Inception - Chris Nolan + Leo DiCaprio = best movie of the summer?

some of it was, but the parts i'm speaking about really reminded me of some of Gondry's work. Using totally realistic looking elements from our everyday life unobscured and fully lit contorting or showing them in impossible states. I can't really think of any other artist working on film who've done things like this. The part where the city folded in on itself was some of the most inventive use of CGI i've seen to date. The only way i could describe it is setting up a hyperrealism type of feel and breaking it apart with a surrealistic event. Some of the stuff from eternal sunshine was on the other side of the spectrum, total surrealism & weird grittiness ie: the house on the beach filling with sand or reverting to infancy scene. Not all of Gondry's work has the guerilla feel, when im drawing the comparison im only talking about a certain segment of his work.

something about Nolan's clean, surgical and minimalist approach to dream imagery really appeals to me. I could definitely see where people are coming from who wanted more crazy imagery but for me it worked. I think if the dreams were more magical and 'dream like' the times where the rules of reality got broken wouldn't have been as striking.

  On 7/22/2010 at 1:10 AM, Awepittance said:

some of it was, but the parts i'm speaking about really reminded me of some of Gondry's work. Using totally realistic looking elements from our everyday life unobscured and fully lit contorting or showing them in impossible states. I can't really think of any other artist working on film who've done things like this. The part where the city folded in on itself was some of the most inventive use of CGI i've seen to date. The only way i could describe it is setting up a hyperrealism type of feel and breaking it apart with a surrealistic event. Some of the stuff from eternal sunshine was on the other side of the spectrum, total surrealism & weird grittiness ie: the house on the beach filling with sand or reverting to infancy scene. Not all of Gondry's work has the guerilla feel, when im drawing the comparison im only talking about a certain segment of his work.

something about Nolan's clean, surgical and minimalist approach to dream imagery really appeals to me. I could definitely see where people are coming from who wanted more crazy imagery but for me it worked. I think if the dreams were more magical and 'dream like' the times where the rules of reality got broken wouldn't have been as striking.

I agree overall that Nolan's style worked well for the most part and I'm not saying the dreams should be like waking life or trippy shit 100% of the time, I just think when the reality of the dream starts to collapse, more interesting things could have happened. Creating an even larger contrast.

it wouldn't have hurt the movie, i feel you there. I obviously could have done with less gun fighting, and more lucid dreaming heroics (like the part where he pulls out a bigger gun)

crossing my fingers Nolan does more movies like this, i've never disliked a filmmaker this much and then had a 180 this hard

re: youtube video: good music too by Hans Zimmer which was ultra surprising

  On 7/22/2010 at 1:28 AM, Awepittance said:

it wouldn't have hurt the movie, i feel you there. I obviously could have done with less gun fighting, and more lucid dreaming heroics (like the part where he pulls out a bigger gun)

Yeah I mean theres really infinite possibilities with this concept and as I have said, I just feel like the whole experience felt too safe, like it was holding itself back from really impressing. Its one of the best movies of the year (this year was shit though) and I need to see it again soon, but even if I learn of new meanings/symbolism that I once didn't realize, I still think I'll be slightly disappointed because Nolan didn't really pull a Kubrick or something and go outside of his comfort zones. I also think Inception lacked a good amount of emotion. I didn't care much about Cobb and his wife, or if he'd see his kids again. I wanted more surreal uneasiness, more disturbing imagery as Cobb loses more and more control. Limbo could have also been far more perverted and bizarre too

With that said I do agree that this is Nolan's best, I've never been much of a fan of his batmans and the prestige was interesting but kind of dull

agree with most of the criticism's and most of the things everyone loves of the film

It was a great movie but the thing that frustrates me is the concept has so much potential. I think said early back when the first trailer came out that I guessed there was going be a lot of lucid dreaming discussed and shown in the film like a story I have been writing in my head and it felt like my idea was stolen from thin air. I thought seeing the film it was going to be like oh shit hes going to blow the lid off of lucid dreaming for mainstream society and idea's like mine will be considered copycats. Then come to see it didn't go that deep into the possibilities at all. This kind of concept could go so much further. Yet there will probably not be a sequel.. but even if there were it would pretty impossible for them explain yeah now with the budget we are going to actually get the dream worlds right and be all surreal, distorting, amazingly trippy etc. To actually discuss lucid dreaming and demonstrate the complexity of consistently achieving it etc. Having the first film were the dream worlds don't look like dreams it would make sense to have a sequel where dreams were dreams.

I would think movies/books in the future that could have fleshed out the possibilities of using lucid dreaming so much in the story will now be considered copycats or never see the light of day because of that.

There's way more potential for the concept than we will probably ever see for quite a few reasons though

I liked Inception and hated Synecdoche.

Fuck your trashbear. Synecdoche wasn't art. It was just pretentious bullshit.

  On 7/22/2010 at 7:16 AM, jefferoo said:

Fuck your trashbear. Synecdoche wasn't art. It was just pretentious bullshit.

Well, you can all dogpile me since saying anything negative about this will be treated like walking into an LOTR convention and pissing on Tolkien's writing.

This movie was really boring and had every signature problem of a Nolan project. Humorless, soulless, cold, and just about completely unmoving on an emotional level.

I was reminded of much of the criticism that was leveled at the latest Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. E.g. - An insufferably action-packed film with almost nothing at stake. In Quantum, some baddy was apparently about to acquire, maybe, just perhaps, full control over the water supply of a third world country. *GASPPPPP* With Inception, a generic sockpuppet caricature of a Japanese, pseudo-yakuza type, just HAS to make sure he has a monopoly on....rice...or oil...or electricity...or who gives a flying fuck? Meanwhile, Leo lost an exotic piece of ass, his wife we're told, in one of these dream experiments gone haywire.

So, in other words, Nolan concocted this puerile wank of a plot as the excuse to spend hundreds of millions on some hi-tech dorky filmgasms he woke up all sticky to once upon a time. I'm happy for him and I'm happy that so many people derived a bit of summer joy out of the concept of Fortune 500 families protecting their dreams with ninjas set against metal gear solid backdrops.

I got a giggle out of some of the tech, but holy fuck, not my cup of tea. I suspect I'll be the first and last to not love Inception around here and I'm jealous of you all.

Nolan's films, updated to include the latest:

Following - I tried, but turned it off when it felt too much like Pi in terms of acting.

Memento - shit

Insomnia - shit

Batman Begins - complete dogshit

The Prestige - damned good

The Dark Knight - meh

Inception - about 90% shit; a compelling concept ruined by Nolan's affinity for GI Joe / James Bond storytelling

man why you gotta be so negative

loved it even more the second time around....

Inception is full of emotion.....

the cinematography/score/editing/sound design/script/acting are amazing and it is the best film of the year so far....

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2010/07/219074/inception-eye-catching-and-profound-usher-concert

Pretty much.

the fuck that is...?

Roger Ebert speaks:

It's said that Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing his screenplay for "Inception." That must have involved prodigious concentration, like playing blindfold chess while walking a tight-wire. The film's hero tests a young architect by challenging her to create a maze, and Nolan tests us with his own dazzling maze. We have to trust him that he can lead us through, because much of the time we're lost and disoriented. Nolan must have rewritten this story time and again, finding that every change had a ripple effect down through the whole fabric.

The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told at all. Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there. And telling you how it got there would produce bafflement. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It's a breathtaking juggling act, and Nolan may have considered his "Memento" (2000) a warm-up; he apparently started this screenplay while filming that one. It was the story of a man with short-term memory loss, and the story was told backwards.

Like the hero of that film, the viewer of "Inception" is adrift in time and experience. We can never even be quite sure what the relationship between dream time and real time is. The hero explains that you can never remember the beginning of a dream, and that dreams that seem to cover hours may only last a short time. Yes, but you don't know that when you’re dreaming. And what if you're inside another man's dream? How does your dream time synch with his? What do you really know?

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate raider of the highest order. He infiltrates the minds of other men to steal their ideas. Now he is hired by a powerful billionaire to do the opposite: To introduce an idea into a rival's mind, and do it so well he believes it is his own. This has never been done before; our minds are as alert to foreign ideas as our immune system is to pathogens. The rich man, named Saito (Ken Watanabe), makes him an offer he can't refuse, an offer that would end Cobb's forced exile from home and family.

Cobb assembles a team, and here the movie relies on the well-established procedures of all heist movies. We meet the people he will need to work with: Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his longtime associate; Eames (Tom Hardy), a master at deception; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a master chemist. And there is a new recruit, Ariadne (Ellen Page), a brilliant young architect who is a prodigy at creating spaces. Cobb also goes to touch base with his father-in-law Miles (Michael Caine), who knows what he does and how he does it. These days Michael Caine need only appear on a screen and we assume he's wiser than any of the other characters. It's a gift.

But wait. Why does Cobb need an architect to create spaces in dreams? He explains to her. Dreams have a shifting architecture, as we all know; where we seem to be has a way of shifting. Cobb's assignment is the "inception" (or birth, or wellspring) of a new idea in the mind of another young billionaire, Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), heir to his father's empire. Saito wants him to initiate ideas that will lead to the surrender of his rival's corporation. Cobb needs Ariadne

to create a deceptive maze-space in Fischer's dreams so that (I think) new thoughts can slip in unperceived. Is it a coincidence that Ariadne is named for the woman in Greek mythology who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur's labyrinth?

Cobb tutors Ariadne on the world of dream infiltration, the art of controlling dreams and navigating them. Nolan uses this as a device for tutoring us as well. And also as the occasion for some of the movie's astonishing special effects, which seemed senseless in the trailer but now fit right in. The most impressive to me takes place (or seems to) in Paris, where the city literally rolls back on itself like a roll of linoleum tile.

Protecting Fischer are any number of gun-wielding bodyguards, who may be working like the mental equivalent of antibodies; they seem alternatively real and figurative, but whichever they are, they lead to a great many gunfights, chase scenes and explosions, which is the way movies depict conflict these days. So skilled is Nolan that he actually got me involved in one of his chases, when I thought I was relatively immune to scenes that have become so standard. That was because I cared about who was chasing and being chased.

If you've seen any advertising at all for the film, you know that its architecture has a way of disregarding gravity. Buildings tilt. Streets coil. Characters float. This is all explained in the narrative. The movie is a perplexing labyrinth without a simple through-line, and is sure to inspire truly endless analysis on the web.

Nolan helps us with an emotional thread. The reason Cobb is motivated to risk the dangers of inception is because of grief and guilt involving his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), and their two children. More I will not (in a way, cannot) say. Cotillard beautifully embodies the wife in an idealized way. Whether we are seeing Cobb's memories or his dreams is difficult to say--even, literally, in the last shot. But she makes Mal function as an emotional magnet, and the love between the two provides an emotional constant in Cobb's world, which is otherwise ceaselessly shifting.

"Inception" works for the viewer, in a way, like the world itself worked for Leonard, the hero of "Memento." We are always in the Now. We have made some notes while getting Here, but we are not quite sure where Here is. Yet matters of life, death and the heart are involved--oh, and those multi-national corporations, of course. And Nolan doesn't pause before using well-crafted scenes from spycraft or espionage, including a clever scheme on board a 747 (even explaining why it must be a 747).

The movies often seem to come from the recycling bin these days: Sequels, remakes, franchises. "Inception" does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does. I thought there was a hole in "Memento:" How does a man with short-term memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss? Maybe there's a hole in "Inception" too, but I can't find it. Christopher Nolan reinvented "Batman." This time he isn't reinventing anything. Yet few directors will attempt to recycle "Inception." I think when Nolan left the labyrinth, he threw away the map.

and Overlook, how was the zero gravity scene made?

Ebert hasn't been useful for at least 10 years. Sad, but true. (In fact, his Inception review is downright ridiculous and should be used to wipe up Nolan's post-wank jizz.)

As to your question...who cares?

I knew you would say that...

you don't fucking know....

not a person I have talked to can figure it out.....

you only hate hype, admit it!

and I don't agree with everything Ebert thinks but I still agree with him more than most critics....

How the fuck do you hate so much and not off yourself the first chance you get?

You need some inspiration from somewhere....

Pretty disturbing...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/jul/16/inception-sceptics

  Quote

To suggest that Chris Nolan's blockbuster is anything less than genius is to invite torrents of abuse from fans. But is a bad review necessarily one that disagrees with you?

 

So, is there anything left to say about Inception other than to remind anyone who hadn't noticed that it's out today and offer directions to the nachos? After all, by this stage, reviews do feel a little beside the point. If the write-up is enthused, as the bulk thus far have been, it tends to fade into the general white noise of the marketing campaign. If not – well, heaven help us all.

 

Ask, for instance, Stephanie Zacharek of the recently revived Movieline, a critic with an unjaded passion for movies and a hugely readable way of expressing it, but also one whose opinion of Christopher Nolan's dream-hopping epic was less than glowing. "Forced [and] elephantine," she wrote this week, her adjectives tough but only in the context of a typically meticulous weighing of the evidence. This, however, was all too much for many of the site's readers. "So you were too dumb to understand Inception so you gave a negative review?" went the first response, leading the way for a torrent of bile during which Zacharek was variously accused of being moronic, laughable, clueless, ignorant, unprofessional, and a "sourpuss of minimal credibility trying to score cheap website hits" who gave a good review to Furry Vengeance while being told what to write by her bosses and/or parents. And on (and on) it went, with the name-calling echoed in other venues that failed to fall in line with the gooier critical consensus.

  On 7/22/2010 at 11:14 AM, Atop said:

 

How the fuck do you hate so much and not off yourself the first chance you get?

 

You need some inspiration from somewhere....

 

Pretty disturbing...

Well, Cody, thanks for at least not calling me retarded for not finding Inception "inspiring".

There are at least three people posting to this thread who are probably wondering, "WTF? Why don't I love this movie as much as Cody?"

I will chime in to let them know they're not alone and offer up some ideas, but please don't digress into the very boring topic of my negativity.

Here is another review I'm re-posting from another site (it feels like it was written by me but it wasn't):

  Quote

I'm surprised to come here and see this film garner such thorough praise, as I was exhausted and overwhelmed throughout. I went in with no predisposed notions about it, I hadn't even seen a trailer.

 

I can't even begin to explain how much I resent Nolan's signatures - an awful, overwhelming score during action sequences (which the entire first and third acts of this film are); those fucking helicopter flyovers of any new setting introduced; and banal conversation that absolutely fails to engage the viewer in the concept of the film. I'm not asking for some loopy mess, but to militarize dreams into a rigid, shoot-em-up blockbuster is exhausting when a film like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind captured the concept of the subconscious with a breezy simplicity that felt organic without divurging into the nonsensical.

 

Here we get the wet dreams of a chronic videogamer: slick chases, shiny hotel rooms, even a snowy espionage mission. Heap the bad dialogue and unforgivably Alan Wake-ish "cutscenes" (I mean, really, we're dealing with a videogame here - the father and wife goofiness is just the "press start to skip" hamminess that desperately aims to tie the huge setpieces together and in a lot of ways, fails miserably) on and you've got a pretty difficult sit for anyone expecting anything remotely engaging. Every single role in this film is either thankless (especially Page's - it's all "ask DiCaprio a question, act surprised, give advice, repeat") or majorly expendable (why is Gordon-Levitt here, again?).

 

The whole film is a self-serious masturbatory fantasy for any director who dreams of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on what amounts to a predictable Twilight Zone episode, and the thought of ever having to sit through it again is far more terrifying than any cinematic torture that I can imagine. Sorry, folks. I just can't see the appeal of this film, whatsoever, but I'm glad you all enjoyed it.

  On 7/22/2010 at 11:05 AM, Atop said:

and Overlook, how was the zero gravity scene made?

Are you sincerely wondering this? The movie cost $200 million. Might it have been.....uhhhh....an anti-gravity chamber?

I'm not saying the effect wasn't fun to watch, but I felt like I was being hit over the fucking head with it and it got a bit exhausting (like most of Nolan's stuff).

Ok, so let's say he did use a plane to create zero gravity?

He put the entire set inside of a plane and shot that scene in a plane while it was nose diving?

This does not impress you to the point where even if the rest of the film did actually suck, you still could not respect him for doing such a thing in the name of art?

i keep trying to post this but the fucking forum keeps crashing for me

they made the zero g scenes by putting the whole room on hydraulics and rotating it

they also used wires

Still impressive...

looked for the most part like no gravity....

One reason I love this film: at this point, the zero gravity scene with Arthur figuring out a way to wake everyone up synced with the other dreams, there are four levels of dream, each with a different time frame, making me jizz in my pants because of the awesome imagination put into this idea of dream time reference differentiation...all conjecture but the idea is one of the reasons I love the film

still haven't seen it, but the fact that mirezzi/overlook liked the prestige is cause for concern, as that's the only Nolan I've liked, too. I have a feeling I'll probably end up agreeing with him.