Inception (with implanted spoilers)

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1939332

amateurist's memory is about as solid as the plot, almost eddy-esque:

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1939332

― juicebox, Monday, August 2, 2010 12:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that college humor thing is pretty otm

― by another name (amateurist), Monday, August 2, 2010 12:44 PM (Yesterday)

i don't understand, not understanding this movie

Shorter Patrick Goldstein:

The olds, they do not understand

Oh wait, perhaps I am wrong

Pretty sure Carl Barks is secretly responsible for like 99% of every modern movie idea ever

i don't understand, not understanding this movie

― the itsytitchyschneider (s1ocki), Tuesday, August 3, 2010 11:04 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

really? you don't think that video has a point?

my favorite part of The Cell is the amazing horse slicing scene
a very high grade moment for a low grade film

thinking maybe years of playing video games prepared me to understand the inception storyline (ie: maybe you need to understand how to think like a video game, suspend disbelief, etc, or else you start to think too much into it and get super confused)

ie: questions like, "how come some people can shapeshift," or "why is it hard to wake up from limbo" would be found in the in-game codex that you never really want to read cause it's boring and you just want to fight some more dudes. (when you get really bored you can read vol 1-10 of the history of dream-theft + inception)

otm, cant be bothered by such questions

how can some people shapeshift is a pretty unimportant thing to worry about but the limbo stuff is... really important to the plot

i just played a ton of Dragon's Age tonight where I basically championed one dude to become king over another dude without knowing the differences between them (even tho all that information was available thru optional conversations + the codex) because I really didn't care and just wanted to kill a bunch of monsters. Knowing the details of how limbo works exactly really doesn't bug me. When you go too deep in a dream you can slip into this place called limbo. Limbo is really intoxicating and hard to wake up from and it's like a shared dreaming space that contains stuff left behind from whoever was there before -- that's really enough for me! I don't need to know anymore. (And I don't care to either. Too many directors ruin movies by giving tmi -- like Donnie Darko)

video games are different from movies--they place different demands on their consumers and their consumers demand different kinds of things from them. its not a particularly helpful comparison imo.

Too many directors ruin movies by giving tmi -- like Donnie Darko

this makes zero sense. INCEPTION gives way tmi, DONNIE DARKO (the theatrical cut) doesn't, it's mysterious; that's why stupid fans argue about the time travel aspects and that's why there's a director's cut filled with stupid exposition

i don't understand, not understanding this movie

― the itsytitchyschneider (s1ocki), Tuesday, August 3, 2010 11:04 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

really? you don't think that video has a point?

― by another name (amateurist), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 12:37 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

i couldn't really get thru it cuz i thought it wasn't very funny... but i agree that it's complicated, i just think that with the exception of a few fudge-y areas what's going on is spelled out pretty plainly, and anything that's not doesn't really interfere with the story.

oh wow i just realised i got that collegehumour video completely backwards - i thought it was about how the film had wayyyy too much ariadne-prompted exposition!

o maybe it was? ha

I just finished "Shutter Island," and as overbaked as it may be, I think Leo is a lot better in it than he is in this, and its own themes (themselves overlapping at times with those of "Inception") more effective. To this I can only credit the direction, and also Scorsese's wise deference to B-movie tropes. As serious as he takes it, at least he seems to be nodding to the ridiculousness of past thrillers, right down to the interminable "what we just saw" breakdown scene (with its shades of the deflating denouement of "Psycho"). Nolan's problem, in retrospect, seems to be that he made a B-movie and treated it like an A-movie, wheres Scorsese's better honed instincts convinced him to make an A-movie but treat it like a B-movie.

I dunno how you'd describe Inception as a 'B' movie tbh

'inception' was better than i was expecting and i was expecting it to be good. there are aspects that maybe don't hold up or are unexplained but i didn't particularly care since i enjoyed it so much. and i guess i didn't think there was much manipulation or trickery, everything was pretty clear to me.

x-post Because it's kind of innately silly, and hides its shaky logic behind oppressive flash, I guess. It aims to be provocative, but ultimately errs on the side of spectacle above ideas. But it's still a very engaging b-movie!

For what it's worth, I found "The Prestige" a much better b-movie ideal, because while it takes itself equally seriously, it at least has some fun with its batshit premise.

I can see Inception as a B-movie. I think I've said it before, but I think Shutter Island worked as an A-movie (?) in a B-movie disguise because it's plot was so stupid that you barely paid any attention to it all, allowing the visuals, sound, and aura of grief take over. In Inception, you're too busy concentrating on the surface to delve any further into the emotions or ideas that might exist within.

The Prestige is not a B-movie to me, as that's the only Nolan film that has any emotional effect on me whatsoever.

um, do you guys know what a B movie actually is?

http://costumzee.com/view/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/bee_movie.png

It aims to be provocative, but ultimately errs on the side of spectacle above ideas.

how does this make it not an a-movie?

uh xpost

yeah, but if you work on the notion that Jaws and Star Wars effectively turned the cheesy B-movie into the very profitable A-movie, it makes sense.

xposts

I enjoyed the fuck out of this. Globetrotting psychic industrial espionage, can't really go wrong.

The third act was the weakest though, too much shit going on at once.

I think movies like "Shutter Island" and "The Inception" are totally B-movie in spirit but blockbuster big in execution. Perhaps that's why I have a trouble reconciling their ideas, as such, with their execution. They're both so much bigger and more expensive than they need to be. Again, as I mention above somewhere, "Inception" cost about 24,000 times what it cost to make "Primer," which shows that the execution of even hyper-complex ideas doesn't need the support of endless shootouts and pointless (but impressive!) special effects like cities folding on top of themselves. The difference between this and something like "Shutter Island" (again) is that Scorsese relishes his overblown elements almost as camp, whereas Nolan approaches it with total seriousness. Yet at its heart "Inception" is still just an old school "Twilight Zone" styled mind-scramble that falls far short of the emotional and/or metaphysical profundity of, say, Charlie Kuafman's best.

Kaufman, that is.

primer showed that you can have an incredibly complex idea, film it on a low budget, and make it completely opaque and boring.

Don't think anyone with half a brain would argue that Nolan's ideas are more radical or engaging than Kaufman's. But I like an overblown blockbuster spectacle now and then, and I like conceptual pulpy SF, and the two are combined, hey, a fun night out for me.

x-post Maybe "Primer" needed 30 minutes of machine gun shoot outs to spice it up?

B-movie does not equal bad, and "Inception" was fun, while it lasted, like most overblown blockbuster spectacles.

no, it just needed some like... storytelling

but whatev, i don't really see the objection here, if someone wants to make a big-budget star-packed high-concept twilight zone episode then i say bring it on

i mean, look at the shit that passes for summer blockbusters these days... if ppl want to make this kind of movie instead of gi joe or transformers, fuckin a

like inception is really not competing in the charlie kaufman 'space'

"GI Joe" was pretty good up until the final final showdown. I liked how it wallowed in its nonsense.

The Baroness was kind of a cop-out but I totally got why they went that route.

i don't think nolan is aiming as high as some people seem to think he is. i think he just enjoys making movies about this kind of trickery and the people who engage in it.

^^^^ I agree totally

i three-gree

i mean, i think he isn't being profound, i think he gets these ideas and figures "oh this would be AWESOME" and yes the notion of industrial mind-thieves messing around in the minds of other people and having insane action scenes in their dreams is kind of awesome. and he's just really, really good at bringing the audience along. the cross-cutting between various levels of subconscious and the time differences in each was pretty brilliant, and not because of the "idea" as much as the execution (which solved an action movie problem via the time differences: cross-cutting between different action scenes and not missing a beat in any of them.)

George Lazenby's thoughts

i think if the movie is saying anything "meaningful" it's about the creative process/movies and not necessarily the metaphysics of reality, etc...

it's a bit tiresome to attack the movie for not being as smart as Nolan thinks it is...intentional fallacy, etc...maybe you could argue Nolan invites that kinda thing but it's a pretty boring way to talk about a movie.

xpost -- uh, wait, THE George Lazenby?

yes, that one. he's great on twitter.

If Nolan invites it, it's certainly up for discussion. And this is just internet discussion, which really is rarely more than boring. Anyway, I love a well-made movie as much as anyone else, and this one is well made, too. Totally enjoyed it as I watched it. But Nolan is such an exacting, self-consciously cerebral filmmaker I would be shocked if he simply set out to make an entertainment. But I suppose my personal struggle (not that it keeps me up at night) is that I deeply suspect Nolan made this movie for us/me to get more out of it than I did, but as with any good magic trick, I'm beginning to feel not that I don't get it but like a bit of a mark.

I think Nolan is a pretty great filmmaker, for what it's worth, and a smart guy, but this may be his first film where his reach slightly surpassed his grasp, especially compared to his other original properties ("Memento," "The Prestige"). No harm, no foul, though. I look forward to his next flick.

i like good magic tricks!

yes, that one.

That's pretty sharp. And I gotta say, he of all people should have been the one to invoke the Alpine setting of On Her Majesty's Secret Service as a comparison but he didn't = A+