Inception

Okay you guys. Lets do this.

First of all, is there anyone out there who actually liked this movie? It was up for a million Oscars, so I guess the answer to that is “Yes.” People also seem to love Velveeta cheese, endless illegal wars and paying for their own health insurance, though, so lets leave public opinion out of this one.

I somehow never saw Inception, even though the preview was awesome, and even though it looked like the kind of movie I would enjoy. I just missed the boat on it completely. I think I was in grad school, which is a time in your life when vast chunks of pop culture pass by you in a wink and you wake up one day never having heard of Aerosmith. So, we watched it last night. It was meant to be a double feature with Blade Runner but then we spent so much time talking about Inception that it was too late to watch Blade Runner and then we were both so pissed because we could have been watching Blade Runner that whole time.

I had been under the impression that the plot of Inception was labyrinthine, that there was at least one twist ending, if not more, etc. Instead, it was the straightest film on earth! It was just a straight-ahead James Bond espionage thriller, it just took place in a bunch of weird videogame-set dreams. There was no twist–or, I guess the twist was that he planted the idea that made her kill herself? HO HUM. I thought at the very least it was going to be a modern take on the “it was all a dream / waking up from a dream and then pulling back the covers and your feet are all muddy and then you go NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” trope, like I figured the wife must be right, and that she HAD woken up when she jumped off the building, and at the end of the movie we’d realize the entire movie had been a dream, and the crack dream-espionage team was actually sent by the wife down into his subconscious to bring him back to reality or something. And when he wakes up it turns out he is actually Daniel Day Lewis. Or else the whole movie is a dream because he really did murder his wife and is hiding in his subconscious, OH NO! And like, even that would have been kind of obvious and hackneyed. But we didn’t even get THAT!

I now know for sure that Christopher Nolan has less imagination than a pile of dirty ol’ rocks, but he desperately strives to cover up this fact–which he knows subconsciously–just like in the movie!!!!!–with increasingly bananas special effects and crazy visuals, which he believes are the same thing as “being imaginative.” But the story was the most rote, boring-ass story, the performances were horrible, except for Cillian Murphy who I would watch even if he was just sitting in a chair unmoving for seventeen hours, and can we talk about the dialogue? Honestly, who writes dialogue like that? It was like dialogue you’d write in 10th grade. The aging eggs in my ovaries could do a better job and they don’t even have brains. Every line delivered with 100% sincerity. It was like a Max Fischer play except not intended to be funny. We kept laughing inappropriately.

“Am I dreaming right now?”
“NO. This is a dream within a dream.”
“Whose dream is it”
“My dream”
“YOUR dream!!!!????”
“I told you, the dreamer dreams, the architect creates the world the dream builds in the dreamer’s dream. Dream.”
“Why is everyone staring at me”
“Inside a dream a person’s subconscious knows the dreaming dreamer’s dream has been changed by an intruding dreamer dreaming. The dream ends up with you dying or something.”
“OH MY GOD I’M SUDDENLY FURIOUS AND SCREAMING AT YOU”
“I don’t wanna talk about it”
“I’m going with you in the other dream because ‘they need someone there who understands what you’re struggling with.'” (<--actual line) Batman was the same way. Christopher Nolan just showing a bunch of random shit that is like flipping through google images of "occupy" and then he's like "look at this incredibly deep film I made." When what he really made was a billion-dollar screensaver that gives you a throbbing migraine. I also just remembered that he did The Prestige, which I loathed. It seems like Christopher Nolan is just not my kind of guy. I guess to each his own. Can you even imagine how many millions of dollars that man has, though? Doesn't it make you just a little bit annoyed?? There are a trillion increasingly-irritating plot holes in Inception, but, just for the most nagging one: what is the deal with limbo? Leo is like "oh no I forgot to tell you, if we die in this dream we don't wake up, we go into limbo, where every second lasts a hundred years, and you forget who you are, and there's no way out, EVER. By the time you came back to reality your brain would be mush! You won't even remember that phone call you were going to make! OH GOD THE HORROR!" but then they do go to limbo and then they all just wake up like normal. I guess limbo wasn't that big of a deal after all. The Japanese guy lives for 100 years in limbo and then Leo wakes him up and he just goes "whoa what a crazy dream" and immediately starts dialing the phone. So yeah, actually no biggie, lets all go to limbo all the time. Were we supposed to care about Leo's character? He was the most cardboard, one dimensional character I've ever seen. Oh he's no longer wanted for his wife's murder, thank god, I was so worried. And also now Cillian Murphy has just been successfully manipulated into ruining his inheritance so some other guy can buy his company? Is that the big urgent espionage goal I'm supposed to bite my nails over? Cillian Murphy seemed like a good guy! WTF Was the "twist" supposed to be that we don't know if he's still dreaming or not at the very end because we don't see the top stop spinning? Can we all just acknowledge that that is the stupidest ending in movie history, not counting Planet of the Apes or AI? It was just like a videogame alternate reality, like people's dreams are just like shoot-em-up videogames. The movie so squandered its potential! What if, to do espionage in someone's dream, you had to, for example, actually interact with all the "projections" of their subconscious, instead of just wading/shooting your way through them as though they are all faceless ciphers? So much more interesting if they actually interacted with the representations of the subconscious. Like if they went and found somebody's mother in there, and had some sort of creepy symbol-ridden seemingly-nonsensical dialogue with her, because they were actually speaking to THE REAL DREAMER, just at a level beneath his conscious awareness? Like maybe they have to go figure out which projections represent which Jungian archetypes in order to put together the puzzle of a person's character. That would have been mind-blowing. Instead it was just gun battles. Not like dreams at all--not the creepy feel of dreams, or the disconnected logic of dreams, or anything. "It's as though the idea for the movie itself was planted in his mind by someone else and then he coldly executed it in a way that reveals he doesn't understand what is cool about his own idea."--my old man WHAT WAS COOL: - Joseph Gordon Levitt having that fight in the hallway that was spinning around - the classic paris-folding-on-top-of-itself moment - Cillian Murphy WHAT WAS BORING, HACKY, AND OTHERWISE POORLY REALIZED: - every other aspect of the film THERE I SAID IT And guess what? In this I am in total agreement with one of my arch-nemeses, David Denby, who pronounced the movie "a folly" and Christopher Nolan "a literal-minded man," and also got in some digs at Hans Zimmer's unbearable score.

But who cares if Cobb gets back to two kids we don’t know? And why would we root for one energy company over another? There’s no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream-world struggle between C.E.O.s. It can’t be a coincidence that Tony Gilroy’s “Duplicity” (2009), which was also about industrial espionage, played time games, too. The over-elaboration of narrative devices in both movies suggests that the directors sensed that there was nothing at the heart of their stories to stir the audience.

DENBY! AT LAST WE MEET, OLD FRIEND

(oh god. If you agree with Denby does that mean that you’re WRONG, though, because he’s always wrong? Or is it more like how even a stopped clock is right twice a day? Lets just say it’s the latter)