"The Social Network," "Carlos," "Winter's Bone"...
Is that starting to sound familiar? The results of two more large-scale critics' polls -- indieWIRE and Village Voice/LA Weekly -- have been announced and those seem to be the consensus picks for best (or favorite-est) movies of 2010. The thing I enjoy most about these kinds of polls is looking at the individual lists, to see if I can determine patterns (based on, say, the writers' geographical locations, publications, politics...) and to get an idea of how the consensus was reached. "The Social Network" placed on 52 of the 85 ballots cast (it would have been 53 out of 86, but I overlooked my e-mail invitation during my recent, month-long mucus infestation) -- a greater percentage than any poll-winner since Todd Haynes' "Far From Heaven" in 2002. The 100+ "critics and bloggers" (some overlapping) in the indieWIRE poll chose it as tops with 71 mentions and 461 points, followed by "Carlos" with 50 mentions and 361 points.
Voice critic J. Hoberman writes of his publications' survey:
The poll has a few anomalies. Three critics named movies as the year's best that figured on no one else's ballots: the Nicholas Winding Refn viking fest "Valhalla Rising," documentary "The Tillman Story" and Rodrigo García's adoption drama "Mother and Child." But these are proudly declared individual statements. Movies are more generally a collective art and social phenomenon.
As box office receipts measure popularity, polls manifest consensus. What's really fascinating is intensity of feeling. Each poll has a hidden story, revealing those movies that are not only liked but really liked or even passionately lurved. "Carlos" may have appeared on significantly fewer ballots than "The Social Network," but it garnered more first-place votes and had a higher average score. To quantify this sort of intensity, we've derived a primitive algorithm (factoring a movie's average score with the percentage of voters listing it first or second) known as the Passiondex™. [...](That "Lourdes," "Dogtooth" and "Life During Wartime" all received votes as the year's worst film just enhances their cult status.) Tied with "Dogtooth," and just ahead of "Greenberg" (No. 18) on the pash list: "The Social Network."
You will find my list (and a shameless mini-tantrum about "Inception" [#16], brought on by a recent Seattle critics' panel in which I participated at the Frye Art Museum) in the indieWIRE directory, though it's not terribly different than my MSN one -- the exception being that I got around to watching "The Ghost Writer" again for the first time since last February:
1) "The Social Network"
2) "Carlos"
3) "The Ghost Writer"
4) "Sweetgrass"
5) "Mother"
6) "Winter's Bone"
7) "Let Me In"
8) "The Killer Inside Me"
9) "Dogtooth"
10) "The Kids Are All Right"
(Links go to whatever I've written about the films on Scanners.)
Also included are categories for Best Director, Best Lead Performance and Best Supporting Performance (though I apparently goofed and put Annette Bening in the "supporting" column for the ensemble "The Kids Are All Right" -- but why she should be "lead" and Julianne Moore "supporting" is beyond me), Best Documentary, Best First Feature and other such things.
And now, I return to watching critically acclaimed 2010 releases in preparation for my Utterly Final List...
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That Best Undistributed Films List for the VV/LA poll looks so much better than the Best Distributed Films list, it makes me want to weep for the state of film distribution in America and to celebrate the glory of the film festival circuit that allows this films to be seen, only some of which will ever receive distribution.
Mostly, however, it makes me wonder why publications insist on restricting themselves to films with theatrical releases in a calendar year. As many others had noted, the question "What is cinema?" has transformed into "Where is cinema?" We need to do away with this odd and archaic restriction. It puts too much power in the hands of commerce. Yes, it helps "organize" things if "Uncle Boonmee" supporters wait until its 2011 release to vote for it, but a film like the "Ceausescu" doc will probably never get an American theatrical release.
A year film that includes "Film Socialisme," "The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu," "Oki's Movie," and "Tabloid" (just to stick to the VV list) is a great one. One that consists of just the top films on the regular list - meh, it's OK but nothing to spill much bandwidth over.
And you just knew which film had to end up (even if it was tied) atop the Worst Film list just to rile up the Sacred One's followers.
My biggest disappointment with any collective polls like this is always how poorly documentaries do on them. I don't know if it's because so many critics really consider docs to be "lesser" films or if they are less widely-seen and/or generate less consensus than the more celebrated feature films. "Sweetgrass" is the #2 documentary, but doesn't even place in the Top 25. *sigh* I'm projecting that, as usual, half of my Top 10 for the year will be documentaries.
I'm guessing the practice of limiting contenders to those that have played theatrically in the US is a holdover from the (pre-video screener) time when that was the way most critics who lived outside of major film festival towns would get to see them. These polls didn't used to have "Best Undistributed Film" categories, because nobody expected most festival films to ever be distributed theatrically. I want to write about this in more detail later, but at the Frye Museum year-end "Critics' Wrap" in Seattle last week, a guy in the audience who has been involved in the local exhibition/distribution business since the late '70s or early '80s asked the panel to discuss the "state of the industry" (because nobody quite knows what it is, or what it is becoming). He observed that weeks, months go by without anything playing at mainstream multiplexes that he'd want to see (that's my experience, too) -- but that he's inundated with art house releases that play for a day or a week (two at most) and are gone before he can get to them all. I find that to be the case, too. So many foreign, indie, documentary films -- but hardly anybody sees them in theaters. We know they're on their way to Netflix Instant or On Demand or DVD/Blu-ray (if they aren't already playing, day-and-date) any day now. That's changing much of how we think about distribution and exhibition. As for "Uncle Boonmee," I guess it's just been released on DVD in at least one part of the world, but only film festival attendees (Cannes, Toronto, NY...) would have had a chance to see it by now. Too bad, though, that it can't be made available to critics in advance. Maybe a poll victory or two (in addition to its festival awards) would help the theatrical release. The question is, given the cost of a theatrical run, can an Apichatpong Weerasethakul even hope to break even in theaters in most cities -- US or otherwise? I have serious doubts. Any theatrical release is just going to be a prestige venture, and a form of publicity for what used to be considered ancillary markets. That said, I salute Strand Releasing (which also has a video arm) for finally giving it a shot! "Uncle Boonmee" went months without a distributor even after winning the Palme d'Or.
Glad to hear that at least one other person has VALHALLA RISING as their top pick.
Also happy to see some love for TRASH HUMPERS and ENTER THE VOID.
Look, it's quite simple. There can be multiple leads in a film, like Closer. Or none, like I'm Not There. But this absurd idea that there can only be one per sex in a film leads to blatant category fraud.
Perhaps it's because of the nonsense of awards season campaigning, but so many people just can't wrap their heads around the idea that Julianne Moore and Annette Bening were BOTH leads in The Kids Are All Right. Arguing otherwise would be like saying Hailee Steinfeld played a "supporting character" in True Grit, which of course only an idiot would believe. Oh, wait...
I watched The Ghost Writer again recently as well. Wasn't it, like, so good?
Far From Heaven was 2002.
Yes. It was brilliant. I do understand some people's objections, but I loved it start to finish. Polanski's still got it.
I was most interested in your mention of 'The Time That Remains'. I've seen very little about it, which I found to be a very rich and challenging film when I saw it last year (had to see it twice and write about it to come to grips with it). I am fascinated by Suleiman.
Far From Heaven in 1982?
Um...
Still mucus-infested there a little, Jim?
The mucus has now filled my skull and replaced my brain.
I've been there, man!
I wish to respond to the Inception critique - although demanding its admirers tell you what the movie is "actually about" less than a year after it came out is wrong, I think (right now it's about enjoying the experience: editing, acting, cinematography, special effects, action, etc). But here goes:
‘Has anybody figured out what "Inception" is supposed to be about yet? I keep asking people and the first thing its defenders say is, "Well, no, it's not about dreams." OK, then, what are these subconscious architecturally formed experiences the characters themselves keep calling "dreams"?’
The obvious answer, that you already know, is that Inception is about ‘dreams,’ but not the kind we have when we go to sleep. Heavily controlled architecturally (visually) formed experiences the point of which is to keep the target convinced for a designated amount of time, so yeah, kinda like movies. But you already knew that.
‘"Well, they're more like movies, like Bond movies and heist movies." Yes they are, and they are extraordinarily unimaginative and they have nothing to do with dreams or the subconscious, so what's the point?’
I think you mean that, as Bond or heist movies, the dream/action/conning sequences are extraordinarily unimaginative…your opinion, which is fine. The L.A. traffic jam action sequence and the snowy mountain action sequence could exist in any Bond movie (minus the train), so I can’t call them innovative or original on their own – but for the most part I like the way Nolan films these standard action scenes. I like the twilight lighting of the L.A. scene; I like the way Tom Hardy shoots through the shattered rear window of the cab; I like the way one of the projections seems to collapse like an empty sack once he’s shot…some of it was shot a little too close to the action, but for the most part, I liked it.
But I was more focused on what was going on during those sequences: I was invested in the characters and the plot at this point, so I was interested in how DiCaprio and his team were fooling Cillian Murphy. And some of the details, like Tom Hardy’s transformation into Tom Berenger, were interesting and clever. This is undeniably a Men-at-Work or Men-On-a-Mission movie, as Ebert says, it’s about process, and I liked the no-nonsense interactions between the actors, because I liked the actors (Hardy, Levitt, Page, Watanabe) and the way DiCaprio is actually the most unstable of all of them.
That’s what I liked on an experience/in-the-moment “level,” but on an intellectual level, it does have something to do with the subconscious, even if there’s not a bunch of Lynchian dream stuff going on. Try to follow me:
When an average person watches a movie without examining it, and relates purely in emotional terms, they’re playing the Cillian Murphy role, “filling the architectural space” with their subconscious, or, wilfully or perhaps unknowingly imagining that this artificial construct has something to do with who they are on the inside.
But once you get to a certain point of movie-watching, where you can, or at least try to, deconstruct your emotional reaction to a given film, you’re playing the DiCaprio part, or the part Murphy is playing once he discovers he’s actually dreaming: you’re attempting to consciously, objectively view/deconstruct your own subconscious/deeper feelings according to an external, artificial experience. To give a personal example: when watching the Ishmael scene in Fanny and Alexander, I was so overwhelmed I had to stop the film, come back and watch it with the sound off. I’ve since come up with enough reasons for my behaviour – religious, sexual, etc – but how do I know? In attempting to consciously analyze my own subconscious reaction to this movie (F&A), I’m creating faulty perceptions of my subconscious by my subconscious, which, in effect, chops up my true understanding of myself even further (NOTE: I know nothing of psychology as a science, I’m just putting this in my own words, but my ignorance should help to express my point anyway).
To bring it back to Inception, which makes it quite literal: DiCaprio enters his subconscious as a physical place, and consciously perceives it as such, can arrange it the way he pleases, can even try to change things about it, but in the end is helpless to it (the parallels with artists of any kind should be obvious), and his excessive 'control' only further separates his conscious self from his unconscious self, which takes the form of a seemingly autonomous being (Cotillard), or, in one case, an unstoppable memory (train). What's interesting is DiCaprio and the other characters still believe in this method by the end, and the climactic tension becomes: can he trick Cotillard, now a solidified part of DiCaprio's physical subconscious, which exists even when he's not "dreaming" (or not-dreaming) because he's perceived it, into believing she's dead?
And this turns out to be a nifty trick of audience manipulation, because at no point are we supposed to be emotionally involved in the Cillian Murphy/Pete Postlethwaite subplot, we view Murphy as ‘the mark,’ but it turns out DiCaprio is his own mark, and it’s easy to feel a sense of relief (if you’re invested in his character enough at this point, which I was) when he succeeds in arranging his own subconscious to “heal” itself by killing (or ratiocinating away) the Cotillard character. Easy to feel relieved, until the last shot.
Further complicating this theme, and enriching it, imo, are the purely visual items no one can argue aren't A) in the film and B) significant:
-the three patriarchal figures (Caine, Postlethwaite and Old Saito – Master of the Dream World)
-Cotillard, who’s really a part of DiCaprio’s character, whose body/beauty are emphasised, representing impossible desire, you want to reach out and touch her but you can’t
-the only other female parts with speaking roles (that I recall) being the sexy blond whom Hardy impersonates in the dream (!!) and Ellen Page, who may not be deliberately “androgynous” but who is at least a lot less “femme” than Cotillard, with little-to-no emphasis on her sexuality, but who is as tough and capable as the male characters, and who is the one to finally shoot (like, with a gun) Cotillard’s character
-DiCaprio’s fear of trains (!!) and taking out his anger on Levitt, who may or may not be (but probably is, I think) having a rather overt and cheesy flirtation with the Hardy character
-the fact that the dream world is obviously, as you admit, representative of Hollywood action films
‘The best not-dreams are the ones they show the architect at the beginning: the folding Paris, the Escher stairway... But the actual not-dreams are pretty mundane. (And if you're going to put Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a nifty "Royal Wedding" hallway, why follow it with an elevator shaft sequence, which is just the same thing turned on its side? Run out of ideas already?)’
I disagree. The first twenty-five minutes or so that introduce you to this world and technology are quite thrilling, with some of the best visual stuff in the movie: House on a Cliff, slo-mo shot of DiCaprio in the bathtub, etc. Also, you sort of pre-emptively dismiss the hallway scene before anyone can bring it up in the first place, but I think a lot of people would call that hallway fight the best dream (or not-dream) of the movie. And the elevator shaft sequence is exciting as an act of last-minute improvisation by the Levitt character, and gains much of its umph from the editing in of the parallel levels. In fact, you don’t even bring up the editing, which perhaps you weren’t impressed by, but which is the movie’s greatest feat, if you ask me (especially the final ‘kick’ montage).
But I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. Nolan intentionally blurs the line between the ‘reality’ and the dreams or ‘not-dreams’ in this movie, even cutting between them without always telling us what’s what (in this way bringing his favourite and most used tool, editing, into the foreground). Now, I think the “reality” scenes are supposed to represent the characters’ reality, I don’t think it’s “all a dream,” but Nolan sure does stress the way cinematic reality can look like anything but. Plenty of wide shots of maze-like cityscapes, the Mombassa chase pitched at about the same level of believability as the dream action scenes, etc.
“Perhaps "Inception" is a movie for people who just like movies that make up their own arcane rules, that have nothing to do with anything outside the movie itself, but give the fleeting illusion of creating an (incoherent) self-contained world. It's for people who think the reductive Director's Cut of "Donnie Darko" -- the one that removes all the mystery and resonance and wit -- to the original.”
I haven’t seen the director’s cut of Donnie Darko, but yeah, I think that’s an adequate description of Inception (except I don’t find it incoherent at all, pretty much everything is explained that needs to be explained for it to make enough sense while you’re watching it). A lot of movies create self-contained worlds with arcane rules, but Inception knows it’s one of those movies, which is why it intentionally collapses its own world with that last shot, which might not bring the average audience member to an immediate conclusion (I still can’t whittle down the movie to a specific message, and I hope it doesn’t seem as if I’ve tried), but which should at least leave them feeling a little uneasy about the supposed catharsis they’ve just witnessed.
Which is more than you can say for like, The Kids Are All Right.
PS. I don’t know if Inception is a masterpiece or whatever – I still prefer the muddy morality, magic and emotional resonance of Nolan’s Dark Knight – but I hope I’ve adequately described why I like the movie.
No Black Swan? Shocking!
My heart goes out to Edgar Wright who arguably made one of the most original movies this year with "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World." I could call it the best video-game inspired movie ever made, and it is that, but that does not do it justice, because after all the competition isn't much. I am glad he got into the best director list (top twenty I think), but the film itself was wrongfully looked over. I know some people that took its box office receipts as evidence of a something not worth their time, but they missed out. All the hyper-kinetic, eye-popping visual moments had me jaw dropped. It was the only movie where I smiled throughout the whole thing. And no, that is not hyperbole. I am glad however that Exit Through the Gift Shop (my personal favorite, maybe behind Black Swan) is getting attention.
The only thing about the list that surprises me is the absence of "Shutter Island" and "Black Swan," both of which I thought were very good and supremely well-made films (although the latter did have its share of melodramatically self-conscious directorial flourishes). If both of them were squeezed out, then this must have been a very good year for film. (I still need to see most of the films on the list.)
hey jim, just noticed a grammatical error on your inception rant:
"It's for people who think the reductive Director's Cut of "Donnie Darko" -- the one that removes all the mystery and resonance and wit -- to the original.”
its for people who think the reductive director's cut of donnie darko to the original?
You're right. The word "think" should be "prefer."
I don't think Inception is deserving of its praise but I also think there's more happening in it that people find interesting than just guns and explosions and mindgames. I'll take a stab at the things it's about...
The first thing one has to note is that it's structured so that we don't understand a whole lot at the outset -- though I agree with what's been said about the prospect of the movie starting in the "dream" without any expository dialogue or "rules" explanation, so that we had to figure it all out ourselves -- but, more importantly, as we get deeper into the movie we get closer to understanding how Cobb got into the situation he did, his dream of getting back to his kids (or just see their smile again) and his guilt over inadvertently helping kill his wife. As the ghost (or memory) of Mal, Marion Cotillard is the centre of pain in the movie... and maybe it's just her "Frenchness" but something about her performance (or maybe just her screen presence) suggests something deeper and more mysterious than may actually be there in this particular film. In any case, she plays the tragic/haunted/mentally unstable wife well. Her scenes are more interesting than the action scenes, she is the "Heath Ledger as Joker" of this Nolan film, finding intriguing notes within limited material, such as during a final confrontation when she says things like "Or is he as lost as I was?" and "Anonymous corporations chasing you around the globe?" to suggest not just that Cobb may be crazy himself but also hinting the Errol Morris idea that we're all a little self-decieving mad in one way or another. For a much more compelling look at this idea though, see Errol Morris' newest documentary Tabloid when it finally gets released. (Also, for a look at what a more dream-like world is like, see David Lynch's purse commercial with Marion Cotillard... Yes, a purse commercial.)
Anyway/ basically, as the movie goes along and we get to the heart of the matter, we discover Cobb and Mal were a young couple (not unlike Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly's characters in Requiem for a Dream) that had gotten hooked on dangerous experimentation with a virtual reality technology (versus drugs), technology that, to some murky degree, is based on a person's subconscious -- it doesn't matter to fans of the movie that these aren't dreams as we know them to be, they accept a somewhat eXistenZ (or Strange Days) understanding of these VR worlds and roll with it. The next important thing to them is that the movie becomes about *a team of friends working for a corporation* each for their own reasons, for Cobb it's about getting back to his kids.
There's a bunch of things mainstream audiences could relate to there. 1) The idea of belonging to a gang of workers that watch out for each other on a project -- whether that's construction and demolition teams, teams of programmers and hackers, whatever, I think it's a common cultural thing to be a little heart warmed by the ideal of camaraderie with those you work closely with. Also, many people can easily understand the desperation one could feel to return to their children they've been separated from, as well as being separated from them because one has to work, or because one has financial problems, or because one made mistakes in their youth and lost custody of their kids, or because of some bureaucratic reason (we saw something similar in Let Me In, with the parenting situation there, the father not being able to see his kids even though the mother is becoming unstable) or people relate to all these things.
Finally, throughout the film, there's all those shots of all those capital cities all over the world... and they basically all look the same. A collection of 2001-like monoliths, all corporate area, not much public space... in short, global capitalism with a bunch of cold, stark, glassy modern architecture that seems designed as if paranoid of letting anything that resembles a unique culture to seep into this world.... anything that might distract from crystal clear corporate war thinking. In the world of this movie (and probably this could be said of our own), some corporations will go to criminal, gang-warfare extremes to get what they need... and in this film it's information, ideas, the ability to predict rival's next moves (or maybe just keep tabs on what they're doing). I think a lot more could have been done with this idea in a better movie but never mind, Inception is here as a sort of... genre stimulator... to get movie buffs and, hopefully, some better filmmakers to consider all these ideas for future sci-fi films about our times. Nolan isn't so interested in our times, he's not so into specifics, he goes for generalities -- he goes for what everybody in the audience can understand on some level. I personally am not so interested in that sort of filmmaking (although it works wonders at the box office and can make a movie really popular amongst the mainstream... because they, like those capitalist buildings, try to resist standing out too much, so this lets them dip into the weird things they really want to explore but from a super safe distance... but that's another rant for another day, though it does explain the two different reactions to the two different Donnie Darko cuts). Over time, I've become more drawn to movies that go in knowing they're gonna rub some people the wrong way, movies like Fight Club (or any David Fincher film... or David Lynch film... or David Cronenberg film... and what it is with the name David in that regard?) that some will loathe and others will relate to and those who see enough movie, no matter which side they're on, will know that the other has a point but will be okay with disagreeing. But I'm getting off track...
So, Inception: In a nutshell, comes down to people (a team of people... and a couple) -- whose motivations audiences relate to on a general level -- that get trapped in a VR world and must then struggle to get back out... or face the fact that they cannot get back out, as well as some of the emotional implications of all that, such as Cobb feeling moral guilt about what happened to his wife, that he pushed her to go in... and to get out... and ultimately to destroy herself. That, to me, *sounds* like a great movie. (And, as I said, we saw a similar story unfold in Requiem for a Dream.) I have mixed feelings about the way Nolan told it, with a voice over montage explaining the "mistakes" the two made. Consider though how similar the structure of Shutter Island is, with us eventually reaching the truth about a Leonardo Dicaprio character's traumatic relationship with a lover... and note that Martin Scorsese didn't rush through a montage with voice over but actually let the whole horrible scene play out. I found that flashback/memory/child death scene in SI to be much more dramatic than Nolan's vague VO and montage explaining Cobb and Mal's time in limbo. To be totally honest, I wish Nolan had just told the story chronologically with the first act focusing on Mal and Cobb's excitement about the possibilities of this VR world... and how they just. couldn't. resist. going deeper and deeper into it, sealing their fates. In other words, I wish Nolan had focused more on sharing their *dreams* (and the romance that grew out of this), letting the tragedy unravel, the dream collapse into nightmare, us *feeling* their disappointments and frustrations with each other as they wander about in limbo wondering if they'll ever get back out. What an incredible first act (or first half... or whole) film that could be, with Mal eventually deciding she wants to forget this isn't real, to try to make the most of the situation, and Cobb being unable to bring himself to do that, convincing his wife to die with him so they might get back out... And then, of course, the awful finale of Mal's suicide and Cobb going on the run, debating if he did something wrong, his regrets eating away at him, his struggle to stay sane himself, his paranoia that he may still be dreaming, his desperation to return to his children, to set something right again in his world. And then we'd have an emotional understanding of what the heist means, something more than just some unusually kind criminals working together to pull of a near-impossible job in some abstract, pseudo-reality.
All that considered, Inception gave me enough for me to feel my time was not wasted. It's a movie with a lot of ideas... and yes it's flaw is that it is unable to fully realize them in emotional terms. However, I got its story about a woman who simply accepted fate... and a man who just couldn't... about a woman who romantically followed her man, loyal all the way down to their doom... and a man who wouldn't return to the favour to her until later. And the ending as Cobb becomes stuck in limbo (I personally believe) and *the idea of a happy ending* grows into a virtual representation... which he decides, in Mal's spirit, to just accept, to just be grateful that he can even have a virtual representation of his children's smiles...
It's an ending similar to the end of The Descent. And I find all of Inception similar to that film in that both are (in addition to all the missing of children and hallucinations about return) about a family of friends (united in The Descent by their love for thrill-seeking and in Inception by their criminal trade) that then get stuck together deep into a situation they don't want to be in. And people get angry at each other. Sacrifices are made. Innovation and determination is displayed. The stakes are high. Some may be able to escape, others will not, all may not. Though I won't pretend for a minute that Inception is as striking a film about this sort of scenario; Inception is much more watered down and utopian. The Descent is horror. Inception began by Christopher Nolan as a horror script but he developed it instead into something he considered to be more sci-fi (and standard action... except people float and whatnot). Horror and sci-fi are closely related genres... horror tends to be what happens when sci-fi genre breaks down. Sci-fi is not necessarily "more hopeful" but thinking of it that way may be helpful in relation to Inception. The original Inception may not have ended on an uplifting note but the final draft does. In all of his movies, Nolan doesn't seem interested in what's true or right so much as how individual characters think of themselves. He's one of the most curiously disinterested filmmakers. His films will display lots of thoughts about his characters but resist too much of that mushy emotional stuff. However, this is one thing I found interesting about Inception. For all its abstractness, the very ending of the film is the closest look we've got at what the British filmmaker feels about anything. Yes, there's a lot of uncertainties about that final image, but it's a resoundingly positive image and Nolan has said in interviews he thinks the most important thing about it is that Cobb doesn't care about the top, he just accepts his kids there. To me, signifying Nolan's feelings about not fighting the currents of life too much, just embracing what is there. After all, how Cobb got himself into the whole mess was always wanting to go deeper... He wanted more, more, more. This aligns Nolan with a lot of contemporary filmmakers that seem to be making movies against the idea of obsessive quests for success or victory or perfection, movies that celebrate humbling one's self to whatever situation they are in, movies that suggest most problems start happening when we meddle with things we don't have to meddle with.
Ultimately, there's more complete visions than Inception on that subject... and it's disappointing that what Inception says in the end is nothing original, just another way of telling it. I would give the movie a "thumbs up" for being a slickly constructed idea that's also well acted (though how could it not be with that cast?)... but that's also me being generous. I can't see how this movie could be anything more than a passable movie. A great film, masterpiece or landmark, that all seems to me surely exaggeration made by audiences that have not encountered these ideas before and, also, have not encountered more visionary *cinema* (imaginative images existing in time, space and a frame) about them. But, I disagree that, say, the elevator shaft scene is useless. One could see it as the nightmare of an engineer, a sort of metaphor for something he has to build that has to get people from A to B without killing them... and there they are asleep, him weightless (floating away from work he must struggle to keep a technical grasp on), surrounded by the interior of a corporate buildings -- jagged, ugly, steely, cold, lonely, dark, looking more alien than human, a reversal of the obsessively compulsively brightly lit, white-or-see-through, almost fetishistically unmarked/bland/blank-walled-and-blank-tiled lobbies of these corporate buildings that we see elsewhere in the film (though I'm not sure how aware of this Nolan is, whereas a director like David Fincher would be I think)-- and Joseph Gordon Levitt has some suggestively under-pressure facial expressions as nervously awaits detonation time, in a corner of the elevator, his hand on the remote... And then all that weaved in with what the rest of the team is doing on other levels, each having faith the other will not fail them... because it all it takes is one slip from one person and they're all screwed. There's something to all this and I found it entertaining to consider how the images could be thought to mean something, similar to how one could sit around thinking a little abstractly about the multiplicity of meanings the final segments of 2001 - A Space Odyssey signifies or adds up to. The difference, I think, is that 2001 is more awesome visually and has a real spiritual current running underneath at all. It becomes something much more than just ideas, it transcends them, becomes a powerful myth about the evolution of mankind, about how we may be able to someday transcend sitting around playing chess games as an act of politeness to/ way of putting up with each other, while a machine that our lives are dependent on watches us intently... Inception doesn't have that same sort of visionary power, it's more of a screenwriting experiment, a genre exercise. Shutter Island was too but was invigorated by the soul of a Martin Scorsese (and Dennis Lehane story). Shutter Island feels its way through its ideas. Inception thinks its way to feelings. Audiences right now seem more comfortable with the latter, maybe because the former invites subjectivity, puts one's own interpretation on the line, which can be scary...
I appreciate your take on the movie, particularly in how it contrasts with mine. Having just watched the movie a fifth time, there are some thoughts I want to add. On the outset, I don’t agree that Inception doesn't invite subjectivity or put one's own interpretation on the line (especially compared with Shutter Island, which explains its mystery rather clearly). Inception is all about subjectivity.
The main tension of the movie is whether or not Cobb (DiCaprio) will return to his kids, or, as I’ll refer to it, since his kids aren’t really characters, to his status as a father. He is lost without this role. There are two things he must do in order to accomplish this: complete the job for Saito (Watanabe), and cease indulging in the fantasy of his dead wife.
The central ambiguity is what actually happened with Mal (Cotillard). Cobb says he went into the deepest part of her mind and there incepted the idea that her world was not real, an idea which she brought into her "real life" and which ended with her killing herself.
But here are a couple things that are important:
-When Ariadne (Ellen Page) enters Cobb's unconscious (the elevator scene) and views his memories, Mal is waiting in the hotel suite where, later, we witness the suicide
-When Cobb describes the suicide to Ariadne later on, Mal is in the window across the street, not inside the suite as we earlier saw her in Cobb's memory
The flashback of Cobb incepting the idea inside Mal's head is handled very vague, as you say, but I don't think that's a flaw. Cobb says Mal "...locked away a secret, deep inside herself, something she once knew to be true but chose to forget." We never find out what the secret was (something about Cobb, perhaps?) but it's visually represented (as DiCaprio reads the VO) by her top, locked away in a safe, which Cobb later spins, destroying her certainty and incepting the idea that her world isn't real.
This entire scene could mean a lot of different things. We create technology, the function of which is to bring us together, but even in a world shared by the infinite subconsciouses of two lovers there is isolation and secrecy, or, to use another word, privacy. It's a basic law of human nature, and it's particularly shattering in the context of a technology that would seem to allow the characters to give themselves to one another entirely, but perhaps only serves to separate them further.
To put it more broadly, it's the movie withholding from us. We never meet the real Mal, it's unclear what happened to her, we only have Cobb's side, and we don't know if we can trust him, or if he can even trust himself. The deeper we go into Cobb's mind, the less we understand.
But when we look at him from the outside – as the protagonist in an action/heist movie – it all seems pretty clear: "There's only one thing you need to understand about me," he tells Ariadne before he shows her (and us) how he lost his kids (his status as a father) and how he needs to get them (it) back.
This brings us back to Saito, as evocative a figure as Mal. He represents order, world order, but not in any positive way. It's order based on money, industry, and subservience to him. The movie begins with a competition between Cobb and Saito, a competition Cobb never really wins, and throughout Saito will often show up when Cobb is thinking of Mal (one scene has Cobb, looking in a mirror, hallucinating a shadowy image of Mal behind him, only to have the image replaced by a shadowy Saito).
(Also I think it's important that after Mal is shot by Ariadne in the final act the scene is directly followed by Fisher's (Murphy's) fake reconciliation with his father that will allow him to "be his own man." The two plots don’t appear to have anything to do with each other, but the way Nolan cuts it would suggest otherwise. There’s something about Mal that makes her problematic to the “Men on a Mission,” even when Mal isn’t a direct obstacle in the story.)
And there’s something sinister, almost satanic (I borrow the word from Ebert’s review of The Prestige) about the Old Saito scenes that bookend the film. No matter how you look at it – in context, how it’s played – Old Saito is in charge, and Cobb is submissive. There’s also the possibility that the entire movie is playing out simultaneous with this scene, in the memories of Cobb and Saito. I can’t think of any other explanation for A) the strange “old man filled with regret” lines recalled throughout the film or B) the subtle change in dialogue between the first Old Saito scene and the last Old Saito scene.
In the end Cobb accomplishes Saito’s mission and Saito rewards him by returning to him his status as a father. There's even a medium shot of the Caine character smiling as one of Cobb's kids shouts "Daddy!"
And Cobb leaves the top - symbolic of Mal's secret - which we never learned - spinning on the table behind him. It wobbles, indicating the scene takes place in reality, but the movie ends before it falls, and so it's forever spinning.
I find the idea that it is real scarier, because we don't know what Cobb is capable of, and those are his real kids.
Anyway I'm still not sure what it all means, but it's interesting. Some other things I noticed on my fifth viewing:
-Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is interesting the way he contrasts Cobb. For one thing, they're almost always dressed in identical or strongly similar outfits. Cobb is all neurosis and instability, Arthur is all competence and efficiency.
-In the climax I think it's interesting that Arthur, the more prosaic character, must use his imagination (elevator shaft) while Eames (Hardy), the more imaginative, must use brute force (fighting off the projections in the snow world)
Hey Andrew, thanks for reading and I hope what I offer can be of some assistance describing what is interesting in the movie. I probably should have posted this somewhere else though, it's a bit of an eye-sore here but would fit in well with all the other rants on Inception at Scanners. Here it is though...
You mention a lot of interesting things. Your thoughts on overlord Saito I especially like (and, in many ways, he is to Inception what Ben Kingsley's character is to Shutter Island), I also will admit I may be assuming too much about what is meant by Mal locking something away and what the top represents. But there it is. It seems like almost everything in Inception is inference, which can make it a difficult film to take much away from emotionally when everything is just hinted at, as opposed to a few key things while the rest is understood well enough. So, my angle was (or I intended it to be) more about how Inception was put together than what it all might mean. Its meanings seem clear enough to me as metaphorical ways of representing the feelings of deception and unreality. But with those things considered, I have to ask "So what? Why should I care?"
I think that's what Jim means when he says "what is Inception about?" He's talking about the envelope the movie's messages are sent to the audience in. The envelope for Inception is a little confusing, like receiving in the mail some sort of rubix cube that upon solving opens up and gives you a chinese fortune cookie message about embracing the real, even if it means paradoxically embracing the unreal. In reaction one might just go "WTF?" and just toss out the little piece of paper, thinking their time on this thing was about as productive as a tarot card reading.
Reading over your thoughts here, a few words/lines jump out at me:
"This entire scene could mean a lot of different things..."
"There’s something about Mal..."
"And there’s something..."
Indeed. There is something there and when we see it in Inception we're like the estranged everyman of Close Encounters of the Third Kind exclaiming "this means something!" The same thing happens watching 50's sci-fi films. We look at an image from those films and think of what it's sort of like. Inception has moments like that, Roger Ebert comparing Eames to anti-bodies, for example. My problem, I guess, is that it's not very interesting to watch on a literal (physical) level and on a not literal, more imaginative level it's all very abstract. None of it hits me in the gut, whereas Shutter Island did. I guess that's what I meant by saying Shutter Island feels its way through ideas. It's not interested in the ideas. It just cares about visceral experience from moment to moment and the cumulative effect of various experienced emotions as the movie concludes. Inception invites (I think) more intellectualizing... and intellectualizing within a loop that doesn't amount to a whole lot more than just proposing ideas.
Shutter Island seems a more pointed, purposeful film (not a Great Film, just more affecting) without sacrificing any of its human mysteries. At the end, the mystery is solved on a plot level but on a deeper, psychological level, we're left with much to sort out for ourselves in terms of the effects of death, deception, doubt, despair. Inception, as sci-fi, tries to imagine beyond these horror genre staples, but the emotional stakes of the world in Inception are so shakily understood that I struggled to build much on it beyond what I discussed above. This is why I suggested that maybe a different structure might have helped Inception, one where we dive down into all these messy issues as Cobb and Mal do and we experience how their dreams fell apart and the echoes of this on the rest of the story. A structure that stresses the emotional importance of their ideas more than the ideas. I think the way the movie is structure now it becomes more a puzzle and gives audiences a layer of protection against some more disturbing feelings the movie could get at if it had chosen to... but it didn't.
Let me put it another way. The maze-like design of the movie could be seen as an Icarus and the maze esque myth. Or it could just be a video-game. Or it could be something compromised between the two. I think Inception is that compromise, which is not to knock compromise so much as high concept blockbuster hijinks that exploit feelings without meeting them head on. To second something that David Thompson writes in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, maybe when Nolan's studio days are over he'll move back to his more interesting earlier territory of movies taking place in settings we instantly (viscerally) relate to and sink into psychologically. A weird example of Nolan's move away into abstract coding as opposed to experiential, immersive cinema is how his short student film Doodlebug is rather dream-like, showing Nolan does have an understanding of the surreal but decisively did not take that approach to Inception, instead opting to build something that anybody could have almost any sort of idea about. Inception seems to me a curious little contraption in that regard but doesn't really transcend its design or just get lost inside it. For the most part, we sense something means something, we have some ideas (or theories)... but what do we feel?
I prefer Shutter Island because it worked on me viscerally. You write that your scared at the end of Inception because we don't know what Cobb is capable of. I don't think Inception makes enough of that to justify that fear. Whereas in Shutter Island, we see what Teddy is capable of... and he sees it... and so fears one way or the other (escape into fantasy... or confront the awful truth) become palpable and relatable back to our own lives in fairly immediate ways. So, yeah, Cobb brings trains into his dreams. If the ending of Inception is real though, his kids don't have to worry about those trains running them over. That's the logic Inception restricts itself to. I partially try to help it out by suggesting the ending isn't real (and is something more on par with The Descent) because that's the more emotionally compelling ending to me than any others, the one that seems most coherent with the movie as a whole and the most creative. I'll admit, I'm doing some of the movie's work for it but, in this case, I'm feeling generous enough to do that.
All of Nolan's movies tend to leave me feeling that way because I share many of the same interests as him. "In the beginning" of my serious film watching (so, four-ish years ago), I didn't really distinguish much between style and substance. If the movie got at something that provoked me, in one way or another, I left it at that. But as I've seen more movies in the last three years than in the rest of my life before that put together, something in my gut started to eat away at me. No, not that my world wasn't real (that I felt much earlier, as I suspect we all do)... but that, while interesting ideas is a requirement for any worthwhile anything (I believe), it's the emotional/physical/visceral execution of those things that really haunts, stays with me, continues to affect how I see future films and my life outside the theater.
One last illustration to explain what I'm trying to get at. The beginning of The Dark Knight, we see a quiet, glass city that seems a little soulless, hiding that soullessness in its shininess. Of course, I think a lot more could have been made of this in a better film but, nevertheless, the basic idea is there on screen, physically represented by the surprising, unsettling stillness of this opening shot. And out of this apparent sign of civility comes an explosion -- literally from within it, an explosion bursting out of a skyscraper instead of an alien critter out of John Hurt's stomach. Anyway, I like that opening but Mr. Emerson made a good point on his blog about how the movie doesn't show how civilians down below react those falling shards of glass. Wouldn't this have been a more haunting opening about the false security the image of a city offers if we did see that too? And, as Jim also noted, a director like David Fincher probably would have shown those dangerous falling shards because, as Fincher has said, he's more interested in films that scar than he is in entertainment.
Can we say the same about Nolan? Ever since he made it big he seems increasingly afraid of frightening the audience too much. Does that have something to do with his studio-mandated PG-13 ratings to pull in the largest box office numbers? I would think yes, to be painfully honest. Of course, none of that matters if you're coming up with visionary images. He isn't exactly doing that though, so much as recycling bits and pieces of other films that are more visually striking. Sure, the realism of the floating men in Inception is an improvement over the effects of the older Matrix but The Matrix hasn't dated visually because it exists as something deliberately unreal, something dream-like, with its slick agents as intimidating as that soulless, shape-shifting cop from Terminator 2, films aiming for psychological stimulation of the subconscious more than literal ideas about this or that.
So, that's where I'm at with Nolan and Inception and I think a lot of people are there too, while a lot also see something deeper bubbling up in his movies. Neither of us are wrong but I question whether Nolan's work is as imaginatively lately as it could be (or his earlier work was) and, maybe more importantly, how much does it really carry back over into our lives (or dreams and nightmares) when we exit the theater and the dream is over?
Ps. Sasha Stone at Awards Daily recently wrote about the movie as a Titanic-like love story, overlapping with some of my feelings that Mal and Marion Cotillard are crucially important to this movie, all the rest meaning little-to-nothing without her/them: http://www.awardsdaily.com/2010/12/one-true-thing-inception-black-swan-true-grit-the-social-network/
Thanks for taking the time to respond!
If you didn't enjoy Inception as an action/heist style entertainment, that's fine, I can understand thinking the characters are kinda weak or that it's too plot-y...I like it mostly for the same reasons I like something like "The Thing from Another World," in that it's about a bunch of guys (and one girl) improvising and being creative in an exciting, unique situation. My above posts trying to coherently realize my thoughts on the movie probably made it sound like I liked it because of some vague (possibly mis)understanding of its themes, which, of course, I didn't. I liked it because it was fun! The actors were fun! The action was fun! The con-game was fun! The climactic montage is especially, endlessly watchable.
But there are some "somethings" under the surface that I find interesting, as I tried to detail above. I think one of the "somethings" is that it's about becoming a father/becoming a man (in the end Caine walks away smiling and DiCaprio holds up his son who says "Look what I've been building! A house on a cliff!") and I think it's interesting that the main obstacle is a beautiful woman who's a projection of a man's guilt.
I think there's enough evidence to support the idea that Cobb doesn't tell it like it is. The suicide scene is handled more dreamlike than the actual dreams (or not-dreams) - for one thing, the hotel room across the street looks exactly like the one Cobb is in (the colours and the chandeliers look the same). And I already said above that earlier, in Cobb's actual memory (not the one he describes) Mal is in his room and not across the street, opening it up for all sorts of crazy possibilities.
I like the idea of a big blockbuster contraption like this with some potentially disconcerting "somethings" underneath the surface. I think Nolan is the kind of writer/director who's more interested in exploiting his own obsessions (well-dressed and intense young men being one of them, high-tech weaponry being another) than telling a very specific story with a very specific meaning. His Batman, for instance, always comes off kind of single-minded and frightening, and I like that I can't quite put my finger on why, because - that's Batman. No one wants Batman to be explicit.
In the same sense, I don't need a sci-fi/action/heist movie to take me to the same emotional clarity of a Scorsese character study (loved Shutter Island, btw) - I need it to be fun in a mischevious way, which Inception is, all the more because it's about the very act of pulling one on your audience (and possibly yourself). And I like feeling like there's some of Nolan's fetishism going on, what with the guns and the suits and everything else that he films with such exactitude.
It's hard not to think there's "something" going on in the bottom level...but I'd need DiCaprio (or Nolan) to help me get to it. As it is, I enjoy the surface, and forming my own ideas.
PS. (I had to): About The Dark Knight's opening shot, I have another take:
We start with a wide shot of a modern-day city and then slowly close in on a single dark nearly cube-shaped building. By the nature of the push-in this is now our (the viewer's) building, and obviously there's something significant about it.
Eventually the building takes up the whole frame. It's dark grey and looks soooorta like a TV screen, turned off - but if that's too much of a leap, it's at least giving off a distorted reflection of the modern-day city.
Then you know what happens: CRASH, window explodes, the barrier between the real and the reflection broken.
The next two shots show the clown thugs inside the grey building, one shoots a harpoon with a line attached to connect with the adjacent building (the second being an over-the-shoulder shot of the clown thug firing the harpoon).
The fourth shot changes locations to an intersection in the city street below: behind The Joker, standing, looking out on the street -> push in on his clown mask -> a truck materializes in front of him and he gets in.
Quite a good beginning for a movie about a modern day city occupied by pop culture Gods, I'd say.
As for the glass complaint...sure, fine, whatever. But the seventh shot shows the street below and it looks fairly empty, and personally, I think the sequence has the perfect number of shots in it. As do most of Nolan's. In my opinion.
I would like to add that the way the story of Mal's death develops sort of mirrors the step-by-step process of how Cobb et al "incept" Fischer. We start with a little information and build over time, as we get "deeper" into the levels and the movie...
Yes to Angie in Salt it was exactly what the role called for and that is harder to do than it looks.
MAMR and Andrew, maybe it's too obvious, but it's hard for me to not see the Arthur elevator scene as being an elaborate homage by Nolan to Dave Bowman's reentry of the Discovery in 2001, which also fits with Andrew's observation of a methodical character having to improvise.
I really like MAMR's comparisons with Shutter Island. Scorsese lets the tragedy scene play out, rather than a quick cut flashback, because he's already shown the lake scene twice from Teddy's dreamy perspective, and he wants the audience to be on solid emotional ground for the following scene when Dr. Cawley's tells Andrew "I hope that what we've done here is enough to stop it from ever happening again, but I need to know you've accepted reality".
For me the best version of Inception is the extended trailer, which establishes a sense of mystery and emotional sweep completely lacking in the film. In the trailer,the shot of Nash being dragged away on the helicopter pad from Dom's point of view in the departing helicopter is a very intriguing and portentious image, but comes across as a throwaway moment in the film. The same thing for Ariadne overseeing the folding city (couldn't Nolan have used that effect for more special occasion than the ground rules walk through?) But most of all, the sweep of Zack Hempsey's Mind Heist theme through the cuts of the avalanche to Dom saying "I found a way to get home, and this last job, that's how I get there". An emotional core that's entirely missing in the film.
What I find most fascinating about Inception is how it functions as a metaphor for the creative process (also true of Shutter Island). That's been brought up by other people, so I won't cite all the examples. But the idea of Fischer representing an audience seems pertinent for the finale. As soon as he reaches his emotional climax with his father, staged by the team, they have to wrap things up. The synchronization of all the kicks seems symbolic of how a director like Nolan needs to bring all his story and character threads together for the climax of a picture. An Inception he figuratively does that while he literally does it. Neat.
For me, the best meta movies are a tie between Groundhog's Day (in which a man workshops take after take of a single day) and Back to the Future Part II, the best time travel movie ever made in my opinion. Groundhog's Day gets discussed a lot, by Back to the Future II is underrated. Nolan could have learned something from it in how to make a multi-layered and complex Sci-Fi plot easy to understand without excessive exposition. But consider how the time travel premise is ingeniously used as a way to revisit and essentially remake the first movie within the second one. It even manages to use the same climax to an entirely different apprehension.
That climax in Back to the Future II was pretty daring, even if it didn't come close to the inspiration of the first movie.
Nice to see Back to the Future Part II getting some love.
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