Stitch on 28/7/2010 at 18:09
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
I'm not saying you're
wrong but just that it wouldn't work in the context of this film's aims.
Yeah, that's a good point. Heading down that rabbit hole may have made for a superior film, but it also would have been a less financially feasible one. But for the record, I don't mean literally "
Heat meets
Primer" so much as a walk in that general direction. Generally speaking, I think more core structural mystery to be puzzled out later could have benefited
Inception, as long as enjoyment of the film didn't hinge entirely on it (i.e. audiences enjoy the what even if they aren't 100% sure of the why).
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Haaaaaving said all that; Inception has done one great thing for sci-fi - even more than the Matrix did it's given the mainstream a taste of something they probably didn't expect but can enjoy. Hopefully more people will be willing to take risks after seeing its success.
Correct?
Agreed, although I'd leave
The Matrix comparison out of it.
Shug on 28/7/2010 at 23:02
Quote Posted by Stitch
I've spent the better part of this thread detailing exactly what in
Inception doesn't work, and I stand by that as substantive criticism.
no FUCK you
What I'm attempting to say is that, acknowledging that one misjudged element as a good point, it was still 'pile on Nolan' time; your attitude to the movie is incredibly negative for someone that apparently found it worthwhile to watch
Shug on 28/7/2010 at 23:43
Dammit Stitch, just let me in
Ko0K on 29/7/2010 at 02:32
I personally thought Nolan made the right call by deciding to do a bit of hand-holding in this movie, because it clearly seems that he understood the majority of the audience would consist of pricks who *think* they're smart.
june gloom on 29/7/2010 at 04:30
Like TTLG? :)
Mr.Duck on 29/7/2010 at 05:48
:cool:
Pricks maybe, but there be suave pricks in TTLG.
:cool:
Matthew on 6/8/2010 at 10:14
Saw this myself last night and greatly enjoyed it. Our audience also gave the 'oooh' at the end (plus a laugh at the kiss in the middle :D).
Personally I got quite invested in Cobb's story, but then I generally do get carried away by characters more easily than other people I know.
Stitch on 6/8/2010 at 13:46
The kiss was the highlight of the movie, as it was the only point anyone did anything human that I could identify with.
This is less of a slag that it sounds, as the movie is far more about ideas than personality, anyway.
Matthew on 6/8/2010 at 14:05
Indeed, which I suppose might have been intentional if the rest of the crew were in fact meant to be projections and so were perhaps at a lower level of 'veracity' in that Cobb's mind didn't bother to flesh them out as much as it could have done.
Or I'm beginning to overthink it.
demagogue on 6/8/2010 at 15:53
I don't think it's possible to overthink a movie that goes 5 levels deep into a person's dream.
For the record, I don't sympathize with Stitch's take, which has this assumption (that I don't like) that movies have to follow a certain form to be proper. I see Inception in the tradition of Borges, Dick, and Lem stories, where the whole point is to alienate the reader/audience from the characters and pull them into a "cold" and maze-like plot, and wish there were more in that tradition. The analytical coldness is an important part of how they work, and backing down on that would be a terrible suggestion for this kind of movie, IMO; it'd remake it into a different movie that wouldn't do what its genre is supposed to do. (I actually thought it wasn't cold enough at parts; Borges is the real master in this tradition IMO, and this movie was trying to build a plot in that vein but still wanted to be a mainstream movie.) One way to frame it, hammy emotion is often seen as a barrier to thinking about the human condition, and building some cynicism and alienation into the movie and distancing us from the characters can be a better window into it because it make us see that most emotion and "personality" in humans is cheap and constructed, often rather shallowly; and making that explicit is a good way to not get distracted and miss that part of it.
Actually, come to think about it, one of the purposes of this movie was to show its disgust with the emotioneering of movies that Stitch likes. One of the more brilliant scenes was how cheap and constructed the "pinwheel in the safe" moment was... We literally see in great detail how this cheap emotional moment is very elaborately and coldly engineered, they even explain how they do it every step of the way, and it's impossible not to miss that he cut the crybaby moment incredibly short, disrespectfully short, followed by the series of alienating explosion cuts just to reinforce how anticlimactic, cheap, and constructed even our most cherished emotions and "get to know me" movie scenes are. The movie is blasting the cheap emotioneering rife in movies today and wagging a big middle finger to Stitch's attitude and I applaud them for it. It wants to say: wake up audience; your slavish dependence on cheap emotional tricks in movies is holding you back as a human and making you not only tolerate but enjoy awful formulaic movies, clamor for more, and wish every movie were like them. (At least that's the message I took from it.)
On that, I'm often -more- skeptical of movies that play up personal connections to the characters and "get to know me" scenes anyway, since they're almost always rather shallow given the time limits, and take the burden off plot, as if a good "story" is told just when we get to know the characters when in fact nothing happens that gives us any insight into the human condition. The way Stitch was describing the way Inception should have been sounded like exactly what turns me off about movies these days, and what I like about some classic movies and modern literature, the value of distancing us from the characters.
Or the funny way I was going to say it -- if I thought every single movie needed to build a personal connection between me and the characters, I'd cut off my dick now and stick to Jennifer Aniston movies.
Lols aside, I understand where Stitch is coming from and see character development and connection important in some kinds of movies, but (1) Inception is in a tradition designed to blast that tradition, so it wouldn't just be inappropriate but counterproductive here, IMO; and (2) I think it's a good thing that the movie industry supports representatives in different traditions, that some follow the template and others blast the template. So I don't sympathize with his take, though I get it and think it's fine for him to not get into that part of it.
