N'Al on 6/8/2010 at 16:29
Haha, I believe Stitch just got dissed as a Jennifer Aniston romcom-loving bore. ;)
Matthew on 6/8/2010 at 17:36
Anyone who didn't cry at the end of Marley and Me has no fucking soul :mad:
ercles on 7/8/2010 at 11:51
Quote Posted by demagogue
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.
Seeing as Memento was an example already cited, does this mean that Inception is Nolan working out his own self hatred on screen?
demagogue on 7/8/2010 at 13:55
I did notice if you take the characters = movie-making jobs metaphor, the point of the entire operation is to construct an elaborate maze-like movie ultimately for the "big-money investor" (Saito) to bilk the "audience" out his money based on a satisfying (if confusing) but self-destructive fantasy. So yeah, I did kind of get that impression.
I think he (Nolan) keeps his movies mainstream as much to get into suburban brains and rile them up than to cater to them, though not sure how successful he is on that front. Also "disgust" and "hatred" may be too strong words, since it comes across like he writes these movies like he has a fetish for the details -- though that's a kind of self-therapy too; but like something you're drawn into rather than trying to spit out at yourself or the audience. It doesn't have the unrelenting disgust and attack of someone like Buñuel or Fellini. Idea-fetish I think is the right operative word for Nolan.
Angel Dust on 7/8/2010 at 13:57
Quote Posted by demagogue
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.)
Uh, no. While Nolan is obviously not trying to manipulate the audience in the same way as a three hankie weepie does, he is absolutely, positively trying to elicit an emotional response from the audience with Cobb's story. He explicitly said so in pre-release (
http://pursuitist.com/arts/interview-with-inception-director-christopher-nolan/) interviews:
Quote Posted by Christopher Nolan
It took me a while to figure out how to make an emotional connection with the material, as heist movies tend to be almost deliberately superficial in terms of emotion, and all about procedure. And I realized it had to be more about the human condition and human emotions, and that I had to work on the characters — the things that help an audience connect with the ideas, however crazy they may seem.
The reason the big emotional scenes seem alienating and coldly engineered in the film is because Nolan is a bit pants at this kind of stuff. It's perfectly possible to create empathetic, engaging characters and drama without resorting to cheap sentiment, hammy acting and obvious manipulation, as evidenced by dozens of great films a year, but Nolan doesn't know how.
Quote Posted by demagogue
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.
Nobody is saying they require every film the build a personal connection with them and the characters, just that if it's trying to - and
Inception most certainly is - then it better do it successfully. This personal connection doesn't have to as deep as --
insert the name of the film that truly moved you here-- either but when actors of DiCaprio's and Cotillard's calibre are as invested in their characters as they are in
Inception, I'm pretty sure I'm supposed be feeling
something.
Also, why the do people keep bringing Philip K Dick into this when defending the cold feel of the film? I've always thought that what characterises and separates Dick's work from most sci-fi authors, particularly in his strongest works like
A Scanner Darkly and
Valis, is the very strong human element running through them.
Sulphur on 7/8/2010 at 14:18
PKD's chracters aren't founts of humanity by any stretch of imagination. A lot of his characters tend to exhibit an almost clinical detachment while the machinery of the narrative roils around them towards the end of his stories.
demagogue on 7/8/2010 at 14:38
Quote Posted by Angel Dust
Uh, no. While Nolan is obviously not trying to manipulate the audience in the same way as a three hankie weepie does, he is absolutely, positively trying to elicit an emotional response from the audience with Cobb's story.
My perspective is coming a bit from the metaphor I just cited in the post above yours. It looks like the moral of the movie is that movies do manipulate audiences ... and not only are we going to do it too, but we're going to
tell the audience
how we manipulate them while we do it (usually "telling" it for the Fischer job then "showing" the same technique for Cobb).
We tell them
we have to make plot holes and try to hide them for the story to work, but we can't hide them as well when time is running out but we take the risk anyway; we tell them we have to appeal to deepest Freudian/Jungian human psych. motives like the relationship with a parent and the deepest desires & fears of married relationships; that positive reinforcing emotions hit harder than negative ones and making reconciliation with a soured relationship works better than turning it away; and some more I have to remember. It's just so transparently self-referential about directing the emotions of an audience to be coincidence.
Once you start looking at the movie like that, then absolutely I agree, of course, Nolan wants to build an emotional connection between the audience and Cobb and that's what he's going to say in an interview is a critical part of the movie. I shouldn't have used the word "cheap" though (and I didn't say "obvious" did I?). Engineering emotions is expensive business, and can be very sophisticated. I think what I meant (one point the movie was making) was that it's still a mechanical thing, no matter how deep the emotion goes, how well crafted the manipulation, how meaningful to us, how hidden (even when we tell you what we're doing then we do it)... Even being meticulously generated, the emotions are just as real. Where I might change my previous post sympathetic to your (AD's) point is that "manipulate" is a loaded word and depends on your perspective. It's definitely emotioneering, but whether you think they're "manipulating" your emotions to take your money (like
Saito is for Fischer) or whether the movie-maker really "cares" about this personal, emotional connection that you, Angel Dust and Stitch, have to Cobb, a fictional character Nolan made up to also
take your money (or in the movie,
Cobb also emotionally manipulated his wife, and then later himself with his own techniques to get her out of his brain; does Cobb really mean it or is it a means to an end?) ... I actually think Nolan wanted to have it both ways and play with that ambiguity about the creator's intentions and the audience's reception ... Even engineered emotions can still be very real and meaningful for the audience whatever their "real" & venial purpose; they were for Fischer. And even while Nolan explains basically every technique the movie uses for the "real" fantasy Cobb-story through the "fantasy" fantasy Fischer-story, we can still have that emotional connection to Cobb's "real" emotions, and Nolan can care about that (I think he does). Or maybe it comes down to whether you think Fischer was "duped" (or Cobb self-duped) or better off making their reconciliation, since I see that as a playful mirror to whether we should feel our own connection to the movie is duped or meaningful, without a right answer.
Anyway, I'm just writing shit that comes to my head for fun; I like reading other peoples' takes on this movie so won't say this is the right way to think about it. Just some interesting things that came to my mind putting the pieces together.
Volitions Advocate on 8/8/2010 at 14:42
*ahem*
well... not to distract the debaters but. I saw it last night and I have one question.
Who else thinks Joseph Gordon Leavitt could kick spidermans ass? That was some crazy stuff he was doing. I love being surprised by people like that.
ZylonBane on 9/8/2010 at 01:10
I just saw this last night. Inception is a movie that, due to its premise, allows handwaving all possible criticism of any plot holes or other inconsistencies. The movie spends half its run time explaining things, the other half in spastic gunfights, and the climax with the dreams within dreams within dreams and the "kicks" and the music and the Limbo was a gigantic ball of incoherent clusterfuck, capped off with the utterly predictable ambiguous ending.
It's a shame, because with a few tweaks to the script it could have been a really good movie.
Someone should sit Nolan down in front of Psychonauts to see how this sort of thing should be done.
