Inception (with implanted spoilers)

http://twitter.com/georgelazenby/status/19952099465

looooooooooooooooooooooooooool

holy hell that is funny

bbbut ebert CONFIRMED

that's not the real ebert

http://www.wreckthetapedeck.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/usual-suspects-spacey_l.jpg

IMO a movie is really only a "B movie" or "B-style" movie if it's one or more of the following:

1. Cheap
2. Uses stock characters, especially reuse of the same characters
3. Lacks emotional/human development between characters
4. A take on traditional B tropes (film noir, capers, etc)

I can see where on 3 & 4 that Inception could fall into this, but there are plenty of other movies that sacrifice emotional development for action/plot and use capers that are not B-style

The budget, I concede, is undeniably A, but the characters are even given stock titles: The Forger. The Chemist. The Architect. The Plot Explicator. The Michael Caine. Again, no harm no foul, but it's pretty much a standard let's get the gang together for one last gig sort of formula at work here.

Loved the South Asian-looking chemist from a predominantly Muslim East African city breezing through US customs with no probs. Proves it was all a dream.

That Up/Inception trailer mash-up is pretty grand.

Coming from someone who enjoyed the spectacle, this movie gets dumber every time I think about it

maybe you're just getting smarter

sometimes I think ILX wants to back away supporting this movie for f33r of being held in less regard by other critic p33ples

not me! IT ROCKS IN UR FACE ILX

The more pressing anxiety to Nolan is the nightmare of anyone engaged in sustained creative activity: that the ineffable juice will find a crack in you somewhere, and drain away. We’ve all seen these movies. Formally, they’re in tip top shape: taut script, polished photography, sympathetic editing, the whole nine yards. But you come away from them with a profound feeling of emptiness. They’re like a piece of coral you’d keep on your desk. Incredibly intricate. Everything has proceeded in lockstep to make something enormously complicated, but it’s vacant. It houses nothing. Wind whistles through its impressive construction.

feel like this is a pretty otm description of inception, if only lazenby also felt this way

I demand to know what Ja Rule thought of this movie....

something something 'kicks' something something 'always on time'

um no, I enjoyed it but I also thought it had no character development whatsoever and that while its internal logic was smartly devised, at points it fell down and resorted to blagging it, and when considered at any depth it's JUST another sci-fi unreality ruse, and not an especially convincing one

the idea that his wife would come and shoot the guy just when he was about to complete the mission was crude but actually does resonate with the inevitability of dream logic - shame her continual appearances were so crassly managed

plus the 'limbo world' stuff was so hilariously unconvincing

plus it wasn't really a movie, more an idea! with guns!

and the snow-station scenes were rubbish and almost heroically confusing in their frantic action-idiocy

ah man that description is PERFECT

sb'ed for starting a new paragraph after every sentence

this wasn't anything like "a b-movie with an a-budget"

and nor was shutter island, are you effing kidding me?

pretty sure hitchcock's spellbound was not a b-movie

plus it wasn't really a movie, more an idea! with guns!

derp

lol I was kinda riffing there

the timelapse device was the movie's great success imo

my favourite thing about inception-as-metaphor-for-filmmaking is the bit where dude's all 'you can't put real places you know into the dream or you'll give yourself away', i almost laughed with surprised delight right there in the cinema as he said it.

ps in case this is unclear i really enjoyed this film and ps fuiud

my favourite thing about inception-as-metaphor-for-filmmaking is the bit where dude's all 'you can't put real places you know into the dream or you'll give yourself away', i almost laughed with surprised delight right there in the cinema as he said it.

yeah. i think this is why there's no sex/sublimated sex in it. nolan is being echt-public schoolboy. or old-timey, before they discovered 'revealing personal shit on the internet' as a thing.

see also: intense focus on secrecy/duplicity, which is the old timey boarding school way of life.

i don't know that you can criticise a dream for not having character development. I think that what a lot of people are looking for and are criticising it for lacking would maybe clash with the internal logic of the story- nothing has happened, it was all just a dream, yeah they're all shallow convenient characters they're in his dream.

oh the whole "here's our brilliant dream-prodigy she's so CREATIVE it's pure creation yay creativity!" thing was fist-in-mouth material

yes yes it's about movies hooray well done my best friend and I had a conversation along those lines after seeing it and we agreed that it wasn't about what a movie does emotionally, more about the basic formal architecture of movies, which is much less interesting

btw my future litmus test for all potential partners is whether they can draw a maze in one minute that I can't solve in two

never understand 'lack of character development' as a criticism. sometimes not developing is part of the story. or lack of story. like in 'marienbad'. the dude who gets incepted 'develops' and learns to be his own man n e way.

xpost

kind of think movies are effective through their formal architecture innit. but the latter is way interesting.

like sorry scarjo, you're just not a-maze-ing enough

hmayne I don't have a problem w lack of character development unless the film tries to make it a plot point like leos conflicted relationship w cotillard

I don't understand why people are complaining that Nolan got dreaming wrong in the movie when the cornerstone of the plot is that they are crafting realistic-as-possible scenarios in order to fool the mark's subconscious but we've gone over that before.

Like, I get "I don't like the choice made with the dreams because it shut off a lot of potentially fantastic visual images that would have been too surreal to fit into the plot" but I don't get "bah dreams aren't like that, why weren't they flying around on giant eggbeaters" unless you just stopped paying attention to the movie within the first 3 minutes.

yes we did go through all of this before, I just felt like repeating it

i think the film had weaknesses, and the leo-cotillard relaish was one of them

I think Cotillard herself was my favorite character in the movie

leos quest to redeem his guilt qualifies as pretty heavy handed char development so I don't have a problem calling Nolan out on it

i had been having this quite confused conversation with a friend about the idea of parapraxis a few days earlier, and everything got tangled up in my mind, and so when I came out of the cinema i started going 'what is the thing that this film is not talking about that is the secret core of this film?' and briefly decided it was the fact that the father-son relationship doesn't have a mother in it, and then... decided i was being too 'but why does this nor conform to all freudian ideas??' and gave up.

hat it wasn't about what a movie does emotionally, more about the basic formal architecture of movies, which is much less interesting

see dude this is why i liked it! in fact i wrote a post on freakytrigger to this effect /plug

secret core of the movie is lol spinning tops

mind blown @ George Lazenby's post!

i still can't buy that george lazenby has a tumblr and tweets things like "fuck yeah amazing dollar bin finds"

the music in this is way overbearing, from the very first moments

― Dan S, Sunday, 1 August 2010 04:27 (4 days ago)

also very much this. when fischer is all "OMG NOW I KNOW" the music did something really cringeworthy

even if 'shared dreaming' is a metaphor for 'shared movie experience', I still think it's not a particularly insightful one. unless we're the projections attacking nolan's dreamer. argh

Lazenby's post is a good defence, granted, but I don't think it defends the movie on any terms grander than "I like how that guy thinks" and "well, it's obviously a huge event movie AND one man's personal vision and was ordained as such so the film itself has to deal with these things" - films should be more than self-fulfilling prophecies

G-Laz rolls on dubs

unless we're the projections attacking nolan's dreamer. argh

definitely can be read this way if you watch it with 'comment on movie making' POV

ie the better a job the inceptor is doing, the happier you are to go with the flow, stfu and leave him alone.

I don't understand why people are complaining that Nolan got dreaming wrong in the movie when the cornerstone of the plot is that they are crafting realistic-as-possible scenarios in order to fool the mark's subconscious but we've gone over that before.

Like, I get "I don't like the choice made with the dreams because it shut off a lot of potentially fantastic visual images that would have been too surreal to fit into the plot" but I don't get "bah dreams aren't like that, why weren't they flying around on giant eggbeaters" unless you just stopped paying attention to the movie within the first 3 minutes.

yes we did go through all of this before, I just felt like repeating it

― Mayor Hickenlooper and the liberal agenda (HI DERE), Thursday, August 5, 2010 10:49 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

yes BUT in the super sublime joint-dream world where all their fantasies can be fulfilled, i woulda liked to have seen something cooler than all their old apartments

dream what you know- otherwise the target gets suspicious- hence the opening scene with the rug giving them away

little known fact: that's where the expression "cut a rug" comes from

movies with dreams are a catch 22. if you dare to impart structure as Nolan and company did, then everyone complains that the dreams made too much sense and aren't like real dreams.

If someone goes all surrealist and puts a bunch of ridiculously discordant and nonsensical images, then they just made a movie filled with surrealist nonsense.

Plus like what HI DERE said times a million -- THEY INVADED THE DREAMS AND RETOOLED THEM.

oh and guyz btw THIS IS SCIENCE FICTION DREEMZ CAN'T RILLY BE INVADED

I love this thread because it keeps reminding me of Vince Vaughan playing a deadly serious cop and I can't help but giggle a little at the memory of it.

I've been following georgelazenby for awhile - whoever he really is - and in my opinion he's the best Twitterer on the planet.

oh and guyz btw THIS IS SCIENCE FICTION DREEMZ CAN'T RILLY BE INVADED

again want to repeat what lots of other said- really glad that he didn't try to explain this other than having one box with a couple tubes and a button. get on with the story, job done.

dream what you know- otherwise the target gets suspicious- hence the opening scene with the rug giving them away

yes BUT this was in limbo where none of that shit mattered

ya a real danger of over-explaining the tech in these things, besides being boring, is that the screenwriter always imagines the solution is somewhere in there, like they'd have ended up "hacking" the machine or some deus ex machina boringness

yes BUT this was in limbo where none of that shit mattered

oh yeah limbo sucked balls, it's true.