "wow i'd never thought of that before"
him: "clearly you never went to college"

'lets put our heads on the train tracks now lol ok u crazy frickin hot french one'

Anna Kalolina

A bit I remembered in talking with the folks I saw this with last night -- I was actually pleasantly surprised by a couple of things that didn't happen, most especially (in light of Haas's character at the start) what I was convinced was going to be one of the team members turning to out be an antagonist/fifth column/inside man type. So when the team saw it all the way through as far as they could when I had been primed for Page or Gordon-Levitt or somebody to reveal their true colors, that was unexpected enough, and made Haas a red herring.

Related to that was Cotillard's character since I figured her first appearance and actions was explained away by her being his opposite in the employ of Saito, so the slow degradation of assumptions that followed was a good touch. Like much of the movie at base it wasn't a groundbreaking move by any means but it was nicely handled.

i thought that about edith piaf too ned!

and mayne, i agree that the hallway fight scene was good, definitely the best in the movie. the moombassa stuff / van chase was pretty weak tho

bothered me a bit how they played so fast and loose with the time differential between the different layers - if they were really on different clocks the gravity shifts wouldnt be so sudden, etc. but i was generally ok with it, it was for a reason.

i thought for a movie the last hour of which takes place with characters simultaneously in a dream, in a dream within a dream, in a dream within a dream within a dream, and in a sort of ur-dream limbo, it was pretty clear what was going on. some of the details about what when where with the kicks and all that i glossed over.

as for the last shot im betting it was jsut nolan's idea of a funny joke on the audience, which it was

it was def clear what was going on (a second viewing was surprising to me at how neatly interlocked the whole premise was during the last 30 minutes), but the mystery ending kinda calls many earlier details into question.

maybe it was a bad move to retrospectively muddle an otherwise admirably clear complicated movie

tbh i would have felt a little cheated if there wasnt some kind of GOTCHA/OR IS IT...? ending

feel like that was an admission that there is no figuring it out, jus a trippy movie abt dreams

well that could have been done in a disclaimer at the end

Inception: the Unbreakable cut.

If Shamwow had directed this Michael Caine would have explained to the audience how this was all a dream at the end.

I think the idea is supposed to be, "it's not important whether or not the top keeps spinning, cuz Leo accomplished what he set out to." Still unnecessary, though.

then they should have put THAT on a title card at the end

If only movies were more like NES games.

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| JUST A CRAZY MOVIE ABT DREAMS N SHIT |
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See, right there, it's the snow fortress after global warming:

http://nedmartin.org/amused/pics/panel_14.gif

broken link - MUST BE A DREAM

The projector broke midway through my screening, and someone predictably (but amusingly) yelled "it was all a dream!"

and how do u know it WASNT?

The dream is coming from inside the message board.

I was thinking they need to make a version of this movie about alcoholics, called Ginception

SPOILER SPOILER DO WE HAVE TO KEEP DOING THIS OR IS IT NOW ASSUMED THAT WE'RE SPOILING

I really liked how the three dream levels were happening at different speeds: three-pronged stories (see Traffic, etc.) usually do it with color or film quality, so having the speeds be the central thing was pretty ingenious.

In the end, to make a big generalization, I think movies about dreams are too meta to engage me fully. Good movies work like dreams, anyway. Same trouble I had with Synechdoche and Jacob's Ladder: if it feels like none of this might be real, then the stakes disappear and even the fundamentals of suspending disbelief and seeing characters as characters goes away. It ends up feeling more like video-game logic than dramatic logic.

So I spent the first half admiring it more than enjoying it, and not trusting that anything I was seeing was actually part of an actual plot. But I left wanting to see it a second time, just to reconcile the first 15 minutes with the last.

SPOILER

Can i just say that the thing i really liked was the way they got around the stando bipartite climax, that is, i assumed there would have to be a second attempt at dreaming that they would have to go into where they would have to be winging it, but instead they had the option of going deeper into the dream world so that each reality had to be passed back through.

Also thought he kindof gave himself a get out of jail card w/ regard the emotional sterility w/ the ciaran murphy plot where his emotional journey is itself just an object of their tactics, manipulations and mechanisms just as theirs are to the film. Like he was stating pretty outright that the whole thing was just an elaborate contraption.

this was amaaaaazing but

fuckin everyone mumbled in this movie

― max

felt like i missed a lot of dialogue.

Too drawn out for me ...and two sections I really hated: the snow section and the CGI city bit that Leonardo had created with his wife.

I'm sure I'll hate this movie

i didn't hate it but tried to take a nap in the middle of it. i liked the collapsing buildings. it was about 30 minutes too long.

this was really great but yeah, coulda tightened up the last 30 mins with the snow army and yet a whole nuther level. no mumbling in the Cinemark as they had it cranked up to 20

they also showed the trailer to Shamalamadingdong's Devil which looks godawful and had the whole theater groaning in unison when we learned it was his.

quite entertaining!

i thought the following things were kind of funny: using michael caine in the vaguely maternal stern but forgiving wise man role again, using edith piaf as signal music when US audiences know mlle cotillard for that role, and giving joseph gordon loveitt all the crazy wirework fight scenes

oh and wtf are you guys on about w/ "spy who loved me", the snow scenes were a straight rip of the snow level in MW2 right down to the rifle leo was using

nah fuck that...they were bond/goldeneye

hm yeah the base itself wasn't very MW2...

thought the whole thing was fairly good but had that feel of a movie people say "oh wow this was amazing" about without actually being able to rationally explain why diff stuff happened...not sure it'd all hold up to much analysis.

the simultaneous timeline stuff was brilliantly done tho, and the way the whole thing made you confused as to what was reality and what was a dream was quite effective. by the end i was trying to remember which layer was actually the top one...

i was never really confused as to which was which tbh, they always made it pretty plain... except for maybe the ending. which i guess you could interrupt as, leo never got out of the "deep" final dream layer state he went down in to find cillian murphy and he's still there. that would be my "alt" explanation.

Just exited the theater. Good for summer fare, but I think the longer term appraisal will be not great. Stylistically a bit slipshod, and not in ways motivated by the plot. (Spoilers) As video game levels I'd prefer to spend more time in zero-gravity hotel elevator and less time in snow prison FPS. The Mol background doesn't add the gravitas Nolan thinks it does. Same film with one less dream recursion would be tighter and require less exposition. And DiCaprio still thinks squinting is an emotion.

Would watch Existenz over this - JJ Leigh groks fantasy dream femme way better than M Cotillard.

everyone can stop saying spoilers now

nah i mean i knew what was reality and a dream but by the end i felt the sheer amount of levels made it sort of convoluted in a way that made the dreams vs reality theme heighten in a good way.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_R5WS6_kmmTI/RglCKlg1zqI/AAAAAAAACek/h05pzWVIBz4/s400/jennifer_jason_leigh_gallery_14.jpg
Aren't you dying to see what's so special about the special? ...

This was great and i'm pretty thankful that i got to see an original mega-budget sci-fi actioner this summer rather than the thousandth iteration of a franchise. Long may it continue.

The whole movie took place inside an I Phone

this was amaaaaazing but

fuckin everyone mumbled in this movie

― max

felt like i missed a lot of dialogue.

― just1n3

amazing movie. it didnt drag in any way for me (partially thanks to my cleverly timed pee break where I probably didnt miss much)
having a huge screen and giant rumbling bass effects to accompany the higher symphonic music kept my attention. plus they were all "we have to hurry" the whole time so the general pacing was pretty upbeat.

however, our projector was extremely out of focus as soon as they started rolling the previews. me and some people went out there and told them to fix it. they had it fixed pretty quickly but I could tell it was a shabby fixing because there was a distinct blur around all the text in the previews. This bothered me enough to tell a manager about it and get free re-admit passes for my whole family. My older sister was like "everything looked great I don't know what your talking about. So what if the credits looked a little blurry". Ehhh, maybe it didn't bother her because she didn't notice and have this problem in the back of her subconscious during the whole movie. I dunno, have any of you ever been bothered by a bit of blur when the projector is slightly off-focus?

Plus the lady next to me had on one of those jangly bracelets that make a lot of high pitched clanky noise everytime she moved her hand... and she answered her phone during the movie and was on it for like half a minute.

yeah they were totally goldeneye! it was so hard not to lol

lol'd at max's line that leo shd've kept the accent

at one point in the movie he toasts and says "ay?" at the end like he slipped back into danny archer mode

also ellen paige was HORRIBLE in this

her role in this was like the opposite of paul dano in "there will be blood" -- dano's was completely overblown and completely amateur and terrible, and ellen paige was totally stone faced and emotionless... and was still completely amateur and terrible -- ellen paige didn't ruin the movie or anything but she was really jarringly bad i thought

movie was cool tho

it was cooler to look at than think about tho

*SPOILER - SOME PEOPLE SHOULDN'T EVEN BE READING THIS THREAD - THERE IS BOUND TO BE SPOILERS*

Are you all assuming that the last reality was real and not a dream? That's how I took it even if there is evidence for the contrary despite the top sounding and looking like it was going to fall at the very very end. The totem isn't necessarily proof of anything and lead to false security. Also, the grampa dude saying "come back to reality" at the classroom scene from the beginning and the kids in the same position and wearing the same clothes at the end sure made it seem like Leo could be dreaming (or rather stuck in an elaborate subconscious world). I like to think of all these scenes were there to plant a seed in our mind (inception) which is a good parallel to the seed planted in Mal's mind.

I'm sure I'll hate this movie
― is breads of india still tite (admrl)

Well maybe reading a page full of spoilers would do that
This movie was a lot better than Shutter Island and it was even more stunning visually.
(I have a friend who was dead set on not seeing this movie ever since the first previews for it came out. Maybe he just can't handle Leo or is gay for him and doesn't want me to find out. He seems to not want to see any Leo movies which is odd)

I liked how this movie kept me thinking or kept my mind stimulating the whole time per se (lots to marvel at when there is so many levels and time lengths going on + artistic beauty). I know that I was in the thinker pose for ten minutes - the one where I have my fingers rolled back under my chin or pinching my goatee. I noticed this because I don't normally do that

Plus I saw most of Brazil a couple weeks ago and it was ten times better than what I remembered from when I saw it in High School

yeah DEVIL was one of the previews and when it finally mentioned 'from the mind of m. night s_____' everyone started laughing. harsh.

liked when juno said the word 'buried' like a canadian. kinda wondering how old she'll be before she doesn't seem like a teenager.

eternal sunshine handled dreams/memories way more "realistically" and interesting
― max

I hated the artistic direction in that movie so much that I couldn't watch more than half the film. It was so conveniently placed that I couldn't stop thinking of it as nothing more than a tool for "let's shove some art in these bits because it's so easy to to picture it in this scene and it will look cool"
- Lorax

spoiler
spoiler
it was definitely a dream at the end--the kids were wearing the same goddamn clothes theyd been wearing all movie
spoiler
― max,

that proves absolutely nothing.. read my take on the dream vs. reality thing 2 or 3 posts up

*It is implied multiple times that being in 'limbo' can cause great harm to one's mind. When Saito says he will honor Cobb's agreement shortly after he is shot, Cobb replies that if he goes into limbo, he won't even remember they had an agreement. Yet he goes into limbo, and does remember, in the last sequence.* -San Te

I could be wrong but I thought that Cobb was talking about "if Japanese dude goes into Limbo". Also, maybe what he meant when he said this is that if you go into limbo you might be gone for a long time or forever and therfor forget the agreement. Also, maybe he didn't remember going into Limbo - I don't see real proof of him remembering. - Lorax

*Cobb says he and Mal spent about 50 years in limbo, and there are shots of them 'growing old together', hand in hand, as elder adults. Yet when both lie on the train tracks, committing suicide and returning to reality, they are both their young selves again. - San Te

Maybe they shape-shifted - Lorax

------

A couple things:

The Japanese dude realistically wouldn't have been able to help Leo be accepted back in US. But it's not a far stretch to believe that something like that could happen in a crazy fiction movie where people go into other people's dreams.

Regarding the Press quote upthread: "None of this prattling drivel adds up to one iota of cogent or convincing logic. You never know who anyone is, what their goals are, who they work for or what they're doing." - Rex Reed
-That's not exactly true. There's people with real goals in this. Not to mention that some groups work well together solely because everyone in it is cool in their own unique way (we don't need to hear everyone's exact motive). The Inception posse was just there being cool like Buckaroo Banzai's posse or The Warriors gang
-And what "convincing logic" did this Rex Reed guy expect out of this fantasy film? Scientific explanations as to how people can go inside other people's dreams? What an idiot

I really loved this! Saw it in a packed theatre and there was a huge "AWWWHHHH!!" at the end. I definitely lost the plot some way through, with whose dream we were in and what had to happen in what order. Also the different dream layers meant the end of the film could have an action climax, an emotional climax and I guess the espionage plot climax all pretty much at the same time. Nice. It did feel a bit Shutter Islandy in places, though.

one of my friends just facebooked complaining that Mr. Nolan didn't need to make his movies "10 hours" long. Is 2 hours and 20 minutes really that long?

It REALLY didn't feel like a long 2 hrs 20 mins to me. I was flat out exhausted yet it kept my attention the whole time.

then again this friend is a contrarian idiot

I just saw it tonight and quite liked it! I think the strongest argument for it holding up to repeat viewing is its lack of a reliance on a twist.

Nolan's non-Batman movies (Memento, The Prestige) while v. v. good are both completely different watches the first time around - they rely on the viewer to know nothing in order to surprise and manipulate them. Ironically, while Inception was shrouded in secrecy and I'm glad that I went in mostly blind to the plot, I don't think there's much here that is particularly shocking. The set pieces and the characters and the handful of emotions that there are stand on their own quite successfully.

Needless to say, stunning visually - best depiction of lucid dreaming since Waking Life and/or Eternal Sunshine. I liked how they papered over the moral implications of inception fairly quickly at the beginning - bla bla energy monopoly bla bla. If it's that risky and difficult one would think that motivations and so on mattered more, but that is the point of Leo's monomaniacal guilt about Mol.

best depiction of lucid dreaming since Waking Life and/or Eternal Sunshine

or even vanilla sky

hiyoooooo

Thought the love story side of it wasn't flawless in that mol was this total harpy in Cobb's subconscious. You never saw whatever the good side of their relationship was or had been. But perhaps it was just a story about Cobb and nobody else.

(Possible spoilers)

Just reading the Philip French review in the Observer:

But because he's suspected of killing his wife (Marion Cotillard), Cobb cannot return to America to see his children. He has, in fact, left her isolated in a distant dream limbo, which not unnaturally has left him riddled with guilt.

The second part of this isn't right is it? She's dead, so Mol is only in Cobb's subconscious?

yeah the story he tells us is that they both came back from limbo via getting run over by a train

but she couldn't deal with the idea that maybe nothing was real

so she killed herself irl

and she 'exists' in what i think is dream space designed by cobb? that elevator shaft that juno gets in on is something he's 'created' i guess, given that she is able to access it.

bothered me a bit how they played so fast and loose with the time differential between the different layers - if they were really on different clocks the gravity shifts wouldnt be so sudden, etc. but i was generally ok with it, it was for a reason.

This isn't right, though.

All of those actions are happening at the same time; the issue is that perception stretches the sensation out. You would expect the jolts in the van to affect the dreamscape in the hotel exactly when they happened, only the sensation in the hotel would last what, 12 times? as long to the people in the dream.

The part I thought was interesting was how they handwaved multiple layers of the dream away from each other; GGL's dream was directly influenced by the physics of the chemist's dream, but since he wasn't in the forger's dream the spatial weirdness didn't translate to there and being asleep in that dream buffered everyone else from it.

it's a fine movie. it was hardly the second coming of Kubrik or something that all the secrecy and advance hype would lead you to believe. I think it's a pretty good crime movie but as far as depictions of lucid dreaming, I preferred Eternal Sunshine. It's still really good.

My biggest problem was that everyone seemed too young. I know that makes me seem really old. But like, didn't we just see Ellen Page playing a high school kid a year ago, and Joseph Gorden Levitt still seems like the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun, and I don't konw when Leo Decaprio is going to seem like an adult to me but he still looks like a kid wearing a fake beard.

JGL is a more convincing adult than Leo, I think.

didn't we just see Ellen Page playing a high school kid a year ago

And she was playing a college kid now -- not a big leap!

**spoiler**

still dont "get" the whole "limbo" thing? if you can just get out of it by killing yourself, why did leo and marion stay there for like 50 years? or did they never leave????????????

― max, Friday, July 16, 2010 1:04 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

@max -- I think the concept behind "limbo" was that it was raw mental activity, and you don't necessarily know right away that you're in it. Which makes sense as to why Leo's character had to 'plant' the thought in his wife's mind that the world wasn't real.

My interpretation is that Marion and Leo did leave. but, the Japanese guy was then in limbo since he then died before the "kick". they never showed him offing Leo, so whether they actually woke up at the end is debatable, as evidenced by them not showing whether the top stopped spinning.

Good lord I'm going crosseyed.

― San Te, Friday, July 16, 2010 3:09 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

did anyone have a better answer for this?

nope.

i think they stayed because they liked it there and created a big imaginary city together. but mol liked it more than cobb.

or, yeah, maybe they never left. it's totally possible. but that would be kind of unsatisfying, because it would mean everything in the film was just happening in cobb's imaginaish.

ok but--if you can just get out of limbo by killing yourself, why is it such a big scary deal to be in it??

as to whether they looked like old people at the end or not... im pretty sure that question is left 'ambiguous' i.e. fudged

ok but--if you can just get out of limbo by killing yourself, why is it such a big scary deal to be in it??

― max, Sunday, July 18, 2010 3:46 PM (10 seconds ago) Bookmark

well indeed. and also there's no 'kick' from train death whereas juno and cillian murphbro both need that falling sensation to get out

The issue was that when you go that deep, you can't tell whether you are awake or dreaming. Cobb and Mal went there intentionally and Mal still got confused as to what was real, leading to the original inception and the movie's central tragedy. The issue they were having on the caper is that, due to the sedation, dying in the dream would send you to this place that you assume is reality but actually isn't, leaving you as this total world-shaping god in your mind as you actual body deteriorates. The bit that is unclear which I am extrapolating is that since time is so elongated at that level, your psyche may die of perceived old age, leaving your body a vegetable.

yah the problems w/limbo is being that deep in yr minds eye fucks w/yr head and one year there is like one minute irl so if youre getting headfucked for hundreds of limbo years and you wake up an irl lil while longer youre gonna be all WHAT BRO WHAT I JUST HAD THE CRAZIEST DREAM

btw agree w/whoever said leos limbo suckd balls juno was all 'omg u maade this' but compared w/like everything else in the move it was pretty dull

Leo's world was Vogsphere from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie crossed with Wall-E's opening sequence = Cobb was just an sf nerd.

All of those actions are happening at the same time; the issue is that perception stretches the sensation out. You would expect the jolts in the van to affect the dreamscape in the hotel exactly when they happened, only the sensation in the hotel would last what, 12 times? as long to the people in the dream.

yes but in the hotel the gravity was shifting as fast as the car was spinning out in rainy city dream. if it was 12 times faster they wouldn't have been flung around like that, it would have been more like the hallway was slowly rotating

or ~would it~

also, those who said it was hard to hear the dialoge were right; it was really hard to understand anything Saito said, and not just because of his accent; the volume just wasn't loud enough (compared to how fucking loud everything else was, including the score). maybe it was the theater I was in.

it was not my man

Mal is so unpleasant in Cobb's subconscious because she's an embodiment of his feelings of guilt.

Nolan does like to use fucking mad big dynamic range between dialogue and BOOMS; the DVD of Dark Knight is nightmarishly loud for the explosions and gunshots and very very quiet for the hushed spoken wordy bits.

i loved this and the more i think abt it the more it seems that it would take enormous self-belief to conceive of this story and then not immediately scrap as waaaay too convoluted and silly. to actually pull it off is pretty amazing imo.

I didn't have any trouble hearing the dialogue.

I didn't have any trouble hearing dialogue either, but the francophone couple sitting next to us got up and walked out 20 min into the film. I figure it was because they couldn't follow the dialogue.

or didn't like the 'mad french broad' stereotype

yes but in the hotel the gravity was shifting as fast as the car was spinning out in rainy city dream. if it was 12 times faster they wouldn't have been flung around like that, it would have been more like the hallway was slowly rotating

Well no, not really. Think about how fast that spinning would have been in the rainy city dream; maybe that car would have rolled 5 - 10 seconds? The speed at which gravity was shifting in the hotel was a good bit slower and not directly synchronized with the rolling van, although it appeared that way due to editing since they kept jumping out to the higher level to show the dream van rolling, then back into the hotel to show how it was fucking with gravity, then back, with both events stopping when the van righted itself.

you may be right but i still think they cheated it a bit... which is fine, movies cheat with space and time all the time

Oh yeah, I don't think it was a perfect ration or anything, but they made enough of a nod to the time dilation for it to make sense, kind of like how dude got a faceful of water in the van and rain pelted the window of the hotel for several seconds, or how he slumped over in the van on a hard turn and hotel trembled for several seconds and the water in all of the glasses tilted for a good bit longer than the turn actually was.

yeah i think the hotel was rocking more slowly than the car was rocking. it didn't matter too much to me really: i thought the interaction between the two was great. but the snow fortress stuff, partly because there was no correspondence, was less interesting. they spent less time there so it wasn't a big deal.

the raining/peeing thing was funny esepcially because i really had to pee at the time

marion cotillard looked less fishlike and way hotter in this than she sometimes does which I attribute to good angles.

one of my friends just facebooked complaining that Mr. Nolan didn't need to make his movies "10 hours" long. Is 2 hours and 20 minutes really that long?

It REALLY didn't feel like a long 2 hrs 20 mins to me..

Felt completely opposite there for me, I honestly thought we'd only hit the two hour mark when the film ended! And I knew it was two and a half hours long so I was expecting more. (I try not to look at the time when watching a movie first time through; even if you know how long the movie is that way you can let it hopefully unfold at its own pace.)

i don't suppose it pays to inspect the internal logic of a summer blockbuster too closely (friend of mine used to call this "james bonding" a film) but i feel like either it's all leo's dream or things are awfully ham-handed. i choose the former.

premises are too simplistic -- fuel monopoly superpower! one call from saito fixes all troubles! if i just accomplish this one task everything will be fine!

hey juno's name is ariadne wot a coincidence.

i guess those bad guys in mombasa were agents of leo's former employer (who set him on saito)? the whole sequence was awfully dream-like with dudes coming after him and then look! saito is here, in a car, protecting his investment!

who was michael caine? was he a professor in paris or was he looking after the kids in the usa, as at the end? why couldn't he just take the kids outside the country to where cobb could see them? (was he mal's dad? and if so, why wasn't he pissed at cobb for "killing" her?)

dude like cobb flits around the globe like bond but is compelled to enter the usa through an airport on his own real passport? he couldn't just steal the kids away?

was there any explanation for why the top had to fall over if things were real? like, why couldn't you just dream it falling over?

anyway, i liked it a lot and yeah you don't want to make the movie five hours long trying to explain every detail. and there are limits to how crazy you want to get in the movie. pretty sure if those were my dreams, in some level i (and/or everyone else) would be naked, wandering around my college campus trying to find the class i've skipped all semester so i can take the final i need to graduate. (tmi?)

the great pete postlethwaite was sadly underused imo. dude should have been 50 feet tall tearing shit up in cillian's dreams.

i feel like either it's all leo's dream or things are awfully ham-handed. i choose the former.

There've been very few movies I've seen where I wonder what happened both before the very first frame and after the very last one, so I really have to give the movie that.

premises are too simplistic -- fuel monopoly superpower! one call from saito fixes all troubles! if i just accomplish this one task everything will be fine!

this doesn't matter, and tonnes of "more serious" films have things like it. who gd cares.

i guess those bad guys in mombasa were agents of leo's former employer (who set him on saito)? the whole sequence was awfully dream-like with dudes coming after him and then look! saito is here, in a car, protecting his investment!

it is indeed dreamlike... as mol says in the film! this is part of its ambiguity/have cake and eat it license.

*spoilers everywhere in this thread*

XPs: The dudes weren't getting thrown around all quick-like in the spinning hallway. It was more like they kept losing their balance and fell over a few times.

I'm still taking the end of the movie as reality restored and the stuff like the kids wearing the same clothes are merely coincidences there to make you believe the contrary (and be planted with the same type of seed Mal was planted with). It's a hedge war but I'm on the right side this time. Saito's awesome power of Cobb's passport has no sway in the pro-dreaming argument for me. Dude's got connections. I was thinking that everything could be a dream throughout the whole movie (or just post waking up on the plane) - did anyone else forsee that the ending would ultimately reveal that it was all a dream or leave it questionable? I mean the dream within a dream idea was planted as a possibility right from the get go

The totem idea was a cool concept but you have to take it for fact because the logic behind it is weird

Also, I couldn't help but wonder why the snow world wasn't in Zero gravity

Those are just minor grievances and maybe there's a good explanation I don't remember hearing

Saw it last night. Bear in mind I was asleep for most of the second half, but I thought it was loud and kind of unrelenting and strangely dull. Also pretty much everyone seemed totally miscast. But I freely admit this type of movie is not my cup of borscht and I wouldn't normally even go to see such a thing, but it was hot and wifey dragged me.

the moombassa scene was so weird... what was with the whole "let's meet back here, they'll never guess" thing? seemed totes unness.

Probably gonna go and see this again tomorrow.

re: the length. like any film, it just seems longer to some people if there's a lot going on and a lot to take in.

pretty sure the guy in the member's only jacket killed. calling bullshit on the russian from pine barrens playing a role.

i really felt avatar's length and would have walked out if i'd been on my own

and i generally deplore long-ass run-times

biut i was chill with this

I liked Avatar in parts.

I do have to give this film props for trying to do what it tries to do on such a budget. But I'm still not sure if I don't prefer my popcorn movies to be expensive genre films rather than expensive art films. So is this the new Matrix or what? I honestly hadn't heard about it until I saw this thread popping up a week ago.

Haha that looks like "I liked Avatar in pants". The only way to see a movie.

So is this the new Matrix or what?

kinda doubt nolan would want to sequelize it, but i wonder if it's in his control

it is the new matrix insofar as it's an original (so far as these things go) blockbuster (i mean, it isn't based on a named toy/theme park ride/comic book/computer game) with philosophical themes that does interesting things, formally

Good 30 min interview with Nolan

http://memegenerator.net/Philosoraptor/ImageMacro/1705024/Philosoraptor-WENT-AND-SAW-INCEPTION-POSTED-ABOUT-IT-ON-THE-INTERNET.jpg

surprised that max liked this so much :/

saw this tonight + enjoyed it immensely altho it was def. 30 too long for me.

here is the main thing i don't understand. did they get out of limbo because they were run over by a train (in this scene they both looked young) or did they grow old in limbo together and just wake up when the sedatives wore off (a short time in real world but 50 years or so in limbo) as was suggested by a different scene?

~both~

it didn't feel long, but it was boring and i was glad when it finished. full marks for trying formally interesting things, and i thought a lot of the plot problems were solved in visually interesting or conceptually clever ways. but if you're going to make a movie about the mind that is kind of centred around a relationship drama then that relationship should be one that faces real problems. use the very clever macguffin to explore human drama, not to explore the very clever macguffin. otherwise you've got two hours of nonsense concerning trains and images from dreams and dreadful firefight set piece direction. note: not complaining about sci-fi films or fantastical events/technologies. eternal sunshine is the obvious film to which this compares unfavourably. but even the druggy episodes of star trek:tng get this right.

maybe i don't like all the ones i've seen for other reasons, but i don't think i've ever enjoyed a riddle movie either. certainly not enough to rewatch. are there more of these films than their used to be? do films with this kind of left-brained rewatch appeal make more money? can't imagine they actually do.

The idea of 'real problems' is one that occurred to me as well; Mal's death is hardly a common situation, shall we say. But the idea of empathizing over a mistaken decision with tragic consequences is at least there.

idiotic zimmerthon score all the way through and inaudible dialogue mix at times. there was an hour around the middle that feelt like a montage.

As for rewatching, I think you could always see it in different ways each time as to where a framing dream stops and ends, but I'll have to rewatch it myself to see if that holds!

xxp, hmm. i don't ~think~ i'm being to hard on that aspect. a preposterous mistaken decision taken as a result of insanity just feels terribly arbitrary to be the core of the film. the similar thing was better used in shutter island because you felt like leo da vinci actually changed as a character having dealt with the fallout, but in this he just changes his address.

worried i'm Robert McKeeing this now, and maybe it was just retarded.

idiotic zimmerthon score all the way through

^OTM think u can count the score-less scenes on one hand

my problem with the film is that it didn't explore any dream symbolism whatsoever. it was so literal. too literal.

It was really wasn't a story about dreams-as-such though -- I forget where I stumbled across the quote this weekend but it was a psychiatrist noting that because dreams are so potentially all over the place that films that get closer to dream symbolism aren't going to be tautly plotted out thrillers. A friend of mine who went in wanting that kind of story about dreams really hated the film as a result.

yeah i hate this film. it's a boring action movie with a horrible snow shoot out. it makes no sense.

the anonymous "projections" really irritated me as well

at least color coordinate the players in a snow shoot out so i can actually give a fuck about what is going on

"A boring action movie with a horrible show shoot out!!!! A++++++"

CUTTY, KILX-TV

shouldve gone with red/blue lasers

my dreams have fucking lasers

u hired as architect for p2

actually not sure which position is in charge of lasers tbh

Might re-watch this on a decent screen (I was in the front row of a huge screen because I got there late). I normally feel that films go on too long, and can NEVER hear dialogue, but didn't really have a problem with either here (although I missed the Japanese guy's line about the airline).

Leo wasn't allowed to know the layout of the dream designs because his messed-up psyche could try and interfere, so presumably all the rest of the team are 100% well-adjusted and psychologically 'normal'? Wasn't too sure about this.
Another thing that struck me as odd was that when the team first got attacked when the heist started, Leo's assumption was that someone had trained Cillian Murphy in dream-protection or whatever. This hints that Leo's team are perhaps one of many doing this kind of dream shenanigans (attack and/or security), whereas before they seemed to be a one-off crack squad.

for anyone who's seen paprika, is this film live-action paprika because if so I may fork out the money to see it

well ive seen paprika and its a kind of spice and this is a movie about dreams

i did NOT like this at all.

aw cmon max

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn7U1KIGeuQ

when you think about it 'paprika' and 'inception' share some letters for example 'p' and maybe 'i'

paprika is way more imaginative and weird

"A boring action movie with a horrible show shoot out!!!! A++++++"

CUTTY, KILX-TV

"A...hoot...!"

I don't know why, but certain movies are not allowed to get away with not making sense. Even if they're Japanese and feature a perma-smiling red onion in ankle chains or whatever

I wonder what Jonah Hill would have been like in Inception

my problem with the film is that it didn't explore any dream symbolism whatsoever. it was so literal. too literal.

― cutty, Monday, July 19, 2010 12:39 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

^^

I don't think I like level-crossing sci-fi movies / tv anymore. I think calling attention to the varying levels of 'reality' within the movie itself makes it harder to accept that the 'top level' of the movie is real and not just, you know, a story that was written and filmed and acted by a bunch of writers/directors/actors.

Exactly. Suspending belief in a regular movie and believing the characters are real is more effectively dream-like.

I don't think this movie is supposed to reflect what actual dreams are like and more than most movies are supposed to reflect what actual life is like.

*any more

It's funny because Nolan kind of cops to that line of criticism with the 'Mr Charlie' (I think that's the name, I can't remember) bit in the 2nd level of the dream. That is, you shouldn't put the person you're trying to get to believe in your made up unreality in the frame of mind to start looking for flaws in that unreality.

The audience, at that point, starts to take on the role of the 'subconcious agents' (or whoever the dudes with guns are) in the film, and starts to look for flaws and shoot holes in em.

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5sgo28Oqw1qz7f9to1_500.jpg

sort of surprised there hasn't been a screencap of this with a "yo dawg we heard you like dreams" caption

Just got back from this, liked it a lot. Maybe more when I'm less exhausted. But I had to share the most memorable moment of the night - during the trailer for Devil, the entire audience groaned/booed/laughed when M. Night Shyamalan's name popped up on the screen. It was glorious.

That seems to have been a common reaction everywhere! Thank god.

Yes, I was pleased to hear how many have turned against him. Apologies if that was already addressed in here, was avoiding spoilers until I saw it.

didnt hate this, didnt love it. felt a bit like i did about the dark knight. lots of almost plot 'twists' or just strands to make it seem mroe complex being stacked on top of each other but it felt a bit tedious or gimmicky. the first half hour or so was a bit of a mess really, seemed to not know what it was doing or where it was heading. got better once we started to learn a bit more about dicaprios past and his own uses for/affects on the dreams but this film thinks its much cleverer than it really is. the arrogant thing i kinda get cos everyone is strutting around with such self importance - theres next to no humour in this film, kinda like the dark knight. overall though, i felt like it was a cool concept, with lots of potential for interesting, thought provoking stuff that might you know feel like a surrealistic dream, but instead what i got was a kinda shallow rendering of that, dressed up to appear as though its the most complex thing ever. can imagine fanboys geeking it up forever about what meant what and how other people just dont understand all the details but this just seems like a bit of a mess between big modern blockbuster form meets hifaulutin concept. and weirdest of all, it felt a bit dated.

nolan is really overrated as a stylist btw. barring memento perhaps, his films arent really all that distinct visually.

obv dicaprio is always going to look like a kind of boy-man but i found it weird how the other main stars in this looked so young too.

"dressed up to appear as though its the most complex thing ever"

basically this shit just wasnt coherent
and they kept piling up more and more on it just in case anyone noticed i think
im sure plenty people will think its all 'deep' though

"dressed up to appear as though its the most complex thing ever"

That was my instinctive reaction, too. I went to see this with my son (14) yesterday, at his insistence. He loved it, and expressed his determination to obtain the DVD so he can watch it again. I fell asleep at the beginning (I almost always do that in cinemas) so missed a bit, but by the end felt I had understood the fundamentals of what I had seen, while remaining confused by some of the different layers of dreams within dreams. But, although the visuals were pretty stunning, ultimately the basic premise, the characters, and the storyline, were all just not interesting to me.

Going to see the film with my son, I was reminded of my father taking me to see '2001: A Space Odyssey'. I remember finding '2001' confusing, but also truly fascinating (in fact I still like it, in particular for its slow pacing and quietness, whereas there was far too much ridiculously over the top noise and frenetic action in 'Inception' for me). But what is almost certainly significant is that I was completely fascinated by '2001', and my son seemed to have a similar response to 'Inception' (whereas I think I was disgusted by it at some very deep level, while enjoying it superficially). My conclusion is that I am growing bit by bit to hate the modern world, which is presumably a side effect of ageing. I wish I could remember if my father detested '2001'. I remember discussing it with him at length on the way home, but I don't remember what his opinion of it was.

My friend Dan North (a film academic) on Inception - http://as.exeter.ac.uk/it/av/digital/#off

i think if this came out in a period where there was more on offer in terms of big hollywood fare, or maybe a decade or so back, it would probably have been seen as a bit of a failure. cos its really just an awkard blend of blockbustery big dumb action fare and attempts to appeal to peoples more intellectual side, except that its just not very smart.

just cos a film academic likes a film doesnt mean their word is law. im almost inclined to trust film academic types less actually. cos their enjoyment/appreciation of a film doesnt necessarily depend on it being enjoyable/good.

If this came out a decade ago, it would have compared unfavorably with all the VR/recursive loop-closing films that were the zeitgeisty flavor. Matrix, Existenz, Dark City, "Harsh Realm", even The Thirteenth Floor all tackled more or less the same plot more stylishly.

Or at maybe they just modeled their noirish worlds on Myst like adventure games which were still selling back then vs. the open world twitch console shooter that influences Inception.

On the bright side, we were spared the obligatory climactic fistfight with protagonists punching WITH THEIR BRAINS!

Hahaha I totally put the wrong fucking link there! Clipboard fail!

http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/inception/

That's the real link!

is the name dom cobb a reference to anything?

I kind of assume so, but I dunno what.

it was so literal. too literal.

A banal espionage plot, lots of people running around with guns, and DiCaprio as usual barely convincing as an adult. Reminded me a lot of that forgotten J-Lo pic The Gift, only that one was at least boring in a stylized way. I guess it's provoking "discussion" among people who don't usually go to movies because, like The Celestine Prophecy and The Alchemist, the movie offers a taste of something Deep and Spiritual along with the usual thrills.

The Cell, I meant.

Cobb was the name of a character from Nolan's first film. Figured he just liked the name. Or Ty Cobb. xposts.

lolling at the "WORST FILM EVER!" hyperbole

guys, there's a Cats Vs Dogs sequel coming out, you have to ration the ire so that it lasts all summer

if cats and dogs sequel goes around masquerading as high art cinema, and the critics buy it, i'll worst film ever that too

seems a bit unfair to rip on inception for 'masquerading as high art' just because a few critics and fanboys claim it as such. i don't think there's anything particularly pretentious about it, nor does it seem to make any claims to be anything other than a summer action/heist film.

as I said before I feel like the studio's secrecy about it did it a disservice. anyway, of the movies I've seen this summer, this ranks below toy story 3 and well above, uh, eclipse.

Mouthy, I'm glad to see an article that notes the DiCraprio character's odd similarity to Nolan himself! I thought I was nuts for noticing that.

ha this movie took in over $60M this weekend, I guess trippy trailers that don't really tell you the story are a good marketing angle

This interview with Dileep Rao (the Chemist) = top notch:

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/inceptions_dileep_rao_answers.html

There aren't many actors -- hell, many people -- able to tackle a question like this:

Q. What if Leo is the one being "incepted" with an idea? We keep hearing the phrase "Do you want to become an old man, filled with regret?" and it's like someone — maybe Ellen Page's character because she's the catalyst of his emotional catharsis — has set this all up so he can let go of his regret over Mal's death. That's why at the end with Saito he offers to come back and be young again (not old, full of regret). Even the Edith Piaf song they use to signal ten seconds before kick translates to "No, I regret nothing." And there's so many scenes where Ellen Page is talking to Leo, getting him to reveal his issues, in the same way that Eames tricks Fischer into revealing his issues. Also, Leo's kids are the same age at the end, right?

A. I'm not trying to be authoritative, so this is just my understanding of how I approached it from my work on it. But you're saying it's like some sort of crazy-ass psychotherapy session where the whole thing is a constructed narrative of massive complexity only to distract Cobb so that he will achieve his change? I mean sure, you could totally say that that's what it is. In a way, that's what we're doing to Fischer, so it's not unfounded.

The problem for me is that you're using negative evidence to support a story that isn't there. I don't know what to say about a character who only exists before and after the movie. You're talking about a character who isn't on screen. And I mean on one hand, it's awesome that this movie can sustain that kind of discussion. It shows you just how well-though-through and comprehensive it is, but I mean I don't know where that kind of speculation ends. It's like people who are convinced 9/11 is an inside job. It's a mental heuristic failure to think that one or two minor details explain absolutely everything. I mean, kids wear the same clothes all the time.

To me, it's a far more elegant story if it's a vast job that Leo has to pull off. The threat is real, the growth is real, the adversary is real. The weakness of "It's all a dream" — why we hate that, why we feel cheated when narratively anything is revealed to be all a dream — is that you've just asked me to spend so much time and emotional capital investing in the stakes of this, and you've now swept it away with the most anti-narrative structuralism that doesn't have anything to substitute in its place. It's laughing at you for even taking it seriously. You don't want to feel like a victim of the narrative, and I don't think Christopher Nolan would do that.

the last paragraph of that interview encapsulates almost exactly how I felt about the movie

okay someone splain this to me because I had a tough time with it. Maybe I am missing something. When Joshua Jordan Lovett is floating around in zero gravity in the fancy-schmancy hotel, gathering up all his bundled-together buddies, he explodes the elevator. AND IT FALLS? BUT HE IS IN ZERO GRAVITY. I DON'T GET IT, CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN PLS.

I am getting more and more annoyed at this movie as more time passes and more people post status updates on Facebook and make LJ icons about it.

also Ellen Page was a terribly miscast.

the answer to that = physics + movie handwaving

he first disconnected the elevator car from the supporting cable with the emergency brake on it so it would move in the shaft, then put explosives on the opposite side to act as rocket propulsion to shove it down the shaft

I still don't get why people who are espousing the "all a dream" theory aren't looking at middle ground. Why does it either have to be "all a dream"? Why couldn't some sequences that we thought were 'real' potentially be a dream, while others (such as the end) be real?

It's "all a dream" is lazy thinking IMO, and likely a product of our exposure to such lazy writing as depicted on Dallas, Roseanne, other tv shows ad nauseam. To be quite honest, the only part I even really thought was up for debate were the events after Cobb met with Saito in limbo. There were other pieces I interpreted (see thread above), but they were mostly attached to the 'alternate ending'. I mean it's not completely unrealistic either to think the events did all happen too, it's just fun to theorize alternates since Nolan left an 'out'.

curse the lazy writing of "Roseanne", it has ruined us all

he first disconnected the elevator car from the supporting cable with the emergency brake on it so it would move in the shaft, then put explosives on the opposite side to act as rocket propulsion to shove it down the shaft

And this was so it would hit the top/bottom of the shaft and generate the kick that they would not otherwise get in zero-g, right?

Correct.

xxpost well I specifically meant how they ended their last season by saying it was all a dream and Dan died, etc....

O WATE SORRY FOR NOT SAYING *SPOILER* GUYS...for those of u who don't no how roseanne ended yet :( :( :(

Damn you, San Te!

the last paragraph of that interview encapsulates almost exactly how I felt about the movie

It's a great point to bring up, isn't it? I remember wondering about that a bit in that brief few seconds between when he leaves the top behind him and the cut to black, then all of a sudden my mind was elsewhere...

dan, i'll trust your explanation because yr smart and went to harvard

Correct

Thank god. Because otherwise that whole sequence made me feel like I'd been on the gin all afternoon ("wait, he's now bundling them up in electrical flex, whaaaa?"), the amount I understood it. Let alone that the explosives would just have torn the liftcar to pieces rather than propelling it so daintily. As you say, "movie handwaving", still loved this film.

xp.

A banal espionage plot, lots of people running around with guns, and DiCaprio as usual barely convincing as an adult. Reminded me a lot of that forgotten J-Lo pic The Gift, only that one was at least boring in a stylized way. I guess it's provoking "discussion" among people who don't usually go to movies because, like The Celestine Prophecy and The Alchemist, the movie offers a taste of something Deep and Spiritual along with the usual thrills.

― I'm never gonna do it without the Lex on (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, July 19, 2010 8:09 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

where are these plebian, non-moviegoing-people "discussions" of how Deep and Spiritual this movie is? not on this thread.

there's really nothing spiritual in this movie AFAICT. fuckin' tomb raider movies are more spiritual.

i mean there's a lot of ways nolan COULD have fudged it with some lame spirituality, like introducing some ambiguity about whether marion cotillard's character was 'real,' like a ghost inhabiting leo's mind, but he dismisses that pretty soundly and thank god for that

yeah if anything, this movie is super clinical (one of the things I really liked about it)

the threat is real, the growth is real, the adversary is real

wait who is the adversary

a bunch of faceless, nameless projections? his crazy dead wife?

where the fuck is robert englund when u need him

I don't think the end says "it was all a dream" so much as "it was all a film". Which I think Nolan does very, very well, and why I think he's a great film-maker. I don't think this has ANYTHING in common with The Alchemist at all.

maybe Nolan leaving the audience without seeing the ending, as well as Leo (who abandons the totem to go see his kids) is his way of saying "Leo doesn't have to be paranoid anymore and can trust reality without looking at his totem".

But yea this movie is one definitely that was worth seeing twice.

how come the bus makes the hotel zero gravity but the zero gravity has no effect on the snow layer?

Easy -- all the dreamers in the zero gravity hotel are floating around calmly.

oh my god

It's "all a dream" is lazy thinking IMO, and likely a product of our exposure to such lazy writing as depicted on Dallas, Roseanne, other tv shows ad nauseam.

you forgot juicy

haha!

actually maybe "limbo" is actually biggie's pool party from the video...woah....

but wait if it was a dream did he really read Word Up magazine? or...did it exist?

the rappin' duke is actually the kid from 3rd rock from the sun! *passes out*

never thought this thread would take it this far

Meanwhile, a really, really sharp -- and moving -- piece by Hua Hsu here that specifically addresses the question about whether/why Inception is not really about dreams, and whether that's a flaw:

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/inception-ghost-town-ghost-faces/60016/

slim thug weighs in:

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5sgo28Oqw1qz7f9to1_500.jpg

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5sgo28Oqw1qz7f9to1_500.jpg

what was the first tv drama to do the "it was all a dream" conclusion? st elsewhere? or was there something earlier?

Newhart did it in 1990.

...which would have been long after St. Elsewhere.

Both Dallas and St Elsewhere were before that

i feel like st elsewhere did a pretty good job of that kinda denoument, especially when you factor in the whole tommy westphall universe meta theory, but i never saw the last episode of roseanne to see how bad it is or not

newhart was probably the first, but there's been lots

if the whole season was a dream, does that mean the commercials were too?

yes

no

possibly

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5sgo28Oqw1qz7f9to1_500.jpg

Hey guys did you see what slimthug had to say about it?

he summed up my feeligns pretty much exactly

it was too complicated for me its abt having dreams while u r dreaming and i missed parts cause i was sleep so i was lost

Slim Thug wasn't asleep...he was sleep

he wasnt dreaming, he was the-dream

I don't think the end says "it was all a dream" so much as "it was all a film".
haha but also oh yeah.

I don't think the end says "it was all a dream" so much as "i used to read word up magazine".

Great timing all around today guys, good job!

o im late

btw juicy

what if its all not a dream, yeah think abt it

mind blown

http://cdn.videogum.com/files/2010/07/inception_2.jpg

So should I bother seeing this or should I wait until it's inevitably used as the demonstration disc for every Blu-Ray set up in Fry's/Best Buy

More to the point, EVERY Nolan movie I've seen has been disappointing and I can't see how this could be any different.

prob read the thread

I did read the thread. Results hazy, try again?

this is the best movie ever its abt dreams... or maybe NOT

reception doesn't seem miles better than Dark Knight, maybe worse - so if you didn't like that, skip it?

all joking aside it was pretty rad, they wore beautiful clothes and went into dreams

it was better than dark knight, it was better than all his movies, i think no prob

Don't know that I'd go that far; I thought it was on par with "The Prestige" but not quite as involving as "Memento" or "The Dark Knight".

i dunno how the results are hazy in this thread, there's been a pretty overwhelmingly positive response, it has mostly varied in the degrees of positivity. there've been a few negatives but then what would an ilxor thread be etc etc...

Can I ask a dumb question? Is the beach where the movie starts a level-4 dream, or is it just a level-4 dream later in the movie? Does Leo come up through the levels at the beginning? Or is i just that level 4 during the main sequence is Leo's head? What the fuck? That's all.

I just interpreted the opening as a purely cinematic thing, where they show you a scene from the end, then loop back to the beginning and show you how it ties in later

the beach is level 4; that's the point where Leo is chasing after Ken Watanabe's character and then the story winds back to tell you how he got there

xpost: ya exactly, it's kind of disorienting when they do out-of-sequence movie tricks in a movie where you kind of can't take anything you see at face value, lol

i thought it was about as good as the dark knight and memento and nowhere near as good as the prestige

the prestige was pretty sweet, i forgot abt that

you know whats a dope movie harsh times

i dunno how the results are hazy in this thread, there's been a pretty overwhelmingly positive response, it has mostly varied in the degrees of positivity. there've been a few negatives but then what would an ilxor thread be etc etc...

I dunno. I can't help but get a "Nolan gets a free pass because of Dark Knight" Harry Knowles-style positivity.

It's just annoying because I should like Nolan a lot, but all of his movies have ultimately been disappointing - especially after a second viewing. (I take back all my previous positive comments on The Prestige after trying to watch it again)

rewatched the prestige this weekend and it was just as awesome the second time, fyi

OK, that all makes sense (re level 4). I do want to see this a second time.

Elvis: sounds like yer mind is already made up then.

so did you guys think of Last Year at Marienbad?

"Everyone was accusing me of ripping it off, but I actually never got around to seeing it. Funnily enough, I saw it and I’m like, Oh, wow. There are bits of “Inception” that people are going to think I ripped that straight out of 'Last Year at Marienbad.' Basically, what it means is, I’m ripping off the movies that ripped off “Last Year at Marienbad,” without having seen the original. It’s that much a source of ideas, really, about the relationships between dream and memory and so forth, which is very much what 'Inception' deals with. But we have way more explosions."

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2010/07/chris-nolan-says-inception.html

not enough explosions in last year at marienbad, imo

I've only seen Marienbad once but thoroughly enjoyed it. It has almost nothing in common with Inception, which isn't really a movie about dreams anyway.

Elvis: sounds like yer mind is already made up then.

Actually you're right! I will leave this thread alone then.

There's only faint Marienbadisms in the seeming abuse at the center of DiCaprio and Cotillard's relationship ... but they were married, unlike A and X.

Last Year at Marienbad is more or less the film adaptation of Casares' The Invention of Morel, which beat Borges to the punch of inventing dream-VR in 1940. Its been referenced so many times (explicitly in Lost) that its some sort of unrecognized Urtext for this sort of thing. Inception may borrow more from Morel than from Marienbad, as in addition to the slowly tracked shots of elegantly coifed watchers watching watchers, it has beached dreamers awaking in the surf, secret basements and probably a few other borrowings as well.

Strangely, Morel has never been optioned for a direct adaptation; as with indefinitely delayed Neuromancer film, its inventions are so much genre convention by now that its well-nigh impossible to make it new for the mass audience.

this was a more interesting and watchable guiltrip for Leo than Shutter Island, but if you make four layers of dreams and all of them are shootouts, you're not as imaginative a writer/director as you think.

my brain hurts. i see like one new movie a month if i'm lucky at this point, i don't think i was ready

people shouldn't have to debate whether there was a logical reason for characters to fly in a dream, or whether the times sync up. People dream about flying without their bodies actually being in mid-air! That's why dreams are cool!

Choose your cruelly unavailable dream brunette:

http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/The-Invention-of-Morel.jpghttp://dearcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/last-year-at-marienbad.jpg
http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/images/marion-cotillard-1.jpg

^^^^^

Eric H. likes this post.

One has more explosions.

what borges story has dream-vr in it? i liked morel ok but not nearly as much as i like the borges ive read

To clarify for max, Borges (who was a huge fan of Morel before it was published) couldn't invent dream-VR because it was already staked.

oh i see. i was hoping he had a good dream-vr story.

i knew that he and morel were friends thanks to the nyrb editions intro. i love the little drawings in that book.

or rather, casares

they even wrote a book together!

or rather, some stories, i think

imaginative stuff:

the people staring thing
people tearing you to shreds thing
being able to go into a dream
being able to go into a dream inside a dream
the projections, the totems, the limbo world
the syncing of layers with music and kicks
the effects of gravity on other layers
the stuff like the endless staircase that an architect is forced to use
being able to shape-shift after you are in a dream
getting killed to leave the dream or alternately ending up in limbo
the idea of stealing secrets or planting thoughts (without being able to do it directly)
....

there was lots of imagination put into this movie besides the artsy stuff like a city folding on itself

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

i think a good bit of bickering about this movie is because people weren't willing to accept all the made up dream rules

the effects of gravity on other layers

dreams getting weird because of external stimuli is observant, dreams ONLY getting weird because of external stimuli is the opposite of imaginative

I don't think the bickering here & elsewhere about Inception is because people resent the free pass Nolan gets after The Dark Knight. I think it's because TDK put his head above the parapet.

xpost and only one guy could shape-shift during the dream, though ellen page was able to give everybody ski suits

http://i32.tinypic.com/29vgyux.jpg

^The inclusion of this after credits were over would've explained so much^

/the effects of gravity on other layers/

dreams getting weird because of external stimuli is observant, dreams ONLY getting weird because of external stimuli is the opposite of imaginative

Except that the team put a lot of work in to STOP the dreams getting weird so that the subject doesn't realise they're dreaming. These aren't regular dreams, they're constructed, shared dreams in which the sharers are lucid.

Except that the team put a lot of work in to STOP the dreams getting weird so that the subject doesn't realise they're dreaming.

yeah, two and a half hours of this sure feels like a waste of $200 milion.

i agree that the non-weirdness was a letdown but it was still fun if u got over your desire to see weird dreams onscreen

that said if i had access to a fantasy dreamworld where i could create whatever i wanted, i sure wouldn't make it a shrine to my old apartments.

less fun than A-Team, Twilight, Knight And Day, MacGruber...basically every movie I saw that WASN'T set in the subconscious

haha I mean Eclipse, I'll take this over New Moon

"I don't like it, it wasn't like my own dreams!"

Leo looking haunted between shootouts >>> Kristen Stewart looking haunted between trees

xpost oh ffs

it was still fun if u got over your desire to see weird dreams onscreen

This really is key for me here -- the strongest complaints about the film from friends have been "But he didn't do any really crazy shit!" I went in intrigued by the general idea of heist + dream + cast + Nolan and as a thriller it worked just fine for me, so I had no regrets about seeing, I don't know, Sting's blue turtles or whatever.

btw, they WERE old when they did the train tracks thing; it was just misremembered. A shot late on was quite explicit about this.

xpost -- About NOT seeing etc. Though I would regret seeing anything to do with Sting these days anyway.

no WAY this was less fun than fuckin 'knight and day'

If you want to see Gilliam, watch Gilliam.

i owe my friend a ticket to PREDATORS because i thought this movie would be amazing, but it's SO BAD! wtf wtf wtf

no WAY this was less fun than fuckin 'knight and day'

Did you see it? I know a lot of critics just went "Tom Cruise AIYEEE" but I enjoyed watching the guy battle his demons in a psychotic dreamworld.

If you want to see Gilliam, watch Gilliam.

But I didn't! I wanted to see an exciting film with a charismatic cast set in dreams! Gilliam only would have given me the "in dreams" part.

re: gravity being imaginative
it was more imaginative seeing a slowed down time perspective of a van rolling causing the hotel to roll tjan having the movie not play with gravity at all. plus the van dropping off the bridge resulting in a zero gravity hotel scene.

as for "there wasn't enough weird stuff in the dreams" argument I must say that we never saw a dream that hadn't been made by an architect. the limbo stuff was a dream in a sense but it wasn't very random because it had been designed a good bit during Leo's 50 year or longer stay

Meanwhile, nice quick interview with Tom Hardy that went into why he disappeared for a while there.

On a roffle note, some Wall Street Journal affiliated rich dork invokes the movie. Because it's timely, you see.

http://www.impawards.com/1984/posters/dreamscape.jpg

DOH!

http://fusedfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/803.jpg

Did Drew Struzan do that or was it just a knockoff?

xpost^Now that's the good shit right there.

But as far as movies where a director with money to burn BLOWS YO MIND and a megastar wrestles with memories of The One That Got Away, this didn't hurt like Vanilla Sky.

So is the consensus that the dream worlds run 4 deep (plunging van, zero-g hotel, snow prison, Saito (or Cobb's) limbo). If so, The Saragossa Manuscript still holds the record for most levels of recursive storytelling, nesting 6 deep once and 5 deep quite a few times. Not a bedtime film, unless you revel in the confusion.

shameless plug: discussion on this got a little heated on the podcast I co-host. some mild spoilers. review starts around the 15-minute mark.

Part of me agrees with this take - http://chud.com/articles/articles/24477/1/NEVER-WAKE-UP-THE-MEANING-AND-SECRET-OF-INCEPTION/Page1.html

this movie is like donnie darko: the director's cut except:
-minus atmosphere
-minus intelligent humor (OMFG THAT ONE TERRIBLE JOKE WHERE HE PULLED OUT THE BIGGER GUN?!)
-minus ANY EMOTION WHATSOEVER
-minus awesome soundtrack
-minus imagination
-plus a middling protagonist
-plus a generic hans zimmer score (wtf, stop praising this bullshit)
-plus even more dull explication
-plus juno
-plus (admittedly competent) action sequences

the thing about inception and TDK is that nolan is trying way too hard to come up with something thats a masterpiece/art so its just far too po faced. its not even enjoyable on a pure explosions and heists and CGI level.

its just a pretty boring, bloated, patience testing movie, admittedly with a few moments of emotional resonance where you care a teeny bit about the characters (well, leo) and some intrigue, though it doesnt really reward you for any of that cos its such a big fucking mess.

If this movie was anything like Donnie Darko I would have set fire to the screen.

wow I expected some of the above arguments from Yahoo! Movies users....

so sad that people don't agree with me : (

http://ikbenangie.nl/joomla/images/jmovies/img_pictures/innerspace1.jpg

"hay guyz if Inception was like the reel dream world there'd be flying hot dogs and antelopes who sing german operas fuk dis i want my money bak also there was a pred ship in fischers dream"

had a dream last nite i ate amazing food for like a week straight, inception was nothing like that smh

"hay guyz if Inception was like the reel dream world there'd be flying hot dogs and antelopes who sing german operas fuk dis i want my money bak also there was a pred ship in fischers dream"

you're right, its wrong to suggest that we can do better than three mundane action movies happening concurrently with Shutter Island.

If Ridley Scott's Monopoly works out maybe Nolan can do Rubik's Cube: The Movie.

or maybe he can consolidate 6 sylvester stallone movies into pill form

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/ellen_pages_outfits_in_incepti.html

According to our very informal survey of grad students (er, our friends), neckerchiefs are not currently a staple of the PhD crowd, and yet she dons one in every single scene

except in the hotel and in the snow fortress...

guys shes a lesbian

I feel like a lot of the people that really hated this movie were predisposed to hating it before they even walked in to the theater.

i was only predisposed to the idea that it might not make sense.

I feel like a lot of the people that really liked this movie were predisposed to liking it before they even walked into the theater. HOW YA LIKE THEM APPLES?

i liked dark knight and i got up at 7am on a sunday so i could imax it before i left town because i was so excited about it. it's rubbish.

this feels like snes vs. mega drive all over again

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Soy6V1eKImA/S-kholQ8OAI/AAAAAAAAADc/FgF2JUKN9gg/s400/discreetcharm1.jpg

^^^ Buñuel should have given Fernando Rey a shotgun.

actually for both this and TDK, i was thinking they would both be great, amazing, huge cinematic experiences, and went on the first day of release for both, but they both left me a bit annoyed.

It's also kind of sad to see how Nolan is regarded as an "auteur" director of big budget films, when 20 years ago you had someone like Verhoeven whose films were 100% more intelligent and entertaining.

And his movies are long as hell.

so can we quit comparing this to Shutter Island simply because the events were surreal and Leonardo DiCaprio is in it? cuz I can't think of a more lazy comparison.

Okay I loved loved TDK and mostly liked Inception, but certainly don't out Nolan in the "auteur" category. He just makes summer blockbusters I happen to enjoy.

2 hrs 20 mins=epic

cuz I can't think of a more lazy comparison.

dude, both movies are about a guy who's bad at his job because he's haunted by guilty visions of his dead crazy wife. It's not just that "events were surreal."

I went in a Dark Knight fan who hoped the film would be entertaining enough to make up for the fact that dream movies can't really "add up". But for all my joshing about dream math vs. dream logic, I think caek best summed it up: if you're going to make a movie about the mind that is kind of centred around a relationship drama then that relationship should be one that faces real problems. use the very clever macguffin to explore human drama, not to explore the very clever macguffin. And if the movie's just about the trickery there's no reason to be so dour about it and not have more fun with your massive palette.

I haven't seen Shutter Island but DiCaprio's scrunchy faces can't be as intense as they are in Inception.

xpost and in both films the "job" itself may be (or is) a figment of his imagination inspired by the guilt

Honest question -- has he ever made a 'fun' movie to start with?

(He meaning Nolan.)

yea if you approach the movies from a very distant synopsis it becomes very easy to compare the two! also Robocop=Robot Jox because they feature cyborgs/robots in dystopian pics.

probably not. I don't go to Nolan movies for fun though -- I see plenty of fun movies daily/weekly and don't go to Nolan films saying "hmm I sure hope this is a rollicking romp". which I suspect was yr point!

also the events weren't a figment of Leo's imagination -- I still don't get how anybody could think the whole movie was a dream.

nolan is the blockbuster guy that makes people feel like theyre watching something smart.