Enjoy. Pretension is like... fine wine.
Christopher Nolan doesn’t have a born filmmaker’s natural gift for detail, composition and movement, but on the evidence of his fussily constructed mind-game movies Following, Memento, Insomnia and the new Inception, he’s definitely a born con artist.
How nice! Everybody knows you start off a review by insulting the director!
When I reviewed Avatar, the first thing I wrote was "F*ck you, James Cameron, you suck."
Maybe I'm not as eloquent as Mr. White here, but I subscribe to the same school of thought.
Inception proves this is Nolan’s moment—a beginning-of-the-end moment for film cultureHoly crap! The Mayans were right! Film culture really is ending in 2010!
Be afraid, ladies and gents. Our buddy Armond says it is so...
It takes the form of a sci-fi adventure movie, updating the old Fantastic Voyage for the digital age, but instead of exploring the human body, Leonardo DiCaprio as dream extractor Dom Cobb goes inside people’s unconscious with the help of his young exploratory team: Joseph Gordon-levitt, Ellen Page and Tom Hardy.
Right, because a movie about people exploring the inside of a human body in a spaceship is very similar to a movie about people trying to steal ideas from a person's subconscious... Did our Friendy Neighborhood Armond even watch this movie?
Its essential con is that, as in Memento, Nolan ignores the morality of his characters’ actions; he accepts that they will do anything—which is the cynicism critics admired in Memento, the con-man’s motivating nihilism.
OMFG - did you see that? Armond dropped the N bomb... Nihilism! I really didn't think he would do that. I mean, I know his reviewing style depends on the shock of using that word so frequently, but... man. It never gets old.
On a serious note, ignoring morality is great fun. You should try it some time Armond.
Stuck in film-noir mode
...As opposed to jumping in and out of film noir mode? What, did you want Inception to be the next Last Action Hero?
Like Grand Theft Auto’s quasi-cinematic extension of noir and action-flick plots, Inception manipulates the digital audience’s delectation for relentless subterfuge.
Excuse me for a moment while I consult the dictionary. Delectation means delights, okay... Subterfuge means "A statement or action resorted to in order to deceive." Ah, back with the old Nolan-is-a-con-man routine. Excellent. On a more serious note, we, the "digital audience" want to be tricked?
Is that why Armond liked Transformers 2? Because it was so damn simple he didn't feel tricked?
Cobb never runs into paradisaical visions like What Dreams May Come—only terror, danger and violence.
Oh yeah? And the music didn't match the brilliance of High Noon, and the cinematography wasn't as brooding as Dark City, and oh! oh! the action didn't match the high-intensity chaos of Armond's favorite Death Race?
See, I can do it too.
Nolan out-Finchers Fincher and seeks Kubrickian misanthropy—but there’s a simple-minded sappiness at the heart of this cynical vision.
Am I the only one who is wondering how a movie can be nihilistic and sappy at the same time? Would that be like a version of "The Blind Side" where at the end Michael goes on a killing rampage for the hell of it?
Inception is full of second-rate aesthetics, yet when shoddy aesthetics become the new standard, it’s sufficient to up-end the art of cinema.
Boom! Take that, modern cinema which I'm currently making a living on!
Nolan’s fascinated by his cast of narcissistic criminals indulging their own treacheries—nihilism chasing its own tail.
Someone needs to tell Armond that he doesn't need to use the N word to be funny.
it distracts from how business and class really work. his shapeless storytelling (going from Paris to Mumbai to nameless ski slopes, carelessly shifting tenses like a video game) throws audiences into artistic limbo—an “unconstructed dream space” like Toy Story 3—that leaves them bereft of art’s genuine purpose: a way of dealing with the real world.
Ooh - Armond smackdown on Toy Story 3!
That's like a 60 year old man wrestling a teddy bear. It's hilarious, but at times... Sad.
Cobb’s dream obsession suggests pop-culture addiction, mirroring how consumers habitually escape reality with video games and movies. But Nolan never critiques this as Neveldine/Taylor did in Gamer.
Oh really, Armond? Does every negative review from you spiral into talk about pop-culture/materialistic societies?
And OMG, how did I forget Gamer, with its 29% Approval rating on RottenTomatoes!
It was, lest we forget, a 21st century masterpiece.
this conceptual failure is apparent from DiCaprio’s glib characterization. Nolan finally has the budget to work with his look-alike (Leo’s an irresistible movie star), yet fails to write him a good role. Cobb suffers the same marital nightmares leo had in Shutter Island; this isn’t depth, it’s morbidity and the confusion is all over the screen.
Forgetting the Hi-Larious misuse of capitalization in his review, Armond does have a point - Inception, written in 2001, is clearly mooching off of Shutter Island, which came out in February.
Inception should have been called Self-Deception.
Hey! That's punny! 'Cause they both end with "ception"!
Maybe it should have been called "Contraception"! Because it's like birth control! Most like it, but for some it rips and we end up with a crying baby.
Armond, you are that crying baby.
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