Movie review: "Inception"

You may have noticed the lack of recent blogging. Nothing much new about me. I finished my last course of temozolomide (oral chemotherapy) and now await another MRI on September 2, the results of which will hopefully be more definitive than those in the past. Was it pseudoprogression (radiation debris) or is it actual progression? Past MRIs were unable to distinguish between the two. If it was radiation debris, that should now have disappeared.

Since I have no news, I thought I'd compare my review with two published reviews of the movie "Inception," which to date has $261.8 million in ticket sales at movie theaters.

Shawn Levy, The Oregonian: Grade A. A deeply dazzling and immense film about a team of mind-explorers trying to implant an idea in a subject's heavily guarded subconscious. Filled with logical puzzles, jaw-dropping action and audacious visuals, it's the brainchild of Christopher Nolan's "Memento" and one of his special-effects movies. Superb....

“Memento” on the scale of “The Dark Knight”: Dense, operatic, thrilling, puzzling, vexing and utterly, utterly brilliant. A man adept at stealing secrets from people while they dream must reverse his process and plant an idea in someone’s head -- and risk his own sanity in the process. It’s a metaphor for moviemaking, of course, with its dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams (it actually goes much deeper....). But it’s also a mournful and nervy depiction of a man driven by loss and guilt and fear. Leonardo DiCaprio seems still in “Shutter Island” mode, which isn’t a bad thing. But a wonderful supporting cast gives it brightness and lift. And writer-director Christopher Nolan’s visual ideas, pacing and audacity mesmerize.

David Denby, The New Yorker:
Christopher Nolan, the British-born director of “Memento” and of the two most recent Batman movies, appears to believe that if he can do certain things in cinema—especially very complicated things—then he has to do them. But why? To what end? His new movie, “Inception,” is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly. Nolan has devoted his extraordinary talents not to some weighty, epic theme or terrific comic idea but to a science-fiction thriller that exploits dreams as a vehicle for doubling and redoubling action sequences. He has been contemplating the movie for ten years, and as movie technology changed he must have realized that he could do more and more complex things. He wound up overcooking the idea. Nolan gives us dreams within dreams (people dream that they’re dreaming); he also stages action within different levels of dreaming—deep, deeper, and deepest, with matching physical movements played out at each level—all of it cut together with trombone-heavy music by Hans Zimmer, which pounds us into near-deafness, if not quite submission. Now and then, you may discover that the effort to keep up with the multilevel tumult kills your pleasure in the movie. “Inception” is a stunning-looking film that gets lost in fabulous intricacies, a movie devoted to its own workings and to little else....

Summarizing the movie makes it sound saner than it is. For long stretches, you’re not sure whether you’re in dream or reality, which isn’t nearly as much fun as Nolan must have imagined it to be. Bizarre oddities, which complicate the puzzle but are meaningless in themselves, flash by in an instant. The actors, trying to suggest familiarity with the task of dream invasion, spin off gibberish in the most casual way. Parodies, I assume, will follow on YouTube. And the theologians of pop culture, taking a break from “The Matrix,” will analyze the over-articulate structure of “Inception” for mighty significances....

I would like to plant in Christopher Nolan’s head the thought that he might consider working more simply next time. His way of dodging powerful emotion is beginning to look like a grand-scale version of a puzzle-maker’s obsession with mazes and tropes.

Norm's review:
There are only two (small) things wrong with this movie:
(1) I didn't know what the hell was happening throughout the movie. It might not have helped that I fell asleep for a period of time during the movie, but I put the blame for that on Christopher Nolan.
(2) The movie went on FOR-EVVVV-ERRRR (148 excruciating, painfully slow minutes, to be exact).

So there you go. If you are one of the few who haven't yet seen this movie, you can believe Shawn Levy, or you can believe David Denby. Personally, I side with David Denby. (You can tell I don't get out much.)