Inception (with implanted spoilers)

this was all right, like a B–, maybe. But seriously I could've done without the retarded action sequences. If they had been (a) better or (b) weirder or (c) shorter I would've liked this movie a lot more. i'm quickly reaching my saturation point with brooding, troubled, leonardo dicaprio. also something about 'what dreams may come'

So somebody figured out that music sounds different when slowed down or sped up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVf6NBHI0Ac

Finally saw this and hugely disappointed. A great set-up squandered on banal shoot-'em-ups, a boringly obvious ending, nil emotional engagement and no sense whatsoever of the strangeness of dreaming. I honestly fell asleep for 10 minutes and started dreaming and was disappointed when I woke up in the middle of the snowfight bullshit. And I was expecting to love this.

Good bits:

Ellen Page warping the scenery in her first attempt at dream architecture.
The way the subconscious projections became suspicious and started turning on the extractors (a great, creepy idea wasted by having hordes of gunmen in Cillian Murphy's dream)
Tom Hardy
The bit where they kept kicking Levitt's chair ever to demonstration "the kick". Good slapstick.

Bad bits: too many to list without sounding like a dick.

2. How can you not love a movie in which the bulk of the action takes place in the 15 seconds it takes for a van to fall from a bridge to the river below?

are you joking or...

Incept deez nuts

such a cop out saying that a good movie has to say something about the human condition. i fart in that general direction

secondly, did yall know that B-movies can be better than A-movies despite the labeling? (you might know, but I'm just making sure)

thirdly, I feel like the only guy in this thread who can review this movie without mentioning Nolan. I don't care who he is and you don't have to know who he is to review this movie

fourthly, Josh in Chicago mentions 'innate silliness' as if that is necessarily a bad thing

I think my main problem with this movie is that I never felt the stakes, the sense of danger. The worst case scenario -- limbo -- seemed pretty pleasant compared to, you know, death. You never really got a sense of what these people had to lose if they never woke up, and we never saw what it looked like to be in limbo from the perspective of the real world. Does it look ugly? As far as I could tell you just look like you're taking a nap.

If Leo missed his kids so much, then why did he spend mental years upon years in a fantasy mental world without them? Didn't really buy that aspect of the story at all. I mean, he grew old with Mal before she killed herself. How did he feel when he woke up after decades away from his children? None of that was really explored.

Instead you have a movie that is essentially just a structural contraption with cool visuals, and that is plenty enough to entertain me, but there's nothing there to make me want to revisit it.

i think a lot of people had that problem (hence people mention that they were falling asleep during the film). a lot of people were feeling the thrill and maybe the sense of danger (and were not bored).

maybe you should see the movie again
-= b u t o n d r u g s =-

ya'll makin for a good list of people never to see movies with

Alls I know is me, Capt. Lorax, Dan and Ned are going to the movies.

If Leo missed his kids so much, then why did he spend mental years upon years in a fantasy mental world without them? Didn't really buy that aspect of the story at all. I mean, he grew old with Mal before she killed herself. How did he feel when he woke up after decades away from his children? None of that was really explored.

I can't work out if Leo was using his Scrunchy Serious Face to suggest someone who felt 50 years older than he was or whether that was just forgotten about because it didn't come across at all. Nolan seemed completely uninterested in how it would feel to live your whole life only with your partner and then snap back to reality still in your 30s. Nolan actually seems to be getting worse with emotion - the Stephen Tobolowsky bits in Memento were more moving than anything in Inception.

Some years ago I saw a pop ~philosophical~ movie with some friends. Credits started to roll and my friends all stood to leave. I stayed in my chair for a second kinda taking it in.

Friend A: What are you doing?
Friend B: He's ~thinking about it~.
Friend A: ............what was there to think about?
Me: ........................you're right, actually.

Got up. Left.

Similar experience here. Page's wardrobe was incongruous, JGL stole the show, Leo still (as always) seemed like he was acting in a high school play. Projections on the attack was really creepy and awesome, wished it had happened more. Had a palpable sense of disappointment (and a genuine lol) at "his subconcious is militarized."

We get that whole training montage and I was expecting more cool city bending stuff throughout the movie but instead it just turned into an action movie with an awesome flying sequence. Meh.

The thread was too long for me to read it all, and a search of the page achieved nothing, so I'll just ask and pray your forgiveness if someone else already addressed this:

SPOILERRRRR!!! (If we're still doing that)

I missed the reason that "limbo" happened. Why couldn't someone just kill himself as a kick and get bounced out of the dream?

Thanks.

ellen page was playing a college student, why the fuss about her dressing like one? the Paris crowd scenes were full of people in casual clothes.

it's like, her character's general look had to operate on three levels: it had to be coded "young," but it couldn't be coded "sexy," and it also had to be stylish enough to fit in with the mass of dudes in suits. part of the problem is that the movie only had two women in it, and they're both types: mal is the sexy one, while ariadne is the brain. so ariadne has to look young and not-sexy, first because she's not functioning as a love interest, and second to play up the difference between her and mal in the "have you ever been a lover?" scene. that takes away the skirt-and-blouse kind of outfits that might have been an analogue to the men's suits.

on the other end of the scale, that skirt-suit or whatever she was wearing in the second dream was pretty dowdy, and it would've been disappointing if she'd looked like that for the whole movie. so they ended up with a kind of androgynous look that reads young and is still stylish, if not in the same "businessman fetish" way as rest of the film.

I missed the reason that "limbo" happened. Why couldn't someone just kill himself as a kick and get bounced out of the dream?

bcz heavy sedation

(which 'leaves inner ear function unimpaired' (science!) so falling backwards into water still works)

but the inner ear function was something the chemist specially mixed in so I don't think it would have worked for leo/mal when they were originally in limbo

AO Scott has once more said it better than me (although DorianLynskey puts it well upthread)

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/movies/16inception.html?ref=movies&pagewanted=all

And then there's

http://github.com/karthick18/inception/blob/master/inception.c

Good movies don't inspire shit like that ^^^

Prosecution rests.

huh. xp

I really like that AO Scott review. I hadn't read it before but my objections seem to mirror his. And this is a very nice line:

The pursuit of competitive advantage by well-dressed, emotionless men is hardly the stuff that dreams are made of

but it is what movies are made of!

Yes, and I refer you to the opening sentence of Scott's review :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Hdx9JjzDfo

http://imgur.com/9Tsd2.jpg

Link to larger image[/http://i.imgur.com/9Tsd2.jpg]

Don't know if this has already been linked to, but it pretty much sums up how I felt about the movie:

http://www.frieze.com/blog/entry/wrap_your_troubles_in_dreams/

Kind of wish I disliked this so I'd feel like talking about what it's not.

But wasn't it pitched as what it's not? If it had been sold as an above-average action film the fine, I wouldn't have bothered seeing it. But when you have a film this serious, an idea Nolan has been working on for a decade, people are comparing it to Kubrick, then I think you're entitled to slam it for being a disappointment and, what's worse, a fundamentally unimaginative one.

it was technically excellent, ably performed (in the main), had no heart and didn't care about the emotions.

what's not to kubrick?

kubrick didn't try but nolan did (to care about the emotions)

the intentions of the director are his business, tbh. doesn't have any affect on my viewing pleasure.

effect/affect i got an a in english you know.

But Kubrick, aware that he didn't care about emotions, compensated with the full force of his scary intellect. With Nolan, the pop psychology is hardly less superficial than the emotions. And when a director tries to do something he's no good at then it can't help but affect my viewing pleasure. It's why I think Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick's only case of disastrous overreach - if you can't do sexy then for God's sake don't try.

I don't want to overstate my dislike though - I had a solid enough time and if friends had just said "go see this weird action movie, it's pretty good" then that would have been enough.

^^^^is killing it itt

Thought it was great that Eyes Wide Shut was completely unerotic. xpost

It's pretty clear that the people who disliked the movie are faulting it for not being deep or insightful whereas the people who DID like it didn't care that it wasn't deep or insightful.

I like that you can have weird mind-melting conversations about the concepts that the movie played around with, but that the movie itself was a straightforward action flick. That was what really sold the movie to me; the underpinnings were there for a full-on philosophical treatise but the movie only discussed on it in the confines of how it impacted the action plot. Pieces of it could be seen as lazy; it might have been more interesting if the subconscious constructs becoming aware of the intruders and attacking them morphed into something unspeakable rather then sprouting guns, and it would have also been cool to see Ariadne freak out and start world-building on the fly in a similar vein to what JGL's character did in the stairwell, but on a larger scale, but those are relatively small quibbles. I enjoyed what the movie did. I expected an action movie with a slightly weird premise; I got an action movie with a slightly weird premise. I enjoyed myself. Pretty much that is what I want when I go to see a movie.

EWS = more a of a "dream logic" movie that Inception. and really please can we drop the idea that Kubrick didn't care about emotions. it's insanely reductive.

EWS could have been so great had they cast anyone besides Tom Cruise

like, they could have cast Yahoo Serious and it would have been better

i remember reading that Kubrick originally wanted Steve Martin. not sure if that's true!

no, xxxpost, i wouldn't care about it not being 'deep' or whatever if it had been an enjoyable action film but it was actually really fucking boring

I'll agree that Nolan doesn't have the chops to explore the deeper themes that someone like, say, Malick might be able to do when dealing with dream invasions. But then again I don't think Malick has the chops to make a thrilling and tight heist-action-thriller. I'm glad Nolan didn't stretch himself to attempt anything profound. If people want to parse the philosophical underpinnings of the idea, they can, but it would have killed the entertainment and so I'm glad they're never really front and center.

xpost

of course if you found it dull than that's fair enough

it might have been more interesting if the subconscious constructs becoming aware of the intruders and attacking them morphed into something unspeakable rather then sprouting guns, and it would have also been cool to see Ariadne freak out and start world-building on the fly in a similar vein to what JGL's character did in the stairwell, but on a larger scale, but those are relatively small quibbles.

Pls remake Inception, HI DERE. This is exactly what the first half hour made me think was going to happen.

please can we drop the idea that Kubrick didn't care about emotions. it's insanely reductive.

I've heard this counter-argument before, and I'm always wary of received wisdom, but I've honestly never seen any evidence that he did care. Maybe Paths of Glory but nothing after that.

i found the parallel action scenes at the end pretty compelling and totally interesting for how they worked within the structure of the film as much as for how they were stylistically executed.

if the subconscious constructs becoming aware of the intruders and attacking them morphed into something unspeakable

so glad they didn't

you know it would have been just some swirly CGI bullshit right?

Not if it was done right. A bit of Lynchian creepiness >>>>>>> anonymous guys with guns.

as far as i am aware all of Kubrick's movies contain people! just because a persistent theme is dehumanization, through cosmic or social means, then it doesn't mean emotions aren't there

hey guys I heard a rumor that Inception had actual humans in it