Inception (with implanted spoilers)

nolanvember rain

I could see Axl beating himself up in a hotel hallway he thinks is spinning around.

thought about this some more, a little, and: still think it's basically the equivalent of a meticulously designed and well thought out ~bong~

i thoroughly enjoyed it, but it's deeply hollow. plus, feel like the most ~human~ part of the film was the suggestion that moll might have been truly mentally ill, which nolan backed off from (she's actually just a casualty of dreaming TOO HARD)

I need to lay off the sleep - I been dreaming too hard

then again, if all "blockbusters" aspire to this kinda of craftsmanship and (as u guys pointed out) singular directorial vision (this was thoroughly nolan's film), i'm all for it.

q my friend had: wouldn't what's-his-name notice he was asleep for a whole 10-hour flight?

i would be so happy if i slept for a flight that long

btw the character's name is Mal

xpost -- you got that right, I would take it as a sign I WAS finally able to sleep on a flight.

w/e

The more I think about it, the more I think Lukas Haas was being lol'ed at with the role he got.

That's for sure.

he was just so happy when the phone rang.

why all the haas hate

Seems like "Leap of Faith" might just be his proudest moment

I heart haas, just - wtf has he been up to?! (besides ugk cameos)

I think he wanted to be in the movie and JGL pulled some strings since they were in Brick together.

why all the haas hate

secret contingent of ILE posters are poorly-spelling Germans

all nolan's movies being centered around protag burying their demons in illusions/delirium OTM! when we left the theater we weren't discussing what the spinning top might have meant or jgl/tom hardy's cute riffing, it was 'man chris nolan is a motherfucker with ISSUES'.

i loved it though btw. the only thing i didn't like about it was leo yelling 'jesus!' after mal jumped.

i know! wtf, that wasn't her name.

is jgl specifically attempting to speak in the lowest register his voice will physically allow in an attempt to make us forget he was the cute little girl on third rock?

will someone tell me if this movie deserved 800 posts and should I see it

not really and yes

I'll prob see it

I've read a slim thug tweet about it so why not

imo the line someone posted above should read 'man chris nolan is a motherfucker with anally retentive ISSUES'.

The head of an architect.

Haven't read this thread yet, but looking forward to it. Just saw the flick today and it blew my mind.

I'm sure people will take exception with this, but my first thought leaving the cinema was that Inception is the Summer Blockbuster version of Last Year at Marienbad.

Pretty sure this was already linked, but
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/a-man-and-his-dream-christopher-nolan-and-inception/

A.
I’ve been looking at some of the Criterion discs. I watched “Last Year at Marienbad” the other night and I’d never seen it.

Q.
You’re making a movie about dreams and you hadn’t seen it?

A.
No, I know. 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.”

Q.
What do you think that means?

A.
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.

Oh cool, makes me happy that I'm not the only person who noticed that.

i thought of Solaris.

but comparing hollow Nolan to Tarkovsky is like Speilberg compared to Kubrik.

Two quick things;

People who claim this film is gibberish must've not been paying attention. Like, it may or may not be a great film, but it's totally coherent (there are a few very technical questions that aren't answered, but if you follow the film's logic you can follow what's going on easily). And second, the people who leave this film asking if the top fell or if the whole thing is a dream are about as bad as the people who left Doubt asking whether the priest was really a pedophile. I don't know if Nolan does or doesn't want us to wonder about the top, but it's (at least in my eyes) the least interesting question in the film.

And second, the people who leave this film asking if the top fell or if the whole thing is a dream are about as bad as the people who left Doubt asking whether the priest was really a pedophile.

Why is questioning ambiguity "bad"? I mean, I agree with your main point, but I don't feel like its that weird for people to be questioning something that Nolan took pains to make a big deal out of... what with the abrupt cut and everything - he clearly wanted people to notice that.

ya man it's a HUGE tease

I bet he regrets it

He accidentally cut the top falling off the table and onto a see-saw contraption that catapulted a magnet into the air that stuck to another electromagnet on the ceiling that powered a toy monkey on a motorcycle that crashed into a lever that opened a trapdoor through which a bowling ball that crashed into a row of dominoes that toppled over in rapid succession and made Pee Wee Herman toast (which burned oh no!).

i bet he regrets accidentally cutting that out

It certainly would clear up a few of those pesky loose ends.

It's not wrong to ask why he left it ambiguous, it just seems silly to try and figure out whether the last scene is real or not when clearly Nolan wants it to remain ambiguous. It's not like it's a lateral thinking puzzle and he didn't show whether the top fell or not because he wants you to deduct from the other scenes in the film what really happened. Clearly he isn't interested in giving the answer away. The top seemed like it could topple at any moment, so maybe it is real, but then again it didn't stop spinning so maybe it's fake. Discussing the choice of keeping it up in the air is obviously true to the flick, but trying to codebreak the film is really silly. It's not a CIA document and has no secrets to give away. (And if you got him in an interview and interrogated him about it, wouldn't the correct answer from Nolan just be a shrug and the concession, "I don't really know myself what happened at the end?")

http://img.listal.com/image/810313/300full.jpg

Either he's alive or he's dead, or the cops got him... or they don't.

It's not wrong to ask why he left it ambiguous, it just seems silly to try and figure out whether the last scene is real or not when clearly Nolan wants it to remain ambiguous. It's not like it's a lateral thinking puzzle and he didn't show whether the top fell or not because he wants you to deduct from the other scenes in the film what really happened. Clearly he isn't interested in giving the answer away. The top seemed like it could topple at any moment, so maybe it is real, but then again it didn't stop spinning so maybe it's fake. Discussing the choice of keeping it up in the air is obviously true to the flick, but trying to codebreak the film is really silly. It's not a CIA document and has no secrets to give away. (And if you got him in an interview and interrogated him about it, wouldn't the correct answer from Nolan just be a shrug and the concession, "I don't really know myself what happened at the end?")

― Mordy, Friday, July 23, 2010 7:05 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i concur

theres a good chance Nolan was influenced by the last cut in the last episode of The Sopranos.

and considering the endless discussions that came after it, that elevated the popularity of the show - it was a good idea market wise.

I half concur. It's pointless, except in entertaining ourselves with theories (and i've enjoyed reading the ones here and in the linked articles).

But only half concur as Nolan left it ambiguous knowing it would stimulate dscussion and is probably loving the extent to which people are discussing the film.

you could say that, phenomenonologically speaking, that the experience of trying, and failing, to answer that question is the point. the film could hardly be true to the philosophical questions it was raising by answering that question. (the other response is to say that it's both real and a dream--what is our communal reality anyway but a shared dream, etc...)

but two other things:
1) if it's a dream, does that mean that Mal was right?
2) for some reason the Japanese businessman seems important to me--why do we hear japanese first thing, why do we start en media res?

ummmmmmmmm...

OK so like hi guys I just registered I hope I don't piss anybody off by saying hi

but my stance on this movie is that there are very few movies I really enjoy once I realize that the script is pretty awful, and this is one of them. Like seriously "something something dream-share invented by the military" who cares Christopher Nolan we're suspending disbelief already stop telling us these things

on the other hand, I'm pretty well convinced that Cobb explained the whole business with performing/achieving/doing/incepting inception on Mal to Ariadne at least twice. So much deja vu in this movie. Sort of heightens the ambiguity of the whole like thing.

As it were.

INCEPTION is the worst movie i've seen all year

I find that hard to believe, considering how crappy this year has generally been for movies!