Inception (with implanted spoilers)

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.