Inception (with implanted spoilers)

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.
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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.

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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.

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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