Film Flam

[Salty]

Just finished watching Earnest Scared Stupid.
Brilliant.
It has Eartha Kitt and one of the best canine actors I've ever seen.
Would watch again.

[Jasper]

I remember liking that, but I don't remember what was in it.  Time to rewatch.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

We ended up deciding on Thor 3D. 

[Faust]

Still haven't seen that. Hope it was good.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Still haven't seen that. Hope it was good.

Date's tomorrow... I'll post about it here after.

[Cain]

Just watched Rango.  They should have subtitled it: "this is how you do an existentialist film, Inception-tards."

Funnier, as well.

[Faust]

I saw X-men last night, Visually it looks amazing. I love the sixties fashion and decor. The action scenes were all well thought out uses of the characters powers and the CGI looked well which can really kill the suspension of disbelief for these kind of films. The plot was decent, if a little flimsy in places but overall this is the best comic book film in a long time.


My only main beef with the film is a spoiler so look away now and it is that in the climax of the film Michael Fassbender's accent switches into a thick Northern Irish accent, it's so jarring it kind of ruins the scene especially because it is so out of nowhere. In fact it happens immediately after he puts on the magneto helmet so perhaps its some kind of cursed RPG item: Helm of psychic resistance, curse: ridiculous accent.


In short even though this is far from a perfect film, even in the weaker parts everyone looks fabulous so a lot can be forgiven.

[LMNO]

No discussion of Inception?

This makes me sad....

I liked this review of Inception

The cinematic progenitor of Christopher Nolan's new movie, Inception, is the catastrophically ridiculous Robin Williams vehicle, What Dreams May Come. What it lacks in goofy black guardian angels, it makes up for in its grotesquely impoverished view of the human imagination. Empowered to create one's own reality, the best that anyone can do in What Dreams is plop themselves into your secretary's Best-of-the-Impressionists wall calendar. But Chris Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister--and really, was there ever a more apropos name?--can't even manage Monet. The visual experience of Inception left me with the distinct impression that I had been drugged by a circa-1999 Tom Ford for Gucci ad and then mercilessly date-raped by his shiny partner, a Lexus commercial. I kept expecting "The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection" to dash across the screen in some boldly sans-serif font. I kept expecting the lease options.

The setup of Inception is supposed to be a brain-teaser. Leonardo DiCaprio and his Jerry Bruckheimer band of specialists (The Chemist, the Forger, the Architect . . . Oh, Lord) invade people's dreams and steal their ideas, or in the case of the central action in this instance, plant a bug of a new idea in someone's brain. Here, they are trying to convince the sharp-jawed, Savile-row scion of some kind of Charles Foster Kane energy executive that what he really wants to do is break up his dad's monopoly. This all has something to do with Ken Watanabe, who runs a rival company? Whatever. The movie doesn't care. Because the fundamental conflict that drives the entire narrative is so hastily and poorly sketched, the dour, totalitarian porentousness of the proceedings seems more than a tad overwrought. Well, this is Christopher Nolan, after all, who played a story about a man who dresses up like a bat in order to karate-chop Bond villians with a straighter face than a community-theater production of Lear, so I'm not sure what else I expected. Inception trips in at well over two hours, which according to the exhaustively-repeated conceit of the film itself is well over a billion years of dream-time, and it contains a single joke. I counted. It involved Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose high, tight ass is the only thing I recall fondly of my wasted time in the theater, and Ellen Page sharing a brief kiss, and the whole movie seems ashamed of it. This is serious.

Anyway, the differing speed of the passage of time is just a part of the larger conceit, which is that not only can Leonardo et al. invade dreams, but that by descending into ever-deeper states of unconsciousness, they can concoct dreams-within-dreams. Even as action/scifi fare this is pretty thin gruel, and since Nolan insists on cluttering the goings-on with pages and pages of expository dialogue full of crackpot ontology and two-joint epistemological impoderables, the whole edifice reeks faintly of the ridiculous. In his silly but entertaining Existenz, which had the misfortune to come out opposite The Matrix, Croneberg managed with much greater ease and humor to trip the lysergical-acidic borders of multiple mind-states and alternate consciousness. In Inception, dreams sit neatly within dreams like Matryoshka dolls, everything just-so, ascent and descent symbolized by Leonardo DiCaprio's rickety dream-elevator (no, really), which, obviously, plies a linear path from top to bottom. By the way, this constant mentioning of other movies is intentional. Inception is the most derivative film ever made, so shameless in its cribbing that you'd think it were meant as pastiche, except for its relentless, monotonous self-seriousness.

The characters in Inception keep asking each other if they remember how they got there, there being here, or there, or where they are, or whatever, the point being that "in a dream," three words repeated with talismanic frequency, as if the filmmakers thought we might forget, you only ever find yourself in media res, with no recollection of how you arrived at the bar, so to speak. It was a familiar feeling. As the movie dragged into its third hour, I began to feel something similar myself. How did I get here? and, Please let this all be a dream. The punishing score, which Hans Zimmer ripped off from Eyes Wide Shut, drones at merciless volume throughout, and by the time Joseph Gordon-Levitt was floating around weightlessly and everyone else was attacking Cobra Commander's arctic lair (no, really), I thought I might burst an eardrum. Ellen Page, who sometime in the first hour demonstrated a remarkable capacity to fold dream-Paris back on itself and generally bend reality like Neo meets MC Escher is along for the ride, but doesn't actully do anything once the action gets underway, other than harrass DiCaprio for imprisonining his memory of his dead wife in, um, the basement? In the hotel room where she committed suicide. Jesus Christ, Nolan, eat a fucking muffin. Schindler's List had more laughs. By the way, the wife-in-the-limbo-of-her-own-imagining, that too is ripped off from What Dreams May Come. Inception isn't a movie. It's an exquisite corpse. A mash-up.

The visual effects have been widely praised, but I found them dull and uninspired. The whole film is flat, colorless, and corporate. My dreams are a lot less Prada and a lot more Alexander McQueen, if you know what I'm saying. Everything is shot at flat angles, and the interminable gun battles and hallway fisticuffs are filmed with so much quick-cutting that you can't tell who's punching whom or shooting what, especially in the big alpine shootout (ripped off from about seven different Bond numbers, the opening of True Lies, Ice Station Zebra, etc.), where everyone, good and bad alike, is dressed in identical white parkas and face masks! The Matrix was dumb, but it was true to its comic-book-meets-kung-fu aesthetic and actually gave us a few full karate chops before the camera cut away, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, whose wire-based aerial combat is also ripped off, was filmed almost entirely in balletic long-shot. Well, everyone's metallic threads glint and do not wrinkle, the men wear spread collars, and Marion Cotillard wanders around wondering what she's doing here, especially as the strains of Je ne regrette rien keep rising in the ghostly background. I would take this as a quirky, metafictive joke, except this is a Christopher Nolan movie, and the rare joke sticks out like Spock at the Funnybone.

I suppose I could list the other movies and moviemakers that Nolan shamelessly rips off. The Wizard of Oz. Miyazaki. Michael Mann. Oh, why bother. Inception is dull, overlong, sexless, and unimaginative. It is a $200 million car commercial, a glossy magazine photo. You give yourself license to create whole worlds from the stuff of pure consciousness, and the best you can come up with is a corner café in Paris and the generic cityscape of Gotham City? Christopher Nolan, you are ripping off your own stupid movies! "If you die this deep, you'll end up in limbo," DiCaprio warns. Oh, let's repeat the adverb. Portentously. Pass me the pistol, brother. I'm going in.

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/07/deception.html

wow that review is pretty much right on ALL accounts.

-  Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the only good thing about the movie
-  the movie is so much derivative, based on so many other movies, but manages to do it worse than every one of them--the reviewer forgot to mention Mirrormask, btw.
-  the imagination of the dreamscapes was indeed rather bland and disappointing (not even an avalanche scene could save them, WTF)
- etc

I still haven't seen it yet, and will definitely see it once it is out on DVD, but I must admit, after several people telling me it was "good, but not that good" after seeing it, I don't hold as high hopes as I originally did when I discovered the premise of the film.

It sounds like the dreamscape premise is nothing more than excuse for wicked awesome special effects, which is sad.  If they had applied some thought to it, like doing the different layers of dreaming in such a way that you didn't know how far you had slipped down, that you could get carried away by the dream itself, that strange and irrational things would sometimes arise that could cause problems for the main characters, things like that, it could've been very cool.  And what happens when they break into the mind of a lucid dreamer?  I'd imagine they would be fucked, since that person could pretty much do whatever they liked to them within the dream.  Or they broke into someone's mind and they weren't in REM sleep at that moment.  Some cool things could be done with the difference in time between the dream world and the real world.  And perhaps to be the kind of person who breaks into peoples dreams, you'd need certain psychological attributes, or to lack them.  What if those who broke into dreams never had dreams themselves, only a kind of REM sleep that involved being more deeply unconscious?  How would that effect them?

See, I've already made the premise a thousand times more interesting and I've only had one coffee so far today.

Saw it on cable last night.  There were explosions.

[Spolier]

Did anyone else figure out in the first five minutes that the so-called "real world" was just another one of Leo's dreams?  I even muttered "I read too much Philip K Dick" out loud when the action moved from the pagoda to Tunisia.

[Cain]

My mother figured out it was a dream within a dream, and she wasn't even watching the film.  She was checking her emails and barely even looked at the TV.

Also, going to watch Sucker Punch either tonight or tomorrow.

[bds]

My mother figured out it was a dream within a dream, and she wasn't even watching the film.  She was checking her emails and barely even looked at the TV.

Also, going to watch Sucker Punch either tonight or tomorrow.

the Extended Edition? if it's not, I would be tempted to say not to bother - I watched the pg-13 cut for cinema Snyder had to make to get it past the MPAA without them giving it an R and it was mediocre at best. downloaded the Extended Cut last night, a lot of people I've seen have said that it's a lot better than the cinema one

[Cain]

I don't know.  Is the one with most seeds on TPB currently the extended edition?

[bds]

it's not, no. i'm not sure if the extended cut was even released on DVD, so if it isn't at least a 720p rip it probably isn't. the non-extended one is still worth a watch, btw, but if you have the option i'd try and get hold of the extended cut

[Cain]

Alright, I'll keep it in mind if this does not entertain.

[Faust]

Also, going to watch Sucker Punch either tonight or tomorrow.

Condolences, its awful. The arbitrary action scenes are pretty though.

[Cain]

Snyder is usually pretty good for that, if nothing else (usually that and nothing else).