for some musings

http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/which-are-you-more-excited-about-i...

For what its worth I really liked it, you took what you wanted from the movie, there are no definite answers and its not as confusing as some reviewers try and make out.

I want to see it again to see if it all hangs together properly now I've seen it once or if its all one big plothole. But like all films you don't HAVE to like it.

...you were still thinking about it the next day, then you did better than me.

repeat what I said in the thread above.

Having let the reviews and hype pass me by. I was somewhat concerned that it was going to be tedious and smugly confusing after 20 minutes but then it clicked into place and thoroughly enjoyed it. Just about clever enough and yet with some interesting action going on as well.

... Mrs. Mickey was very much in the "2 hours of my life I'm not getting back" queue.

I also think people are reading too much into it. The film sets up a reasonably simple world where a (rightly unexplained) device with some chemicals enables people to enter and manipulate each others' dreams, then rides that premise hard to the end of the line. It's meticulously plotted and has some great action beats, but to me isn't the great mind-melter it's being talked up as.

On the other hand, if you see that set-up and just think "this is ridiculous", the film itself is never going to win you over...

I liked it too. It wasn't particularly brain-melting in it's complexity (try "Primer" for that if you haven't seen it) but I would echo an opinion expressed by Mark Kermode; that it is always great to see a film that is not empty-headed comedy/action film, or a sequel (or both) do very well in box-office terms.

("Kinda like a work placement?" made me snort coffee over my laptop...)

interview with Will Self in The Telegraph last weekend and he is quoted as saying that Inception is:

a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent film is like. It melts like a prawn cracker on the tongue, with that disagreeable fizz of monosodium glutamate

This quote got me thinking about Nolan as a Director.

I've not seen the film myself but would like to see it irrespective of how good or bad anyone's opinion is of it. It seems to be that kind of an opinion-dividing movie which in itself is no bad thing. Even those that don't like it feel obliged to be rigorous in the way that they explain their dislike of it. It demands a rational response or presents enough substance to make people feel duty-bound to examine why they didn't like it. Most films these days can be dismissed with a fleeting moment of deflation, a shrug and then a swift move onto the next distraction.

Inception strikes me as being one of those films that comes along every once in a while and acts as a mainstream sounding-board and filter for what people really expect from a film or what they really like about films in general. It may or may not appeal in its entirety but it has enough to appeal to certain values that people subscribe to in films even if it misfires on those levels.

For example, in many respects the film can be perceived as a blockbuster. It apparently has jaw-dropping scenes and special effects that really are special, that one traditionally associates with the blockbuster genre. But I'm given to understand that Inception also has themes, plot devices and levels of characterisation that one doesn't normally associate with a blockbuster. It has qualities and tones that draws from, for want of a better phrase, the classical language of film; those devices and techniques specific to the medium that have been at its core long-before the advent of computers and digital and for which maybe a dozen or so Directors are held in great acclaim.

Another example is that the film deals with an age-old theme of what is real and what is illusion, a trait of many of Nolan's films and in truth, of cinema at its fundamental level. Nolan can be as much a purist in that respect as he is an experimenter.

Based purely on my knowledge of Nolan's other films this is what I think he does very well as an experimental Director: he juggles the high-brow with the low-brow to render something new for mass appeal. It strikes me that his modus operandi is to raise the bar for the mainstream by blending the traditional artistry and bespoke work of the great auteurs with the best in technical wizadry. A peer of Nolan is M. Night Shyalaman who has failed to keep pace with expectation because he has stuck to mining the same seam he did with The Sixth Sense for ever-diminishing returns. Basically I think Shyalaman has tried to be a blend of Hitchcock and Spielberg - and not much else - without fully understanding their appeal beyond the surface or what has given their films longevity. He has flashes of brilliance in many of his films but he jars with his sentimentality and his dogmatic contrivance to sustain the audience's ignorance by keeping his characters ignorant of "the big reveal". It's a version of illusion versus reality but it's a narrow and repetitive one that lacks substance.

By working in the realms of a more spacious theme of illusion versus reality Nolan gives himself a broad enough canvas in which to experiment with the auteur and the hack approach to directing a movie (and he makes movies, not films, the distinction in my mind being that a movie implies a desire to have mass appeal). It does require a lot from the audience to work with this potentially conflicting methodology which traditionally has been kept apart by previous conventions of film: it's not just the laws of physics Nolan is defying in Inception but also the laws of film-making. But compared to Shyalaman Nolan expects or demands his audience to step up to the plate with him, to view his film not just as a linear device to resolve key twists in the plot but as a space in which the audience can make judgements about what has driven the characters to be in the position they are in. Nolan directs in a way that keeps you interested in other things in addition to "the big reveal", he has skills in areas of film-making not normally associated with the types of plots and technical features he incorporates.

In other words I think Nolan is open-minded and savvy enough to be inspired as much by what he sees in "stupid" films as by what he sees in "clever" films. He is, I believe, consciously attempting to bring the mass appeal of the dumb blockbuster movie into the orbit of the art school/auteur brigade. It's a bold and maybe ultimately foolhardy approach but, he's steered the path of box-office success and critical acclaim very well.

Again despite not seeing the film I doubt very much that it is "a stupid person's idea of an intelligent film". Nolan is better than that. This film has come on the back of his biggest financial successes with the Batman franchise and he has both his audience from before those films (e.g Memento) and those that have come afterwards to appeal to. But he doesn't seem to want to dumb down or compromise on his expectation that the audience needs to be engaged over and above the conventions of plot. It is a a difficult balance to maintain but it's not a balance that a stupid person would undertake.