pinback wrote:Prestige sucked. Inception is forgettable, and as such has been forgotten. Heath Ledger is still great, and also still dead. Memento is still one of the best movies ever. Aronofsky's body of work now eclipses Nolan's, and that's not even counting The Fountain, which I thought was borderline inexcusable.
When compared to the majority of films, Nolan is actually genuine, insightful, deep, and engrossing but it feels as if he is being sold on making movies for the sake of Hollywood as opposed to himself. Aronofsky is probing a concept, creating a world, and creating this deep recollection of his own madness, giving his movies that hard edge that actually illustrates an idea.
Nolan has been Hollywoodized to the point where he embraces the big budget and feels he has to utilize it, so we get the Prestige, Inception, and the Batman films. Aronofsky is still making small, personal films that center on the subject of exploring an individual and delving into who and what they are, which is basically what Pi, The Wrestler, and Black Swan center around.
Thinking back, I watched The Prestige in the same week as the other magician movie that came out at the same time. ( Cant think of the name) So the two movies blur together. The scene where.......Fuck, I'm having a serious Alzheimer moment, be right back.
The scene were Michael Caine takes a long metal stick and cranks the dangerous looking spring-pack on the magician's back so he can make the birdcage vanish.
I said: "Nothing good can come of this."
Anyway, I just got around to watching Inception last night. A few random words floated through my head while I watched.
Words like:
Matrix
James Bond
Oceans 11
When I see a city street bend over like that I think The Matrix. Imagine if this movie had come out before the Matrix. Inception would be the benchmark instead of the other way around.
When I see bad guys on skis shooting machine guns I think James Bond. The Bond movies invented bad guys on skis shooting machine guns, fer chrissake.
When I see a bunch of criminals planning an elaborate operation I think Ocean's 11.
Know what I liked best about the movie? Not the special effects. I know they used very little or no CGI but that didn't really make a difference, did it. Even if it wasn't CGI I thought it was. So they lose ten points for making it harder that necessary with no appreciable gain other than bragging rights.
Not the dream levels. And speaking of which, how do these people just KNOW all this stuff? How does Leonardo know about brains turning into scrambled eggs if he gets killed while dreaming four levels down? Or the time dilation effect from level to level. And who the hell has a subconscious that automatically generates random people on city streets and in hotels and such? It reminded me of GTA, random people just walking around looking at you if you start to cut loose.
I liked the very understated humor. I will have to watch it again, only earlier in the day so as to keep from looking at the clock thinking: I'm losing sleep for this?
I can say that I watched it now, so that's a good thing.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:.
DISCLAIMER: My movies about music are often incorrect.
DISCLAIMER: I have no idea what ICJ was trying to say there.
Am I telling you "AUGHH, the FOUNTAIN and the PRESTIGE were the WOIST PICTCHAS!!!!"??
No. They were fine. They both aimed relatively high, and just kinda came through with something kinda interesting, but overall unfulfilling. You never need to see either of these movies again.
Nobody has ever watched the Fountain or the Prestige twice, I guess I'm saying, and I am totally 100% right about this.
Requiem for a Dream aimed high and nailed it, to the point that you can watch it again right now and it will make you just as queasy and spellbound as the first time. Memento aimed high and nailed it, and even though you know how it "ends" you can't help continuing to love the maze.
Inception is a caper movie that people think is deep because the last thing they saw was I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry... and they loved it.
When you need my help because I'm ruining everything, don't look at me.
Inception can cradle a cock, but you're wrong about The Prestige (why do you keep calling it Prestige?) and The Fountain, both of which I have seen twice.
Inception is odd in that, for all its supposed depth, there isn't really anything to go back and look for; any signs that Depp is using his totem, so the viewer can distinguish what is a dream and what isn't? Nope. Any nuanced symbols to show where the entire movie begins to swirl into madness or a preconceived fabrication of reality? Nope. Is it possible to tell that maybe Depp is just at another, deeper level of the dream state? Nope.
Its as Pinback stated, a Scifi themed caper thriller without any nuanced themes, symbolism, or construction behind it, with a bone thrown to the audience at the end. Its a decent flick but beyond that, it feels hollow.
That's another thing. I question the girl's ability to make a perfect brass chess piece with a Dremel tool. Well, perhaps she simply bought it and was just erasing the 'made in China' stamp on the bottom. Sure, sure.
That's just another small incident that took away my suspension of disbelief. I could handle her bending the whole street, that was dreaming. Implying that she has advanced lathe skills brought me back to my couch thinking it was past my bedtime.
Another thing was the way they can fall asleep almost instantly wherever they are. Perhaps the simon looking thing in the metal briefcase does it somehow. It was never mentioned so I have to assume that's the answer.
AArdvark wrote:I question the girl's ability to make a perfect brass chess piece with a Dremel tool.
The group I initially watched the movie with, assumed she was an art major of some kind and had shop experience. This led into a deeper dialogue of Depp's major in school, the class his father in law was teaching, and who would be best suited to deconstructing dreams in the way and scale that they implied was required.
AArdvark wrote:Another thing was the way they can fall asleep almost instantly wherever they are. Perhaps the simon looking thing in the metal briefcase does it somehow. It was never mentioned so I have to assume that's the answer.
I've flirted with polyphasic sleep, breaking down the stages of REM sleep, insomnia, sleep deprivation, lucid dreaming, and other such nocturna and can to a lesser or greater extent, slumber on command (even while standing up, sitting in awkward positions, etc.) and didn't question that someone who was completely immersed in the subject developed a method for phasing into it whenever desired.
Tool of the trade, but that metal brief case did basically substitute for a magic black box. This was another discussion the group had: did it have to be a lucid and willing sleep, or could it be drug induced and if not, did how they put under whoever then constitute a plot hole?
I just watched the movie last night for the first time. This will pretty much be a long post just reiterating what everyone else said here a year ago. You have my permission to skip the entire thing.
I agree with whoever made the Matrix comparisons, which unfortunately for Inception, beat it to theaters by over a decade. The Matrix was mind-blowing in that what we consider to be reality is in fact "the Matrix". In Inception, the dream world is the dream world and everybody knows it except the original dreamer. For such a supposedly ground breaking film, I thought it was a remake of 1984's Dreamscape, except instead of assassinating people in their dreams, these guys open safes and steal their mental secrets. Big whoop.
One thing I didn't like about it was how rules kept being invented as the story moved along. At first, when you died in your dream you woke up, but when you got hurt, you got really hurt. Or something. Then, with the "magic sleeping potion" the one guy concocted, if you died, your brains went to la la land, unless they are able to hit you with the AED paddles ("CLEAR! Zzap!") The whole time I kept wondering what new rule would be waiting just around the corner.
And wow, what a guy to know -- a guy who creates custom sleeping potions but can modify them to where they don't affect your inner ear functionality. If this guy ever loses his gig as a stand by alchemist, I'm sure he would make one hell of a bartender.
As the father of two kids, I got the ending immediately. To me, it meant that seeing his kids' faces were more important than the outcome of the spinning top. The point wasn't whether or not he was dreaming -- the point was, if he was reunited with his kids, it didn't matter if he was dreaming or not. Also, I don't think at any other point in the movie did we see dreaming on the same "plane of existence" for lack of a better term, which would mean that if the top did continue to spin, the entire film from beginning to end would have been a dream, and what would have been the point? If you're going to do that, you've got to pay it off better than that at the end (see: Jacob's Ladder).
I thought there were plot holes in this film big enough to drive a cargo van full of sedated extractors through. I didn't buy the whole thing about the totems grounding anyone to reality. When you're in a dream, even stupid things seem real and logical (I have made out, at length, with a monkey before). Anything you are familiar with in real life would seem just as real in a dream. I also thought the projected bad guys or whatever they were ... dumb. Plus, those people have boring dreams. I'd like to think that, in dreamland, I'd at least be able to whip up a band of ninjas or an atomic bomb or something to people out of my (dusty and most likely empty) subliminal safe of knowledge.
I guess the biggest thing was, for 2+ hours, I felt like the movie spent more time explaining things to me and dropping in plot devices than it did showing me a good story.
OK, here's why I didn't contribute to this thread.
I don't like it when a movie tries oh so very hard to get me to talk about it.
And I don't like dream movies.
That wasn't the case for Inception. I liked it. I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the best actor going today now that Heath Shuler is dead. But the problem is that dream movies become as tedious as people who talk about their dreams in public. (Well, one dream a year is OK. That's my limit.)
It did just leave me "empty" when it was done. I mean, I was finished with it. Maybe it's because Cobb was never seen to be that vulnerable or THAT sympathetic?
So it was no reflection on your thread, Flackwell. Inception is just showing up to work with a live otter around its neck as a scarf, dying for me to comment on it.
